Xiahe

I'm sure you're all aware of the major protests that have taken place in Tibetan cities inside and outside of China. A lot of the footage I've seen has been from Xiahe (Xiàhé 夏河). It's not in Tibet proper, but in China's Gansu province. There's a major Tibetan monastery there, its name usually romanized as Labrang or Blabrang, where thousands of monks live, and it's an important center of Tibetan Buddhist worship for the Yellow Hat sect (of which the Dalai Lama is the head).

I spent four days in Xiahe in 1999 -- it's an amazing place. I gave a photograph of the Dalai Lama that I'd smuggled into the country to one of the young monks I met there. The town is remote, peaceful, and lovely, which is why it's became a destination for backpackers as well as Tibetan pilgrims.

The personal connection makes it especially distressing for me to see the violence going on there.

---

This is a rather clever editorial cartoon that appeared in the March 18 issue of The Daily Focus, a local free paper.


The logo of the Beijing Olympics is a stylized version of the Chinese character 京. It is pronounced jīng in Chinese (gyeong 경 in Korean) and means 'capital city'. It is the second character writing the city name Beijing 北京, which literally means 'Northern capital'. (And, just in case you are interested in such things, it is pronounced kyō in Japanese, and is the second character writing the city name Tokyo, which literally means 'Eastern capital'.) For the Olympics logo, the character has been stylized in such a way that it resembles a running athlete. Here the cartoonist has re-imagined the figure as a bloodied body lying on the ground. The caption reads "Ah ... Tibet!"

Hanja 2

At long last it's time to follow up on my post from way back when about the use of Chinese characters (hanja 한자 漢字) in Korean writing. Those of you who have been patiently (or impatiently--how should I know?) waiting need wait no longer.

1. The Puzzle

I ended that post with this photo and the questions below it:


See the two Chinese characters to the right of the (British) English words "Way Out"? Are they writing Korean or Chinese? Or something else?

At the top of the sign it says in Korean naga-neun got, literally 'place for going out', i.e. 'exit'. On the lower right are two Chinese characters, 出口, that any Chinese speaker would recognize immediately. In Mandarin they are pronounced chūkǒu, writing the word meaning 'exit'. So at first glance I thought that this was a trilingual sign: Korean, English, Chinese.

As it turns out, however, the two Chinese characters can also be read in Korean as chulgu 출구, which is a Sino-Korean word meaning 'exit'.

So it is also possible that this is a bilingual sign, English and Korean, on which are two different Korean words for 'exit', each written in a different script.

On the face of it, it would seem more plausible for this to be a trilingual sign. After all, there are lots of Chinese tourists and residents in Seoul who would be well served by signs with Chinese on them. And furthermore, why would the Koreans need to put two different Korean words for 'exit' on the same sign, and write one of them in Chinese characters, which are increasingly unfamiliar to many Koreans?

Setting aside plausibility considerations, however, there is no linguistic way to determine whether the Chinese characters on this sign are writing Korean or Chinese. There is insufficient context to decide the question. A Chinese tourist would certainly think it is writing Chinese (and perhaps breathe a sigh of relief).* I have no idea what the average Korean would say if pressed on the question.

But we do have another means of settling the question. If we assume that all of the subway signage works in the same way, then we can keep looking at other subway signs until we find one that allows us to determine unambiguously if Korean or Chinese is being written. For example, if we could find a sign that has Chinese characters that write a common Chinese word, but which do not write a possible Sino-Korean word, then this would demonstrate that the sign is in fact written in Chinese. Or, if we found a sign that had an entire phrase on it (instead of just a single word), the grammatical structure would give the underlying language away.

2. The Clues

Put on your linguistic detective beanie cap! Let's take a look at some other subway signs and see what we, as brilliant linguistic detectives, can determine.

Here's a sign at one of the stations on Line #4 of the subway system, indicating some of the stops that you can reach by boarding a train on the platform to the left. You'll notice the same pattern as on the "Way Out" sign: Korean (written in hangeul) on top, English** on the bottom left, and Chinese characters on the bottom right.


