(Cambria Sinophone World) Chong-Sok Ko, Jongsok Koh, Ross King-Infected Korean Language, Purity Versus Hybridity_ From the Sinographic Cosmopolis to Japanese Colonialism to Global English-Cambria Pres.pdf

Infected Korean
Language,
Purity Versus Hybridity
Infected Korean
Language,
From the Sinographic Cosmopolis
to Japanese Colonialism to Global English
KOH JONGSOK
Translated with a critical introduction by Ross King
Cambria Sinophone World Series

General Editor: Victor H. Mair
Copyright 2014 Cambria Press

All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ko, Chong-sok, 1959- [Kamyomdoen ono English]
Infected Korean language, purity versus hybridity : from the sinographic
cosmopolis to Japanese colonialism to global English / By Koh Jongsok ;
Translated by Ross King. Originally published as Kamyomdoen
ono: Kugo ui pyonduri rul tamun myotkae ui p'unggyonghwa, 1999.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60497-871-1 (alk. paper)
1. Korean language--Usage. 2. Korean language--Social aspects. 3. Korean
language--Foreign elements. I. King, Julian Ross Paul, translator. II. Title.
PL908.8.K6413 2014
495.7----dc23
2013045103
Table of Contents
List of Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
Introduction: Koh Jongsoks Infected Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Preface to the Revised Edition: Koh Jongsok . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Chapter 1: A Clumsy Confession of Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Chapter 2: A Footnote to My Confession . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Chapter 3: Infected Language, Infected Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Chapter 4: Contamination, Infiltration, Hybridity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Chapter 5: We Are All Greeks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
Chapter 6: Disposable Legacy, Indispensable Heritage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215
Chapter 7: France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245
Chapter 8: Random Thoughts on Nuije Ka . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
Chapter 9: On the Peripheries of Sgyng pylgok . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279
Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305
Cambria Sinophone World Series . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309
About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
About the Translator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
List of Tables
Table 1: Reversal of made-in-China sequencing of the Chinese

characters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Table 2: Replacement of made-in-China calques with made-inJapan calques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Table 3: Made-in-China Sino-vocabulary words with new madein-Japan meanings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Table 4: Words first created through translation from the
Dutch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Table 5a: New calques from European languages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Table 5b: New calques from European languages
(Continued) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128
Table 6a: Neologisms created by the Japanese by combining
Chinese characters into new words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
Table 6b: Neologisms created by the Japanese by combining
Chinese characters into new words (Continued) . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
Table 6c: Neologisms created by the Japanese by combining
Chinese characters into new words (Continued) . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Table 7a: Japanese wago imported with Sino-Korean
pronunciations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
viii
Infected Korean Language
Table 7b: Japanese wago imported with Sino-Korean

pronunciations (Continued) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Table 8: Doublets in French evolved from textual
borrowing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
Table 9: Doublets from the Old French nominative and accusative
case forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
Table 10: Doublets where one word retains the original Latin
shape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
Table 11: Triplets from Latin roots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
Table 12a: Examples of doublets showing loose synonymy like
kwang and kobang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
Table 12b: Examples of doublets showing loose synonymy like
kwang and kobang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
Table 13a: Examples along the lines of sanyang and sanhaeng with
somewhat more divergent semantics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 148
Table 13b: Examples along the lines of sanyang and sanhaeng with
Table 13c: Examples along the lines of sanyang and sanhaeng with
Table 14: French words created from Greek roots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154
Table 15: Sino-Korean words weightier and more official
sounding than the native Korean equivalents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies Grant
funded by the Korean Government (MEST) (AKS-2011-AAA-2103) and
by a translation grant from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.
I am grateful to Mr. Koh for the opportunity to translate his book, and I
also wish to thank the Literature Translation Institute of Korea, the staff
at Sup sogi Hosu (the Korean Language Village, Concordia Language
Villages), Hyoshin Kim, Daniel Pieper, and Natasha Rivera for their assistance at crucial moments in the translation process.
Infected Korean
Language,
Introduction
Koh Jongsoks
Infected Language
Ross King
Koh Jongsoks Infected Language was first published in Seoul in 1999
with the title Kamymdoen n: Kug i pynduri rl tamn mytkae
i punggynghwa (Infected language: Portraits of the landscape on the
periphery of the national language). That this book must have sold
reasonably well can be surmised from the fact that a revised and slightly
expanded version appeared in 2007 with the same title but carrying the
additional chapter Contamination, Infiltration, Hybridity: A Swipe at
Purism in Korean. The book is difficult to categorize in terms of genre; in
effect, it is a series of critical essays about Korean language and writing
situated at the intersection of history, politics, linguistics, and literature.
Infected Language is not about the Sinophone world, nor has Korea by
any stretch of the imagination ever been a constituent part of that world,
as long as one understands Sinophone to mean Chinese-speaking.
Indeed, most patriotic modern-day Koreans would likely bristle at the
notion of a book about modern Korean-language debates appearing in a
series about the Chinese-speaking world, and perhaps even Koh Jongsok
himself, for all his progressive inclinations, would raise an eyebrow at

the thought.
But the significance of Kohs collection of essays lies precisely in
the living testimony it gives to the difficulties and challengeshistorical, technical, and epistemologicalentailed by the vernacularization
process in one quarter of what, following Sheldon Pollock and his work
on transculturation and vernacularization in the Sanskrit cosmopolis, I
propose to call the sinographic cosmopolisthat is, the traditional region
in East Asia that was bound by its commitment to literary Sinitic (classical Chinese) and to sinographs (Chinese characters). And as Kohs
essays show, the legacies of Koreas recent, enthusiastic, and centurieslong participation in this panEast Asian cultural formation are only
highlighted by its modern-day conscious attempts to sever ties with it.
To be sure, other terms for this translocal cultural formation are in
circulation: Sinitic sphere, Chinese character cultural sphere, Sinosphere,
and so on. But Sinitic sphere and Sinosphere are too China-centric in
their implications while eliding the all-important role of the writing
system, and Chinese character cultural sphere carries with it the unwelcome implication that the culture across this vast region was somehow
uniform (not to mention the additional problem that this term is basically a calque on the notion of the kanji bunkaken of which
modern imperial Japan fancied itself the leader). In many ways, the most
accurate way to refer to this area would be to focus on the common
commitment to literary Sinitic as a written language, and Kin Bunky
of Kyto University gestured in this direction with his 2010 Kanbun
and East Asia: The Cultural Sphere of Reading-by-Gloss (kundoku
), but his primary concern was to show both the pervasiveness and
the diversity of local strategies for reading literary Sinitic in different
vernaculars across the sphere, and in any case it is not easy to create a
pithy term that incorporates either literary Sinitic or classical Chinese.
However, if one follows Pollock (2006, 12) in accentuating the supraregional (the cosmos) and the political (polis) dimensions of the pursuit of
Koh Jongsoks Infected Language
literary Sinitic in traditional China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam (among

other places) and adds to this the overwhelmingly important fact that all
these places traditionally used Chinese characters before they encountered any other writing system and continued to do so even after (indeed,
well after) the advent of other writing systems, sinographic cosmopolis
captures the key parameters of a translocal cultural formation that can be
usefully compared to the Sanskrit cosmopolis or to Latinitas in Western
Europe, the two areas about which Pollock has written so richly in his
book.
One other point that Pollock emphasized in his 2006 volume and
in other publications leading up to it is the scandalously underresearched field of vernacularizationthe process of people knowledgeably becoming vernacular (2006, 20) and a key historical problem
that despite its crucial importance, has so long been off the map of
historical cultural studies (Pollock 2000, 606).
Pollock has little to say with respect to East Asia, and the few statements he has made are provocative and controversial. For example:
The full vernacularization of Vietnamlike that of Korea, despite
the development there too of a demotic writing system in the midfifteenth century owing to King Sejongs reformswould be the
project of a derivative modernity. (Pollock 2006, 486487; cf. also
Pollock 2000, 595).
Quite apart from the problem of East Asia (see King forthcoming),
Pollocks critics have pointed out that his work is much stronger on
beginnings than on endings. In other words, most of his work on
the interplay between cosmopolitan and vernacular in the Sanskrit
cosmopolis focuses on the period before the advent of British colonialism, leaving unexplored questions of what Pollock would term the
second wave of vernacularization that took place under conditions of
contact with Western colonialism and modernity.
Was vernacularization in Korea a project of derivative modernity?

How did the transition from sinographic cosmopolis to (modern) vernacular language, writing, and literature play out across East Asia? What
were the contours of this process in Korea, given its relatively late
opening to the world beginning in 1876 and its subsequent annexation
and colonization by Japan starting in 1905? Unfortunately, there is still
relatively little theoretically informed research on these questions, and
there was even less at the time when Koh Jongsok first wrote his book.
Nonetheless, when read in conjunction with some of the key ideas from
relevant research that began appearing in the mid-1990s on language
ideology, kokugo ideology (Yeounsook Lee), and translingual practice (Lydia Liu, but see also Masini) in Japan and China, Kos book reads
as a series of eloquent case studies of the multitude of parallel issues
confronted by Koreans as they de-sinographicized and re-cosmopolitanized.
Language Ideology, De-Sinographicization,

and Re-Cosmopolitanization
One possible subtitle for this translation of Infected Language could be
Purity vs. Hybridity in Korean Language Ideological Debates. Here I
take my cue from the relatively new interdisciplinary field of language
ideology as developed by scholars like Susan Gal, Judith Irvine, Jan Blommaert, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul Kroskrity, among many others. In
the introduction to his 1999 edited volume, Language Ideological Debates,
Blommaert (1999b, 435) wrote,
The tropes, associations, symbolizations used in discussing
languages, their qualities or disadvantages, and the way in which
they ought to be used in society, all reveal a magnificent amount
of insights into available ideological sources or traditions, their
(lack of) power, their intertextuality with other cases, sources or
traditions and so on. This is why inconsequential or marginal

debates can be very informative.
And Susan Gal (1998, 325) contended that any detailed study of language
ideologies in a particular culture and society
must lead us to complicate considerably Andersons (1983) influential proposals about the relationship between language and
nationhood. First, it is clear that not only communities but also
languages must be imagined before their unity can be socially
accomplished.
So how have modern Korean language and writing been imagined
by Koreans since the demise of the sinographic cosmopolis? This is
precisely where Kohs book is so helpful. Infected Language is a precious
resource insofar as it throws the reader directly into the middle of virtually all the key language ideological debates that have vexed Korea
for the past century. Broadly speaking, those debates can be summed
up under the headings of de-sinographicization and re-cosmopolitanization, both of which processes have transpired under conditions of
pronounced ethno-nationalism and an accompanying, almost overpowering, linguistic nationalism that manifests itself most prominently as
script nationalism and a kind of cult of hangl (see King 2007).
Simply put, de-sinographicization refers to the debate on the role of
Chinese characters and Sino-vocabulary. The infection metaphor in the
books title is used by Koh to refer to a wide range of impurities singled
out nowadays by Korean purists (Japanese elements, Internet language,
English loanwords), but goes back more than a century in Korea to
the early 1900s when Korean intellectuals came to decenter China
and Chinese writing, promoting the vernacular Korean language and
script instead. Such intellectuals likened Chinese characters and Chinese
writing to a disease sickening both vernacular Korean and the body
politic and started a debate about the proper place of Chinese charac-
ters in Korean education, Korean literature, and Korean language and

inscriptional practices that rages to this day.
The term re-cosmopolitanization takes its cue from relexification in
creole linguistics. Historical studies of pidgin and creole languages
usually distinguish between substrate and superstrate languages, where
the substrate (Low or L) language provides the grammatical core of the
contact language and the superstrate (High or H) language provides the
bulk of the lexicon. Relexification occurs when, for historical reasons,
the superstrate, or the dominant culture, changes. For example, a creole
spoken in a territory formerly ruled by Portugal or France might undergo
relexification with English as the lexifier language when ownership
of the territory in question switches to England. In the case of recosmopolitanization and Korea, Kohs Infected Language shows that, in
effect, Korea underwent this process twice. But with re-cosmopolitanization, far more is at stake than just switching lexical items in the dictionary; instead, the process is a much more all-encompassing one of transculturation that affects literary and political culture more broadly.
In the first instance, starting already in the late nineteenth century and
accelerating rapidly at the beginning of the twentieth, imperial Japan
became the new cosmopolis for Korea. This entailed numerous changes
to the Korean language as a result of intense and prolonged contact with
Japanese language, writing, and literature, particularly on the part of
the Korean intellectuals engaged in forging a new vernacular language
and literature in Korean. The effect was particularly salient in the area
of lexicon, whereby large numbers of made-in-Japan Sino-vocabulary
flowed into the language. Indeed, one of the most enduring linguistic
legacies of Japanese colonialism in Korea was the circumstance that,
by the late 1930s and 1940s, written documents of a public or official
nature became virtually interchangeable and in fact were issued as bilingual documents: the Sino-vocabulary in such texts were rendered in
sinographs and shared between the two languages, whereas grammatical elements like nominal particles and verb endings were written in
tandem, side by sidethe Japanese bits in kana and the Korean bits in
hangl. Japanese readers read the sinographs as Japanese and focused
on the Japanese grammatical elements, and Korean readers read the sinographs in Korean and focused on the Korean elements.
In the second instance, with the defeat of Japan in World War II and
with liberation, the new cosmopolis (for the South, anyway) became the
United States, and the new cosmopolitan language has become English,
a language that South Koreans have pursued with a vengeance for more
than half a century now. South Koreas love affair with English and
the controversies surrounding when, how, and to what extent to teach
English in South Korean schools began to heat up in the late 1990s
with president Kim Yng-sams globalization drive, and they continue
unabated to this day (see Park 2009).
The issues of how to cope with the legacies of the sinographic
cosmopolis in general and of Chinese characters in particular have been
studied in depth in the case of Japan. For example, in his useful book on
kanbunmyaku and modern Japan, Tokyo University professor
Sait Mareshi deployed kanbunmyaku as a metaphor for the pulse,
beat, cadences, and aura of kanbun (literary Sinitic) and the way
they have continued to permeate modern Japanese. But there is much
less research about Korean in this regard, and the legacies of the sinographic cosmopolis and Japanese colonialism are further complicated by
the continued and ever-more hegemonic presence of English in postliberation Korean linguistic life. And the Korean situation is rendered even
more complex by the fact that all these issues have been debated in Korea
in an intellectual environment dominated by deeply conservative and
racialized notions of purity, minjok (ethno-nation) and kug
(national languageitself an ideological formation owing in large part to
Koreas experience with Japan; see Lee 2010). It is these illiberal facets of
Korean language ideology and linguistic nationalism that Koh Jongsok
seeks to expose and critique. In the process, the reader learns volumes
about the course of linguistic modernity in Korea since the 1890s and
comes away with a healthy skepticism about the dominant language

ideological narratives surrounding the history of language, writing, and
literary culture in Korea.
About the Author

Koh Jongsok is not an academic. Nor is his book Infected Language a
scholarly work. But this is not to say that Koh is an uninformed amateur.
Born in 1959 in the city of Ysu in Chlla Province in the southwest
of Korea, Koh is a well-known essayist, novelist, critic, and public intellectual. More to the point, he is also a highly trained linguist. Though
his BA in 1983 from the prestigious Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul
was in law, he went on to earn an MA in linguistics from Seoul National
University in 1986. He then worked briefly for some years as a journalist,
but in 1992 he went to Paris to pursue a PhD in linguistics at the cole
des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales. That particular project was cut
short by the eruption of the International Monetary Fund financial crisis
in Korea, and he returned to Seoul in 1997 (sans PhD). Subsequently, he
worked as a columnist for the Hanguk ilbo (Korea times) until 2005 and
as a freelance writer until 2013, when he announced his retirement as a
professional writer.
Koh debuted as a writer in 1993 with his novel Kija tl (The reporters).
The title story of his 1997 short-story collection, Chemangmae: Ko
Chongsk sosljip (Requiem for my dead sister: Short fiction by Koh
Jongsok), harks back to the famous Silla-period hyangga song by the
same name and is also the subject of one of the shorter literary essays in
Infected Language (chapter 8). Koh published another short-story collection in 2003 and two more full-length novels in 2010 and 2013. His short
stories have been selected at least twice (in 1995 and 2007) for inclusion
in the annual Hynjang pipyngga ka ppobn orhae i chon sosl (This
years best short stories, as chosen by the critics), anthologies produced
by Hyndae Munhak publishers, and he has also published numerous
collections of social and political commentary (see the references at the

end of this introduction for a full listing).
But without question the most original genre in Kohs oeuvre is that
of n pipyng, or language criticism. Indeed, in some ways Ko must
be considered the leading exponent of this special brand of critique in
Korea. His first such collection appeared in 1996 under the title Sarang
i mal, mal tl i sarang (Words of love, the love of words). Two more
collections followed in 1999: Infected Language (i.e., the first edition of
this volume) and Kug i punggyng tl: Ko Chongsk i uri mal kangjwa
(Landscapes from the national language: Lectures by Koh Jongsok on
our language). Besides the revised and expanded edition of Infected
Language in 2007, Koh published another three such collections (2006a,
2007a, 2009a). Kohs background as a journalist and then a professional
novelist and columnist, combined with his critical and progressive political acumen and his many years of professional training in linguistics
(especially historical-comparative linguistics) at the highest level, come
together in this niche genre to produce highly informed, eminently
sensible essays, written with a personal touch that makes them immediately accessible, on a wide range of topics related to language, linguistics,
and writing that are nonetheless intimately tied to and relevant to many
of the major political and social currents in modern Korean history.
The reader can sample for him- or herself the variety of topics touched
on this book, but the following are some of the lightning-rod issues for
Koh:
Linguistic modernity and the problem of dictionaries and
lexicography (for which see also the recent book by Hwang and Yi)
The question of language purism, the quest for pure Korean on
the part of Korean linguistic nationalists, and the short conceptual
step from this quest to fascism and racial discrimination
Translation and the beginnings of literary Korean in translation,
along with the question of translationese in the history of Korean
literature, whether from literary Sinitic, Japanese, or English
10
Images of Korean the language, especially as concerns the growing

