Susukkekki

We had a Korean lesson text about riddles, so the teacher told us a lot of Korean riddles. These are riddles of the Dixie-cup type:

Q: "When is a door not a door?"

A: "When it's a jar (ajar)."

Most of them work fine in any language, such as:

Q: "What can you only see with your eyes are closed?"

A: "A dream."

Two of the riddles we learned involve multilingual puns. Of course these were the most interesting to me. Here's the first one:

Q: "세계에서 제일 큰 코는?" "What's the biggest nose (ko) in the world?"

A: "멕시코" "Mexico" (Korean mekshiko, which sounds like "maxi"-ko)

[Updated May 1, 2008 by Lance: I have it on authority from at least one native Korean speaker that "maxi" is not actually part of this pun. Mexico, being a country, is already a big ko. But for me as an English speaker, the pun has an added dimension!]

And the second one:

Q: "풀중에서 제일 좋은 플은?" "What's the best of all the plants (pul)?"

A: "원더풀" "Wondeo-pul" (Korean pronunciation of English "wonderful")

Possibly you had to be there.

Xiahe

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

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

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

---

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


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

Haeinsa

Last week, before school started, Erma's mother took me to Haeinsa (해인사 海印寺), one of the most famous and treasured Buddhist temples in Korea. It is most famous for housing the Tripitaka Koreana, about more which later.

The temple is about a three-hour's drive from Erma's parents house. Or at least it should be. But for the first time on any road trip in Korea, there was no traffic at all, and we made it in a little over two hours in each direction.

The temple is nestled in the Gaya Mountains (가야산). The approach to the temple is beautiful.




I'll present several pictures without comment.








Our 8-year-old trusty 1 megapixel Nikon Coolpix camera was fatally damaged when I fell ice skating in December with it hanging from my shoulder. This forced us to purchase a new camera, which has features. I tested out the panoramic functionality for the first time. (You'll want to click to see a larger version to get the full effect.)


Here I am inside one of the four temple buildings housing the Tripitaka Koreana (an odd hybrid Sanskrit-Latinate name), which is a complete set of the Buddhist canon, in Chinese, carved into over 81,000 wooden printing blocks. It has survived the ravages of war and the environment since its creation in the 12th century, and is still in good enough shape to be used for printing. In addition to being a living object of devotion for Buddhist practice, its historical and academic value can't be underestimated.

The amount of care and labor that went into its creation and preservation is astonishing to contemplate. Although the interior of the buildings is off-limits to visitors, and flash photography isn't allowed, I was able to stabilize the camera against the window beams and get some reasonably good interior shots. You can see the wooden pages of the canon, stacked two rows deep, shelf after shelf after shelf of them.




The characters were, of course, all carved backwards and in relief into the wood.


The buildings that house the blocks don't look like anything special.


The fact that they date to at least the mid-15th century, and survived fires that seriously damaged other parts of the temple, isn't in and of itself that remarkable. That they and their contents were saved from being destroyed during the Korean War when a Korean pilot repeatedly disobeyed orders to bomb the site is remarkable, but says nothing about the quality of the buildings themselves. (There is a memorial plaque to this pilot located outside the temple.)

But despite appearances, the buildings are scientific marvels.

Something about the foundation, structure, and materials of the buildings maintains optimal humidity conditions for preserving the woodblocks. Notice that the upper-level windows are smaller than the lower-level windows. On the other side of the building this pattern is reversed. Somehow this creates optimal airflow. Somehow the builders knew that it would do so.

Because of the importance of the buildings to the preservation of the Tripitaka, they are designated as a Korean National Treasure and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

You can read more about both the temple and the Tripitaka, if you are interested, at the Wikipedia sites here and here.

I can't resist ending the post with another multilingual pun. We saw this truck on the road to Haeinsa:


It's a Seoul Milk truck. On the left side it says "I heart 乳". The fact that the word "LOVE" is written inside the heart makes it clear that this sentence is meant to be read in English. The Chinese character at the end is, in Korean, pronounced yu (like English 'you'), giving us the sentence "I love you", familiar to every Korean over the age of 2. The character means 'milk', so the sentence is also understandable as meaning "I love milk".

And, just in case the Korean reader doesn't know the character (especially likely if the target audience is children), the pronunciation is provided, visible to those with sharp eyesight, in parenthesized hangeul letters 유, as you can see in this closeup:

Rak!

Yesterday Erma and I were in one of the local eateries having lunch while I bemoaned my poor performance on our listening comprehension final exam. (I'll find out tomorrow just how poor it was.) The television in the restaurant was tuned to a music video station, and they were showing a live musical performance at a big open-air theater.

On the screen behind the performers on stage, the following text appeared in giant green letters:

SCHOOL OF 樂

The Chinese character is used to write two different meaningful syllables in Korean (and in Chinese). One is ak 악 (Chinese yuè), meaning "music". The other is pronounced nak 낙 or rak 락 (Chinese lè), meaning "joy".

Have you figured out the multilingual pun? If the character is given one of its Korean pronunciations for the meaning "joy", the sign can be read "SCHOOL OF RAK", i.e. "SCHOOL OF ROCK". This, of course, evokes associations with the character's other meaning, "music".

