How do Koreans pronounced "iPhone 6"?

A normal person might attempt to answer this question by asking some Korean people. But we can take a less direct and more nerdy approach and try to puzzle it out.

First, some necessary background. (Stick with it, there's a payoff at the end.)

There are two sets of numbers in regular use in Korean. One set is the native Korean numbers that have been in the language for thousands of years. The native numbers from one to ten are:

1. hana
2. dul
3. set
4. net
5. daseot
6. yeoseot
7. ilgop
8. yeodeol
9. ahop
10. yeol

The other set is the so-called Sino-Korean numbers, which were borrowed from Chinese around 1500 years ago. They are:

1. il
2. i
3. sam
4. sa
5. o
6. yuk
7. chil
8. pal
9. gu
10. sip

Both are in common use, but usually only one set is used in a given context. For example, when telling time, the native Korean numbers are used for the hour and the Sino-Korean numbers are used for the minute. So "6:06" is:

yeoseot-si yuk-bun
'six-hour six-minute'

As in the example just given, whenever a Korean sees the written Arabic numeral "6", he or she will determine from context whether it represents native Korean yeoseot or Sino-Korean yuk.

6일 can only be yuk-il 'sixth day (of the month)'
6명 can only be yeoseot-myeong 'six people'

So that's the necessary background. Now we're ready to solve the mystery of "iPhone 6".

On a recent trip to Seoul, Erma and I noticed a billboard for the iPhone 6, visible from the train window just a few minutes outside of Seoul Station:

It's the square white billboard on the right. Click through to see a larger version of the picture. Or just look at the photo detail below.

Here's a close-up of the billboard, with the text transcribed in the caption to the photo:

"iPhone 6로 찍다"

The billboard says "Take photos with the iPhone 6". But how is that "6" pronounced? Erma and I wondered. Is it yeoseot or yuk? Neither of us are native speakers of Korean and we have no feel for what would be appropriate here.

But a moment's linguistic analysis yielded a surprising result: the answer is neither.

"iPhone 6" is followed by a Korean grammatical word, ro 로, which means 'with'. (Unlike English with, which as a preposition precedes a noun, this Korean word is a postposition which follows a noun.) The word ro is a bit like the English indefinite article a/an. The indefinite article has two forms: one precedes a consonant sound, and one precedes a vowel sound (e.g. a book, an apple). The Korean word also has two forms: ro follows a vowel and euro follows a consonant.

What this tells us is that "6" here represents a word that ends in a vowel. But neither yeoseot nor yuk ends in a vowel!

There's only one remaining possibility, and in Sherlockian fashion, we have no choice but to accept it. The word represented by "6" is the English word six.

"Oh-ho!" you say, Watson-like: "But six too ends in a consonant!"

"Quite so, my dear Mr. Watson. But you have overlooked one crucial fact. This is not the English word six as pronounced by Englishmen such as ourselves, but as pronounced in its borrowed form by people of Chosŏn."

That borrowed form is sikseu (pronounced something like sik-suh), which does indeed end in a vowel, and thus must be followed by ro, not euro.

So the answer to the question that forms the title of this post is: aipon sikeuseu. And we didn't have to ask any Koreans to figure it out!

English borrowings vs. English words

Here's an interesting sign that we saw recently in the window of a clothing store at a highway rest stop, advertising a really good deal.

Reduced from $300 to $150!

You will notice immediately that there is an English word on this sign. But it may surprise you to know that, in fact, all the words on this sign but one are English. Or, to be more precise, they are of English origin.

The text in green reads:

Orthography: 매쉬 베스트 + 점퍼 SET
Transcription: meswi beseuteu-wa jeompeo seteu
Pronunciation: me-shwee be-suh-tuh-wa juhm-puh setoo [mɛ.sʷi bɛ.sɨ.tʰɨ-wa tʒʌm.pʰʌ sɛ.tʰɨ]
Meaning: "mesh vest and jacket set"

Excluding the plus sign, this line consists entirely of words of English origin:

meswi 매쉬 from mesh
beseuteu 베스트 from vest
jeompeo 점퍼 from jumper (British English meaning 'sweater', but used for 'jacket' in Korean)
seteu SET from set

So why are the first three written in the Korean alphabet, while the last is written in the Roman alphabet?

I don't know why.

First hypothesis: The first three words are Korean words—though Koreans may know they are from English, they function as ordinary Korean words. The fourth word is not a Korean word, but an English word that all Koreans recognize from having studied English in school. This accounts for the difference in orthography.

Second hypothesis: All four words are equally Korean, but the last is written in the Roman alphabet to attract attention and lend cachet.

What's wrong with Korean alphabet

Actually, nothing is wrong with the Korean alphabet per se. It's great. But there is a problem with the way the letters of the alphabet are presented and learned. It's the result of some changes in pronunciation that have happened over the 500+ years since the alphabet was invented.

Here's a poster of the alphabet the way it is usually presented, with 24 letters: 14 for consonants and 10 for vowels.