But look at it more carefully. Go on, click on it to open a larger version of the picture, and study it good.

Did you find it? Did you spot the clue?

I'll wait another minute while you look at it one more time. There is something fishy about the Chinese characters writing one of the place names.

Okay, hopefully you've spotted it by now. It's the Miasamgeori stop. The hangeul is 미아삼거리. The Chinese characters are 彌阿삼거리. But wait a minute -- let's look at those again.

미아삼거리
彌阿삼거리

Those last three things aren't Chinese characters! They're hangeul--written exactly the same as the last three syllables above them. No way could that be the Chinese language, which is never written with the Korean alphabet.

As it turns out, most Korean place names are Sino-Korean, and these can be written with Chinese characters. But some Korean place names are, in whole or in part, native Korean words. The native Korean parts can't be written with Chinese characters. They have to be written in hangeul. (Geori is the native Korean word for 'road'. Samgeori means 'three-way intersection'.)***

[An aside: Philologists and epigraphers often face similar questions when studying newly discovered ancient texts. They may recognize the writing system--the Brahmi script, say--but still have to puzzle out what language is being written with it.]

3. The Solution

There you have it: proof that what is being written in Chinese characters is the Korean language, not the Chinese language.

[An aside again: Suppose, just suppose, that you wanted to write this place name in Chinese, not Korean. How could it be done? Well, you'd have two options. One, transliterate the pronunciation of the Korean samgeori using Chinese characters, just as the pronunciation has been transliterated into English on the lower left. Two, translate the meaning of the Korean using Chinese words. Since I don't want to leave you in suspense, I went and found a Chinese-language map of the Seoul subway system on the web. The stop is named 彌阿三岔路口 Mǐāsānchàlùkǒu. Sānchàlùkǒu is the Chinese word for 'three-way intersection'. So this is a translation, rather than a transliteration, into Chinese.]

Now you should be able to spot a second clue on this same sign. The second clue is simpler, but possibly harder to notice. Take another look.

Did you find it? It's the last stop listed on the sign. There are NO Sino-Korean elements in this place name (gogae means 'ridge'; I don't know what the dang part is). So there was no point writing the name again on the lower-right: it would have looked exactly the same, all in hangeul.

Once you realize that the signs have no Chinese on them, just Korean written twice (once all in hangeul, as Koreans normally write it; once with all Sino-Korean words written in Chinese characters and the rest in hangeul), then you see evidence of it everywhere.

Consider this neighborhood map. All the subway stations have them -- they are a great way to orient yourself and figure out where you should exit the station to get to where you want to go.


It's got dozens of place names on it. Here's a close-up (from a different neighborhood map than the one pictures above):


The part in parentheses says Gu Peuraja 'Turtle Plaza'. Peuraja, of course, is a borrowing from English 'plaza'. Below it you see a translation into English: "Gu Plaza".**** Then you see below that Korean written in Chinese characters. But peuraja, of course, is not Sino-Korean, so it appears again in hangeul as 프라자.

One more sign:


This sign is for the East Seoul Bus Terminal. (For some reason the English says "Dongseoul"--dong being Sino-Korean for 'east'-- instead of "East Seoul".) Seoul is one of the only city names (perhaps THE only city name?) in Korea that is not Sino-Korean. So at the bottom it stays in hangeul. The Korean word for 'bus terminal' is teomineol 터미널, an English borrowing. So it too stays in hangeul at the bottom. Only dong, 'east', can be written with a Chinese character: 東.

Based on linguistic evidence, we've determined that the subway signs are bilingual, not trilingual. But this raises a perplexing non-linguistic question. Why? Why write Korean twice on the same sign, using a writing system that is bordering on the obsolete for most Korean speakers?

