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.

Beoseot

What is this thing? We assume that it is some kind of mushroom (beoseot 버섯). If any of you know, please post a comment and share your knowledge.

At the supermarket today Erma bought a pre-packaged meal set containing beef, chopped vegetables, noodles, and sauce. That's where the mystery mushroom came from. She cooked it up tonight and it was pretty delicious. You can see a little of it in the background behind the mystery 'shroom.

Jucha 2

There seems to be a requirement in Korea that parking attendants wear cowboy hats. Exactly what set of historical contingencies has led to this rather bizarre re-coding of cultural iconography is not clear to me.

This guy is directing traffic at Severance Hospital. The parking attendants at the big Hyundai Department Store in Shinchon have similar uniforms.


As a follow-up to the earlier post on parking, here's a picture I took recently of a long line of "no parking" jugs on our little street.

Redeu Sakseu-ga igyeotda!

Although this is not, strictly-speaking, Korea-related, I would like to note here that the Boston Red Sox (Boseuteon Redeu Sakseu 보스턴 레드삭스) this morning (Korea time) won the 2007 World Series. To a Red Sox fan with a memory of any length, the idea that one could be lucky enough to see not one but TWO Boston championships in one's lifetime would have, until recently, seemed utterly ludicrous and magical. And yet, following on the team's 2004 triumph, that is exactly what has happened.

All the games were played in the morning here in Korea. Most started at 9:30 and ended around 1:00, coinciding almost exactly with my class time at the Language Institute. Aside from the one game I was able to watch at Erma's parents' this past weekend, I had to follow most of the games by checking the score on the internet during hourly class breaks.

Here I am celebrating with a shot of soju (소주), while the victorious Boston team celebrates on the computer screen behind me.


And here they are, looking almost as happy despite their lack of soju:

Gyeongju

Erma and I are at Erma's parents' place in southeast Korea this weekend. It's not far from Gyeongju, the ancient capital of the Shilla Dynasty. We spent Saturday at the Gyeongju National Museum, where Erma's mother volunteers regularly as a docent, giving free guided tours in English. She's very knowledgeable about the collection.

The museum has a great collection, much of it excavated from the royal tombs in the area. The Gyeongju landscape is, to use a slightly inappropriate term, littered with the burial mounds of Shilla kings and nobles.

Here's a picture of one I took from our moving car.


I think it might be the one you can see ahead in the distance in this picture, which was taken a bit earlier.


Then again, it might not be.

And here's a nice view, from the hillside restaurant where we ate dinner, of four mounds in a line. (That's Erma's mom enjoying the view.)


It's nice to get out of Seoul, which is unrelentingly devoid of greenery. Gyeongju is smaller, quieter, on a more human scale. There are more street and sidewalk markets, no really tall buildings. The hills are nicely touched with autumn hues this time of year.


One of the most striking artifacts at the museum sits outside rather than inside the museum. It's the King Seongdeok Bell, which hangs in a specially designed pavilion. The mammoth bronze bell was cast in 771 AD and weighs almost 19 tons.


The bell still works, although it hasn't been rung in a few years. In the second picture you can clearly see the flying apsaras (that's a Sanskrit term), a kind of celestial maiden in Buddhist mythology, descending from heaven next to Erma's head.

I only took a few pictures inside the museum, because you're not allowed to use a flash. They have a lot of amazing stuff, and the museum itself is quite nice as well.

I particularly liked this frieze, from a tomb. It's one of a set of twelve zodiac animal guards, which were set up facing outward around the perimeter to protect the tomb.


It's the pig, if you were wondering.

Byeongwon

I've been going to Severance Hospital twice a week. It's the hospital attached to Yonsei University, and it is less than a ten-minute walk from our place.

The reason I've been going is because of the mallet finger injury I suffered back in July in America. (In mallet finger, the tendon that attaches to the last finger joint separates from the bone; as a result, the joint flops over and can't be straightened. The treatment is to splint the finger straight for at least six weeks and let the tendon re-attach to the bone.)

The first picture was taken the morning after the injury, before the fingers were splinted. The second was taken the day the splints were removed. The third was taken today. The fingers look pretty straight in the middle picture, but that's largely because they were frozen into that position by the splints and stiff as boards. As they loosened up, they also started to flop over more. I left for Korea right about when I should have been starting a program of physical therapy to restore strength, range of motion, and a normal appearance to the fingers.