I've placed a bright red vertical line after the last consonant and before the last vowel.

The ordering is quite systematic. All the consonant letters come first, then all the vowel letters. Within each group there is also a logical ordering. Little kids learn the alphabet by reciting these 24 letters in order.

Here's an example of systematicity in letter design. If a vowel sign has an extra short line attached to it, that signifies a preceding "y" sound. Below are the vowel letters in the same order seen on the poster, along with their transcriptions. As you can see, they are paired together in groups with and without "y".

ㅏ a   ㅑ ya
ㅓ eo  ㅕ yeo  ("uh" and "yuh")
ㅗ o  ㅛ yo
ㅜ u  ㅠ yu
ㅡ eu  (close to the vowel sound in English "put")
ㅣ i

These are the basic vowel letters in the alphabet, but they are not the only vowel sounds that can occur in a Korean syllable. Most other vowel sounds are actually combinations of vowels—diphthongs—and are written with two vowel letters each. This is why they are not considered basic and don't appear on the chart. You don't need to learn them as part of the alphabet, because they are just letter combinations.

For example, the word for 'ear' is gwi. It has two vowel sounds in it, u followed by i. It's written 귀, i.e. ㄱ (g) plus ㅜ plus ㅣ. The vowel combination wi ㅟ isn't considered part of the alphabet because it is transparently composed of ㅜ plus ㅣ and it is pronounced as u plus i. (Try saying "ui" fast and notice that it turns into "wi".)

Okay, so far so good. But something interesting happened to Korean pronunciation a few hundred years ago. In 15th-century Korean there were two diphthongs ay and eoy, pronounced like the vowels in the English words buy and boy, respectively. The first one, ay, is an a sound followed by an i sound, so was written ㅏ plus ㅣ, i.e. ㅐ. The second one, eoy, is eo ("uh") followed by i, so was written  ㅓ plus ㅣ, i.e. ㅔ. Just as with wi, these were transparent combinations, so they weren't learned as basic letters of the alphabet.

But then pronunciation changed. The sound ay coalesced into a single vowel ae (as in English met), and the sound eoy coalesced into a single vowel e (as in English mate).* But their spelled forms didn't change. So while graphically ㅐ and ㅔ look like sequences of two vowels, they are pronounced as single vowels. That means that you can't understand how to pronounce them by looking at their graphic structure the way you can with wi ㅟ. You just have to learn them as is:

ㅔ e
ㅐ ae

Well, think of poor little 3-year-old Tek. He's been looking at this poster in his room every day, learning the letters, singing them at school, and he's also learned how to write his name in Korean. And one day he says, looking at the chart, "Where is ㅐ?" That's the vowel in his name. And it's not on the poster!

In my opinion, the "alphabet" should have been reformed long ago with the addition of ㅐ and ㅔas basic letters. In our household we have taken a small step in that direction by amending our poster.

The alphabet chart, now supplemented with one of the two missing basic vowel sounds.

 * For almost all Korean speakers these two vowels have now merged, but they are kept distinct in spelling. Kind of like the way "w" and "wh" sounds have merged for most speakers of American English, but we still keep them distinct in spelling.

Want to know how to translate the name of that Korean dish into Chinese? Read this.

If you run a Korean restaurant here or abroad, and you hope to serve a not exclusively Korean clientele, things can be pretty rough. Romanizing the Korean names of the dishes is hard enough, but how do you translate them in a way that makes sense to foreigners?

It's not surprising that many restaurant owners resort to on-line dictionary translations. It's a dangerous game. Korean is full of homophones, and pitfalls are everywhere. For example, if you put yukhoe 육회 into a Korean-English dictionary, you might get back "six times". And you might put that on your menu. As your translation for steak tartare. And if you enter bangeo gu-i 방어구이 'fried yellowtail', you might end up with 'fried defense'.

Fortunately, the Korean government has come to the rescue with a comprehensive new app. Search for any one of hundreds of Korean dishes by name or type. You'll get the official transliteration and Japanese, Chinese, and English translations. From what I've seen of it, the app is extremely accurate and professional.

Since we here at Shou'er Journal pride ourselves on our technical savvy, I'm introducing the app to you via newspaper article. A digital photo of a newspaper article!

You can click through for a larger, more readable image.

One thing that's interesting to me about this headline is the way that Chinese characters (with alphabetic rendering of their pronunciation in parentheses below) in the headline efficiently convey a huge amount of information that would otherwise be quite difficult to explain clearly and succinctly. Chinese characters are rarely used in Korean writing these days, but their use can differentiate words that are homophonous and, because Korean spelling is so regular, orthographically identical.

The Korean alphabetic spelling 육회 could be the word yukhoe 'steak tartare' or the phrase yukhoe 'six times'. They are spelled and pronounced identically. So if the headline had just said "육회 gets translated as 'six times'", readers wouldn't understand the problem. Providing the characters makes it clear that the intended word is steak tartare, and the spelling beneath clarifies the pronunciation for anyone who is shaky on their characters—and makes explicit the homophony with 'six times'.