I can only speculate. I think that it was done for Japanese and Chinese tourists. True, the words on the signs don't necessarily always make sense to Japanese and Chinese speakers.† And true, sometimes there is hangeul mixed in with the characters, or there are no characters at all. But on the whole, the signs are still very useful for such tourists. They are easier to recognize, understand, and remember than the pure hangeul or romanized forms. And in many cases they end up being identical to written Japanese or Chinese words.

Why not go all the way then, and just translate everything into Chinese or Japanese, as they've done with English? Two reasons I can think of. One, doing it this way allows a single written form to do double-duty for Chinese and Japanese speakers. Second, the signs can be made by Korean speakers--no need to hire Chinese and Japanese translators--without error.


*Would you believe that I'm still oversimplifying things? Well, I am. There are two forms of the Chinese character script, usually termed "traditional" and "simplified". The so-called simplified forms were promulgated by the Communist government of mainland China in the 1950s and 1960s in an effort to make the characters easier to learn and thus promote literacy. The traditional forms continued to be used in Taiwan and Hong Kong -- and in Korea when writing Sino-Korean. In the case of 出口，the simplified and traditional forms are exactly the same. But on other subway signs, it's clear that only traditional forms are being used. Some might be unfamiliar to travelers from mainland China. That alone doesn't, however, indicate whether what is being written is Chinese or Korean. The Korean sign-makers might have chosen to write Chinese using traditional characters. Return to main text.

**This isn't actually English, of course. These being place names, there is no English to be had. This is just a Romanized form of the Korean names. It's as much French as it is English, and more Korean than either of those. But I'll refer to it as English for simplicity. (Apologies to all non-English speakers whose writing system uses the Roman alphabet.) Return to main text.

***Yes, I'm afraid so. I've been caught oversimplifying again. In fact, the sam of samgeori, which means "three", is Sino-Korean. It could have been written with the Chinese character 三. Why wasn't it? I'm not sure, but I think it's because that if the place name were written as 彌阿三거리 it would be natural when reading it to group the Chinese characters together and misread the place name as Miasam Road instead of as Mia Three-way Intersection. By putting the sam in hangeul, the wordhood of samgeori is made more apparent. Perhaps a Korean speaker could comment on this. Return to main text.

****Oh ho, so it was English after all! (See footnote **.) Return to main text.

†Case in point: If you look again at the picture at the top of this post, you'll notice a smaller sign in the background reading "Toilet". The Chinese characters on the lower right, 化粧室, do not write a normal word for 'bathroom' in Chinese. Return to main text.

Names

A few thoughts about names. Many of our readers in America probably know, or are related to, some Steve Lees or John Kims or Helen Parks. We're accustomed to the idea of immigrants, typically Asian immigrants, taking on "normal" sounding first names when coming to the States (or Canada or the UK), or giving such names to their children. (I have to admit, though, that very ethnic first names mixed with Asian last names, such as Shaniqua Wong or Luigi Choi, still don't sound quite normal to me.)

It seems that this happens in non-English speaking countries as well. When we were in Greece we negotiated what would turn out to be a long and somewhat harrowing taxi ride with driver named Kostas. Since he had such a prototypically Greek name, I was surprised to learn that he was in fact an Albanian immigrant. It turned out, of course, that Kostas was not his real name, but his Albanian name was much harder for me, and probably for most of his Greek customers, to remember.

Before coming to study at the Language Institute, I thought that in Korea, foreigners generally did not adopt Korean names. As you know by now, Korean uses an alphabet, which makes it possible to phonetically represent a person's name in hangeul. For instance, Lance's name can be written in Korean as 랜스, or raenseu, which is pretty close. But I have encountered some people at the Language Institute who have unofficially adopted Korean names. One is a Mongolian woman whose Mongolian given name ends in a lateral fricative (!)*. Perhaps she, like our Albanian taxi driver, found it easiest to have people call her something more familiar.