threat (in the eyes of linguistic nationalists) of North-South
divergence (see also King 1997, 1998, and 2007 on this topic)
The question of the boundaries of Korean literature, especially
in terms of how one accommodates the vast amount of literary
production by Korean authors in literary Sinitic, and the need to
distinguish Korean literature and Koreaphone literature
Vernacular hyangga songs from the Silla dynasty (57 BCE935
CE) inscribed in a complex sinography, and the linguistic distance
between Silla Korean and modern-day Korean (can one really say
that they are both Korean?)
The vexed issue of the genetic affiliation of Korean and the
ideological problems with searches for linguistic bloodlines in the
first place: Is there or was there ever such a thing as pure Korean?
The frequent conflation of language and writing (i.e., of Korean
and hangl) and the ways in which this conflation makes Korean
linguistic nationalism even less benign and tolerant
The English-as-official-language debate sparked by writer and
public intellectual Pok Kil in the late 1990s and the related
questions of globalization, cosmopolitanism, and class division in
South Korea
The relationship of liberalism, individualism, and ethnonationalism in South Korea, seen through the lens of language
The way in which Japanfirst in the Edo period with the Rangaku
movement and subsequently during the Meiji period translation
boommanaged to assimilate Western European culture into
Chinese characters, the common legacy of East Asian civilization,
and the continuing vitality of made-in-Japan Sino-vocabulary in
Korean (and Chinese) today
Latin and literary Sinitic as universal languages, and the comparison
of hanmun and Sino-vocabulary with the Graeco-Latin base of
intellectual vocabulary in European languages, leading to the
conclusion that Chinese characters are not the unique possession
of Chinese speakers but function instead as a common cultural
resource (see also the recent book by David Lurie on the origins
11
of writing in Japan and the idea that Chinese writing needs to be

reconceptualized as East Asian writing)
The relationship between hangl and Chinese characters (both
historically and currently) and indeed, their interdependence and
the need for them to be taught to Korean schoolchildren from a
young age (which in no way contradicts the pursuit of a hanglonly orthography)
Images of France and French as reflected in different sinographic
renditions of the word for France, and the chaos in both hanmun
and hangl orthography in the first decades of the twentieth
century.
Summary
In sum, Infected Language is a linguistically informed, highly readable,
politically progressive, and topically wide-ranging series of essays in
the genre of language criticism that sheds welcome light on a variety
of topics intimately connected with the advent and growth pains of
linguistic modernity in Korea as Korea has negotiated and navigated
between the old sinographic cosmopolis, the newer imperial Japanese
metropole, and the newest global formation of all: English and the American empire. As such, it will be welcomed by all readers interested in
the demise of this once-great translocal cultural formation, as well as by
those with an interest in the historical contours of language, writing, and
politics in modern Korea. Though Koh is quite clear in stating where his
own choices lie, his book leaves the reader pondering the question how
Korea and Koreans will cope with the stark choice that Pollock (2006,
568) sees much of humanity facing now:
a national vernacularity dressed in the frayed period costume of
violent revanchism and bent on preserving difference at all costs,
and a clear-cutting, strip-mining unipolar globalism bent at all
costs on obliterating it.
12
References
Blommaert, Jan, ed. 1999a. Language Ideological Debates. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
. 1999b. The Debate Is Open. In Language Ideological Debates, edited
by Jan Blommaert, 138. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Gal, Susan. 1998. Multiplicity and Contention among Language Ideologies.
In Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, edited by Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, 317331. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Hwang, Hodk. 2005. Kndae neishyn kwa k i pyosang tl: Taja,
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words]. Seoul: Munhakkwa Chisngsa.
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book diaries: Prose by Koh Jongsok].Seoul: Munhak Tongne.
. 1997b. Chemangmae: Ko Chongsk sosljip. Seoul: Munhak Tongne
[Dirge for my dead sister: Anthology of fiction by Koh Jongsok]
. 1998. Sinhwa wa yksa ka innun 7-il kan i Yng yhaeng [A
seven-days journey into English filled with myth and history]. Seoul:
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. 1999a. Kug i punggyng tl: Ko Chongsk i uri mal kangjwa [Landscapes from the national language: Lectures by Koh Jongsok on our
language]. Seoul: Munhak kwa Chisngsa.
. 1999b. nmun sesl: Ko Chongsk sanmunjip [nmun sesl: Collection
of prose by Koh Jongsok].Seoul: Yllimwn.
. 2000. Kod humchigi [Code-stealing]. Seoul: Mam Sanchaek.
. 2002a. Chayu i muni [Patterns of freedom]. Seoul. Kaemagown.
. 2002b. Sl tansang: Han Chlla-do saram i sesang ilkki [Random
thoughts of an illegitmate son: One Chlla Province mans reading of the
world]. Seoul: Kaemagown.
. 2003. Elliya i cheya: Ko Chongsk soslchip [Elijah's watch night:
Fiction by Koh Jongsok].Seoul: Munhak kwa Chisngsa.
14
. 2003. Historia [Historia]. Seoul: Mam Sanchaek.

. 2004a. Hanguk ynghwa kamdok i him n senga? [Are South Korean
movie directors really influential?]. Seoul: Kaemagown.
. 2004b. Tanhaek pannun tanhaek, k ihu [Denunciation
denounced, and thereafter]. Seoul: Kaemagown.
. 2006a. Mogug i soksal [The mother tongue exposed]. Seoul: Mam
Sanchaek.
. 2006b. Sinsng tongmaeng kwa hamkke salgi: Ko Chongsk
sipyngjip [Living with the holy alliance: Political commentary by Koh
Jongsok].Seoul: Kaemagown.
. 2006c. Ko Chongsk i yng iyagi [Koh Jongsok on English]. Seoul:
Mam Sanchaek.
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[The verbal landscape: Koh Jongsoks Korean-language odyssey].Seoul:
Kaemagown.
. 2007b. Kamymdoen n: Kug i pynduri rl tamn mytkae i
punggynghwa [Infected language: Portraits of the landscape on the
periphery of the national language]. Seoul: Kaemagown.
. 2007c. Palchaguk [Footprints]. Seoul: Mam Sanchaek.
. 2007d. Latin n haengbok ida [Latin is happiness]. Seoul:Param Kudu.
. 2007e. Pariette: munhwa wa chngchi i chubyn punggyng
[Varit: Vignettes from the political and cultural peripheries]. Seoul:
Kaemagown.
. 2007f. Kija ro sandann kt [Life as a reporter]. Seoul: Homi.
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Words of love, the love of words]. Seoul: Maum Sanchaek, 2009.
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difficulty of drawing boundaries: Political commentary by Koh
Jongsok].Seoul: Kaemagown.
. 2009c. Ko Chongsk i yja tl [Koh Jongsoks women]. Seoul:
Kaemagown.
15
. 2010. Tokko Chun: Ko Chongsk changpyn sosl. [Tokko Chun: A

novel by Koh Jongsok]. Seoul: Saem.
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family].Kynggi-do Paju-si: Munhak Tongne.
Ko, Chongsk [Koh Jongsok], Kang Chunman, Chng Chinsk, Kim
Tongmin, et al. 1999. Uri mam sok i kwnwijui cheje [The authoritarian regime within us]. Seoul: Kaemagown.
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edited by Paul V. Kroskrity, 134. Santa Fe, NM: School of American
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Kroskrity, Paul V., ed. 2000. Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and
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James Currey.
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Modern Japan. Translated by Mari Hirano Hubbard. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
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34: 513.
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The Making of National Languages. Journal of Asian Studies 53: 707751.
Masini, Federico. 1993. The Formation of Modern Chinese Lexicon and Its
Evolution toward a National Language: The Period from 1840 to 1898.
Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series 6. Berkeley, CA: Project
on Linguistic Analysis, University of California.
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Min, Chnggi. 2005. n hoengdanjk silchn: munhak, minjok munhak,

krig pnyktoen kndaesngChungguk, 19001937 [Korean translation of Liu 1995]. Seoul: Somyng Chulpan.
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Ideologies of English in South Korea. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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Studies 57(1): 637.
. 2000. Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History. Public culture 12(3):
591625.
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Sait, Mareshi. 2007. Kanbunmyaku to kindai Nihon: M hitotsu no kotoba no
sekai [Kanbunmyaku and modern Japan: Yet another language world].
Tokyo: Nihon Hs Shuppan Kykai.
Schieffelin, Bambi B., and Rachelle Charlier Doucet. 1998. The Real
Haitian Creole: Ideology, Metalinguistics, and Orthographic Choice. In
Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, edited by Bambi B. Schieffelin,
Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, 285316. New York: Oxford
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2(3): 235250.
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Preface to the Revised Edition
Koh Jongsok
Eight years have passed since the publication of the first edition. The
only new content is the chapter Contamination, Infiltration, Hybridity:
A Swipe at Purism in Korean, and the rest of the chapters remain as
before. The Korean publisher would have preferred to add yet another
chapter and market the book as a revised and expanded edition, but I
wouldnt go along. On one hand, there was my inveterate laziness (will
it ever go away?), but my compulsion to rummage around in the social
contexts of language had somehow faded, too.
My ideas as expressed in this book remain virtually unchangedeven
concerning Were All Greeksan essay that caused some controversy.
Even if I were to revisit that topic today, I doubt that my conclusions
would be any different. But I was puzzled when a number of readers took
this essay to represent a world view based on survival of the fittest.
My own less-than-perfect command of Korean may be the root of this
misunderstanding, but the side that I was trying to take in that essay
was precisely that of the weakest, least fortunate members of Korean
society. I was also puzzled that still other readers interpreted that essay
as a defense and espousal of dirigiste language policy. Yet I clearly
stated there my opposition to active language planning at the state level,
18
whether along the lines of Korean-language purification or English as

an official language.
Perhaps if the criticism of Were All Greeks had been on a completely
different level, it might have led me to a more elegant and accurate
assessment of the problemthe level, that is, of a question along the lines
of Is it right for the current generation, living and breathing in the here
and now, to suffer inconvenience and disadvantage for the welfare of
future generations yet to be born? For better or for worse, there were
no such criticisms.
Infected Language heralded the beginning of a fruitful relationship
between Kaemagown Publishing and me. How delightful to see it
published again in a handsome new edition.
Chapter 1
A Clumsy Confession of Love

In Lieu of a Preface
In my late teens when I was still a young Bohemian, the book I treasured
more than any other was Oesol Choe Hynbaes (18941970) Korean
grammar, Urimalbon (lit., A grammar of our language; first published in
1937). The book was too bulky to carry around, so I kept it under my
pillow and read from it every night, bit by bit, in bed. Then as now, the
only link connecting me to society was the Korean Civil Defense Corps
(Minbangwidae; this was about the time when President Pak Chnghi
revived the Students Corps for National Defense [Hakto Hoguktan],
founded the Civilian Defense Corps, and completed the militarization of
South Korean society). If there is a difference between now and then, it
is this: my fellow Civilian Defense Corps colleagues then were all nearly
twenty years older than me, whereas my colleagues now are all mostly
my age or younger. Then as now, I was anxious about my future. Where
I should have been was in school, but instead I was wasting my time
outside of school, and where I should be now (speaking secularly) is in
a proper job, but I am spinning my wheels somewhere outside of any
normal career track. And then as now, I soothed my anxieties about my
future by reading books. Choe Hynbaes Urimalbon was my greatest
and most dignified source of comfort and solace.
20
I bought my copy in one of the secondhand bookshops that used to line

Chnggye-chn. I first learned of the existence of Urimalbon in middle
school. I think one of my kug, or national language, teachers must
have told me about it. Or perhaps I first learned about it from my father,
who was a high school national language teacher. In any case, one day
in my late teens (I think I was sixteen or seventeen), as I was making
the rounds of the long stretch of secondhand book stores in Chnggyechn, I first encountered Urimalbon. And I became an avid reader of
this book. Amazingly, it wasnt all that difficult to read. To say that a
teenage high school dropout read Urimalbon and understood it the first
time around would not be particularly apt. But for me to say that I read
it and actually enjoyed it is not at all far from the truth.
My Dream of Compiling a Dictionary

I was so enamored with my reading of Urimalbon thatfor a time
I thought I would study kughak (national language studies) if I ever
had the opportunity to go to university. But fate being just as capricious as the minds of teenagers, I ended up studying something totally
different when I finally scraped my way into university. My interest in
the national language and my fascination with Oesol Choe Hynbae,
though, the author of Urimalbon, did not fade. Quite the contrary; my
bookcase in my first years of university contained practically everything
that Choe Hynbae had ever published, from slim volumes like The Way
to the Rebirth of the Korean Race (Chosn minjok kaengsaeng i to; 1926)
and Reader in Linearized Hangl (Hangl karossgi tokpon; 1963) to his
more substantial tomes like Urimalbon and Hangl-ology (Hanglgal;
1940)whatever I could find at Chongno Books. And I always kept up to
date with my issues of Love of Country (Nara sarang), the journal edited
and published by the Oesol Society. I dont think I read them all in detail,
but on nights when I couldnt get to sleep I would flip through them and
think about things like the mother tongue and minjok (race, Volk, ethnie,
nation, etc.). The national language studies of Oesol and, moreover, the
21
linguistic nationalism of the Korean Language Society (Hangl Hakhoe,

founded 1921) that I encountered then clearly changed the trajectory of
my spiritual growth. The fact that, even after I had come to understand
the ways of the world a bit more profoundly, I was still unable to free
myself completely from the nationalism that I was so eager to discard
was almost certainly a result of the books by Oesol that I had read in my
late teens and early twenties.
Even later in my university years when it was already clear that
becoming a national language studies scholar (kughakcha) was not in
the cards for me, my daydreaming continued apace, and I dreamed that
someday in the future, if ever I should find the time and money, I would
try my hand at compiling a dictionary of Korean; that I would become
the Webster or Larousse of Korea. The Korean-Korean dictionaries that
I knew twenty years ago were somehow so shoddy that I wanted to
make a new one that would be in a league of its own. I obviously had
never given any serious thought to what a gargantuan undertaking lexicography is, and it had never occurred to me that it was a process that
required extreme talent and devotion; that it was virtually impossible for
one individual to accomplish on his own; that even though it required
several dozens or several hundred times more effort than publishing a
few glossy-looking yet insubstantial articles and playing the scholar, it
brought little or no glory to the author; and, more than anything else,
that one could not be a first-rate lexicographer without being a firstrate scholar. Without profound ideas to back them up, daydreams are
bound to come to nothing. As graduation day grew closer, it became
clear that the only path that awaited me was that of the average whitecollar working stiff.
My University Days: A Sea of Languages

But I did manage to study a few foreign languages while attending
university. I went more for breadth than depth, so much that I cannot
22
claim to have learned any one of them truly well, and it all seems to
have been rather a waste of effort now that I reflect on it. Still, learning
new languages back then was enjoyable. I practically lived at the French
Language and Literature Club, one of the more seriously academic
groups, thanks to which I was able to read most of the novels of SaintExupry and Malraux in the original Frenchall very superficially, of
course. That I was able to read works like Michel Tourniers Vendredi ou
les limbes du Pacifique and Patrick Modianos Rue des boutiques obscures
in the original French before the Korean editions came out was also
because of this club. In those days, I even thumbed through works like
Robbe-Grillets La jalousie that I would never have read, even if they had
been available in Korean. Now that I look back on it, the club strikes
me as having been more of a lame gathering of guys with no social
conscience hanging out with girls (who also had no social conscience),
all under the vain pretext of Francophilia. But in any case, I read quite
a few French books in the club and ended up with several close friends
(and even my wife) as a result.
During my brief time at university, I learned how to distinguish the
Greek and Cyrillic alphabets and learned how to read both the Hebrew
and Arabic scripts. After I more or less blew off university and returned
to a more Bohemian lifestyle, I met a much older student (well, at most he
would have been twenty-seven or twenty-eight) who had recently taken
up his university studies again after completing his military service and
who had grown up mostly in Spain. From him I learned Spanish for six
months or so and absolutely fell in love with the language. Simply for the
joy of writing somethinganythingin Spanish, I even sank back to the
level of middle and high school students and found myself some Spanish
pen pals until I graduated. Perhaps I am exaggerating heremy Spanish
pen pal was actually rather charming. The recipient of my more than
one hundred letters was a woman called Susana Perez Lendon Guerero
living in Granada, Andaluca, Spain. She was two years younger than
me. She looked so young and pure in her photographs, but she must be
23
close to forty now. I wonder if Ill ever meet her. Shes still there in my
photo album
Realizing that law didnt suit me, I would take courses over in the
Faculty of Arts whenever possible and as a result memorized a few lines
of German, Latin, and ancient Greek. I also dropped a lot of money on the
Japanese language schools lined up along Chongno, but all that I have
left in my head now to show for that investment is a few stanzas from the
lyrics to the song Blue Light Yokohama, which swept through Korea
in the 1970s. I learned a lot about various different languages without
ever really mastering any one of them, and after paddling around in the
shallow end of this sea of languages, I suddenly found myself standing
face to face with the real world.
The Fantasy of Writing in a Foreign Language