The picture of the app in the paper shows the jjigae 찌개 'stew' section, starting with kimchi-jjigae and dongtae-jjigae. (The makers of the app, who as I've said clearly know what they are doing, have wisely decided to stick with the familiar spelling kimchi instead of the formally correct gimchi.)

Names of Korean letters

When I was blogging here seven years ago, I was immersed in language classes and interacting with native and non-native Korean speakers on a daily basis. I was thinking a lot about Korean language and writing, and blogging extensively about both.

This is the introduction to Korean writing that I wrote back in 2007.

I haven't been doing that so much this time around. (I'm planning to blog in the future about how weird and constrained my life is here.) But it occurred to me that a post about the origin and structure of the Korean alphabet letter names might be of interest. Some of you have seen the video posted on FB showing Tek contorting his body into the shapes of various letters. You can hear him and me saying the names of the letters. Unlike the English names of the letters of the Roman alphabet, the Korean letter names are highly systematic (if not entirely consistent, as will be explained later).

These are the consonant letters, their transcriptions, and their letter names. It is helpful to remember that eu represents a single sound close to that in the English words book and put (for the linguists: [ɨ]) and eo represents a single sound close to that in the English words butt and some (for the linguists: [ʌ]).

ㄱ g: gi-eok
ㄴ n: ni-eun
ㄷ d: di-geut
ㄹ r: ri-eul
ㅁ m: mi-eum
ㅂ b: bi-eup
ㅅ s: si-ot
ㅇ zero/ng: i-eung
ㅈ j: ji-eut
ㅊ ch: chi-eut
ㅋ k: ki-euk
ㅌ t: ti-eut
ㅍ p: pi-eup
ㅎ h: hi-eut

(The vowel sounds are simpler; their names are just their sounds. For example, the name of the letter ㅏ a is "a".)

The names are each two syllables, and they indicate precisely how that letter is pronounced when it occurs at the beginning of a word and when it occurs at the end of a word. The difference in pronunciation can be considerable.

So: The name mi-eum shows that the letter ㅁ is pronounced with an "m" sound at both the beginning and end of a word. The name si-ot shows that the letter ㅅ is pronounced with an "s" sound at the beginning of a word but a "t" sound at the end of a word.

We actually know the origin of this system of naming letters. It is later than the invention of the alphabet itself. The alphabet was invented in 1443 and promulgated in 1446. The document explaining the use of the alphabet does not specify names of the letters. Some scholars believe they were simply pronounced with an i ("ee") vowel:

ㄱ g: gi
ㄴ n: ni
ㄷ d: di

etc. But we don't really know.

In 1527 a brilliant linguist named Choe Sejin 최세진 published a Chinese-character primer for children called Hunmongjahoe 훈몽자회 訓蒙字會. The pronunciations of the Chinese characters were given in the Korean alphabet. Choe lived at a time when most literate people were more comfortable and familiar with Chinese characters than with the still-new Korean alphabet. Because of this lack of familiarity, in his introduction Choe laid out the letters and examples of their pronunciation, much as a modern American dictionary explains its pronunciation guide in the front matter.

Here's what the relevant page of the introduction looks like:

The text is read from right to left, top to bottom. Click through for a larger image.

You should be able to identify the first eight letters listed (in the second column from the right) as identical to the first eight that I listed above. (As it happens, modern Korean alphabetical order also originates with this work.) These are the eight letters that could normally occur both at the beginning and the end of a word in Choe's time.

To illustrate the proper pronunciation of the letters, Choe provided two Chinese characters for each: one illustrating its pronunciation in word-initial position, and one indicating its pronunciation in word-final pronunciation. (The characters under each letter are half-width.) For example, the letter ㅁ is illustrated with the characters 眉 (pronounced mi meaning 'eyebrow') and 音 (pronounced eum meaning sound).

To the extent possible, he chose initial characters with an i vowel and final characters with an eu vowel. He was able to do so for the letters ni-eun, ri-eul, mi-eum, bi-eup, and i-eung. But there were no Chinese characters available that had the right pronunciations for the other letters, so he picked the closest available, yielding gi-eok, di-geut, and si-ot.

This basic system was later extended (I don't know when or by whom) to the other consonant letters in regular fashion, which is why the last six letters in my list above all have completely regular i-eu names. (Interesting aside: in North Korea they regularized the names of all the letters, so instead of gi-eok, di-geut, and si-ot, North Koreans call them gi-euk, di-eut, and si-eut.)

Now if you go back to that FB video, you should be able to hear and understand the letter names.

Mom Zone

Let't talk Korean-English bilingual punning.

This is a photo of the hospital that we took Tek to back in January, when he had a really bad illness and we were worried it might be flu. (Because we didn't have any Korean medical insurance at that time, we had to pay the full cost of the doctor's visit: about $15.)