So, after I was here a couple of weeks, I decided to see if I could find a therapist at Severance. The hospital completed a brand-new, state-of-the-art building in 2005 that is clean, modern, and very high-tech. There is an International Health Care Center in it that caters to foreigners and has staff speaking English and other foreign languages. For simple treatment the Center doctors can take care of you themselves; for more specialized treatment, the Center acts as a liaison to the rest of the hospital helping you schedule appointments and communicate with doctors and staff.

Through the Center we set up an appointment with a doctor, and he recommended that I get paraffin wax baths for the hand and see a physical therapist. Before each appointment I'd go to the International Health Care Center, they'd charge my credit card, and walk me over to the right place for my appointment.

After a while I realized that they were charging me $30 a visit for this service. So, with Erma's help, I started using the hospital's services directly. Since the appointments were all already set up, it turned out to be pretty simple. I even have my own Severance Hospital patient card now!

Each paraffin wax treatment costs about $15. It involves sticking my hand in and out of a hot vat of molten wax, letting the layers congeal around the hand. This seems pretty low-tech, but it's a great way of permeating the fingers with long-lasting, even warmth to loosen up the tissues and make them flexible. (If I remembered more from high school chemistry and physics I could perhaps claim that it has something to do with the specific heat, but I don't.)


My hand gets bigger and bigger, and smoother and more doughy-looking, with each immersion. It's actually quite comfortable, even soothing.


No matter how many layers of wax go on, though, my monkey-knuckle-hair shows throw black as ink.

The therapist uses a spoon to scrape off the wax, and then we repeat the whole process two more times.


Seeing the physical therapist costs about another $15. She taught me how to do little strength-and-flexibility exercises that I can practice at home and at school multiple times a day. Here I'm extending one of the injured fingers back against pressure from her fingertip.


The fingers are definitely getting stronger, but I'm not sure they'll ever fully straighten out.

From what I've seen of this hospital and the staff, I'd feel pretty comfortable getting treated here for a major trauma or injury.

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).

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.

Maikeurosopeuteu

It's surprising and alarming how many things here seem to be running on Microsoft Windows software.

In my report on the Yeon-Go Jeon (aka Go-Yeon Jeon), I showed you this picture of the big electronic scoreboard in center field:


It turns out that the ATM machine in our classroom building is also running on Windows. It was hard to get a good picture because of the glare of the flash off the screen, but I think you'll get the idea:


I haven't tried to read the error message -- it's long and, when there's a line of people behind you waiting to withdraw money, you can't really pull out a dictionary and start translating.

There's a note posted on the wall above the ATM saying to just ignore the error message. And, in fact, the machine seems to work fine.

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.

Gyeolhon Shik

This evening we went to the wedding of one of my students, who moved back to Korea a few years ago. Coincidentally her wedding was scheduled during the time that Erma and I are here. We didn't know about it until just a few weeks ago.

The wedding was held in the 63 Building, which is named for the number of floors. When it was built in 1985, it was the tallest building in Asia. It's got the obligatory observation deck on the top floor, and an IMAX movie theater and aquarium. It's a fancy place and they do a lot of wedding banquets as well.

Even though the standard Korean wedding today is, in its general outlines, of Western style, there were still a number of differences between this wedding and a typical American wedding.

In Korea the most common wedding gift is cash. When we arrived at the banquet room, the area outside was festooned with large wreaths from which hung banners on which were written felicitous expressions in Chinese characters. There were two desks, each manned by two people. One desk had a sign with the groom's name on it, and one with the bride's. At the appropriate desk I handed over my cash-filled gift envelope, and signed the guestbook. (Because cash can so easily get separated from envelopes, it is common practice to write on the gift card the amount given.)

While the men were in Western dress, nearly all in dark suits, quite a few women were wearing hanbok 한복, the colorful traditional Korean dress. (There's a picture of a girl wearing a hanbok near the end of the Chuseok post.)

The wedding started at precisely the scheduled time; since we arrived a few minutes late, we ended up standing in the back of the hall while the bride and groom processed to the front. The bride was in a white wedding dress with a hoop skirt, no train, and a very long veil that trailed on the floor behind her. One woman seemed to have the job of making sure the dress looked perfect for photos; every 30 seconds or so during the ceremony she ran up to the bride and tugged emphatically at various parts of the dress. (It was often unclear to me what effect was achieved by all this tugging.) After they made their vows, the newlyweds received some instruction (occasionally humorous) from the officiant on how to have a successful marriage. Erma hypothesizes that the officiant was probably an advising professor or work supervisor of the groom or bride.