My first job was working for an English-language daily newspaper in
Seoul. I hadnt been gunning for an English-language daily as opposed to
a Korean-language newspaper and had simply been lucky with the job
application I had submitted in response to their posting. But once I ended
up in a position where English was the main language, I cant deny that I
felt a hubristic urge to write well in English. Apart from the compositions
we did in elementary school and the occasional term papers I had written
in university, I had never written anything until that time. And so my
first published piece belonged to the genre of the newspaper article and
was written in English.
I wanted to write in beautiful, precise English; such was my fantasy as
a professional journalist. I did my best to imitate the articles published
by the Big Four wire agencies in the Overseas News Department and
tried to copy articles from current events weeklies like Newsweek and Far
Eastern Economic Review. My efforts paid off with a modicum of success,
and after five years of working as a reporter for an English-language
daily, my English had improved considerably.
24
But it didnt take me long to realize the constraints of English. English

always existed somewhere outside of me, and it was never a case of my
writing what I wanted to say but rather one of my being able to write
only within the confines of what my English proficiency allowed. When,
after five years, I changed jobs and moved to a newly established newspaper company, I was just as happy at being able to write in Korean
finally as I was about being able to relax in the democratic environment there. Finally, I can make a living writing in Korean! I thought
to myself, and even though my work was still just newspaper articles, I
wanted to write in beautiful, precise Korean. And I tried my best to do
so. Of all the fantasies I cherished, writing in beautiful, precise Korean
was the one that I had the highest chance of achieving in real life.
After about five years in my new job, I had an opportunity to go to
Paris to study journalism with the support of the French Ministry of
Foreign Affairs. As part of my study program there, I had to write newspaper articles in French, and as I read my published articles in French,
I dreamed up yet another little fantasy: that I could be a Francophone
writer. At that point, I should have recalled the sense of constriction
I had felt when working for the English-language daily. But I didnt.
Whats more, I somehow felt very Europeanized after eight months of
living in Paris. Even after completing my studies in Paris and returning
to Seoul, I yearned for my life back in Europe. Ultimately, I quit my job
and returned to Paris with my familyand with my fantasy of becoming
a Francophone writer. I guess I had in mind writers like mil Cioran and
Eugne Ionesco at the timewriters who had abandoned their mother
tongues and cut off their roots to write in French. I had no idea then
how unkind French would be to me. After writing a few little magazine
articles in French, I succumbed to the hubris that I could write anything
in French.
Cioran once said that he resolved to write in French one day out
of despair as he sat in an inn in Dieppe, Normandy, translating one
of Mallarms poems into his native Romaniandespair, that is, at the
25
thought that nobody would ever read his native tongue. Cioran gives
voice to this despair of the writer who writes in a foreign tongue in
many places in his books. For Cioran, who is considered one of the
greatest prose writers of twentieth-century French literature, French was
a kind of yoke. For him, French was not just any foreign language contraposed to his mother tongue but a very special foreign languagedifferent
from, say, German or English. He once described French as a language
suffering from arteriosclerosis. By this he meant that French, a language
delicately refined and cultivated at the hands of countless writers over
many centuries, crushed writers with the weight of its past and limited
their creative writing options. Cioran claimed that when he wrote in
foreign languages like German or English, he could deploy the resources
of these languages to express his ideas, but that when he wrote in French,
he could express only ideas allowed by the confining strictures of French
linguistic structure. Needless to say, this characteristically disingenuous
evaluation of Ciorans pretends to put down French but in fact puts the
language on a pedestal. One frequently encounters claims that it is far
more difficult for foreigners to wield beautiful, precise French than it is
for them to master other languages. Russian-born writer Andr Makin,
winner of the Goncourt Prize in 1995, was rejected by several French
publishers and succeeded in publishing his prize-winning work only
after it underwent aggressive copy-editing and polishing at the hands of
the final publisher.
Whatever the language, writing in beautiful, precise prose requires
effort, and in this respect French is no different from any other language.
But it seems nonetheless true that this language is not a particularly kind
one to foreigners. This is probably not the only reason, but in my case,
my fantasy of becoming a Francophone writer turned out to be just that
a fantasy. Four years after dragging my family all the way to Paris,
our trials and tribulations there forced us to return to Seoul. Ever since,
I have been working as a freelance writer in my native Korean because
Korean is the language that I know best.
26
Actually, it might be more accurate to say that Korean is the only

language I know. Ever since my university days, I have poked my head
inside the door of numerous different languages, but the only foreign
languages I can read and write now after a fashion are English, Spanish,
and French. And that I can read and write these languages at all is a
result of the itinerations of my life as just described: the enthusiasm of
the French Language and Literature Club, my Spanish pen pal, my job
at the English-language daily, and my European wanderings. But it is
somehow truly embarrassing for me to claim that I can read and write
these foreign languages. When I read the pieces that I have written in
these languages, they leave such an unpleasant taste in my mouth
Dictionaries: Repositories of the Knowledge

and Information Accumulated by a Society
Of the various fantasies I have held dear since the halcyon days of my
youth, hardly a one has come true. But when I see among my contemporaries somebody who has actually managed to make one of my fantasies
a reality, or when I see such a person bringing to life one of my own
daydreams, I feel a sense of relief (along with a bit of envy). My sense
of relief owes not so much to any magnanimity on my part as to a sense
of relief and good fortune at having avoided competing with individuals
I could never hope to best.
As I mentioned before, there was a time when I wanted to study the
national languageKorean language and linguistics. That is, I wanted
to become a kughakcha: a national language scholar. Of course, this
particular fantasy did not materialize. But there are tons of talented
kughakcha out there. For example, the list of references at the end of
professor S Chngsus monumental Grammar of the Modern National
Language (Hyndae kug munpmnon; Hanyang University Press, 1996)
contains some thirty pages of names of scholars who have devoted their
lives to research in Korean language and linguistics.
27
After giving up on my hope of becoming a scholar of national language

studies, I wanted to become a competent lexicographer. That dream went
up in smoke, too. But even if I had become an independent lexicographer, I would never have been able to achieve anything as impressive
as what, for example, the independent scholars Pak Yongsu and Nam
Yngsin have. I regret that I have never done anything to be of assistance
to these gentlemen, but it is certainly my good fortune that I never had
to compete with them. Not only the popular media but even so-called
intellectual journals are dismissive of their work, but their contributions
to the creation of Korean language and culture go above and beyond
those of professional national language scholars and writers. Dictionary
compilation is far more important and difficult than usually thought,
and the current level of dictionary compilation in Korea is likewise far
lower than usually thoughtwhether one considers types of dictionaries
or their overall quality.
The dictionary is a repository of the knowledge and information accumulated by a society. And just as the activities of the eighteenth-century
French encyclopdistes demonstrated, they are also a basis for education
and enlightenment. One of the deepest impressions that the homeland
of the encyclopdistes made upon me was the obsession of French intellectual society with dictionary compilation. All manner of dictionaries
from dictionaries in the traditional sense, like language dictionaries,
to specialized terminological dictionaries for every branch of scholarshipfill the shelves of book stores and libraries. Even just speaking
of etymological dictionaries, there are several different kinds available,
ranging from the massive, three-volume Dictionnaire historique de la
langue franaise (published by dictionary publisher Le Robert; needless
to say, its size and scale are connected to the fact that the research in
historical and comparative linguistics that must inform the compilation
of any such etymological dictionary is most advanced in the case of the
Romance languages, of which French is one) to pocket-sized editions
targeting middle and high school students. From all kinds of dictionaries
of proper nouns (not dictionaries of general proper nouns, but dictio-
28
naries explaining the origins of names for French individuals, places,

rivers, and mountains) and dictionaries of peoples names according
to specific fields, to pronunciation dictionaries, rhyming dictionaries,
dialect dictionaries, dictionaries of foreign loanwords, dictionaries of
slang and professional terminology according to class and field, and
dictionaries of obscenities, the French seem to want to capture and
systematically incarcerate in their dictionaries every single word they
can collect in their speech community. If one adds to these the many and
varied dictionaries of technical terms according to academic subdivision,
level, and design and sundry encyclopedias of various types, the list of
dictionaries available in French is so long as to make ones eyes and neck
sore just glancing it over.
In the future, just as now, the one place that will likely continue
to produce the most knowledge and information is the United States,
and when compared to English, French is already nothing more than
a second-tier language, even in academic fields. But this vast array
of dictionaries compiled in French until now serves as eloquent testimony to the fact that Frances cultural might is not yet entirely spent,
and collectively, these dictionaries will play the role of a time capsule,
preserving the dignity and prestige of a language and culture that served
as the cosmopolitan language and culture of Europe right through the
eighteenth century well into the future (or at least until such time as
English or some variety thereof takes over).
In Koreas case, there is little variety among the few general KoreanKorean dictionaries published to date, and they tend to include a motley
assortment of proper nouns as entries, thereby muddying the identity of each dictionary. Moreover, because of the lack of solid research
in Korean historical linguistics that would be required, there is not
a single decent etymological dictionary of Korean. Korean-language
dictionaries of technical terminology according to different academic
fields are woefully skimpy and tend to be translations of foreign dictionaries. The compilers and translators are typically lacking in both profes-
29
sional expertise and meticulous care, with the result that, for instance,
the Korean-language Dictionary of Semiotics (Kihohak sajn, translated
by the Ehwa Womens University Research Center for Semiotics and
published by Usk in 1990), which is supposed to be a translation
from the English translation of Ducrot and Todorovs Dictionnaire encyclopdique des sciences du langage (published in 1972 by Seuil), is really
nothing more than a pile of paper that happens to retain the format of
the French original. Even if one excuses the numerous mistranslations
and inconsistencies in terminology as owing to the time pressures of a
hastily executed team effort, the constant but unpredictable stream of
ungrammatical and incomprehensible sentences makes it nearly impossible to read this book without the assistance of a highly active imagination (needless to say, this problem isnt unique to this dictionary;
indeed, it isnt unique to dictionaries in general, or even to translation in
general in Korea. Ultimately, it must be seen as a problem of the national
language in South Korea).
And so, though I may be criticized for not understanding the inner
workings of academia, I venture the following suggestion: What if academic degrees were awarded for the compilation of dictionaries, be they
solo projects or team efforts? Contrary to first impressions, dictionary
compilation requires just as much creativity as writing or editing a scholarly article does, not to mention erudition, voluminous powers of recall,
and a meticulous eye for detail. In the case of dictionaries for specialized
fields, in particular, the explanations accompanying each entry amount
to short scholarly articles, and when one considers the need to synthesize
systematically all the relevant knowledge that has accumulated in the
relevant field, a high level of intellectual creativity is essential. When two
or more dictionaries are compiled for the same field but with different
points of view and different levels of execution, comparisons between
dictionaries become possible, in turn creating fertile soil for the compilation of even better new dictionaries. Instead of writing scholarly articles
that will be read only by the author and a journals editorial committee,
then, it seems to me not such a crazy idea to award academic degrees for
30
the painstaking efforts that go into compiling dictionaries that will be

used by a somewhat broader (albeit still limited) readership. And given
the unknown destiny of the Korean language in the future, the inventory
of dictionaries compiled in this way will also become the best insurance
policy (or, in the worst-case scenario, a time capsule for Koreaphone
culture) for Korean at some time in the distant future.
I Want to Write in Beautiful, Precise Korean

After giving up on my fantasy of becoming a lexicographer, I wanted for
a time to become a professional writer writing in a foreign language. But
that desire ended up as mere fantasy, too. I doubt that I will ever write
much other than the odd simple personal letter in languages other than
Korean. And even if I were to write something long in a foreign language,
I would never be able to write as well as Mirok Li (Yi Mi-rk) or Richard
Kim (Kim n-guk). People like Lucien Goldmann and Julia Kristeva, who
conducted their intellectual work in French, did not tread French soil
until their adult years, but they had been steeped in French language
since their childhood days in their homelands in Eastern Europe. For
my part, the only language that surrounded me in my childhood was
Korean. I do not consider this to be particularly fortunate, but in any case
such was my fate. There are, of course, others who have written works
worthy of recording in literary history in languages that they acquired
after reaching adulthood. But these are people of exceptional talents and
passion, and I have no such talent or passion. This, too, is not something
I consider particularly fortunate, but such was my fate.
Now that all these dreams have slipped through my fingers, I harbor
a dream of writing in beautiful, precise Koreanof writing something
that will be critically received as a work that expanded the possibilities of Korean in terms of beauty and precision. It is still nothing more
than a fantasy, but because I intend to continue writing in Korean, I may
someday be able to realize this dream. So the goal of one day writing
31
something in readable Korean is the one and only fantasy remaining

from my days as a teenager that still has some possibility of realization
left in it.
Actually, there are plenty of people writing in beautiful, precise
KoreanChoe Inhun, Cho Sehi, Kim Wnu, Pok Kil, Yi Insng, and
Choe Yun are just a few of the names that spring to mind. Most of
them can be criticized for using a translationese style, but this is not
a problem at all. If one compares the Korean language in which they
write at the end of the twentieth century to the Korean language of the
end of the nineteenth century, one gets a vivid sense of the extent to
which Korean has changed over the past century. The process that has
led to such change has been a process of infectioninfection by foreign
languages and foreign cultures. Cultural history is a history of infection,
and the histories of the languages that serve as the bearers of culture
are also histories of infection. Artificial languages aside, there is no such
thing as an uninfected language. From Choe Inhun to Choe Yun, Korean
literature infected through and through by foreign languages has stood
at the vanguard of Korean as it marches onward in search of refinement
and enrichment. Will I ever be able to write Korean as elegantly as they?
I will certainly try.
This little book is a collection of the various musings I have assembled
as a result of my ramblings along the peripheries of Korean. Few readers
will agree with all the ideas I have developed here. But many readers
will agree with the proposition that it is precisely the kaleidoscopes of
ideas formed by different opinions colliding with one another that are
the most welcome spectacles in an open society. I hope that such readers
will read my book in this generous spirit, smoothing over any rough
spots as they go.
By no stretch of the imagination am I a nationalist. Actually, let me
put it another way. By no stretch of the imagination do I wish to be or
become a nationalist. But if loving ones mother tongue is a sign of being
a nationalist, then I am not immune to nationalisms gravitational force.
32
If I can imitate Georges Mounins criticism of Ferdinand de Saussure, I

may well be one of those nationalists who doesnt realize hes a nationalist, but I dont think I would take this as a compliment.
At the risk of repeating myself: Korean is the one and only language
in which I can express myself freely, and is the only language that I truly
love. If I have engaged in some grousing about my mother tongue in this
book, it is because of the sense of comfort and ease I feel with my mother
tongue and because of the love I have poured forth about my mother
tongue. I hope my readers will feel the same way.
Late spring, 1999
Koh Jongsok
Chapter 2
A Footnote to My Confession
The two ongoing solo and independent dictionary compilation projects
being conducted by Pak Yongsu and Nam Yngsin are both fueled by
nationalism. That this is fundamentally the case can be seen in that their
day-to-day pronouncements betray a strong nationalist inclination but
also in that the entry words in their thematic and reverse dictionaries
are restricted to so-called pure Korean words. Of course, because their
projects are still ongoing, they may still include Sino-Korean vocabulary
and foreign words (loanwords) in their projects, but for now one can
say that their work proceeds under the aegis of linguistic nationalism
the linguistic nationalism that began with Hanhinsaem Chu Si-gyng,
passed through the Chosn Ynguhoe and Chosn Hakhoe during
the Japanese colonial period, and continued after liberation in 1945 with
Kim Tubong and Yi Kngno in North Korea and Choe Hynbae and
the Hangl Hakhoe in South Korea. This linguistic nationalism could
also be called linguistic purismif so, then my thoughts on the national
language (and national language policy) are different from those of
Messieurs Pak and Nam.
To my mind, all purismslinguistic purism includedare connected
in their sensibilities by an umbilical cord to fascism (or collectivism or
34
absolutism more generally). The purification in the national languagepurification movement (kug sunhwa undong) is the same purification
of the various reeducation camps of earlier absolutist societies or of the
purification education (sunhwa kyoyuk) that the notorious Samchng
Kyoyuktae made as its goal in the early days of President Chn Tuhwans
Fifth Republic. That the German language-purification movement that
had begun in the seventeenth century grew quiet for a time only to
gain spasmodic momentum under Hitler or that the Chosn (Korean
language) purification movement launched at the end of the nineteenth
century has flourished as much as it has in North Korea after liberation suggests the close affinity between linguistic purism and absolutism.
Linguistic purismmuch like the idealistic Korean unification movementis a symptom of aggravated nationalism. From this perspective,
both the Hangl Hakhoe and the Pan-Korean Alliance for Unification
(Choguk Tongil Pm-minjok Ynhap), regardless of their diametrically
opposed positions under Koreas various political regimes over the years,
are kindred groups. In actual fact, the right-wing Hangl Hakhoe and
the left-wing Pan-Korean Alliance for Unification both stand side by side
(cordially, of course) on the far right of Korean societys ideological landscapebecause they are both guardians of the kuksu , or national
essence.
Linguistic purists are worried about contamination of the national
language. They lament that the lexicon of the national language is
infected by foreign words, and they complain that literary style in the
national language is infected by translationese. I agree with their prognosis that the national language is contaminated. But I do not think that
this contamination is a cause for concern.
The reasons I am not worried about contamination of the national
language are two. The first is because, realistically speaking, contamination of the national language is unavoidable and inevitable. As long
as Korea does not establish a utopia on some remote island and shut
itself off from the outside world, there is no way to block the conta-
35
mination of the national language. The purists wring their hands over
the contamination wrought by foreign words and Sino-Korean vocabulary in the Korean lexicon. They are especially hysterical about SinoKorean words coined in Japan. But in fact, a significant portion of the
Sino-Korean lexicon in Korean is made in Japan. The vast majority of
the cultured vocabulary used now in Korean, in particular, comprises
Sino-Korean words that the Japanese created by translating Westernlanguage terms and that were imported into Korea starting at the end of
the nineteenth century. As long as we Koreans are unwilling to throw
down our pens and live without ever opening our mouths, there is no
way to cull from Korean all those made-in-Japan Sino-Korean words.
In principle, it would be possible to go to the trouble of replacing
all these words with neologisms based on pure Korean etyma, but
such a project would simply be yet another loan translationyet another
calquing process. The many pure Korean linguistic terms that appear
in Oesol Choe Hynbaes Urimalbon are good examples of loan translations based on made-in-Japan Sino-vocabulary. Moreover, for some
morphemes it is simply incredibly difficult to tell whether they are
pure Korean or not. A significant proportion of the words thought
to be pure Korean are either Sino-Korean words that have undergone
morphological deformation or loans that have come in through spoken
language from either Chinese or Mongolian. And then there is the question of practicality. The fact that the pure Korean linguistic terms like
im (myngsa = noun), t (hyngyongsa = descriptive verb), um (tongsa
= action verb), kyt (chosa = particle), it (chpsoksa = conjunction), n
(kwanhyngsa = modifier form), k (pusa = adverb), nol (kamtansa =
exclamation), and kkt (chonggylsa = final ending) coined by Chu Sigyng and the set of terms like irmssi (substantive), and so on, introduced in Choe Hynbaes Urimalbon have not been accepted by the
general public shows that the linguistic habits of a speech community
cannot easily be changed by the guidance of one or two people or by
nationalist fervor alone.
36
That Korean literary style is being infected by Western languages and