There is a pediatric clinic on the first floor, but the hospital primarily specializes in ob/gyn. The English name of the hospital appears in the koala bear logo at the top, as transcribed in the photo caption:

It says: MOM ZONE WOMEN'S HOSPITAL

The Korean name of the hospital is: Mam Jon Yeoseong Byeongwon. The first two syllables (pronounced "Mahm Jone") sound very close to English "Mom Zone".* The rest of it is "Women's Hospital" (여성병원 女性病院). So the Korean name would seem to be just a borrowing from English: Mom Zone Women's Hospital.

But wait! I am told that Mam Jon 맘존 is also a common, playful contraction of Ma-eum Jo-eun 마음 좋은, which means "kind-hearted".** So setting aside the similarity to English "Mom Zone", in Korean the hospital name means something like "Kind-Hearted Women's Hospital".

That's a pretty sophisticated bilingual pun.


* Korean has no "z" sound. The closest sound is "j". Koreans do not perceive a difference.
** Corrected from earlier.

Fear of (words that sound like) death

In keeping with its historical position within the Chinese culturo-linguistic sphere, Korea has a taboo against the number 'four', which in its Sino-Korean manifestation is pronounced the same as the Sino-Korean morpheme meaning 'death'.

Four: sa 사 四
Death: sa 사 死

As in Japanese, the two morphemes are completely homophonous. (This is actually not the case in Chinese, where there is a tone difference, cf. Mandarin sì 四 'four' vs. sǐ 死 'death').

The taboo seems to be taken to an architectural extreme in Korea. In many buildings, the "4" button in the elevator is replaced with the letter "F" (from English "Four"), which I suppose is somehow meant to suppress the Korean number from arising in the mind of the elevator user. (Oddly, in deference to Western superstition, many buildings also lack a thirteenth floor.) [Update: I have been alerted to the fact that this very same information was already posted by me over 4 years ago in a comment made on a fascinating post about similar superstitions in China at Mr.  & Mrs. SB's blog.]

Anyway, the avoidance of the number 4 is manifested in a way I've never seen before in the apartment complex where we live. The complex has nine large residential buildings. They are numbered from 101 to 110.

How's that again? Take a look:

Adjacent buildings 103 and 105

There is no 104! Nobody has to live in "Building One-Hundred-DEATH".

Not only that: every building has three entryways, each with a staircase and elevator. On each floor of each entryway are two apartments, one on the left and one on the right, making in all six vertical stacks of apartments in the building, numbered 1 through 7. That's right, again there is no 4.

So, for example, our building has the following apartment numbers on its second floor, grouped in pairs around the three entryways: 201, 202; 203, 205; 206, 207. Thus nobody has to live in an apartment whose number ends in DEATH.

But this may surprise you: The first digit in the apartment number indicates the floor. Each building has five floors. INCLUDING A FOURTH FLOOR. You might think the people living in the fifth vertical stack of apartments in the fifth building consider themselves lucky to have dodged not one but two bullets. Had the designers of the complex not, in their wisdom, skipped the number 4, these folks might have found themselves inside a DEATH apartment inside a DEATH building.

Don't you then feel sorry for the people living on the fourth floor? Some poor soul is in apartment 405. In fact, there are apartments numbered 401, 402, 403, 405, 406, 406 in each of the nine buildings. Ending up in one of these apartments must feel like living inside a Twilight Zone episode.

Gangwondo

Today I returned to Seoul for my last weekend before going back to America. Erma's parents drove me up, and tomorrow they will take away all the stuff they lent me. We drove to Seoul through Gangwon Province (강원도 江原道). Not far north of the capital city, Chuncheon (춘천 春川), we passed this sign, which illustrates several features of Korean transliteration of French that I mentioned in my previous post. The Korean says Bongjyureu, rendering French Bonjour. We see the use of Korean ㅇ ng for the nasalized vowel of the French syllable bon, and the foreign-looking spelling 쥬 jyu for the syllable that is normally spelled 주 ju in Korean.

What's funny about the sign is that Bonjour has actually been misspelled as Bongjour at the top of the sign, no doubt because the normal romanization of Korean ㅇ is ng.


Beef is not the only meat that is making news here in Korea. Avian influenza has hit the chicken industry hard here, and huge numbers of chickens are being slaughtered. In order to try to protect the uninfected chickens in the north, the authorities have set up several stations along the roads that spray all cars that pass.

The stations look like this:


Here's the truck in front of us approaching one of these stations.


And now we are going through the spray.


(Full disclosure for journalistic integrity: The careful reader will notice that I've mixed pictures together from three different places.)

Here's a truck carrying a cow. Poor cow has no windows to roll up, and will get exposed to the spray.




I have no idea what the spray could be. An antibiotic wouldn't be of any use against a virus.

At this point we were above the 38th parallel, not far from the DMZ. Periodically along the road one sees these structures:

They are protective barriers. In the event of a North Korean invasion, those large columns will fall across the road, blocking it off and, hopefully, slowing down the tanks.


We stopped for lunch at a restaurant with a lovely view that specialized in salmon trout sashimi (song'eo hoe 송어회).



It also came with salmon trout spicy soup (mae'untang 매운탕). On the top are hand-shaven noodles.