[Picture added December 20, 2007.]
At American weddings it is typical for the newlyweds to pose with members of the wedding party and with close relatives for formal pictures. Pictures of guests are generally candids, taken at the dinner tables and during after-dinner dancing. Here, however, the formal photos included one set with all relatives who were present, and one set with all other guests who were present. For each of these, the subjects of the photos were lined up four deep on risers.

[Picture added December 20, 2007. I'm the white guy with closed eyes.]
The disadvantage of the way we do things is that inevitably some guest at the wedding ends up not being in any of the pictures, or has only an elbow, ear, or toe visible. I know that Erma would have liked to have these giant group photos taken at our own wedding.

The bouquet was thrown right after the picture-taking with friends, with all of us still arrayed on the risers behind the bride. Unlike in America, the bouquet toss is not an opportunity for the single women present to compete to either run toward or away from the arcing flowers. One woman is designated in advance as the bouquet recipient. (She actually caught the bouquet twice, since the photographer didn't like the shot he got the first time.)

[Picture added December 20, 2007.]

Probably because the building didn't have a dining hall large enough for all the guests, we were divided into two groups, with relatives eating in one room and friends in another. As far as I could tell, Erma and I were the only two foreigners present among several hundred guests.

The food was Western: squash soup, steak, chocolate cake. But we were also served a small bowl of noodle soup, which is a Korean tradition. A friend of the bride, sitting next to us, said that the Korean expression "When are you going to serve us noodles?" means "When are you going to get married?".

After the main ceremony and dinner, the bride and groom performed a traditional pyebaek 폐백 ceremony. I've seen this once before at a wedding in America, and it's pretty interesting. For this the bride and groom dress in traditional costume and engage in a number of ceremonial acts of symbolic significance. At today's wedding, though, the pyebaek was held in a small private room for just a few relatives. I was able to go in while they were setting up and wish my student and her new husband well. Both had changed into clothes similar to those pictured here.

And that was it! The whole thing lasted about two hours. There was no music, dancing, or general merriment, like we have at home, but all the guests had a good time and enjoyed seeing the bride and groom start off on their new life together.

It was a special pleasure for me to see my student again. I had not seen her for several years, and it was wonderful to be present at such a joyful moment in her life.

Jangmi

It's really autumn here now. The days are cool and wonderfully crisp and sunny. The sunlight is bright but weak, and you can smell the incipience of winter in the air.

Took a picture on Yonsei campus today of roses in bloom. This is just outside the main library building.

The rose, as we discovered, is our gu flower.

Jucha

Korea has developed extremely quickly over the last few decades. The standard of living has risen rapidly, and Seoul has become a major metropolis with a good modern infrastructure (including the subway).

But in some cases what looks modern and Western is a thin veneer. There's a fair amount of "third-world" structure and behavior lurking beneath the "first-world" surface. (There's also a lot of stuff that is truly first-world, stuff that works better than in the US.)

To take one small example, the sewer system isn't really able to handle toilet paper. There are signs in public bathrooms instructing users not to put toilet paper into the toilet. So the soiled paper goes into little trash cans in the stalls, and the bathrooms smell.

Another example is traffic. Driving habits are scary and dangerous. There is essentially no place you can walk as a pedestrian where you are not in danger of being struck and killed by a motorized vehicle. It's imperative to keep your wits about you at all times. Motorbikes, often carrying wide crates behind the driver's seat, drive up onto sidewalks and weave in and out among pedestrians with impunity. (This is probably illegal, but if so there is no enforcement.) Cars are constantly making dangerous U-turns, or gunning through intersections, or inexplicably backing in and out of alleys for no apparent reason than to make life interesting for pedestrians. Walkways, sidewalks, staircases, and building entrances are often blocked by cars, forcing pedestrians out into the street.

Erma and I have found that trying to move out of the way of cars is often more dangerous than just plodding ahead in a straight line. Cars often give the impression of trying to go one way, only to change course right after you've moved to where you thought was a safer place.

As far as I can tell, there are no parking laws at all. Drivers will park wherever they think they can get away with it. On sidewalks, blocking lanes of traffic, up against doorways. I've never seen a parking enforcement officer or a parking ticket.

The businesses on our alley, in an attempt to reserve spaces for their customers, place large plastic jugs weighted full of sand out on the street with "No Parking" (Ju Cha Geum Ji 주차금지) handwritten on them.


You see a lot of other interesting parking-related phenomena when you walk around. Here are pictures of a few of them.

These are cars parked in the alley on which we live.