by Japanese is also a matter of concern for the purists. But a closer look at
reality reveals that this issue is not confined to Korean. It is well known
that modern literary German takes its departure from Luthers translation of the Bible, and mutatis mutandis much the same story applies to
other European languages as well. Korean, then, is by no means exceptional, and before the advent of Western-language translationese and
Japanese-language translationese in Korean there was classical Chinese
(hanmun) translationese. When hangl was invented and the Korean
language that had existed previously only as a spoken language finally
achieved the status (however peripheral) of a written language in the
fifteenth century, its point of departure was a genre called nhae
, whereby documents in classical Chinese were translated and annotated using the new Korean script. Insofar as the birth, development,
and fixing of Korean as a literary language all constituted a process of
translation like this, it is impossible for me to imagine what a literary
Korean style that isnt translationese would look like. If by this one
means a literary style characterized by nmun ilchi , complete
unity of speech and writing, one might advocate a thoroughly colloquial literary style,1 but in a language like Korean with complicated and
intricate honorifics and speech levels, complete identity between speech
and writing is impossible from the very outset. And even if it were
not, forcing colloquial speech onto written language would only render
Korean literary style all the poorer, despite the best intentions of those
advocating such a style.
But there is an even more important reason why I am unconcerned
about the contamination of our national languageI am a champion
of impurity and hybridity. I champion impurity because I abhor the
monochromatic proclivities and uniform tendencies of collectivism and
absolutism and because it fosters a certain magnanimity toward others
who look completely different from oneself. In the chaotic, contaminated mix of so-called pure Korean words, Sino-vocabulary (whether
made in China, Japan, or Korea), and European vocabulary (whether
37
made in England, France, or wherever) that is Korean, I breathe the

air of freedom. In the sentences and turns of phrase bent by classical
Chinese translationese, warped by Japanese translationese, and abraded
by Western-language translationese, I sense enrichment and refinement.
I think I would probably suffocate in a Korean composed only of pure
Korean words and pure Korean literary style (if there even were such a
thing). From linguistic purismfrom the fear of the shadows and echoes
of foreign languagesit is only a short hop, skip, and a jump to the
oppression of foreign laborers, abhorrence of mixed-race individuals,
fantasies of punitive expeditions against Qing China and the Japanese,
and disregard for disabled persons. One must not forget that the impulse
toward purification is often an impulse toward killing.
The Contributions of Pak Yongsu and Nam Yngsin

Of course, I am not claiming that the two gentlemen mentioned in the
heading are closed-minded linguistic purists. But the way they think
seems to have a certain affinity with linguistic nationalism and linguistic
purism, and it also seems to be a fact that they are both at least leery
about the idea of a contaminated national language. On this point I
am unable to support them. But on other points, I cannot but express
respect for the time and painstaking effort they have both invested in
their ongoing dictionary-compilation projects. That these projects are
proceeding without support from the government or from significant
private capital, almost as individual labors of love, is both admirable and
amazing. One of them has even lost his hearing!
The greatest of their contributions has been to pioneer the field of
the thematic dictionary for the first time in the history of Korean lexicography. Known as pullyu sajn in Korean and often referred to as
image dictionaries in Europe, thematic dictionaries are used not to
look up meanings for words one does not know but instead are used
when one doesnt know how to refer to a certain object or concept.
38
Bundles of words are classified by theme, and only those words in the
lowest subgroupings are then arranged in alphabetical order. In general,
thematic dictionaries are designed not to help readers but to assist
writers. Anybody who writes professionally will have felt the need for
such dictionaries long ago. That some of the earliest Koreans to realize
the need for thematic dictionaries in Korean and to proceed to compile
some of them on various scales were poets is therefore closely connected
to the fact that thematic dictionaries are designed to assist the writing
process. The advent of thematic dictionaries in Korean has stimulated
Messieurs Pak and Nam, along with still other scholars and lexicographers, to compile a whole range of other types of specialized dictionariesreverse dictionaries, synonym and antonym dictionaries, nuance
dictionaries, and so onthereby opening up the possibility of a more
three-dimensional grasp of Korean. Korean lexicography still has a long
way to go compared to the West or to Japan, but it is a fact that Koreans
thinking about dictionaries has begun to change.
Nam Yngsins Hn+ Kug Sajn (Hn+ Korean-Korean dictionary),
which is a regular word dictionary, is unusual in that it contains
rich example sentences, gives etymologies for words, explains difficult
Chinese characters, includes North Korean vocabulary, uses a reference
column for additional information, and lists verbs in their stem forms as
opposed to the traditional (and unhelpful) dictionary form in -ta. One of
the greatest weaknesses of Korean-Korean dictionaries until recently has
been the almost total lack of example sentences. All that dictionaries did
was provide a list of meanings for the entry word, without ever giving
the courtesy of example sentences showing how the word was actually
used. Moreover, all too often the words mobilized in the explanation
were more difficult than the entry word itself. Nams Hn+ Kug Sajn,
therefore, is already a huge improvement over previous dictionaries with
respect to this particular defect. Of course, Nams dictionary still needs
improvement in places regarding the level of concision in its explanations, and the quantity of example sentences is not yet entirely sufficient,
but that this solo effort has improved on earlier publications is absolutely
39
remarkable. Besides, insofar as all dictionaries are doomed to endless

revision, Nams Hn+ Kug Sajn, too, will clearly go through many more
editions in future and improve with each one.
This dictionary also takes its many example sentences from literary
works, and although this practice is quite common in European dictionaries, it is virtually unprecedented in the case of Korean dictionaries
probably because it is so labor intensive. Through this dictionary,
Korean-Korean dictionaries were able to connect systematically with
Korean literature for the first time, and such is this dictionarys greatest
merit. The etymological information that it gives (insofar as the current
state of Korean historical linguistics allows) and the explanations of the
meanings of difficult Chinese characters are all things that any selfrespecting Korean-Korean dictionary should have done many years ago
other dictionaries until now have been derelict in their duties.
That this dictionary, in cases where the entry forms are verbs, lists
these in their stem forms rather than in the -ta form traditionally referred
to as the basic form (kibonhyng) and adopted in other Korean dictionaries, is a matter of some potential controversy. Personally speaking,
I support Nam Yngsins position. The -ta form is not a fundamental
part of the verbal paradigm, and calling it the basic form is also an arbitrary misnomer. In fact, the question of how to determine the base form
of verb stems has been a matter of controversy ever since the Japanese
colonial period. That the -ta form won out in that debate is a reflection
of the numerical superiority of its supporters rather than a reflection of
the logical superiority of their position. But precisely for that reason,
it will not be easy now to abandon the notion of the basic form or to
somehow define it in a different way. Considering that the vast majority
of dictionaries today list the -ta forms in their verb entries, the pioneering
attempt in Nams dictionary to list verbs in their stem forms may well
inconvenience some readers.
With respect to this dictionarys incorporation of North Korean vocabulary items, I am neither for nor against. It is neither a plus nor a minus
40
for the dictionaryit is simply one feature that sets it apart from other
dictionaries. No doubt, the compilers consideration of North Korean
words in this dictionary is connected with his concern about NorthSouth linguistic divergence and his assiduous pains to somehow turn
back that tide. This is just a guess on my part, but I imagine that the
compiler may well think it necessary to address this tide of divergence
through language policy measures. I repeatthis is just my guess, and I
have never directly encountered the compilers position on this question;
I simply wish to register my own thoughts on this subject in this context.
Divergence Is Another Name for Enrichment

First, I should say that I am not particularly worried about NorthSouth linguistic divergence. And because I am also fundamentally not a
supporter of national language policy, I neither approve of attempts to
resolve North-South linguistic divergence via policy nor even think that
it is a problem that can be resolved by policy in the first place.
It is a fact that after more than a half century of division, the North
and South Korean languages have become rather different. The differences reflect in part a state of dialect differentiation that was already in
place, but for the most part they reflect the construction of two divergent
political systems characterized by almost no human contact. In the 1980s
South Koreans were able to access North Korean publications, albeit in
a very restricted way. Some of these were simple reprints or copies of
North Korean publications, whereas others were republished by South
Korean publishers with the contents corrected to reflect South Korean
orthography or even with explanatory glosses provided for certain North
Korean words. North Korean texts that were simply reproduced as is
were difficult for South Korean readers to understand completely. This is
because North Korean differs from South Korean not only in superficial
norms like orthography and foreign loanword spellings but also in its
lexicon, which is the core of any language.
41
Some words share the same form in North and South Korean but
differ in meaning, and the reverse also occurs: some words with different
shapes mean the same thing. Moreover, many North Korean words are
simply not used in the South at all. Some of these words are North Korean
regional dialect words that have been promoted in status to become
part of North Koreas cultured language (Munhwa), and others are
the product of generations of the official language refinement (Mal
Tadmgi) campaign waged for generations by the North Korean regime;
and there are still other neologisms that reflect North Koreas socialist
system and official ideology. And it isnt just the Korean language of
North Korea that is strange to South Koreans. The Korean language
of the Yanbian region in northeast China, which shares a wide range
of linguistic norms and regional and social dialects with North Korean
Munhwa, also looks strange to South Koreans. In other words, South
Korean language under the name of standard language (pyojun)
and North Korean language under the name of Munhwa really are
diverging, just as people have noted.
This divergence has occasioned more than a little hand-wringing on
the part of serious North and South Korean intellectuals (as well as on
the part of some policy makers). Needless to say, opinions on the question of who should bear the bulk of the blame for this state of affairs
have differed depending on which side of the Thirty-Eighth Parallel one
stands. South Koreans have cited as the main reason the excesses of the
language policies pursued by the Pyongyang regime under the name of a
linguistic revolution, and North Koreans have assigned primary responsibility to the current state of the South Korean language, which they
characterize as having fallen in status to that of a mongrel language
(chaptangmal) from overexposure to the languages of imperialists and
reactionary bourgeois. But alongside political and ideology offensives,
there have also been sincere attempts to turn back the tide of divergence
purely because of fears that linguistic divergence might somehow lead
to a solidifying of ethno-national division. Talks between the North and
South about unifying Korean Romanization and about dictionary-compi-
42
lation projects that include vocabulary from North Korea and Yanbian
are one aspect of such attemptsthey are the product of a sense of crisis
and of a sense that North-South linguistic divergence has reached an
extreme level.
I do not share this sense of crisis, for two reasons. First, NorthSouth linguistic divergence has been greatly exaggerated. If North-South
summit talks were to be opened, it is clear that no interpreting would
be needed for either side. And when South Korean readers come into
contact with North Korean texts, the phenomenon they experience is one
of a slight strangeness or unfamiliarity, not incomprehension. For the
average South Korean, the regional and social dialects of South Korea,
for example, the fictional texts of Yi Mungu and Kim Sngdong, and
the Internet language that now runs rampant in Korean cyberspace are
no less divergent than North Korean is. Besides which, this divergence
includes in itself enrichment. Take, for example, the beauty and richness of the Korean language in the first part of the North Korean revolutionary opera Pibada (Sea of blood). There are many who will criticize
the world view of Pibada as nave and derivative of the old Sinpagk, but
there are few who would deny that the Korean language that comprises
this work breaks new ground in terms of its beauty and richness. In the
course of diverging in this way, Korean has also been enriched. Moreover, as and when the mood for unification ripens, and once personnel
exchanges and movement increase and the North and South Korean mass
media become mutually intermeshed, the divergent elements from North
and South will be absorbed and neutralized by both sides, leading to a
gradual homogenization of the two varieties.
Second (and this is really the more important angle), even if North and
South Korean truly are diverging, and even supposing that this process
is accelerating, there is nothing that anybody can do about it. As long as
one rejects absolutism, there is no way to staunch the flow of divergence,
and there is really no need to staunch it, anyway. Only dead languages
can avoid change, and the factors that change languages are linguistic
43
and extralinguistic conditions and circumstances that one cannot easily

control. Just as one cannot and need not bring todays Korean back in
line with nineteenth-century Korean, there is no way to and no need
to bring divergent North and South Korean back into congruence. All
that needs to happen is for Koreans in the South to use South Korean and
Koreans in the North to use North Korean. Though it seems unlikely,
if North and South Korean should diverge so much as to exceed the
bounds of mutual comprehension, then we would simply need to learn
each others languages. The costs that would be incurred for North and
South Koreans to learn each others languages would be far lower than
the costs (and adverse side effects) of a forced homogenization of these
two varieties.
44
Notes
1. This is the position of individuals like Yi Odk, who criticizes certain
linguistic nationalists engrossed in the creation of neologisms that the
speech community is likely to reject. For him, the ideal form of Korean
language is the quotidian spoken languageunsullied by school educationthat one learns from ones parents in childhood and the living
language that has been passed down orally since times immemorial by
the minjung, or popular masses. Insofar as Yi emphasizes the language
of the masses (minjung i n) rather than the language of the ethnonation (minjok i n), his view of language is different from the mainstream view of the Hangl Hakhoe.
Chapter 3
Infected Language,
Infected Literature
One Perspective on Koreaphone Literature
From ancient times until the end of the nineteenth century, the vast
majority of the literary heritage accumulated by Koreans was in hanmun
(literary Sinitic). The difference between written language and spoken
language that Koreans viewed as so natural for so long has presented
difficulties in delineating the boundaries of Korean literature. Does
Korean literature mean only literature written in Korean, or does it
include also literature written on Korean soil by Korean authors in the
medium of hanmunthat is, classical Chinese? Language is fundamental
to the definition of literature, and thus any bundling together of literatures using disparate languages is somehow unnatural. To put it another
way, it is natural to view Korean literature as only that literature which
has been created in Koreanjust as the French and the Germans exclude
from French literature and German literature the medieval literature
amassed in Latin.
Even so, Korean literature cannot mean only the hangl literature
collected or recorded after the fifteenth century, when the Korean
46
vernacular script was first invented. For starters, the hyangga songs
written in hyangchal script must be included in Korean literature, and
among the many documents recorded in idu script until the end of the
nineteenth century, there are some that can be singled out and included
within the definition of literature. But again, there is no getting around
the fact that once one puts aside literary works written in hanmun, the
sum of Korean literature written until the end of the nineteenth century,
whether in quality or quantity, is too meager to warrant the dignity
of the term ethno-national literature (minjok munhak). This is because
compared to the literary heritage amassed by Koreans during the same
period in hanmun, the literary heritage that can be assembled on the
basis of hyangga, hangl literature, and select documents written in
idu is tiny. When the contours of Korean literature are made identical
with those of the Korean language, the vast majority of literary works
amassed by Koreans up to the end of the nineteenth century are ultimately excluded from Korean literature.
Among the various ways to escape this quandary, one is to distinguish between Korean literature and Koreaphone literature, in which
case Korean literature would include literary works written in Korea by
Koreans in hanmun, and Koreaphone literature would designate only
works written in Korean, starting with the hyangga of the Silla dynasty.
Its a bit of a quick-and-dirty solution, but it is not an inelegant one,
either.
From ancient times until the mid-fifteenth century, when the Hunmin
chngm was invented, the two inscriptional systems used by
Koreans were hanmun and idu , and from the mid-fifteenth
century until the end of the nineteenth century, hangl was added to
the mix to create a tripartite inscriptional system whereby hanmun, idu,
and hangl existed alongside each other. Hanmun and idu resembled
each other insofar as they both used Chinese characters, whereas idu
and hangl resembled each other insofar as they were used to write
Korean. So when I say Koreaphone literature, I mean literature written
Infected Language, Infected Literature
47
in idu (idu in the broadest sense, including hyangchal) and in hangl.