HOT뜨거!

We've been eating lunch at the large dining hall in the student union building with some frequency. As I mentioned earlier, the dining hall has a number of different stations serving food, one of which is called Sestorang, written in such a way that is makes a complicated multilingual pun.

Erma pointed out that one of the other stations also has a multilingual pun name. Unlike Sestorang, which always features a meal cooked and served on a hot iron skillet, this one always serves a thick soup in a little earthenware crockpot. It's called "HOT뜨거!", which would be pronounced hot-tteugeo. Now, the second part of that, tteugeo, is an abbreviated form of the Korean word for hot, tteugeowo (뜨거워). When a Korean person touches something burning out, they'll pull their hand back and say the equivalent of "Yow, that's hot!" which is at-tteugeo. (The "at" part is meaningless, it's just an exclamation. It rhymes with "hot".) Not only does English "hot" mean the same thing as tteugeo, but if you pronounce "HOT뜨거!" it sounds almost exactly like the Korean for "Yow, that's hot!".

When you are served your food in the earthenware crockpot, it is in fact still boiling.

If any Korean speakers can correct or clarify my explanations, please leave a comment!

Shikdang

Today was rainy. Erma and I took our placement tests at the Korean Language Institute. All of the new students gathered in a large auditorium where we received verbal instructions in, serially, Korean, English, Chinese, and Japanese. (A guy sitting near me, looking at a Russian text, was presumably out of luck.) Then we all separated into small classrooms where we took a written exam and had one-on-one oral exams with instructors. The whole process took about two hours. Our assigned class levels will be posted tomorrow.

After the test, the two of us went over to the main student center on Yonsei campus to have lunch in the dining hall. The student center was pretty old and run down. The dining hall itself was large and grimy. Most of the space was filled by long rectangular tables with white plastic chairs. At the back end of the room were a number of windows where you could pick up a brown plastic tray and some silverware, and get served a meal. After looking at a few of them, we chose this one:

We each helped ourselves to a small bowl of radish kimchi and a small bowl of bean-sprout broth. The worker behind the counter brought over, and put on each of our trays, a sizzling iron tray of kimchi fried rice.

Then we looked around to try to figure out where to pay. It wasn't obvious. By this time it was well after 1:00, and there were not too many students getting food, so there was no big line that we could just get in. The few other people we saw getting food were just sitting down and eating. The meals couldn't possibly be free, could they?

Finally, we spotted a woman sitting at a wooden desk in a far corner of the dining hall. We approached her with our trays of food and asked if this was the place to pay for our meal. "You didn't pay yet?" she said in surprise. We were, it turned out, supposed to pay her first, get a little meal ticket, and then use the meal ticket at the counter to get our food.

I took the two meal tickets back to the counter, where I found a plastic bucket at the bottom of which a whole bunch of similar tickets were forlornly clustered, and dropped them in.

The meals cost 3000 Korean won each. At current exchange rates, that about $3.25.

While we were eating, we looked around and realized how the system is supposed to work. When you enter the dining hall, you should immediately turn left. As you walk along the wall, there is a menu of today's dishes, and a glass-fronted cabinet in which you can see samples of each of the meals available, with prices. Here's the meal we got:


The sign says "철판 김치 볶음밥 & 후라이". That's kimchi fried rice and "hurai". "Hurai" is the Korean pronunciation of "fry", and means the fried egg. (This is a case where the English "F" sound, absent in Korean, is replaced with "H" rather than "P".)

The more observant of you will have noticed that the counter where we got our food has an orthographically bizarre name. Here it is up close:

There are three scripts involved here, and a trilingual pun. Let's start with the last two elements, 토랑. This is written in the Korean alphabet, Han-geul, and spells out "torang".

At the beginning is a Chinese character, 世. Chinese characters aren't used much in Korean writing anymore, but they are still used occasionally in signs or in certain formal settings to write Korean words that have historically been borrowed from Chinese. This Chinese character writes a word meaning "world", pronounced "se" in Korean.*

The middle element is, of course, the English "apostrophe s".

So what does the whole thing mean? Well, it appears to say something like "World's Torang", which has the look of a name of an establishment. But "torang" is not a Korean word, as far as I know. The trick to understanding it is to pronounce the whole thing in Korean. Then you get "Se + seu + torang". (The vowel transcribed here "eu" is a very short, whispery vowel. Its presence is necessary because Koreans cannot pronounce an "s" sound at the end of a syllable.) This pronunciation differs by only one consonant from "reseutorang", the Korean word for restaurant, which is borrowed from French.

What we have, then, is an establishment name that puns on the French-borrowed word for restaurant while incorporating a Chinese character meaning "world" and an English possessive form.

I wonder if any of the Korean students who see the sign ever think about this?

[Footnote added September 28]
*I've just discovered that the 世 is the Chinese character used to write the second syllable of Yonsei University. In this context it's got nothing to do with "world". So "Yonsei's Torang" is a better interpretation than "World's Torang".