The front two cars in the pictures are parked in marked spaces, but the third guy isn't. It seems that almost all cars sold in Korea have side-view mirrors that fold in. Drivers often park in very tight spaces -- spaces that would be deemed unparkable by Americans -- and are perhaps also concerned about reckless drivers coming into contact with their parked cars. So many of them fold the side-view mirrors in when they park. The first and third cars in the picture here have theirs mirrors tucked in. (Maybe this is common practice in other countries as well. I don't know if cars sold in the US have foldable mirrors, but if so I don't think they get used much.)

Here's a close-up:


In the background you can see an orange "No Parking" sign. This one's a bit more sophisticated than the sand-filled jugs, but serves the same purpose.

Quite a few cars have their cell phone numbers visible in the windshield:


Perhaps this is so an errant driver who crashes into the parked car can call the driver to apologize. More likely, it's so that whoever's business, driveway, or door is blocked by the parked car can call the owner and tell them to move.

Because parking is so hard to find in the city, some businesses have installed very innovative space-saving parking structures. This one is right next to Princeton Square, our favorite cafe about a block from our apartment.


This is sort of a ferris wheel for cars. The structure holds five cars. The black car has been rotated up to the left, making room for another car to enter.


And there's a second car.


I've never seen this thing actually moving. I hope I will one day. Just the idea of trying to back a car into it seems terrifying.

At a fancy restaurant downtown, I've seen a car elevator that takes cars down to an underground parking garage. The elevator compartment was exactly the size of one car. Between the driveway and the elevator was a large lazy susan embedded in the concrete. The driver would move the car onto this large circle, which would then rotate it 180 degrees. The car could then be backed into the elevator, and driven out facing forwards once it reached the underground parking structure. Coming back, the car goes head first into the elevator, comes up to the surface, backs out onto the lazy susan, and then gets rotated around so it can drive down the driveway into the street.

Go-Yeon Jeon update

I'm sure many were waiting with bated breath to learn the results of the Korea-Yonsei competition from a few weekends back. Apparently Korea won everything except soccer, which was a 0-0 tie.

The sharp-eyed reader may have noticed that I switched the order of the two school names in this post. I hear from Uncle Q that this is what the kids at Korea U. call the event. I myself am more of a SNU gal (What's SNU, you ask? Seoul National University. What's SNU with you?), so either way is fine with me.

Jungguk sarami manneyo!

Which is to say, 중국 사람이 많네요!

Which is to say, "There sure are a lot of Chinese people!"

Of the 1000 or so students studying Korean here at Yonsei's Korean Language Institute, it seems that at least half are from Mainland China. You hear Chinese spoken everywhere: in the hallways, on campus, even on the bustling sidewalks of Shinchon.

Perhaps this will not surprise most of you. Take a look at the map, and you'll see that Korea dangles off its monstrous neighbor most precariously. In addition to geographical proximity, there are over a billion Chinese people. Why shouldn't several hundred of them make the short journey here to learn Korean? After all, look at all the Canadians in America learning English. (Okay, sorry, that's a cheap joke.)

But it does surprise me. Not too long ago the Chinese weren't going anywhere. They were too poor and isolated. And then, when they did start going places, they all wanted to learn English. They went to the US, England, and Australia. Why would a Chinese person bother with little insignificant Korea?

But things have changed now. Not only are Koreans aligning themselves more closely with China than the US, in terms of their economic (and perhaps political) future, they are having a major cultural impact on Asia. Korean movies, TV shows, celebrities, and music have been extremely popular in China for the last decade. (When I lived in Hong Kong, there were Korean movies playing everywhere. That was over 6 years ago.)

So the Chinese here, and I expect they'll be here for a long time to come.

Eumshik 4: Surasang

Yesterday Erma and I went to the Third Festival of Traditional Royal and Noble Food (재3회 궁중과 사대부가의 전통음식 축제), on the grounds of the Unhyeon Palace (운현궁 雲峴宮). It was put on by the Institute of Korean Royal Cuisine. The institute researches and reproduces the food that was eaten in the royal palace in the closing years of the Joseon (aka Chosun) Dynasty, which ended in 1911. The institute's knowledge comes in a direct line of descent from a "chief cuisine court lady" who served under the last two kings of Korea.

There were tents set up all over the grounds of the palace, under which recreated dishes (some plastic models, some actual cooked foods) and full meal settings were displayed. It was really interesting.

The king ate pretty good, let me tell you. But his meals follow the same basic principles that govern Korean eating today, including the CoRSE (Conservation of Rice and Soup Edibles) Law mentioned in my previous entry. (Hat tip to Monkeyboy for the acronym.)