In this chapter I wish to examine one aspect of Koreaphone literature,
which also entails examining one aspect of the Korean language. This
is because asking What is Koreaphone literature? implies the question
How does one define the Korean language? So how does one define
the Korean language?
The Distance between Silla Korean

and Contemporary Korean
I begin with the hyangga song by the name of Wn ka (Song
of resentment; also known as Channamu, or Korean pine), said to
have been written in eighth-century Silla by a certain Sin Chung. The
original text of this song, along with the story of its provenance, can
be found in the Samguk yusa (Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms; late
thirteenth c.), under part 8 of the section Pin , in the article titled
Sin Chung kwaegwan . Before he assumed the throne, the
future King Hyosng would often sit beneath the Korean pine
in the palace garden with a wise scholar by the name of Sin Chung and
play paduk. One day he said to Sin Chung, If I should ever forget about
you later when I become king, I shall be like this pine tree. Hearing
these words, Sin Chung stood up and bowed. A few months passed,
and King Hyosng ascended the throne. In the process of conferring
rewards and government posts upon his meritorious retainers, he forgot
to include Sin Chung. Filled with hurt, Sin Chung composed this song
and pinned it to the pine, whereupon the formerly fresh and green tree
suddenly became brown and withered. Finding this peculiar, the king
sent somebody to investigate. His attendant discovered the song that Sin
Chung had pinned up and delivered it to the king, who exclaimed in
great surprise, I have been so distracted by the many affairs of state
that I nearly forsook somebody I have always held dear. He immediately summoned Sin Chung and conferred a government post upon him,
whereupon the Korean pine thrived once again.
48
The first half of the original text of this song as recorded in the Samguk
yusa is as follows:
Although the text is inscribed in Chinese characters, the inscriptional

system is not hanmun but hyangchal. That is, what this text is inscribing
is not classical Chinese but eighth-century Korean. What that eighthcentury Korean was really like is not known, so there is no way to know
how Sillans sang (read) this song. Not only that: there also is no way
of knowing how the thirteenth-century monk Iryn, who recorded this
song, read it. Not only are Sin Chung and Iryn separated by more than
five centuries, but whereas Silla Korean was centered on the language
of the city of Kyngju, Kory-era Korean was centered on the city of
Kaesng, meaning that Sin Chungs Korean and Iryns Korean must
have been substantially different.
Nonetheless, the hyangga songs that Iryn recorded demonstrate
somethinghowever vaguelyof the traces of ancient Korean. Although
there is no way of knowing the details of eighth-century Korean and
therefore no way of reading them in the language of Silla, one can
still sketch out in broad strokes, on the basis of these precious literary
remnants, the language of that time, however much this remains on
the level of imagination and guesswork. When one dresses up such
imagination and guesswork with a bit of theory and tries to sketch out
the language of Silla, this is called hyangga interpretation. Japanese
scholars like Ayugai Fusanoshin (18641946) and Ogura Shinpei (1882
1944), and Korean scholars like Yang Chudong (19031977), Hong Kimun
(19031992), and Kim Wanjin (1931) have pioneered hyangga interpretation in order to delve into ancient Korean.
49
Thus, Hong Kimun reads the first part of Song of the Korean Pine
as follows:
Kas tywohi caz i
Kosol antol iWuli tim ay
Ne estehi nice kolochin
wulGwelten nach i kwochi syahwon tiwiya1
This translation, which Hong Kimun terms a direct translation, begs a
number of questions. First, assume that, through some stroke of fortune,
this translation has brought readers safely and without mishap to the
language of the Sillans while avoiding all the landmines of error that
lurk at every step of the long and perilous journey called hyangga interpretation. To put it another way, imagine that the Sillans sang this song
exactly as Hong Kimun has rendered it. Even if this were the case, this
eighth-century Korean would give a very strange impression to twentieth-century Koreans. Except for professional researchers in the field of
Korean historical linguistics, there is probably almost nobody who could
understand even the gist of Hong Kimuns translation. Hong Kimun
provides the following explanation of his direct translation into modern
Korean:
Hancham musnghan channamu
Kal i toeyado iulji anni
N tchi ijrya hasidn
Urldn k nach-i kochyjil chul iya
The once-flourishing pine
withers not even in winter
How could I ever forget you?
Will that face that I so revered ever change?
In this free translation one can hear all the more clearly the voice of the
eighth-century poet. Although there are deliberate archaisms in places, if
one replaces toeyado with toedo, iulji with sidlji, urldon with urrdon,
and kochyjil with pynhal, even the average reader should not find the
50
poem too taxing. What I wish to point out here is the distance between
Hong Kimuns direct translation and his free translationthat is, the
distance between eighth-century Korean and twentieth-century Korean.
Even for the linguistic intuitions of the normal person who has never
received linguistic training, it would be difficult to realize that these two
texts are recording one and the same language.2
Next, and regrettably for all of us, the likelihood that Hong Kimuns
direct translation has captured the essence of the language of the Sillans
is almost zero. In fact, two other monumental works of hyangga interpretation that preceded Hong Kimuns own book by that titleOgura
Shinpeis Kyka oyobi ritoku no kenky (A study of hyangga and idu)
and Yang Chudongs Chosn koga yngu (A study of Koreas ancient
songs)both read this song quite differently from the way Hong did. The
differences are not confined to simply determining the exact forms of
what are, in origin, the same words. To put it another way, the differences in these interpreters opinions do not owe simply to minutiae
of phonetic outer formdepending on the scholar, each interpretation
assigns completely different lexemes to the same Chinese characters, and
the form and meaning given to each syllable differ accordingly.
For example, where Hong Kimun reads MK kas tywohi for the first
four characters of Song of the Korean Pine (), Yang Chudong
reads MK mulhuys or mulGuys.3 As a result, whereas Hong understood
as once-flourishing ~ very good, Yang interpreted it as murt
~ modn (all; each and every). In the same passage, Yang also entertains
the possibility of reading as MK mot and as MK hoy, and
according to his explanation, this MK mothoy means palace. He adds
that the character earlier had the vernacular gloss mat. And if one
recalls the Samguk yusa passage about this song, a reading of in the
palace sounds plausible. In any case, where Yang Chudong reads
as all the Korean pines or the entire Korean pine or in
the palace, Hong Kimun reads the once-flourishing pine. Personally, I
51
prefer Hong Kimuns interpretation, but there is no way to know which

is correct. And there is every likelihood that both are wrong.
This state of affairs is easy enough to understand. As methods for
inscribing Korean, both hyangchal and idu are very low in quality. Documents recorded in hyangchal or idu are extremely inconvenient as materials for studying the history of the Korean language. This is because they
are inscriptional systems that are much more inconvenient for reading
than for writing. More than anything else, though, it is because there was
no systematic framework of rules for distinguishing when to read characters with their Sino-Korean pronunciations as phonograms (mdok
) or as vernacular Korean semantograms (sktok = hundok ).
Moreover, whether one read a character as phonogram or semantogram,
there were no strict and universally applicable rules for each and every
case, on top of which Chinese characters were incapable of expressing
in detail the sound structure of Korean and were also unable to keep
up with the historical changes in Korean phonetics and phonology. The
result is that the earliest we are able to grasp Korean in its systematic
entirety is the fifteenth centurythat is, after the promulgation of the
Hunmin chngm.
What all this means is this: attempts to read hyangga in the language of
the Silla era are not much different from trying to read them in fifteenthcentury Middle Korean. So when one says hyangga interpretation, one
is not reading hyangchal in exactly the same way that Sillans read
hyangchal but is rather translating the Silla-era language recorded in
hyangchal into an older language close to fifteenth-century Korean. To
put it another way, the essence of the interpretation in hyangga interpretation is interpreting ancient Korean more or less as fifteenth-century
Korean.
But the gap between the time when Sillans sang hyangga and the
fifteenth century is much greater than the gap between the fifteenth
century and now. Because language change is not simply a function
of time, there is no way to determine whether the difference between
52
eighth-century Korean and fifteenth-century Korean is greater than that

between fifteenth-century Korean and twentieth-century Korean, but
one is certainly justified in supposing that eighth-century Korean and
fifteenth-century Korean must have been significantly different. If so,
then clearly the difference between eighth-century Korean and twentieth-century Korean must be much greater than that between direct
translation hyangga and free translation hyangga. Most Koreans
today can barely even understand the hyangga interpreters direct translations, but the actual Korean of the Sillans would likely be far more
unfamiliar to Koreans today than the abstruse direct translations of the
hyangga interpreters. To sum up, then, for twentieth-century Koreans,
the language of the Sillans would likely be no different in its alterity than
any other foreign language.
The Lexicon Is Always Changing

Ever since the 1960s, American linguists have hypothesized that the
structure of human language is composed of five different types of
knowledge: the category rules in the syntactic component, the lexicon,
transformational rules, semantic interpretation rules in the semantic
component, and phonological rules in the phonology component. The
syntactic component is divided into the base and transformational rules;
category rules and the lexicon are included in the former, and transformation rules in the latter. Category rules determine the system of certain
grammatical relations that govern semantic interpretation, as well as the
sequential ordering of abstract elements in the base. Roughly speaking,
they are the rules that determine which functions individual lexemes (or
words) come to play in concrete sentences. Broadly speaking, these rules
encompass lexical knowledge.
The lexicon is the set of lexemes (or words) that speakers of a
particular natural language can use. Technically speaking, the lexicon
comprises the set of lexical entries, themselves composed of sets of
53
features denoting certain semantic, syntactic, and phonological features,

along with various redundancy rules. Thus, the lexicon includes not only
the phonological and morphological definitions of individual words but
also the information about how to deploy them in sentences.
Transformational rules are necessary for transforming sentences
formed abstractly at the base level into concrete sentences. In other
words, they are the rules needed to get from the deep structure up to
the surface structure. Transformational rules include both obligatory and
optional rules, and these two rule types can be distinguished by their
shape. Semantic interpretation rules use the meaning recorded in individual lexical entries as information about deep-structure grammatical
relationships in order to render possible the interpretation of sentential
meaning. Phonological rules convert phonological signs into phonetic
signs; for example, they convert Korean /pata/ ocean on the phonological level into [pada] at the phonetic level.
Among these five different types of linguistic knowledge, all except
the lexicon are closed sets containing a certain limited number of
elements for any given natural language at any given point in time. But
the lexicon is an open set. Even at the individual level, the lexicon is
ceaselessly expanding in tandem with the intellectual growth of the individual, and at the level of individual natural languages, too, the lexicon is
ceaselessly changing through interference from and contact with other
languages. Therefore, the most conspicuous type of language change is
lexical change, even if changes in the phonological system or syntax are
in some way more fundamental. The reason that Koreans find the direct
translation of Song of the Korean Pine so strange at first is because the
lexicon of eighth-century Sillan Korean and that of today are so incredibly different.
54
Sino-Vocabulary in Korean
The Korean lexicon has been changing ceaselessy since ancient times,
and one of the strongest catalysts behind this change has been the influx
of Sino-vocabularylexical items composed of Chinese characters. The
penetration of Sino-vocabulary had already begun in ancient times. Of
course, one can imagine the Korean language before the influx of Sinovocabularya Korean language with a lexicon filled only with purely
native words before it was infected by foreign elements. But ever since
historically attested times, Sino-vocabulary has penetrated ceaselessly
into Korean, with the result that the Korean lexicon has come to have a
bipartite structure comprising the two pillars of native and Sino-Korean
vocabulary. This bipartite structure began to take form as early as the
ancient Three Kingdoms period and was further intensified during the
Kory and Chosn dynasties. There is evidence of a substantial influx
of Mongolian vocabulary at the end of the Kory period, but this was
not so radical as to convert the former bipartite lexical structure into a
tripartite one.
Sino-vocabulary did not simply create endless sets of synonym pairs
with native words; with the cultural might of Sinitic culture behind
it, it also drove out many native words. This is true judging even
from the period after the fifteenth century when the Hunmin chngm
was created, thereby providing a much clearer picture of Korean. For
example, MK kuwuy government office was replaced with the word
kwanchng , and MK kuwuysil government clerk was replaced
with kwalli . Sino-Korean kyeymo step-mother drove out
MK tasomemi, chinchk relatives drove out azom, and chp
secondary wife; concubine drove out kwoma. Even adverbs like MK
elwu possibly, MK cyekuntes for a brief moment, MK sile possibly,
and MK pacilwo by amazing coincidence were replaced by Sino-Korean
kahi, chamkkan , nnghi, and konggyoroi, respectively.
And many native Korean verbs were replaced by combinations of SinoKorean verbal noun + ha- do/be. For example, the MK kyeleloW- be
55
idle, carefree yielded to hangaha-, MK kozoma-l- manage to

kwalli ha-, MK somoch- penetrate; get through to tongha-, MK
cowolaW- be intimate to chinha-, and so on.
Of course, lexical replacements like this did not pit only native etyma
against Sino-vocabulary. There are also plenty of cases of native words
pushing out other native words. For example, chumni pocket; pouch
pushed out MK nomoch, koppi reins pushed out MK syeks (hyek), kago pushed out MK ni-, myt how many; some pushed out MK hyen,
manh- be many, k- be great pushed out MK ha-, and so forth. Even
in cases where lexical replacement did not take place, both native words
and Sino-vocabulary underwent numerous changes in their outward
phonetic appearance or form, albeit in different ways. For example, many
Sino-Korean character readings underwent palatalization or monophthongization.
The morphological changes in native Korean words were even greater.
To recognize in the fifteenth-century MK spahhye- take out, remove
the precursor of the twentieth-century ppae- requires quite a nimble
imagination and a refined linguistic sensitivity. Nor is it the case that
because something was spelled the same way five hundred years ago it,
was also pronounced the same. A trivial example would be the vowels
ae and e; though these are monophthongs in modern-day
Korean, they were diphthongs in fifteenth-century Korean. Moreover,
fifteenth-century Korean had pitch-accent, a feature that has disappeared from standard Korean today. If fifteenth-century Koreans were
to speak in their pitch-accented Korean, very few modern-day Koreans
could understand them. In any case, the changes to the Korean lexicon
took place in various layers. Broadly speaking, though, the history of
the Korean lexicon has been one of a deepening or intensification of
the bipartite division between native vocabulary and Sino-vocabulary,
of native vocabulary being pushed out by Sino-vocabulary.
Looking back on the processes of renewal and change that Sinovocabulary has wrought on the Korean lexicon, there are two periods
56
worth remembering. The first is the era of King Kyngdk of Silla. As

most Koreans know, in the sixteenth year of his reign (757 CE), King
Kyngdk decreed that the names of all nine provinces of the land, as
well as the prefectures and counties under their jurisdictions, be changed
from native Korean names to Chinese-style names. As many have noted,
this event marked the first major manmade change to native Korean
proper nouns and served as the catalyst for a tendency to change even
personal names into Chinese-character names. Two years later, King
Kyngdk changed the names of both civilian and military posts to
Chinese-character terms, too. In other words, one might say that King
Kyngdks reforms to place-names and government-post names were
the point of departure for a new situation in the Korean lexicon whereby
native Korean words and Sino-vocabulary came to exist side by side. On
the other hand, this change can also be seen as reflecting the fact that
even at that time a significant number of Sino-vocabulary items were
already putting down roots in the Korean lexicon.
The second memorable period in the history of Sino-vocabulary
in Korean is that lasting from the end of the nineteenth century to
the present. A huge amount of new-style Sino-vocabulary coined in
Japan by Rangaku scholars as early as the Edo period came flooding
into Korean during this period, and as a result the Sino-vocabulary
portion of the Korean lexicon that had traditionally been more similar to
Chinese came to resemble Japanese. Endless made-in-Japan Sino-vocabulary entered the Korean lexicon, and many other preexisting Sinovocabulary items shed their earlier meanings and acquired the new
meanings that these words had in Japanese; Chinese-style Sino-vocabulary was converted to Japanese-style Sino-vocabulary. The changes in
Korean Sino-vocabulary during this period, then, have been a continuous
process, and a sort of Sino-Japanese war was played out in the Korean
lexicon whereby made-in-Japan Sino-vocabulary has been asserting
ascendancy over made-in-China Sino-vocabulary. Thus, in cases like in
table 1, the made-in-China sequencing of the Chinese characters has
been reversed in the made-in-Japan versions imported into Korean.
57
Table 1. Reversal of made-in-China sequencing of the Chinese characters.
And in cases like the calques from English in table 2, the made-in-China
calques have been replaced in Korean with made-in-Japan calques.
Table 2. Replacement of made-in-China calques with made-in-Japan calques.
Made-in-China Sino-vocabulary words, including the items in table 3,

have lost all or most of their original meanings and have taken on new,
made-in-Japan meanings.
58
Table 3. Made-in-China Sino-vocabulary words with new made-in-Japan

meanings.
It is not just the Sino-vocabulary in Korean that Japanese has changed.