Much packing to do now!

Beullangjeri

The title of this post is a Korean rendering of boulangerie, the French word for bakery.

French-style (or at least French-in-name) bakeries are very popular in Seoul these days, and there are several highly successful chains with branches all over the city. I decided to compile a photo gallery of some of them.

The first one, Cherbourg, is the least fancy of the lot. I took this picture in the long-distance bus terminal (Gosok Teomineol 고속 터미널), which is where I catch the bus to Erma's parents'.


Bonespé is located on Jongno 종로, a major downtown thoroughfare. I've only seen this one, but I think it must be a chain, since the sign identifies this as the "Jongno Branch". It looks very fancy.


Jean Boulangerie is in Nakseongdae 낙성대, not far from where I live. I always seem to be walking by on a Sunday, when it is closed.


Paris Baguette is one of the largest chains, and is pretty fancy. This one, not far from the Seoul National University subway station, has a café inside. It's where I took the picture of the strawberry-cream bagel.

Tous les Jours is the most common chain store. I don't know of a neighborhood that lacks one.


And then, of course, there is my little neighborhood shop, Petit Amour.


There is something of linguistic interest here as well. For those of you who don't want to follow a slightly technical discussion, skip down to the next line of asterisks.

**********

Here are the names of the stores and their Korean renderings. I've also provided Korean pronunciations in International Phonetic Alphabet for those of you to whom it's meaningful. (Because there is no accepted IPA symbol for the Korean tense obstruents, I will simply double the letter.)

Cherbourg	쉘부르	Shwelbureu	[ʃwɛlbuɾɯ]
Bonespé	보네스뻬	Boneseuppe	[ponɛsɯppɛ]
Jean Boulangerie	쟝 블랑제리	Jyang Beullangjeri	[tʃaŋ pɯlaŋdʒɛɾi]
Paris Baguette	파리 바게뜨	Pari Bagetteu	[pʰaɾi pagɛttɯ]
Tous les Jours	뚜레쥬르	Tturejyureu	[ttuɾɛdʒuɾɯ]
Petit Amour	쁘띠 따무르	Ppeutti Ttamureu	[ppɯtti ttamuɾɯ]

What's interesting to me is the fact that the Korean transcriptions of these names show remarkable sensitivity to the actual pronunciation underlying the French orthography, and in particular to orthographic differences between French and English.

In particular, note the Korean rendering of the voiceless French sounds spelled with the letters p and t. In English, these letters generally represent aspirated sounds (i.e. they are accompanied with a puff of air), and therefore are rendered into Korean as ㅍ [pʰ] and ㅌ [tʰ] in the transliteration of English words. But in the names above, they are rendered as tense initials ㅃ [pp] and ㄸ [tt], reflecting their unaspirated pronunciation in French. (I've marked these in red above.) This seems to be quite consistent, except for "Paris", which as a place name already has a fixed Korean spelling of long standing.

Of particular note is the rendering of "Petit Amour", capturing the French liaison. The final t of Petit is, in the Korean orthography, the beginning sound of the second word, 따무르 Ttamureu.

Also of note in these transcriptions:
1) The French ch sound is always rendered in Korean with lip-rounding (note the [w] sound in the transcription of Cherbourg).
2) After Korean palatals ㅈ j and ㅊ ch, there is no distinction between palatalized and non-palatalized vowels. In other words, while one can spell 자 ja and 쟈 jya differently, the pronunciation is exactly the same: [tʃa]. Native Korean morphemes are always spelled without the -y-. But foreign words are often spelled with the -y-, probably because it makes them look orthographically foreign. Thus the English name John is usually spelled 쟌 jyan rather than 잔 jan, even though both are pronounced as jan. We see this principle at work in the Korean renderings of Jean and Jours.
3) Nasalization of French vowels is represented orthographically by a following -n. Koreans render this as ㅇ ng, whereas for English words final -n is rendered as ㄴ n. You can see this principle at work twice in Jean Boulangerie.
4) French voiced obstruents (b, d, g, j) are, like their English counterparts, rendered with the plain series of Korean obstruents, which are pronunced as voiceless unaspirated (well, slightly aspirated) word-initially, and as voiced word-medially.

**********

The other day, perhaps just to drum up business, out in front of Petit Amour there was a balloon arch and speakers blaring music. The song playing when I took the picture was "Hot Stuff". You can recreate my experience by looking at the photo while listening to this.

This kind of balloon arch is very commonly seen when Korean businesses have their grand opening, or as they call it in Korean, "Grand Open" (just like that, in Roman letters). But to really do a Grand Open right, you should have two scantily-clad dancing girls gyrating to the music.


Not long ago two construction projects took place near Petit Amour. The top floor of the building was renovated, and the street was repaved.

It all happened incredibly fast. I wanted to take a series of pictures documenting the process, but it was all over in one day.

Note, above, the thick electrical cables that run from the roof of the building down into Petit Amour. This is probably not to code!