Interestingly, a number of Chinese people also adopt Korean names as well. One might not expect this, since Chinese people have a couple of other options when choosing what to be called in Korean. You have to understand that most Koreans have names that use Chinese characters, just as Chinese people do, so Korean names and Chinese names are similar in many respects. So Chinese people in Korea could choose to transliterate their names into Hangeul according to the Chinese pronunciation, or they could use the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese characters in their names. For example, suppose that Chow Yun-Fat were coming to study at the Language Institute. He could either transliterate his name into 차우 윤팟 (Cha-u Yunpat), or he could use the Korean pronunciation of his characters, 주윤발 (Ju Yunbal).

By the way, Westerners who study Chinese typically adopt Chinese names, probably because it is difficult to transliterate foreign words into written Chinese. Lance, for instance, took the Chinese name 蘇懶思 Sū Lǎnsī. As I said, he doesn't have to make himself a Korean name, but if he wanted to, he could make one based on his Chinese name. Using the Korean pronunciation of his Chinese name would result in the name 소나사 (So Nasa), which is perfectly pronounceable to Koreans, but doesn't really sound like a name. The surname is fine (So is a Korean surname) but the Nasa is not a typical name. This sometimes happens to actual Chinese people when they use the Korean pronunciation of their characters. So I've found that there are some Chinese people who skip the two options discussed above for transforming their Chinese names into Korean names, and actually choose a different Korean given name altogether.

Finally, perhaps I can illustrate with a somewhat analogous Western example. One might imagine that a Spanish speaker in the States named Jesus might want people to pronounce his name as hay-SOOS, as it is in Spanish. Or that he might have people pronounce his name as they normally read that word in English, JEE-zuhs. Or he might decide that "Jesus" is not really a normal first name for English speakers, and decide to go by "Justin" instead. Of course this is a fake example, since there are enough Spanish speakers in the US that we have mostly accepted hay-SOOS, if not JEE-zuhs, as a perfectly normal name. For Spanish speakers, that is. Jesus Kim still seems kind of strange.

[Footnote added October 27, 2007 at 8:24 pm]

* A lateral fricative is like an "l" sound, but with more friction.  It's like a cross between a "l" and a French "j" (we sometimes spell it "zh").  The IPA symbol is ɮ.  You can hear what that sounds like by going to this site and clicking on the ɮ symbol (sixth row down, third big column over).  I don't really know what sound is at the end of the Mongolian student's name, not actually knowing anything about Mongolian.  But I do know that her romanized name ends with an "l", and that when Lance (who didn't know how her name was spelled) heard her say her name in a noisy cafeteria, he thought it ended in an "s", and that Wikipedia says that Mongolian has a lateral fricative (two actually, but for our purposes let's say they sound pretty similar).

Hanja

In an earlier post I talked about the Korean alphabet, hangeul. So now it's time to talk about Chinese characters, and the role they play in Korean writing, and then we can take another look at some of the signage in the Korean subway.

But before we talk about writing, we have to talk a bit about the history of the Korean language, and that means getting a bit of background about language history in general.

1. Borrowed vocabulary

The set of words that exist in a language is always changing. Over time, some words fall out of use, become obsolete, and eventually disappear. New words enter the language. A language's lexicon (a technical term for vocabulary) is like a palimpsest, reflecting the historical changes that have taken place over preceding centuries and millennia.

Where do new words come from? Simply put, there are two basic sources: internal and external. New words can be created internally by repurposing what is already in the language -- the words, roots, prefixes, suffixes, etc. -- to create new words. In English, a new verb to impact was created from the previously existing noun impact. The new word internet was formed from the existing prefix inter- and the existing root word net. And so on.

New words can enter a language externally, too. Often when a society encounters a new animal, plant, food, artifact, or cultural concept, it will borrow an existing word for that thing from another language, and incorporate it into its vocabulary. The English words raccoon, sushi, khaki, coup d'état, and schadenfreude are all words that entered English from other languages (Algonquian, Japanese, Hindi, French, and German respectively).