Japan was also the point of origin for loanwords from European
languages before they were imported into Korean. Numerous European
words were borrowed into Korean via Japan: English loans like terebi
television, apat apartment, ppangkku flat tire, and sando sandwich; sandwich-like cookie still bear the traces of their journey via
Japan. So many new lexemes have registered in the Korean lexicon over
the last century as to warrant their own rather hefty dictionary, and most
of them owe to contact with Japanese.
Twentieth-Century Neologisms
Todays Korean is not the Korean of one century ago. Among the various
more widely known languages of the world, there are probably few that
have undergone such massive changes as Korean has in the last hundred
years or so. It is not so easy for Koreans now to read documents from the
end of the Chosn dynasty, but if a Korean from the end of the Chosn
dynasty were to be reborn today, it would be much more difficult for him
or her to read documents from present-day Korea. This would be as true
59
for documents written entirely in hangl as it would be for documents

with all the Sino-vocabulary rendered in Chinese characters. True, such
a person would likely be familiar with the individual Chinese characters
but would be completely ignorant of all the neologisms created over the
past century using those characters. If the Korean document in question
also had European loanwords mixed in, it would be even more difficult to
understand. And imagine how difficult it would be for an eighth-century
Sillan! For example, imagine Sin Chung, the Silla poet who wrote the
Song of the Korean Pine, reading yet another poem about the Korean
pine.
Tellebijn kage ap l chinagadaga lpit
k chip anjip ro nan mun i kur in chul algo
lln nae lgul l pichwttni
kul i anira mun iss
Passing by the television store I suddenly
mistook the door leading inside for a mirror;
All of a sudden I could see myself
But it was a door, not a mirror.
Porygo haessnikka poytchi ankess, tchtcht
tchtchtchtcht
ssrjy innn nodongja rl pal lo chignjign palpko
tjin mri rl tto ttaerir kann soepaiph tl i
16 inchi, 20 inchi hwamyn e chum in, chung in
kur in chul arattni mun iss
You saw what you saw because you tried to seetsk-tsk
Tsk-tsk, tsk-tsk.
Steel pipes bent on cracking more skulls
And the trampling of fallen laborers
Zoom in on sixteen- and twenty-inch screens.
I thought it was a mirror, but it was a door.
Kri kamyn trgabrin mun
ttl e nn han kru channamu
chabmyn pyngmyn in namu
60

krchiman hwal chrm kge kijigae rl kymyns
charann channamu kaji
Had I gone inside,
a lone Korean pine stands in the yard.
A tree that, if you grab it, has a level surface
Yet stands there stretching,
Its pine branches spread like wings.
from Hwang Chius Ttl ap i channamu (The pine in front of
the yard)
Of course, Sin Chung knew neither the writing system called hangl
nor Arabic numerals. But for arguments sake, suppose he knew both
hangl and Arabic numerals. Even assuming so, for this eighth-century
bard, the poem written by his compatriot 1,200 years later would be no
different from one in a foreign language. For starters, he would have
no clue what a television or a metal pipe is, or what inch and zoom in
refer to. Furthermore, even if words like nodongja laborer, hwamyn
screen and pyngmyn surface were to be written in Chinese characters, he would not understand them in the sense that speakers of Korean
understand them today. This means that language change (along with
changes in world consciousness) is keenly affected by material and ideological (or just new) impulses. For example, another poem titled Steel
Idea (Kangchl Idea) by the same poet would be incomprehensible
even to a Korean from the early twentieth century:
Chamjari ka hel rl nako
Tuguge ka robot rl natsi
Pokrein l nahn kt un
Ppantchak, hann aidiytta.
Kangchl idea ka
Hwangto mnji irkimy
Hgpchigp ndk l pamktn
Chugkson ro
Ttae ro nn han saram trgal
Mudm l panoki do handa
61
Just like the dragonfly begets the helicopter

And the horseshoe crab begets the robot,
What begat the digger
Was a glinting idea.
As this steely idea
With its scooper arm
Digs its way through green hills
Kicking up yellow dust,
Every so often it hollows out a grave
Just the right size for a human.
Language and Historical Contingency

But what would render The Pine in Front of the Yard incomprehensible
to Sin Chung is not necessarily just the names for those new material
goods that were unknown in his time. Even in Sin Chungs time there
would have been things like shops and things like mirrors, so it is entirely
likely that he would have been able to pass in front of a shop, mistake
its door for a mirror, and see his reflection (although the door wouldnt
have been made of glass). So suppose that through some grand coincidence Sin Chung experienced something similar to what the speaker in
The Pine in Front of the Yard does and that, through yet another grand
coincidence, he experienced it on the same affective wavelength. Even
then the poem by Sin Chung expressing his emotional reaction would
be completely different from The Pine in Front of the Yard.
First of all, putting aside words like television and zoom in that
designate new civilization and technology, the other lexemes mobilized in The Pine in Front of the Yard would have been absent from
Sin Chungs lexicon, too. Moreover, even if one supposes that Sin
Chungs and Hwang Chius heartstrings were similar and that they
shared exactly the same impulses to express the sounds of those heartstrings in language, Sin Chung would certainly not have organized the
language needed to express his feelings in the same manner as The Pine
62
in Front of the Yard does because style is not a matter of the individual
only but also, to a certain extent, a matter of ones society and ones
linguistic community.
The organization of The Pine in Front of the Yard reflects not the
individuality of Hwang Chiu apart from or outside of the world but the
subjectivity of the Korean language used by Hwang Chiu at the end of
the twentieth century, as well as one particular subjectivity of the endof-the-twentieth-century Korean language created by the end-of-thetwentieth-century world. The chances of a present-day foreigner who
has learned some modicum of Koreanas long as he is a talented poet
writing a poem like The Pine in Front of the Yard are probably better
than those of Sin Chungs doing the same. There are far more and far
deeper traces lurking in twentieth-century Korean of twentieth-century
foreign languages and twentieth-century Korean society than there are
of eighth-century Korean. Even poems stripped bare of foreign elements
or of specific historical or social circumstances would be just as strange
to Sin Chung. For example, the poem While Waiting for You by the
same author as The Pine in Front of the Yard begins like this:
Ne ka ogi ro han k chari e
Nae ka miri ka n rl kidarinn tongan
Tagaonn modn paljaguk n
Nae kasm e kungkunggrinda
Pasrakkrinn namunnip hana to ta naege onda
Kidarybon chk i innn saram n anda
Sesang es kidarinn il chrm kasm aerinn il isslkka
When I get there first
And wait for you to come as promised,
Every footstep
Reverberates inside my chest
And every rustling leaf rustles to me.
Anybody who has ever waited knows
There is nothing on this earth quite so heart-rending as waiting.
63
There are almost no foreign elements in this poem. The lexemes mobilized in the poem are so-called native Korean words and mostly core
vocabulary, at that. One could note that the word sesang world
is a Chinese-character word, and indeed this word may well have been
known during Sin Chungs time. Moreover, it would be hard to claim
that the emotional impact of this poem is influenced by foreign civilization or ideology. Whomever or whatever the speaker of the poem means
by you, the impatience and anxiety felt while eagerly awaiting something
or someone is a universal emotion that transcends time and place. And
yet Sin Chung would not be able to decipher this poem. This is because,
just as with the other poems already cited, the lexemes that make up this
poem would almost all be missing from Sin Chungs lexicon. Perhaps he
would be able to understand the second-person pronoun n and the noun
saram person. And if one were to write the loanword sesang earth;
world as in Chinese characters, perhaps he would understand that
word, too. But even if he understood these words, he would not be able
to understand the poem as a wholethere are simply too many words
in this poem that he wouldnt know. For Sin Chung, this poem would
be like an encoded document demanding a difficult decoding process
even though the majority of its component words are easy ones, familiar
to any present-day Korean kindergartener.
What this means is that language change occurs under the influence
of not only external forces but also of language-internal impulses. Sin
Chung was waiting anxiously for the call of King Hyosng, and though
the poem While Waiting for You coincides to a certain extent with Sin
Chungs fervent desire, Sin Chung would not be able to understand it
because the poem is written in Korean but in a Korean that is not Sin
Chungs Korean. If a poem composed of basic vocabulary items (the halflives of which are relatively longer than those of other types of vocabulary) is perceived by him as a foreign language, then imagine what the
case would be with twentieth-century prose literature, which bears innumerable traces of countless foreign contacts over a long period of time.
64
The Futile Quest for Language Genealogies

So can one say that eighth-century Korean and present-day Korean are
the same language? For the vast majority, the answer seems to be an
obvious yes. One calls the language in which Sin Chung sang The Song
of the Korean Pine Korean, just as one calls the language in which
Hwang Chiu composed The Pine in Front of the Yard Korean. That
we Koreans regard these two languages as the same means that we see
some sort of identity being maintained between eighth-century Korean
and present-day Korean. What defines the identity of a language?
This is a difficult question to answer, and the time when the readiest
answer at hand was genetic identity was the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century European linguists immersed themselves in categorizing
all the worlds countless languages according to genetic relations. They
would lump together languages that shared the same bloodline into
families (language families) and spend their time searching for the
ancestors (Ur-languages, Ursprachen, protolanguages) of each family.
The branch of linguistics that was so passionate in the nineteenth
century about creating genealogies for languages is comparative-historical linguistics. The seeds of the historical-comparative linguistics that
would come into full bloom at the University of Leipzig in the late nineteenth century were sown a century earlier by an English lawyer. This
lawyer, a man by the name of William Jones, worked at the end of the
eighteenth century for the British East Indies Company in India, and as
he was learning Sanskrit, the ancient language of the subcontinent, he
was shocked by the systematic similarities he noticed between Sanskrit
and the ancient languages of Greek and Latin, which he already knew
from his classical upbringing and education. The kinship terms, words
for the main body parts, and numeralsall lexemes that are difficult to
view as borrowings from one language to anothershowed fixed phonological correspondences across the three languages.
After returning to England, Jones wrote up his amazing discovery and
announced it to Europe. At the beginning of the next century, scholars
65
like Franz Bopp, Rasmus Rask, Jacob Grimm, and August Schleicher
refined Joness studies and in the process of expanding his work came to
the conclusion that most of the languages of India and Europe, starting
from the Celtic languages on the Atlantic coast and stretching all the
way to Sanskrit in India, were one family sharing the same bloodline.
They christened this the Indo-European language family.
They went even further and set themselves the ambitious task,
through comparisons of these languages, of reconstructing the hypothetical Indo-European Ur-language, or Proto-Indo-European, that must
have been the unique progenitor of all these languages. They even
tried to imagine the Indo-Europeans who must have used this imaginary protolanguage in remote antiquity. Insofar as the comparative
method that they used was, within the limitations of their materials,
quite rigorous and exacting, one cannot simply denigrate the concept
of Indo-European itself as a fiction, but it seems fair to say that the
emotional or affective basis for historical-comparative linguistics was a
kind of mythical romanticism.
The Indo-European language family, embracing numerous languages
over a wide territory, is subdivided into various subgroups: Indo-Iranian
languages like Hindi and Persian, Romance languages like French and
Italian, Germanic languages like English and German, Slavic languages
like Russian and Polish, and Celtic languages like Irish and Welsh.
Thanks to the added influence of colonialism and imperialism, English,
French, Spanish, and Portuguese have all spread into North and South
America, Oceania, and Africa, with the result that today Indo-European
languages have come to cover almost the entire globe, with the exception of some parts of Asia.
The European historical-comparative linguists who so loved to create
linguistic genealogies for their languages also wanted to create genealogies for all the other languages of the world. Of course, compared to the
Indo-European language family, which is richly attested in numerous
documents ranging from 1500 BC to the present over a period of more
66
than 3,500 years, it was no easy task to create linguistic genealogies for
languages that were attested rather more scarcely. For example, Italian,
French, and Portuguesesister languages of the Romance language
familyare all well attested in detailed documents that show the process
of how their mother (Vulgar Latin) gave birth to them, but there
are plenty of other languages in the world that came to be written
down only as a result of contact with Europeans. But the Europeans,
like good colonizers, were only too happy to assume the white mans
burden, and as a result of their labors, today some ten to twenty different
linguistic genealogies, or language families, are recognized. Some of
the bigger language families are Altaic (including Mongolic, ManchuTungusic, and Turkic), Uralic (including Finnish and Hungarian), SinoTibetan (including Chinese and Tibetan), Afro-Asiatic (including Arabic
and Hebrew), and Dravidian in the south of India (including Tamil and
Telugu).
But there are also languages that remain outside such genealogies:
languages like Basque, in the border region between France and Spain,
and Ainu, which used to be spoken on the island of Hokkaido in Japan,
are cases in point. With languages like these, no amount of genetic
testing to ascertain their genetic affiliation will make their bloodlines
any clearer; they are linguistic orphanslanguages from outer space.
Korean: Free of Myths of Linguistic Bloodlines

So what about Korean? For many Koreans it is a pity that Korean, too,
is close to being a linguistic orphan. With no confirmed blood relatives, Korean is an unusual languagedifficult to assign to any particular
genealogy. Research into the genetic affiliation of Korean has proceeded
now for nearly 150 years, ever since the second half of the nineteenth
century, but Koreans pedigree is still a mystery. For me this is not a
pity but a stroke of luck. Compared to the users of other languages that
67
have long since been assigned definitively to one genealogy or another,

Koreans are that much freer from the myth of linguistic bloodlines.
There are basically two opposing claims concerning the genetic affiliation of Korean. One holds that Korean belongs to the Altaic language
family, and the other objects that this is difficult to maintain. Yet
neither claim stands on very firm ground. The linguist who popularized
throughout the academic world the notion that Korean belongs to the
Altaic language family through works like Studies in Korean Etymology
and Einfhrung in die altaische Sprachwissenschaft (Introduction to Altaic
linguistics) was the Finnish Altaicist, Gustav Ramsted. But even Ramsted
was not entirely convinced of the blood relationship between Korean
and the other Altaic languages and was skeptical enough to have said
once that Korean was a strange language that needed more research.
Even those scholars who prefer not to include Korean in the Altaic
language family are not categorical in denying that Korean is an Altaic
language. Rather, they simply maintain that the evidence for such a claim
is insufficient. Historical-comparative linguistics teaches that regular
phonological correspondences in the basic vocabulary are what prove
that two languages are genetically related. Yet when one compares
Korean with the various Altaic languages, although examples of attractive correspondences are not totally absent, there are not so many as
to make it possible to claim a genetic relationshipsuch is the position of those scholars who decline to include Korean among the Altaic
languages. Because materials that allow one to examine Korean before
the Middle Korean period are so limited, it also seems unlikely that
research on this question will make any great advances in the near (or
even the distant) future.
In contrast, when viewed from the perspective of typological linguistics, Korean resembles the other (so-called) Altaic languages in many
respects. For example, the verb comes at the end of the sentence, modifier
always precedes modified, word formation is accomplished via suffixation, there is clear vowel harmony (in Middle Korean, at least), and so
68
on. So whereas Koreans bloodline is not necessarily Altaic (or is simply

unknown), its behavior is very Altaic-like, even if the behavior in question is not confined to the Altaic languages alone.
But the point I wish to make here is that the debate on whether Korean
is Altaicthe question of linguistic genetic affiliation or bloodlineis in
all likelihood futile. And this is not simply because of the probability
that the Altaic language family (or the Indo-European language family or
whatever language family) is a fiction, the product of the imagination of
theoreticians. As historical research into the Korean language deepens,
the genetic affiliation of Koreanits bloodlinecould perhaps one day
be rendered much clearer than it is today. But if that ever happens, the
Korean language with the established bloodline that emerges will be a
pure Korean from ancient, prehistoric times before foreign elements
entered the language, and it will be for Koreans today no different from
a foreign language.
The metaphor behind historical-comparative linguistics is that of
biological evolution. For example, historical-comparative linguists
imagine that Vulgar Latin, through linguistic evolution, gave birth to the
Romance languages of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian,
and Rhaeto-Romance. And there is an element of truth in this because
if one traces each of these Romance languages back in time through
documents, the convergence upon Vulgar Latin is quite clear. But Vulgar
Latin and the modern Romance languages are completely different.
The languages that share some sort of identity with Vulgar Latin are
the Romance languages of the distant past, not the modern Romance
languages. The Romance languages of the past and those of today are not
the same languages. The present-day Romance languages contain within
them countless non-Latin elements that muddy their Latin bloodline
its just that linguists do not consider these foreign elements part of
the bloodline. So one cannot say that two languages are somehow the
same just because their bloodlines have become intermixed.
69
One has to be careful when using the term related language, too. For
example, in the case of Romanian, which is usually included among the
Romance languages, it is difficult for linguists to decide whether the
Latin bloodline is the more fundamental constituent or whether the nonLatin elements are more fundamental. Moreover, these bloodlines themselves often turn out to be nothing more than myths. This is true of the
term Romance languages itself, but one practice in the field of linguistics labels these languages New Latin, a strategy that implies that these
Romance languages and Latin are essentially one and the same language.
Still, Latin has clearly subdivided into several other languages with the
result that there is little room for confusion between mother language
and daughter languagenobody thinks that Italian and Latin are the
same language. But in the case of languages like Old Korean, where
there has been no subdivision or splitting off of new daughter languages
during the evolution process, there is ample room for confusions of this
nature. In other words, the possibilities for rampant myth-making about
bloodlines are much greater. And indeed, in the consciousness of most
South Koreans, the language of the Sillans is the same language as the
Korean used in Korea todaythe countless foreign elements in modern
Korean that clearly make these two languages different are judged to be
irrelevant to the bloodline and are simply removed from consideration.
A Perspective That Brooks No Change

This situation with Old Korean is comparable to that of ancient
Greek, which likewise never underwent subdivision into independent
languages during its evolution process. That the language used by the
ancient Greeks evolved into the language used in modern-day Greece is
undeniable. But just as modern-day Italians and French people cannot
read Vergil in the original without specialized study, modern-day Greeks
are unable to read Homer in the original without studying ancient Greek.
In particular, the modern Greek (demotic) that was defined as the official language of education according to new legislation in 1976, unlike
70
the archaizing Katharevousa (pure language) that it had finally defeated

after many decades of struggle, is hugely different from ancient Greek.
And yet one still refers to both the Koine used in pre-Christian times
and modern-day demotic Greek as Greek, blithely imputing to them a
linguistic identity that they do not have. The official name of the demotic
Greek that is so different from ancient Greek is modern Greekthe metamorphoses undergone by this language for more than 2,500 years are
completely ignored.
Nevertheless, in the case of both the Romance languages and modern
Greek, because constant reference to and loans from classical Greek
and Latin texts came to form an important tradition within European
intellectual historyin other words, because of the constant borrowing
and reborrowing of lexemes from texts in their mother languagesthe
relative degree of deviation from the mother languages has been rather
small, and the sense of kinship can be justified. But in the case of the
Germanic and Slavic languages, even though they also belong to the
Indo-European language family, the story is different again. Though it
is not a typical case, Old English before it was infected with the French
virus and Middle English after it was thoroughly infected with that virus
have such radically different lexicons that one can no longer describe
them as being the same language. Yet as far as linguists are concerned,
the Germanic bloodline of English remains completely unaffected.
The somewhat square and hidebound nineteenth-century linguists
had no concept of hybridity or cross-breeding. For them, it was once
a Germanic language, always a Germanic language; once a Romance
language, always a Romance language. So in the eyes of linguists, even
in the case of modern English, with close to 70 percent of its vocabulary stemming from Latin or French, English will always be Germanic,
not Romance, because its basis was Germanic. According to this logic,
the Germanic elements in English are its bloodline; the Latin and French
elements are simply nutrients, just as the Germanic elements in French
are nothing more than nutrients there, too. According to the linguists
71
genealogy, English will continue to be a Germanic language until the

last days of this earth, whatever calamities might befall it, and French
will likewise forever be a Romance language even if the earths tectonic
plates should realign themselves. And the English that will be used in
the last days of this earth will be the same language as the English of
Beowulf, whereas the French to be used on the other side of eternity will
the same French as that found in La chanson de Roland.
The Problem of Mixed Languages