I would like to mention here how incredibly hard-working the small business owners in Seoul are. The chef-owner of Petit Amour is there every single day (including weekends and holidays) from at least 7:00 am to 10:00 pm. (He might be open longer hours than that, but I haven't checked.) Restaurant owners, convenience store owners, and produce sellers in my neighborhood work similar hours. What recreation they enjoy (TV, newspapers, conversation) takes place during lulls in their work. And as tough as their lives must be, I have found in almost all cases that they are polite, friendly, and provide good service.

Chujeok

This is a general follow-up to some earlier posts.

First, I've already described the ferris-wheel-like parking structure near where we live, and the cowboy-hatted parking attendants at Severance Hospital.

Turns out there's a parking lot in Shinchon with two even larger ferris-wheel like parking structures.


I got a better picture of cowboy-hatted parking attendants at Severance:


And discovered that they have a female counterpart at the main entrance gate:


Isn't she cute, all in pink?

At the Hyundai Department Store in Shinchon, there are also be-hatted uniformed parking attendants. But they look like this:


Guy looks like he just wandered off the sound stage after auditioning for the Wizard of Oz.

I've also written about apostrophes on Korean signs. Erma discovered a place in Shinchon called "Comma,,". (The name of the café whose sign is above the one for Comma,, will have special significance for some of my family members.)


A lot of restaurant signs have anthropomorphic animals on them. Most of them are giving a big thumbs-up, as if to say "I wholeheartedly agree with the idea of you eating my delicious self." We sent some pictures of to our friend Pangea, who collects such things and posts them on her blog accompanied by witty commentary. Take a look here.

In the same vein, here's another sign in Shinchon. The name of the restaurant, Gui Baksa 구이박사, translates roughly as "Dr. Grill" -- that's Dr. as in Ph.D. The clever and happy fish and octopus are not only wearing mortarboards as they celebrate their doctoral graduation, but also licking their lips in eager anticipation of devouring each other.

Aposeuteuropi

Koreans seem unnecessarily enamored of the apostrophe, a punctuation mark that is not even used when writing in Korean script. You'll remember the intriguing use of the "apostrophe s" described in this entry.

But that's not the half of it.


This presumably Italian joint is in a Yonsei student dining hall one floor above the one we usually eat at. Precisely what kind of relationship between pizza and pasta is being implied by this use of the apostrophe is, to be understated about it, a bit vague. The chef too appears to be puzzled by this conundrum.

We move now to the bustling neighborhood of Shinchon on a recent sunny autumn day.


There is something attractive about the symmetric use of capitalization in Shinchon Bob's name. It makes me think that it would be nice to meet ol' Shinchon Bob some day. By the way, Shinchon Bob's serves -- you guessed it -- Korean food.

After a delicious dinner at Shinchon Bob's, the perfect spot for a little post-prandial jazz music might just be Caesars's.


What I can't figure out is just how many Ceasarses own this place.

Still hungry? Maybe what you need is a chimichanga! Thought you couldn't get Mexican in Shinchon? Think again!

Choi is a common Korean last name. But just how many of them are slaving away behind the counter here dishing up tortillas and refried beans? Perhaps there is one Choi for each Caesars.

Erma and I were very excited to see what's going on at Chois' these days.




This presents us with something of a dilemma. Midterms exams begin Monday November 5. On Sunday should we study or check out the finals of the burrito speed-eating contest? Post a comment, and let us know if you're the little devil with the pitchfork in our left ear or the kindly angel with a halo in our right ear.

Recently overheard at the officetel

Erma: ... and that's how you escape when you're attacked by monkeys.
Lance: Monkeys are scary.
Erma: Are you smarter than a monkey?
Lance: I speak Korean better than a monkey.
Erma: What about a Korean monkey?
Lance: I might not understand Korean better than a Korean monkey, but I think I speak Korean better than a Korean monkey.

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.

Haksaeng saenghwal

It sure is fun to be a student again.

Sure, it can be busy and tiring. Four hours of class and three to four hours of homework, review, and class preparation make for full days, with the brain firing on all cylinders through most of it.

And, granted, the language learning process itself is fraught with frustrations, especially with an aging brain that doesn't always do for me what I'm used to expecting of it. There's just so much vocabulary to learn, so many grammar points to master. And if you really want to learn, you have to go out and actually talk to people, making mistakes and wondering what they are saying back to you. For someone who has tendencies toward shyness and perfectionism, it's a situation that alternately (or simultaneously) produces feelings of humiliation and exhilaration.

Even taking all that into consideration, though, this sure beats my regular life. The gazillions of to-do lists that used to clutter and dominate my life are a thing of the past. The hassles and anxieties of tending to the job, keeping up the house, doing a million errands, meeting deadlines ... they've all kind of sloughed away, like an uncomfortable extra layer of skin. It feels like I'm ten years younger. I go to class, I sit at home or in a cafe and do my homework, and then there's even a little time to read or post a blog. Every day I get something done, I make some progress, and I have some fun. I'm already wondering why I'm going to go back after only three months ....