Here's breakfast, the biggest meal of the day.


In the front you see the rice on the left and the soup on the right, same as today. But of course, the king gets lots and lots of side dishes. This is technically a "12 side dish" table setting. Traditionally, when counting side dishes, kimchis (there are three at the top) and soups (there are two on the right) are excluded, as are the three dipping sauces. For reasons we didn't understand, the large meaty thing next to the soups also doesn't count. That leaves the twelve dishes, in three rows of four, that are properly banchan. (The covered bowl front right is for depositing bones and other inedible bits.)

[Paragraph added October 30, 8:57 pm:
The royal table setting with 12 side dishes is called surasang 수라상. Only the king was allowed to have this many side dishes.]

But there's more! Here's the rest of breakfast:


The raw meat (front right) and the vegetables are grilled by a servant on that metal brazier behind the table, and it all gets turned into a big meaty soup (with the eggs somehow involved), which is then served to the king.

I also mentioned in the last post that there are a wide variety of kimchis. Here's a display of some of them.


Some of them were really intricate and bizarre. Here's one that is wrapped inside cabbage leaves. It's called bo gimchi, "wrapping-cloth kimchi".

Eumshik 3: Menyu

As it happens, my class is doing a unit on food right now. Between the class readings, my experiences eating here in Korea, and insights from Erma, I feel like I've gotten a pretty good sense of the basics of Korean cuisine.

Of course, as in many other countries, the cuisine is too rich and varied to capture in its entirety with a few generalizations. But that won't stop me!

Although the more rarefied examples of Korean cuisine can be quite delicate and sophisticated, the basic dishes that you see everywhere and that are a staple of home cooking are not terribly complex. I hesitate to use the term "unsophisticated", because it sounds pejorative. And I certainly don't mean to say that the food isn't delicious -- it is. But there isn't the kind of high aesthetics that you see, for example, in the best of French or Japanese cooking. Korean food is hearty and filling. Many of the best dishes, like good Mexican food, involve throwing a lot of ingredients together and then cooking them for a long time until they turn into a big flavorful saucy mush.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of the meals we made at home recently provides a good illustration of the basic components of a simple Korean meal.


Each person is given an individual serving of rice and of soup -- the latter of which can come in a number of different guises. Each person also has a pair of chopsticks and a spoon. With a few exceptions, all the other food is shared out of common serving dishes. Unlike in Chinese or Japanese dining, the rice and soup bowls are never lifted off the table. Both the rice and the soup are generally eaten with the spoon. The chopsticks are used for eating the other food (except, of course, shared soups), which may be taken in mouthfuls straight from the serving dishes, or placed momentarily on a small plate or in the rice bowl.

Usually there are one or two largish centerpiece dishes, like the bulgogi pictured here. We can call those "main dishes". Everything else in the meal is "side dishes" (banchan 반찬). The number and variety of side dishes is staggering. At some meals, especially at the cheaper restaurants, you might only have one or two side dishes. At fancier meals there may be dozens crowding the table, presenting a complex arrangement challenge to both servers and diners. The best known of the side dishes are the kimchis (gimchi 김치, though I'll continue to spell it as "kimchi"), of which in turn there are hundreds of varieties. There is generally always a kimchi present, so if there's only one side dish, it'll be a kimchi.

In the picture above, there are three side dishes, two of which are kimchis. We've put the two kimchis on one plate, which isn't really proper. One is a cabbage-leaf kimchi (the best known and most prototypical type), and the other is a radish kimchi. The third side dish, which is in a square plastic container at the back of the frame, is fried anchovies.

Korean food is famous for being spicy hot (maepda 맵다). It's certainly not true that all Korean food is spicy -- some of it borders on the bland -- but it is true that there is something spicy present at almost every meal, even if it is just a kimchi. And some of the spicier Korean dishes can rival South Indian or Sichuan food in their ability to induce pain.

As Erma has pointed out, Korea is both a rice culture and a soup culture. You really should have both at every meal. More on this in a bit.

Let's take a look at part of a menu for one of the cheap restaurants near campus that caters to students. This is the kind of restaurant where each person in a party will order and eat their own main dish, and share only the side dishes that are placed on the table. It's not uncommon to see pictures on menus in Korean restaurants, which is a great help to both the novice language learner and the novice Korean food eater. The menu pictured here is posted outside the restaurant door, so you can have your order ready the moment you sit down.