Even if one concedes that most language contact and linguistic interference takes place at the lexical level, this does not mean that these
processes leave the phonology or grammar unscathed. Contact and
interference can also agitate phonological systems and change syntactic
structures radically. Where is one to find a languages bloodline or its
identity in cases like these? The case that is usually cited in this instance
is that of so-called Balkanisms. Balkanisms designates the set of features
that has come to be shared, as a result of long-term contact and interference, by the various genetically unrelated languages spread across
the Balkan Peninsula. The languages that share features like the development of postposed articles and clitic pronouns, the loss of infinitive
constructions, the collapse of nominal inflection, the loss of distinctions
of tone and length, and so on, are Bulgarian, Macedonian, and some varieties of Serbo-Croatian (all Slavic languages); Romanian and some varieties of Italian (Romance languages); and Greek, Albanian, Turkish, and
certain Hungarian dialects, all belonging to diverse language families.
These divergent languages have converged to create something called a
Sprachbund, or linguistic area.
So how can one assign the bloodline of mixed languages like these
that have come to share certain typological features as a result of
prolonged geographical and cultural contact? Must one leave these
features out of consideration because they are somehow secondary
72
or fortuitous? Because the historical research on each of the relevant

languages is relatively well advanced, it is relatively easy to declare in the
case of Balkanisms that these varieties are somehow divergent and that
the bloodlines are different. But when two languages are typologically
similar, it is often difficult to say with certainty whether this is a result of
genetic affiliation or of contact and interference. That is, the boundary
between genetic relationship and contact and interference, especially in
the case of geographically contiguous languages, is often a gray area.
This is true even on the level of lexiconit is essential to note that the
question whether a certain lexeme is a borrowing from another language
or is the result of evolution and change away from the same etymon in
a common source language becomes more and more difficult to answer
the further back in time one goes. One of the high-octane fuels stoking
the debate about whether Korean is Altaic is precisely this murky question of loanwords versus cognates.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that all (or virtually all)
languages are Mischsprachen (mixed languages) participating in this
or that Sprachbund, although the comparative-historical linguists who
cherish rigor would probably disparage any such move to abandon the
notion of genetic relationship as linguistic amateurism. But I believe
that this linguistic bloodline-ism that serves as one of the underpinnings
of historical-comparative linguistics cannot be justified, whether on the
level of historical science or on the level of ideology. When seen from
the perspective of hypothesizing a pure language that probably never
existed on this earth, the act of abstracting away the inner core essence
of a language and using it to create a genealogy is not only unscientific;
when one considers that language families were frequently ranked hierarchically and that certain pure social groups that must have used these
pure languages were also hypothesized, the whole enterprise becomes
a kind of pseudoracism. This is one piece of nineteenth-century garbage
that needs taking out.
73
From the perspective of linguistic geography, the single most important criterion in distinguishing between dialects and independent
languages is that of mutual intelligibility. In other words, when two
speakers are incapable of mutual comprehension, they are seen to be
speaking different languages.4 One can also take the spatial dimension of linguistic geography and convert it to the temporal dimension.
Thus, regardless of whether a language is called by the same name at
different points in its evolution, if the speakers of this language from
different points in time are (imagined to be) unable to achieve mutual
comprehension, it can be said that these are different languages. In
which case, eighth-century Korean and present-day Korean are different
languages, completely independent of each other. Under this understanding, the question whether modern-day Korean is formed on the
basis of Sillan, Koguryan, or (as one recent Japanese researcher would
have it) Paekchean loses much of its force.5
If one adopts this perspective, Korean as seen along a temporal axis
and according to the possibility of mutual intelligibility will fracture into
a multiplicity of Korean languages. We are left not with the Korean
language but with countless Korean languages. In which case, we are
also left not with one single Koreaphone literature but with countless Koreaphone literatures. And the same goes for other languages, as
well. It is commonplace to say that the so-called Romance languages
are languages that have evolved from Vulgar Latin, but nobody can
pinpoint for certain where Vulgar Latin ends and where, for example,
Italian begins. Following a temporal axis, there were simply numerous
Vulgar Latins at different stages and numerous Italians. The beginnings
of English literature, French literature, and German literature are said
to coincide with the epic poems Beowulf, La chanson de Roland, and
Das Niebelungenlied; I do not wish to deny that the languages mobilized
in these works are English, French, and German, but I do nonetheless
think that those languages are not the same languages as modern-day
English, French, and German. Just as what exists in Korea is not the
Korean language but numerous Korean languages, one must reckon with
74
multiple Englishes, Frenches, and Germans rather than with just English,
French, and Germanand with multiple English, French, and German
literatures.
To repeat: speakers of Old English would not have been able to understand Middle English after it was infected with French in the wake of the
Norman Invasion of 1066, just as for speakers of Korean from the end of
the nineteenth century, present-day Korean with its made-in-Japan Sinovocabulary and European loanwords would be totally incomprehensible.
We Are All Infected

The eighth-century Korean Sin Chung and the Korean language he used
do not seem any closer to me than any twentieth-century foreigner and
his language do. This is not simply my subjective feeling but a fact. The
differences between eighth-century Korean and modern-day Korean are
probably greater than those between modern-day Korean and Japanese.
What has rendered modern-day Korean and Japanese so similar are
the foreign elements in both languagesthe Others inside Korean and
Japanese. The Others inside us Koreans and inside the Japanese bind us
both together.
Sin Chungs language and my language are different. Just by coincidence, these two languages both happen to be called Korean, but my
Korean is not his. Naturally, my Korean literature is not his Korean
literature. Just as many Others unknown to Sin Chung are inside
me, my Korean also harbors many foreign elements that would be
unknown to Sin Chung. Just as I am an infected person, so too is my
Korean an infected language. We are all infected, and all languages
are infected languages. Realizing this will help us adopt the distance
of a dispassionate observer when thinking about the ethno-national
language (minjog) and ethno-national literature (minjok munhak).
It will also help us to embrace Bashs haikus and Kitahara Hakushs
modern poetry just as much as we love Korean hyangga or premodern
75
sijo. Moreover, it will also help Koreans someday to cherish, or at least to

accept without any great sense of resistanceand to the same extent as
the Korean literature recorded in such odd Korean by ancient Koreans
a Korean literature that can be housed just as well in English or in other
foreign languages.
Munhak kwa sahoe (Summer 1999 )
76
Notes
1. Cited from Hong Kimun, Hyangga haesk [Hyangga interpretation]
(Pyongyang: Chosn Minjujui Inmin Konghwaguk Kwahagwn, 1956;
reprint, Seoul: Ygang Chulpansa, 1990), 315. The transcription follows
the Yale system as modified for Middle Korean (henceforth, MK) in
Samuel E. Martin, A Reference Grammar of Korean (Rutland, VT: Tuttle
Publishing, 1992).
2. Because Hong Kimuns direct translation and free translation are
rendered for Korean readers in what is more or less the same writing
system, some Korean readers may find this hard to appreciate. Such
readers should recall that the person who wrote down Hong Kimuns
direct translation in the Hunmin chngm was precisely Hong
himself, a twentieth-century Korean. The direct translation is an imitation of how he imagined Silla-era Koreans must have read hyangchal
literary compositions in vernacular Korean inscribed using Chinese
characters. So if Hong Kimuns direct translation is an accurate approximation of Sillan speech, the original written in hyangchal and the
direct translation written in the Hunmin chngm are simply different
recordings using different inscriptional systems of the same concatenation of sounds. If so, then the distance between the direct translation
and the free translation is the same as that between the original and
the free translation. If one compares the original and the free translation, does not the difference between eighth-century Korean and twentieth-century Korean sink in a bit better? Some readers might counter
that the linguistic difference is unfairly enhanced because of the difference in inscriptional systems, with one recorded in hyangchal (Chinese
characters) and the other recorded in hangl, but such readers are
invited to imagine that the direct translation and free translation are
rendered in Romanization (as here). In this case, too, the difference looks
much greater than that between modern French and modern Italian.
3. Yang Chudong, Chngjng koga yngu [Revised and expanded study of
ancient songs] (Seoul: Iljogak, 1965/1997), 612.
4. Of course, because the linguistic boundary between language and dialect
is so unclear, political considerations also come into play in delineating
the boundary. Norwegian and Danish are called different languages
even though there are almost no impediments to mutual intelligibility
77
between them, whereas Japanese and Okinawan are lumped together as

Japanese even though the differences between them are far greater than
those between Danish and Norwegian.
5. In fact, this question will not move any closer to a neat resolution even
with the passing of time. We are unlikely to discover much in the way of
new data, anyway, but the more relevant point is that both politics and
science are mixed up together in this problem.
Chapter 4
Contamination,
Infiltration, Hybridity
A Swipe at Purism in Korean
Reining in Hangl-ology (Hangl-hak)
On January 1, 2004, with the passing of Korean grammarian H Ung
(19182004) at the age of eighty-six, the world lost one of the great stars
in a tradition of nationalist linguistics reaching back to the end of the last
century and the pioneering grammatical studies of Chu Si-gyng (1876
1914). Dr. Hs death called forth a spate of essays and articles in the
popular media praising his life and academic contributions and paying
respect to his memory. Indeed, the legacy bequeathed by Dr. H in the
areas of Korean language studies and the Korean language movement
fully justifies the outpouring of articles mourning his loss. Although his
theoretical leanings were quite different, in the zeal with which he strove
to put his views into practice Dr. H was a direct heir of the pioneer
grammarians Chu Si-gyng and Choe Hynbae, and indeed, his views
commanded just as much allegiance in the spheres of nationalist linguistics and the national language movement as those of his teachers. Like
his two intellectual predecessors, he was known to Koreans as a hangl
80
hakchaliterally, a scholar of hangl or, more clumsily in English, a

hangl-ologist. This custom of referring to H Ung as a hangl hakcha
persisted in his obituaries, whether in the articles written by journalists
or in the appreciations penned by younger kughak (national language
studies) scholars. For example, the opening lines in the essay by the
national language studies scholar Kwn Chae-il (1953), published in the
January 28 issue of the Hanguk ilbo, read as follows:
Shortly before the Lunar New Year, snow fell. The mountains
were deep in snow. Nunmoe or Snowy Mountain was the courtesy name of H Ung, our teacher and hangl scholar, who passed
away on the 26th. He was already 86, but the news that this man
who had always stood at the forefront of hangl research, his
white hair streaming behind him in the wind, had died was a
shock.
As many others have noted, the custom of referring to a subset of the
scholars engaged in research on the kug (national language) as hangl
hakcha (hangl scholars) is not entirely appropriate. If there is a subfield
in academia that can be referred to legitimately as hangl-hakhangl
studies or hangl-ologythis would be research focused on the
writing system called hangl; surely no one wishes to confine the academic legacy of Chu Si-gyng, Choe Hynbae, and H Ung to such a
narrow domain. The appellation of hangl hakcha (hangl scholar)
should, by rights, be reserved for writing-systems experts specializing
in research on the script called hangl, whereas hangl scholars
like H Ung should be referred to as either kug hakcha (national
language scholars) or hangug hakcha (Korean linguists or linguistic
scholars of Korean; the Korean expression avoids the ambiguity of the
English Korean linguist). One reason that H Ung was called a hangl
scholar was almost certainly his deep and long-standing connection to
the Hangl Hakhoe, an academic society that calls itself the Korean
Language Society in English but whose Korean name means simply
hangl society or society for the academic study of hangl. For some
thirty-four years, from 1970 until his death in 2004, Dr. H served as
Contamination, Infiltration, Hybridity
81
executive director of the Hangl Hakhoe. The year 1970 was the year
when Choe Hynbae, his teacher, died. Professor Choe, likewise, had
served as executive director of the Hangl Hakhoe from 1949the year
when the former Chosn Hakhoe (Society for the Academic Study of
Korean) had changed its name to Hangl Hakhoeuntil his death. In
other words, the Hangl Hakhoe was led for half a century by this
teacher-disciple duo, and their two names were virtually synonymous
with the identity of the society, so much so that the strength of the
connection between their names and that of the Hangl Hakhoe could
be likened to that between professor Paek Nakchng of Seoul National
University and the Changjak kwa Pipyngsa publishing company.
Insofar as mere mention of the Hangl Hakhoe brought to mind the
names Choe Hynbae and H Ung, it must have been only too natural to
refer to these two scholars as hangl hakcha. Likewise, it must have been
quite natural to go back one generation further and refer to Chu Si-gyng
the teacher and founder of the Korean linguistic nationalism shared by
these two menas a hangl scholar, too. But it is not Choe Hynbae
and H Ung alone who were customarily referred to as hangl scholars;
other scholars with close connections to the Hangl Society like Chang
Chiyng (18891976), Kim Yungyng (18941969) and Chng Insng
(18971986) were also usually referred to as hangl hakcha. In this way,
the custom of referring inappropriately to an entire group of national
language scholars as hangl scholars and to their field of inquiry as
hangl studies or hangl-ology shares a common history with the name
of the Hangl Hakhoe.
But in much the same way that the scholarly breadth of nationalist
linguists like H Ung could not be confined narrowly to a hangl-ology
that specialized in the writing system called hangl, the research activities of the Hangl Society as a whole are not limited to this kind of
hangl studies, either. The scholarly activities of the Hangl Society,
both in theory and in practice, bring together anything and everything about the language called Korean. Most assuredly, these activities
include work on that shadow or reflection of Korean called hangl
82
the vernacular script. As already mentioned, the Hangl Hakhoe is the

present-day descendant of the earlier Chosn Hakhoe. It is not difficult
to imagine the circumstances that must have lain behind the choice of
the somewhat awkward name Hangl Society when Yi Kngno (1893
1982), the de facto leader of the Chosn Hakhoe during the Japanese
colonial period, cast his lot with the Communist North in 1948, and the
remaining members in the South set about reorganizing the society. For
starters, as soon as the Democratic Peoples Republic of Chosn was
established in Pyongyang, the political implications of the word Chosn
would have made it impossible to continue with the name Chosn
Hakhoe. One can also speculate as to why the names Hangug Hakhoe
(Society for the academic study of Hangug or Korean) and Kug
Hakhoe (Society for the academic study of the national language) were
not adopted, either. The objective distance from the subject of inquiry
implied by the name Hangug Hakhoe would not have appealed to the
Korean language nationalists. Moreover, that Korean had been called
chosn (chsengo in Japanese) under Japanese rule was not unrelated to
the implication that, under Japanese imperialism, Korean was nothing
more than a regional language with respect to Japanese, which was
the only legitimate kokugo (national language). In the newly liberated
fatherland, then, calling Korean hangug and thereby relegating it, in
effect, to a level that was formally no different than the old, regional
chosn, must have seemed distasteful.1 In contrast, if they had opted
for the name Kughakhoe, it would have been difficult to distinguish
themselves from the research group with a similar name formed around
some South Korean universities. Besides, that neither hangug nor kug
is an indigenous Korean word (they are both Sino-Korean in their lexical
composition: []) must also have played a role. By contrast, not
only did hangl represent the quintessence of Korean national culture,
but its very name was composed of indigenous Korean building blocks
and also happens to have been the name of the official journal of the
Chosn Hakhoe ever since its first publication in 1932. Because of
its pure Korean credentials and connection to the Korean essence,
83
hangl must have seemed most appropriate for expressing the nationalist ideals to which the society aspired. But in choosing Hangl Hakhoe
as the name for a society dedicated to multifaceted research on the
Korean language, the leaders of this society sowed the seeds of confusion
between hangl (the script) and hangug (the language) in the minds
of Koreans at the level of everyday usage.
Every year on Hangl Day (October 9), cries of love for hangl fill the
popular media. But the hangl in these voices is not simply the Korean
indigenous script promulgated in 1446; more often than not, what is
meant is simply Koreanthe Korean language as a whole. Thus, one
encounters expressions like hangl translation of Hamlet or English and
hangl quite frequently. Recently, I have been reading the Korean translation of American historian Stefan Tanakas Japans Orient: Rendering
Pasts into History (Ilbon tongyanghak i kujo; Minhak kwa Chisngsa,
2004), and the preface to the translation reads: Authors preface to
the hangl edition. Needless to say, hangl translation of Hamlet and
Authors preface to the hangl edition should be corrected to Korean
translation of Hamlet and Authors preface to the Korean edition, and the
expression English and hangl (as long as it is not about how to use
the writing system called hangl to write the natural language called
English) should be corrected to either English and Korean or Latin script
and hangl. It is likewise a commonplace to refer to the generation of
Koreans who attended elementary school just before and after liberation in 1945 and who reached maturity around the time of the April 19
movement in 1960 as the hangl generation, but this, too, is somewhat awkward. If what this expression is meant to capture is something
like the generation that did not obligatorily learn Japanese in school
and thus the generation that does not know Japanese, then hangug
generation would be more appropriate. In fact, the term hangl generation would be most appropriate for the later generation whose members
can barely read Chinese characters because they never learned them in
school. The point is this: hangl is simply the name of the writing system
used to write Korean.
84
Of course, none of this means that the Hangl Hakhoe should change
its name, or that we Koreans should abandon the term hangl generation. However inappropriate its name may be, the Hangl Hakhoe is a
proper noun with deep roots in the Korean populace now, and the term
hangl generation, too, is just as familiar. But this does not mean we
should forget that hangl is a writing system and hangug a language.
If we really wanted to, we could understand and accept the custom of
referring to indigenous lexical items that are not foreign loanwords or
Chinese-character words (Sino-Korean vocabulary) as hangl. After all,
in Korean orthography, native or pure Korean lexical items are written
in hangl, right? We encounter this same sense of hangl when we
say things like I have five kids in my class with hangl names: Karami, Sinae, Poram-i, Yesl-i and Slgi or The hangl place-name for
Sinchon is Saemal, and the hangl place-name for Mapo is Samgae.
But if it were up to me, even in cases like these I would prefer to use
indigenous Korean, native Korean, or pure Korean to avoid confusion. My
given name of Chongsk can be written like this in hangl; but just
because it can also be written in Chinese characters doesnt make it any
less a hangl name. My two childrens names are non-Chinese-character names: Arom and Achim. But that makes them indigenous names
or pure Korean names before it makes them hangl names. Even if one
allows a usage like hangl name in cases like these, the hangl being
talked about needs to be strictly distinguished from the writing system
promulgated in 1446 by Sejong and cultivated over long centuries.
Hangl and Korean: Another Kind of Contamination?