Here's my student ID card, newly issued. If I feel ten years younger, perhaps it's no surprise, given the date of birth they've put on it.

Hangeullal

Today, October 9, is a holiday in Korea. Not a major holiday -- most everyone is working and shops are open -- but a holiday of note nevertheless. Today is Hangeullal: Hangeul Day. Hangeul is the name of the Korean alphabet, which is one of Korea's proudest cultural achievements. We had the day off from school.

Today, then, seems like an appropriate time to explain some things about the Korean writing system for those of you who are unfamiliar with it.

1. Hangeul 한글

There aren't too many alphabets that are celebrated by national holidays. (Does anyone know of any others?) There also aren't too many alphabets whose invention can be traced to a specific time, place, and person. But the Korean alphabet is one. It was invented in the mid fifteenth century by the great King Sejong. (There is speculation that the alphabet was actually invented by a committee appointed by the king, who then took credit. But King Sejong was actually very talented and learned. It's quite likely that he was the driving intellectual force behind the alphabet, even if he did have some help from advisors.)

Before the invention of the alphabet, there was no simple or systematic way of writing the Korean language. Literate Koreans wrote in Classical Chinese (much the way that medieval Europeans wrote in Latin rather than in their spoken vernaculars). The invention of Hangeul paved the way for the formulation of a truly Korean literate society, although it took several centuries before it became accepted to write formally in Korean instead of Chinese.

To the untrained Western eye, Korean writing doesn't look alphabetic. Take a look at this Korean sentence, randomly chosen from a web site:

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

It looks like it is made up of Chinese-character like rectangular blocks. But this is a false impression. It is actually made of alphabet letters arranged into rectangular blocks.

For example, the first word of the sentence is Hanguk, meaning "Korea". It is composed of six letters: ㅎ (h), ㅏ (a), ㄴ (n), ㄱ (g), ㅜ (u), ㄱ (g). (Yes, I know, the last one should be a "k". I'll explain later.)

When writing Korean, the letters are always grouped into syllables. The first three letters make the syllable "han", so they are grouped together: ㅎ +ㅏ + ㄴ makes 한. The next three make the syllable "guk", so they are grouped together: ㄱ + ㅜ + ㄱ makes 국. The letters are arranged top-to-bottom and left-to-right within each block. The arrangement of the letters within a given syllable block depends on the particular letter shapes (of the vowel letters, to be precise), so that the blocks end up being neither too high nor too wide.

It's pretty neat that when you look at Korean writing you can see not only the letters, but also a clear delineation of the syllables. Even without knowing any Korean at all, you can tell that the first word in the sentence above (한국) contains two syllables and the second one (민속촌은) contains four syllables.

Influence from Chinese is certainly a major factor behind the way Korean writing is structured, even though Chinese is not written alphabetically. Chinese characters are rectangles that are slightly taller than they are wide, and each one represents a single syllable. Korean syllable blocks have the same overall shape and proportions as Chinese characters, and represent the same unit of speech. So it would have made sense to 15th-century Koreans to create rectangular written units representing syllables. And as a result, Hangeul syllable blocks and Chinese characters blend together well when intermixed in a single line of text.

2. Morphophonology

Although the Korean alphabet is extremely well designed, and although in almost all cases the spelling of Korean words uniquely encodes their pronunciation (by which I mean that, if you understand the rules of the alphabet, you can correctly pronounce any written word even if you've never seen it before), it is not the case that there is a one-to-one correspondence of written letters with pronounced sounds.

One reason this is the case is that Korean has very complicated morphophonology. Put simply, morphophonology refers to the way that pronunciations of word parts change when those parts come together to make words.

This concept can be illustrated with an example from English. Consider the word "electric". It ends in a "k" sound. And as part of the word "electrical", it also ends in a "k" sound. But when the noun-forming suffix "-ity" (cf. conformity, equality, etc.) is attached, the pronunciation of "electric" changes so that it ends in an "s" sound. In written English this change of pronunciation is masked, because we spell the "electric" part the same way regardless of the pronunciation. There's a disadvantage in that: the spelling doesn't consistently tell you about the pronunciation. But there's an advantage too: you can immediately spot the common root that the words "electrical" and "electricity" share, in a way that would not be as obvious if you spelled them "electrikal" and "electrisity".

Korean is full of this stuff -- there's tons more than in English.

For example, consider the Korean word for the Korean language. It's a compound word. The first part is Hanguk 한국, which we've seen above. The second part is mal 말 "language". When these two word parts combine, the -k ending of Hanguk turns into an "ng" sound, and the resulting word is hangungmal. But the spelling doesn't change: 한국말.

The fact that the spelling doesn't change is hugely helpful if you want to understand the meanings of unfamiliar written words. When you see 한국 at the beginning of 한국말, you know the word has something to do with Korea, even if you don't know what the second part of the word means. But there's also a big disadvantage of you are a new learner of Korean: you have to remember to change the pronunciation of the last consonant from "k" to "ng". It's a regular rule -- "k" always changes to "ng" before "m", in all Korean words -- but it takes time for non-native speakers to internalize it.