But it's not always the case that borrowed words enter a language piecemeal like this, attached to individual objects or ideas. When the speakers of one language are in close contact with speakers of another language over an extended period of time, large numbers of words can be borrowed from one language to the other, forming what linguists call a layer of vocabulary. This is precisely what happened to English in the centuries following the Norman conquest, during which the ruling class of England was French-speaking. English ended up borrowing thousands of words from French. In many cases these were words for things for which words already existed in English. As a result, modern English has many pairs of words like the following:

get : acquire
watch : observe
land : nation*
brotherhood : fraternity

We might call the words on the left "native English"; they are descended from words that have been in English throughout its known history. The words on the right might be called "Franco-English"; they are anglicized words of French origin that entered the language following contact between English and French speakers. Usually, but not always, the Franco-English words seem fancier, more formal, more learned, or more prestigious than the native English equivalents.

2. Native Korean and Sino-Korean

You can probably tell where this is going.

The relationships between Korean and Chinese on the one hand, and between English and French on the other, are parallel in many respects. For most of its history, Chinese culture has had a tremendous influence on Korean society. Many fundamental Korean cultural elements (in religion, philosophy, government, literature, etc.) were borrowed from, or deeply influenced by, China. On top of that, before the invention of hangeul, it was nearly impossible to put the spoken Korean language into written form. Literate people in Korea wrote and read in the Chinese language, using Chinese characters.

As a result of all this, the Korean language borrowed thousands of Chinese words beginning over 1000 years ago. Many of these words were related to the many concepts and artifacts that came from China, but many were not. And just as Franco-English words were anglicized, by which I mean that they were given English-like pronunciations, these Chinese words were Koreanized, acquiring Korean-like pronunciations.

In modern Korean, the words that are of Chinese origin are called Sino-Korean words, and those whose history predates contact with the Chinese are called native Korean words. (That doesn't cover all of the vocabulary. For example, there are also words in modern Korean that are borrowed from English and Japanese.)

So, just as in English we have land and nation (the latter of French origin), in Korean we have nara 나라 and guk 국. Both mean "country", but the former is native Korean and the latter is Sino-Korean.†

3. Chinese characters

It will be helpful before we go on to set out a few basic facts about Chinese characters as they are used in writing the Chinese language.

a. Each Chinese character writes a single syllable of the spoken language, and each spoken syllable is represented in writing by a single Chinese character.**

b. All syllables in Chinese are meaningful.*** So we can say that Chinese characters write meaningful syllables. If two syllables are pronounced the same but have different meanings, they will be written with different characters. (This is a bit like the way we write some English words differently even though they have the same pronunciation, like two vs. too vs. to, or pear vs. pair vs. pare.****)

When Chinese words entered Korean and became Sino-Korean words, they all remained one syllable long.

4. Sino-Korean and Chinese characters

Even after hangeul became a standard alphabet for writing the Korean language, it was still common practice to write the Sino-Korean vocabulary with Chinese characters.

The Chinese word for country is written with the character 國. The Sino-Korean word that originates in this Chinese word, guk, could therefore also be written 國 (using the same Chinese character), as well as 국 (using the hangeul alphabet).

So we have to draw a distinction between a Chinese character writing a Chinese word in the Chinese language, and a Chinese character writing a Sino-Korean word (i.e. of Chinese origin) in the Korean language. Both look exactly the same: 國. But the pronunciation will be different. In modern Mandarin, the word written with 國 is pronounced guó. In modern Korean, it is pronounced guk.

A reasonable analogy is the written form nation. When writing French, this sequence of six letters writes a word pronounced something like nah-see-OHN. When writing a Franco-English word in modern English, the same sequence of letters is pronounced something like NAY-shun.

In isolation, it's impossible to say whether the Chinese character 國 is writing Chinese or Korean. In the same way, it's impossible to say whether nation is writing French or English. But in context, of course, it is clear what word in what language is being written, and thus what the pronunciation should be. Even out of context, without knowing the language or the pronunciation, the meaning is apparent to anyone who is literate in one of the two languages involved.