The first nine items are all cooked and served in stone bowls (dolsot 돌솥). (This isn't mandatory for these dishes, but it's a common method of cooking.) The bowls are remarkably good at holding in the heat. The stews usually arrive literally boiling hot, and can remain too hot to eat for more than ten minutes after they are set down at the table. (If the spiciness doesn't make you sweat, the heat will.) Notice how red the items in the third row are; that's a good indication of the spiciness level.

All twelve of these dishes can be categorized in simple binary fashion: they are either rice dishes or soup dishes. If you order a rice dish, you'll get a little bowl of soup on the side. If you order a soup dish, you'll get a little bowl of rice on the side. This is in conformity with Erma & Lance's Law of Conservation of Soup and Rice, which states that at every meal each person must have both soup and rice. (Let me know if you can figure out a way to contort the name of the law into a memorable acronym.)

Let's take the dishes in order, starting from the top left and working across and down.

Top Row
1. Yukkejang 육계장: A very spicy soup with shredded beef.
2. Bulgogi Dolsot Bap 불고기돌솥밥: Bulgogi (grilled beef strips) on rice.
3. Jeyuk Dolsot Bap 제육돌솥밥: Pork on rice.

Second Row
4. Kimchi Al Bap 김치알빕: Kimchi and roe on rice.
5. Dolsot Bibimbap 돌솥비빔밥: Bibimbap is one of the most famous Korean dishes. Literally "mixed rice", it consists of ground beef, various julienned vegetables, hot pepper sauce, and sometimes an egg, served over rice. The diner stirs it all up before eating it.
6. Budae Jjigae 부대찌개: A jjigae is a thick and spicy stew. Budae means "military unit". This dish is supposed to be jjigae the way soldiers eat it. (And every single male in Korea serves in the army for several years, so they've all had this.) Basically it's a jjigae full of disgusting processed meats, like SPAM, and kimchi. (The picture shows the ingredients dry. When cooked and served, it will look as red as the dishes in the next row.)

Third Row
7. Kimchi Sundubu 김치순두부: Sundubu actually means sundubu jjigae. Sundubu is soft tofu. So this is a soft-tofu jjigae with kimchi. One of my favorite Korean dishes, it's delicious, with great texture, and very spicy. Notice the raw egg cracked into it. The egg will cook in a minute or two in the boiling liquid.
8. Chamchi Kimchi Sundubu 참치김치순두부: Same as the above, but with chunks of canned tuna as well.
9. Chijeu Kimchi Sundubu 치즈김치순두부: Chijeu is just a Korean pronunciation of the English word "cheese". This is kimchi sundubu with, apparently, a slice of American cheese on it. It's not clear to me or Erma why anyone would want to eat this, and we haven't tried it.

Bottom Row
10. Ojingeo Deopbap 오징어덥밥: Squid fried in spicy sauce over rice.
11. Omeu Raiseu 오므라이스: Omeu is short for "omelette"; raiseu is English "rice". I think both the name and dish come from Japan. As you might guess, it's an omelette on rice.
12. Kimchi Bokkeumbap 참치볶음밥: Kimchi fried rice.

The prices on this menu range from 3300 won to 4000 won, or about $3.50 to $4.25 at current exchange rates. The portions are large and the food is healthy and filling. Plus you get side dishes, and side dishes always come with infinite refills at no cost.

(Interesting aside: From the descriptions of Korean dishes I've read in my class textbook, it appears that Koreans are very sensitive to how many colors a dish has. Almost every description says whether a dish has "just one color" or "a variety of colors" in it. This is not something I would ever think to include in a discussion of European cuisine.)

This is also the kind of food we've been getting in the student dining hall, although there you pick up the side dishes and put them on your tray along with your main dish, so you can't get seconds. All told, Erma and I are probably eating this sort of low-end Korean food for over half of our lunches and dinners.

Though it's not obvious from the menu I've shown you, Koreans eat a lot of seafood. Makes sense: it's a peninsular country. Among the most popular for eating are squid (ojingeo 오징어), small octopus (nakji 낙지), and large octopus (muneo 문어). Americans are often squeamish about these creatures, or at least about seeing them whole instead of cut up into bits. But Korean have no such compunctions. Here's a signboard outside one of the restaurants that's on our walking route to the subway through Shinchon:


The name of the restaurant, written on the top of the sign, is Nakji Chingu 낙지 친구. It means "Octopus Friend". But if you look carefully at the pictures, you'll see that this restaurant is no friend to the octopus.

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.