3. An aside on cognitive processing

Koreans are very proud of their alphabet, and they should be. It's not just a matter of national pride -- it's their own alphabet, invented by one of their greatest rulers, and intimately connected to their beloved national language -- but also of usability. The alphabet is beautifully designed, flexible and efficient, and extremely functional.

[It's also linguistically very sophisticated. Those of you with linguistic training will appreciate two amazing, and inter-related features, of the Hangeul letters. First, the basic letter shapes are based on the appearance of the articulators when pronouncing the sounds represented by the letters (as seen in mid-sagittal section, of course). For example, ㄱ, which represents the plain velar stop, is meant to look like the curved tongue back raised up against the velum. Second, letters representing sounds at the same place of articulation are distinguished in a consistent way. For example, aspirated sounds are written with letters that are modified from the letters that write the unaspirated sounds through the addition of a single stroke. So, in a sense, the writing system is featural, as well as phonemic, syllabic, and iconic.]

But I think it does have some disadvantages. From a cognitive processing point of view, I suspect that it is not an easy alphabet to read. This is because different syllables can end up looking very similar to each other. It often takes top-down processing--that is, educated guesses about what syllable one is likely to encounter in a particular context--to read quickly. Otherwise, you have to slow down and peer really closely.

For example, look at these three syllables: 홍, 흥, 훙. Yep, they are all different. The first and last letters are the same in all three: ㅎ (h) and ㅇ (ng). But the vowel in the middle is different. The three vowels are ㅗ (o), ㅡ (eu), and ㅜ (u). Those little stems on the "o" and the "u" become so short that they are nearly invisible. Native speakers aren't much bothered by this because the other syllables in the word will clue them in to which of these three possible syllables is being written. But if you don't know Korean well, you've got to squint a lot to figure out what's going on.

Let's try blowing those up a bit bigger, shall we? [Note: If they don't look bigger for you, try increasing the font size in your browser.]

홍, 흥, 훙

See the difference now?

4. Transliteration

The nature of the alphabet and the complex morphophonology (sound changes involved in word formation) present interesting challenges for transliteration. What's the best way to render Korean words in the Roman alphabet for foreigners?

In these blog entries, I've been following the guidelines of the Korean government's Revised Romanization of Korean, promulgated in 2000, with one modification. (The one modification is that I write "sh" where the official Romanization has "s" whenever the actual pronunciation is closer to the English "sh" sound. For example, the neighborhood near us called Shinchon is officially romanized as Sinchon. But the first syllable sounds more like English "shin" than like "sin".)

The question that arises with any transliteration is: should you be trying to represent the original written form, or should you be trying to represent pronunciation?

For example, consider the by-now familiar letter ㄱ (g). It is consistently pronounced as "g" at the beginning of a syllable, and as "k" at the end of a word. So should the word for Korea, 한국, be transcribed as Hangug or as Hanguk? The former transliteration more accurately represents the written Korean form. It's also relatively easy for a Korean speaker to create the romanized form, since there is a one-to-one relationship between the Korean letters and the Roman letters. But for an American tourist with no knowledge of Korean who is reading a street sign, the latter is preferable because it is more likely to result in an accurate pronunciation.

A more complicated question arises with the word for "Korean language", 한국말. Should it be written Hangugmal, Hangukmal, or Hangungmal? The last is the only one that a foreign reader who doesn't know Korean will pronounce with any accuracy. But, it's impossible from that transliteration to either (1) recognize the component Hanguk "Korea" in the word or (2) be able to reconstruct the original Korean spelling. Where that "ng" appears in the Romanization, the original Korean letter could be either ㄱ (g) or ㅇ (ng), and there is just no way to know which it is.

For the most part, the Revised Romanization opts for representation of pronunciation rather than written form. But there are still a few tricky things you need to know if you want to be able to pronounce the transcribed words in my blog entries.

1) The letter combinations "eo" and "eu" represent single vowel sounds. "eo" is the vowel sound in English "hum". That's why I said in an earlier post that Chuseok is pronunced CHOO-suck. As for "eu", there is no real equivalent in English. But it's not so different from the vowel in English "full". (So pronounce the last syllable of Hangeul, the Korean alphabet, so that it rhymes with "full".)

2) Sometimes you will see double letters, like "tt", "kk", "pp", "jj". These are "tense" sounds. They sound rather sharp and strident. For our purposes, it's okay to just pronounce them like their single-letter equivalents. (That won't work if you're really trying to speak Korean though!)

3) The vowel sounds written "e" and "ae" are both pronounced the same, like the short "e" in an English word such as "bed".

By the way, the Korean word for "day" is nal 날. But Hangeul Day (한글날) comes out as Hangeullal (as in the title of this post). Yep, more morphophonology!

Since this post is already way too long (has anyone actually made it this far?), I'll talk about the role of Chinese characters in Korean writing -- a subject near and dear to my heart -- some other time.