As I said, it used to be common practice to write all Sino-Korean words using Chinese characters instead of hangeul. Why? Well, it's complicated, but to simplify things, we can identify at least two reasons. One, many different Sino-Korean words have the same pronunciation. These homonyms look the same if written in hangeul, and ambiguity can result. But they look distinct if written using the appropriate Chinese characters. Second, it seemed more proper to write the words this way, reflecting the knowledge that literate intellectuals had of written Chinese, and continuing the tradition of Chinese writing that predated the invention of hangeul.

So let's go back to the example sentence I used in my previous post to illustrate hangeul:

한국 민속촌은 서울에서 30분 거리에 있으며 365일 언제든지 관람 하실 수 있습니다.

Some of the words are Sino-Korean. Here I've bolded them:

한국 민속촌은 서울에서 30분 거리에 있으며 365일 언제든지 관람 하실 수 있습니다.

The rest of the sentence is made up of Korean words and grammatical suffixes.

It's possible to write the sentence using Chinese characters to represent all the Sino-Korean words, like so:

韓國 民族村은 서울에서 30分 거리에 있으며 365日 언제든지 觀覽 하실 수 있습니다.

Regardless of how the sentence is written, it gets pronounced the same. (And note that whichever way it's written, you gentle reader -- even without any knowledge of Korean -- can identify exactly how many syllables are being written. Each Chinese character writes one syllable, and each hangeul block writes one syllable.)

By the way, our by-now familiar character 國 can be seen writing the second syllable of the first word in the sentence. You'll recall from the previous post that that word is Hanguk, "Korea". The sentence means "Korean Folk Village is 30 minutes from Seoul and can be visited any day of the year".

Now, you may well ask, why bother with these crazy characters at all? Why should Koreans learn thousands of complicated Chinese characters and write Sino-Korean words using them, when they've got a perfectly serviceable alphabet?

The first answer is that using Chinese characters can be very helpful in distinguishing homophonous Sino-Korean words. The Korean syllable il 일 could mean 'day', 'one', or 'thing'. The first two are Sino-Korean, the last is native Korean. Writing all three as 일 is potentially confusing. But writing them as 日, 一, and 일 respectively distinguishes them nicely.

But the second answer is that in most cases there really isn't a good reason to write these words in Chinese characters, and that's why Korean hardly ever do so anymore. Usually context is sufficient to differentiate the different words. So in modern Korean, Chinese characters are hardly ever used in everyday writing. It's only where context is insufficient (as in newspaper headlines or shop signs) or where the writer wants to convey a learned, old-fashioned, traditional, or sophisticated feeling, that Chinese characters are still seen. And because they are so rarely used now, most Koreans don't even know how to write many of them any more.

5. Subway signage

This post has already gotten too long, so I'll review the subway signage in a future post. Yes, I know, I promised at the top of this entry that I'd talk about it. But I've just realized that I need to take some better pictures to do it right. And besides, you might not have read all this stuff if you didn't think it was leading up to some pictures.

But here's a teaser:


See the two Chinese characters to the right of the English words "Way Out"? Are they writing Korean or Chinese? Or something else?


*You might think that "country" is the native English equivalent of "nation", but in fact "country" is of French origin as well.

†A note for the linguists among you: Strictly speaking, Sino-Korean elements are actually morphemes, not words. Many, like guk, are bound. But I'll use 'word' instead of 'morpheme' throughout the post.

**There are a very small number of exceptions to this rule. Probably fewer than half a dozen.

***Again, this is a generalization. There are dozens of exceptions.

****The two situations aren't really analogous when you look at the historical reasons for these different spellings in English. This analogy is for illustrative purposes only! Morever, English doesn't do this consistently. Many homophonous but distinct words are spelled exactly the same way, like trip and trip.