Of course, the ultimate arbiters of language usage are the people who
use the language. If the majority of Koreans use hangl in the sense of
Korean language, there is little that anybody can do about it. But this
confusion and ambiguity always weighs on my mind. Perhaps the origins
of this confusion owe to the fact that the Korean language and hangl
are so inextricably intertwined in the minds of Koreans. In the minds of
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the hangl scholars who christened their research society the Hangl
Society, too, Korean and hangl were so intimately connected that they
must have seemed one and the same. But the connection between Korean
and hangl is neither inevitable nor preordained. One could just as well
write Korean in a foreign script, too. For example, in the same way SerboCroatian, the primary official language of the former Yugoslavia, can be
written in either Latin letters or Cyrillic letters, we could write Korean in
either Latin letters or Cyrillic letters if we wanted. To be sure, we would
need to do a bit of thinking in order to work out some rational orthographic rules. Actually, in ancient and medieval times Koreans contrived
ingenious ways to write Korean using Chinese characters with systems
like idu, hyangchal, and kugyl and used these systems for quite a long
time. By the same token, we could use hangl to write foreign languages
to write, say, languages like Spanish, Italian, or Japanese. Again, we
would need to work out some rational orthographic rules, but the principle is the same.
Generally speaking, there is no such thing as an organic connection
between language and writing or between any one language and any one
script. Turkish was written for many centuries with the Arabic script
but came to be written with the Latin script after the introduction of the
republican system of government after World War I. And Vietnamese,
which had been written down using Chinese characters for so long, is
also written now using the Latin script. The Serbo-Croatian language
mentioned earlier was written in Cyrillic script in Serbia and in Latin
script in Croatia. Thus, however good a fit hangl may be for writing
Korean, this does not mean that there is some God-given and inevitable
link between the two. Naturally, then, one should keep these two
concepts distinct. Concepts that parallel hangl are Chinese characters,
Japanese kana, Latin script, Greek script, Cyrillic script, Arabic script,
and so on, whereas notions parallel with hangug (Korean) are Japanese,
Chinese, English, Russian, and the like. The Korean language existed
long before hangl was invented. And the Japanese language existed
long before kana were invented, just as the Russian language existed long
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before the Cyrillic script was invented. If I may be permitted a somewhat extreme analogy, using hangl to mean the Korean language is no
different from using English to refer to the Latin alphabet, or Mongolian
to refer to the Cyrillic script. Even if Koreans hang on to expressions like
hangl generation and hangl scholar, in everyday discursive contexts
referring to the language we should use hangug, and in contexts referring to the script we should use hangl.
There are two reasons why I am beating this particular horse to
death here. First, with persistent repetition over time, this confounding
of terms has led to confusion in communication. More than that,
there is also my conviction that this confusion has contributed indirectly to making Korean linguistic nationalism rather less benign and
tolerant than it could be. Compared to the number of languages in
the world, the number of writing systems is in a distinct minority.
There are countless communities that can boast of their own indigenous languages but rather few communities that can boast of their own
indigenous writing systems. The Latin alphabet is almost certainly the
most widespread writing system in the world, but the only language
communities that could perhaps claim it as their own indigenous script
are, more narrowly defined, speakers of Italian or, more generously
defined, speakers of Romance languages in generalthose languages
like Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, and so on, whose roots
lie in Vulgar Latin. For speakers of English, German, Malayo-Indonesian, Turkish, and Vietnamese, the Latin alphabet is simply a borrowed
script. In the case of the Cyrillic script, too, it is probably only Russian
speakers who could claim it as their indigenous script, whereas for
speakers of Bulgarian or Mongolian it is just a borrowed script. But
technically speaking, both the Latin alphabet and the Cyrillic alphabet
have their roots in the Greek and Phoenician scripts, which in turn can
be traced back to the hieroglyphic writing of the ancient Egyptians, so
perhaps it is a bit dodgy after all for modern-day Italian speakers or
Russian speakers to claim these scripts as somehow indigenous. Even if
one allows a somewhat loose or generous understanding of indigenous
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script in a statement like The Cyrillic script is the indigenous writing

of Russia, the number of smaller language communities that can boast
their own indigenous scripts is extremely small. But the Korean language
community is one such rare community, and clearly the possession of an
indigenous writing system contributes to the pride and self-esteem of the
community. But it can also contribute just as easily to the intensification
of exclusionary linguistic nationalismall the more so in the case of a
match-up like Korean and hangl, where even if the two werent made
for each other, one (hangl) was definitely custom made for the other.
Even if, technically speaking, it is not impossible to write Korean
with either the Cyrillic or the Latin alphabet, the day when Korean and
hangl are divorced from each other will not likely come anytime soon.
Quite apart from writing Korean with a script other than hangl, it also
seems unlikely that linearized hanglthe idea promoted by Chu Sigyng, other early hangl scholars, and even the North Korean authorities in that regimes early years, of dismantling the syllabic blocks of
hangl orthography and writing each individual hangl graph side by
side in linewill ever be put into practice.2 It is sometimes claimed that
the current moassgi orthography, which groups together individual
hangl letters in syllable blocks, is a less evolved writing system than
purely phonemic scripts like the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, but it is
actually precisely this syllabic orthographic feature that makes hangl
such an appropriate writing system for recording Korean. This owes not
only to the fact that Korean is a highly morphophonemic language but
also to the fact that Korean has an unusually high number of homophones compared to other languages.
Allow me to put aside a technical discussion of the morphophonemic
characteristics of Korean and focus instead on the question of homophones. A hangl-only orthography that eschews Chinese characters
already makes it difficult enough to distinguish certain homophones in
Korean, but a linearized orthography that also did away with wordinternal morpheme boundaries would add greatly to the confusion. For
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example, homophone pairs like the following are distinguished at least

in writing in the current moassgi orthography but would be indistinguishable in a linearized orthography: rm ice and
rm junction; chagwi a title/peerage and chagwi spoor,
animal track; kanm adultery, fornication and kanm
aim, sight; pari sales, selling and pari fly (insect);
talma resembles and talma Dharma; saekki animal
young and saekki colored banner; nymphomania; kkochi
flower (nominative) and kkochi food on a skewer; kipi
depth and kipi avoidance.3 The problem would be even worse
with nominal particles and verbal endings, all of which at present are
written flush with the preceding nominal or verbal form with no intervening space. For linearized hangl to function at its full potential, some
symbolbe it or whateverwould be needed to indicate morpheme
boundaries; nouns and their particles as well as verbs and their endings
would need to be written with an intervening space, and the tense,
unaspirated consonants currently written as geminates would need some
tweaking in order to function better as independent graphs. But putting
aside the question whether people would even go along with such revolutionary changes, there is no guarantee that such a reform would
increase the legibility of hangl beyond what is currently available with
syllable-based moassgi. Besides, the complaint that moassgi orthography is inconvenient for typewriters has been rendered moot by the
advent of the word processor. In other words, one might conclude that
the current moassgi orthography is (almost) ideal for writing Korean.
It seems, then, that this close fit and tight connection between hangl
and Korean has added to the confusion between the notions of Korean
language and Korean script. When nobody was looking, and before
anybody had even noticed, the hangl community suddenly became the
Korean language community (and vice versa).
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Finding the Way to PurityAn Elusive Destination

Because of the current state of affairs whereby the Korean language and
Korean script have virtually fused into one and the same body for so
many Koreans, the struggle against foreign languages on the part of
the Korean language community/hangl community (more precisely,
the struggle of the Korean language nationalists and Korean language
purists) has been waged on two fronts. First is that of the writing system.
On this front, the purists have insisted that all Korean-language texts
be written exclusively in hangl. The primary foe, of course, is Chinese
characters. This is precisely the front where the long, protracted battle
between hangl-only usage and mixed-script usage (with Chinese characters mixed in) has been waged. And in this particular battle, the purists
seem to have more or less won the day. Hangl-only usage got its start
with the Bible, fiction, and other popular reading materials but moved on
to the newspapers and is now observed even in most academic publications. And there appears to be little prospect of a come-from-behind win
for the mixed-script advocates on this front. This is no doubt a natural
consequence of the unconscious desire on the part of most speakers for
a uniform writing system and orthography. That the very first genre to
attempt hangl-only orthography at the end of the Chosn dynasty was
the Korean translation of the Bible, and that this was taken up thereafter
by fiction, is highly suggestive. Its almost as if hangl-only orthography was born of the desire to commune with the masses. That is to
say, hangl-only orthography is tied just as closely to democratic values
as it is to nationalist values. This cannot be emphasized enough, as it is
precisely this point that was the decisive factor in the victory of hanglonly usage.4
Actually, for a language to be expressed by just one writing system
seems to be the default, natural state of affairs. Other than Japan and
Korea, it is difficult to come up with examples of societies in which one
and the same text or sentence mixes different writing systems. In the
case mentioned earlier of Serbo-Croatian, which can be written in both
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Cyrillic and Latin script, entire texts are written in either Cyrillic or
Latin script, and one never encounters sentences, let alone whole texts,
that mix both scripts. Note that, just because Koreans agree to adopt
hangl-only orthography does not mean that Chinese-character education will disappear; nor should it. Quite apart from the practical goals
of learning Chinese or Japanese, Chinese-character education is necessary for the internalization of Korean itself. Even at a very conservative
estimate, at least half the Korean lexicon is made up of Chinese-character words. Even when a Korean text is composed entirely in hangl,
the outer garb of the better part of the text conceals beneath it undergarments composed of Chinese characters; as long as readers are oblivious to the fabric of these undergarments, they can never understand
Korean properly. To be sure, this does not apply to all Chinese-character words but certainly to a good number of them. That Koreans can
understand hangl-only texts with relative ease is a result of the knowledge (however vague) of Chinese characters that we bring to the reading
process.5 Though Chinese characters are Public Enemy Number One on
the writing-system front, they are not the only enemy. Besides Chinese
characters, the other foe that leaps to mind is the Latin script. Every
year around Hangl Day, when the language purists line up impure
street signs in their sights, one senses a desire to reject and exclude not
only foreign languages but also foreign scripts. Most recently, the newest
enemy on the writing system front has become emoticons, a subject to
which I return later.
In the struggle of the Korean-language and Korean-script community
against foreign languages, though, the more important front is definitely
the language. On this front, the two main enemies are Chinese-character
words, with their roots in either Japanese or Chinese, and foreign loanwords from European languages, of which English is far and away the
prime culprit. After liberation in 1945, the language nationalists strove in
the first instance to chase out all words whose origins in Japanese were
obvious and plain to the eye. Thus, smekkiri (J. tsumekiri) nail clippers
became sontopkkakki, pentto (J. bento) lunch box became tosirak, ssri
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(J. suri) pickpocket became somaechigi, and nedabai (J. netabai) ripoff became sagi (Sino-Korean ). Likewise, takkuwang (J. takuan)
sweet pickled daikon radish, siage (J. shiage) finish; finishing touches,
adari (J. atari) bullseye, direct hit; success, yoji (J. yji) toothpick,
and temppura (J. tempura) tempura (this word, of course, being a loan
from Portuguese in Japanese) each became tanmuji, kktsonjil/mamuri,
tansu, issusigae, and twigim, respectively. In this particular battle, the
language purists have more or less prevailed. Japan has always been the
easiest target of Korean nationalism, and the Japanese identity of these
words was all too plain to see. Insofar as it was difficult even for the most
educated and refined Japanophiles to reveal their Japanophilia openly
and honestly, there would have been no way for the language nationalists to lose this particular battle.
The next target was wago ()6Japanese words written with kanji
(Chinese characters) in Japanese but pronounced in Japanese according
to their kun, or vernacular Japanese, readings. Because they were read in
Korean according to their Sino-Korean pronunciations, these are difficult, at first blush, to discern as Japanese loans. For example, purists
insisted on changing the Korean word ipchang situation from the
Japanese tachiba to chji, and susok procedures from the Japanese
tetsuzuki to chlcha. However, it must be said that the victory
won by the language nationalists in this particular battle was a paltry
one. For one thing, chji is not an apt replacement for ipchang in some
contexts, and for another, a great many words of exactly this type remain
in Korean without suitable pure Korean replacements: for example,
yps postcard (: J. hagaki), ipku entrance (: J. iriguchi),
chulgu exit (: J. deguchi), harin discount (: J. waribiki),
chwiso cancellation (: J. torikeshi), chohap a guild; union (:
J. kumiai), kynsp apprenticeship (: J. minarai), and so on.
The third front has been a more general struggle against Chinese-character words, whatever their origin. In fact, this particular struggle goes
right back to the end of the Chosn dynasty, to Chu Si-gyng and other
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Korean language nationalists associated with him. It is also a struggle

that has been waged, since liberation, by the North Korean regime as
an official leg of its language policy. The language nationalists took this
battle first to their own turfKorean grammatical terminology. Thus,
Chu Si-gyng, in his treatment of pumsaron (the parts of speech
in Korean), called the latter kinangal and distinguished the following
nine parts of speech (forms in parentheses are the standard Sino-Korean
terms): im (myngsa = noun), t (hyngyongsa = adjective), um (tongsa = verb), kyt (chosa = particle), it (chpsoksa = connective ending), n (kwanhyngsa = modifier), k (pusa = adverb), nol (kamtansa = exclamation), and
kkt (chongjisa = final ending). Chus student Choe Hynbae
subsequently distinguished ten parts of speech (ssigal for him) in Korean
and created yet another set of neologisms: irm-ssi (myngsa =
noun), taeirm-ssi (taemyngsa = pronoun), sem-ssi (susa =
numeral), umjik-ssi (tongsa = verb), krim-ssi (hyngyongsa
= adjective), chabm-ssi (chijngsa = copula), maegim-ssi (kwanhyngsa = modifier), tchi-ssi (pusa = adverb), nkkim-ssi
(kamdongsa = exclamation), and to-ssi (chosa = particle).
The late professor H Ung, too, though considered rather less radical
than his two predecessors in this regard, filled his works with native
terminology that he had either inherited from his teachers or coined
himself.7 Relying in part on backing from the South Korean government, the purists went on to attempt the launching of a kug sunhwa
undong, or national language-purification movement, in order to purge
the language of Chinese-character words. But the language nationalists
were unable to win this battle and are also unlikely to win it in the
future. This is because Chinese-character words have, for the most part,
already become naturalized components of the Korean language. The
purists evince the most displeasure at made-in-Japan Chinese-character
words rather than those hailing from China, but ever since the opening of
Korea to the outside world in the 1870s, countless munmyng ,
or words of civilization, coined by the Japanese have been incorporated
93
into Korean. If these words were to be purged from the language, Korean
would end up a truly anemic and scrawny language, indeed. If we let our
imaginations run wild for a moment, it is not difficult to picture a victory
for the language nationalists in this battle. If ever Korea should witness
a political regime like, say, that of Oceania in George Orwells 1984a
totalitarian regime much more repressive than that of North Koreaa
victory in this battle would not be impossible for them.8 But even the
most radical of language nationalists, as long as they were still in their
right minds, would not wish to see the advent of an Oceania in Korea to
ensure victory in this battle.
The battle with that other foe, words of European origin, has
proceeded more smoothly than the battle with Chinese-character words
and has also recorded comparatively more successes. Because such
words stand out like sore thumbs in Korean, it was easier for them to
provoke feelings of nationalist rejection and revulsion. But a final victory
will be difficult even in this battle. For better or for worse, the borders
around the Korean language are growing gradually lower and more
porous, and the number of made-in-Europe and made-in-the-USA words
crossing those borders and coming into contact with and interfering
with Korean will gradually increase. In particular, the extent of interference from English in Korean is bound to increase, and any attempts at
blocking it are unlikely to find satisfaction. Even Koreas most conservative daily newspapersto say nothing of the broadcast mediaare now
calling the opinion page opinin, as opposed to the Sino-Korean yron
, the finance and securities page mni (money), the international
economy page kllobl pijinis (global business), the buy-and-sell page
mat (mart), and so on. And there are pages with headings like poks
(focus), porm (forum), and kllik (click), too. It is an unavoidable trend,
and of course, that it is unavoidable does not mean it is necessarily desirable. The zealous overuse and abuse of foreign loans (including Chinesecharacter words) has a certain coolness and cachet to it at first, but there
is also clearly an element of (even an appeal to) vanity in it. But even
if one is able, at the individual level, to scorn this sense of vanity, it is
94
impossible to stop it at the societal level. Besides, there is nothing fundamentally horrific or out of the ordinary about a language incorporating
into itself numerous foreign elements and becoming somehow mixed or
hybrid in the process. This is precisely the process that Korean has been
undergoing, ceaselessly, since its birth in the ancient past.
Contamination, Infiltration, and Hybridity in Korean

How can one define Korean? It is the language spoken by the residents
of the Korean Peninsula and the various islands that belong to it. It is
also the language spoken by people originally from the Korean Peninsula
and its constituent islands who have moved overseas and are still not
sufficiently assimilated to their new host countries. This language enjoys
the status of sole official languageof national languagein the two
states that exist on the Korean Peninsula: the Republic of Korea and the
Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea. It is supposed that this language
came to be used across most regions of what is now known as Korea
sometime after the end of the seventh century, when Silla established a
unified state south of the Taedong River. In other words, this language
must have become the lone, common language of the Korean Peninsula
by no later than the eighth century. I say that some ancient form of
Korean had become the lone, common language of the Korean Peninsula
by the time of the eighth century because the opinions of South Korean
historical linguists are divided on the question whether before the eighth
century, during the Three Kingdoms period, the languages of the Three
Kingdoms were the samewhether the populations of these Three Kingdoms could communicate with each other without difficulty. It is easy to
imagine that, even if the differences in speech between the Three Kingdoms were nothing more than dialectal differences, those differences
must have been greater than the differences between different Korean
dialects today.
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In any case, Sillan (the Silla dialect of Korean) in the southeast of

the peninsula was centered on the city of Kyngju and must eventually have pushed out both Paekchean (the Paekche dialect of Korean),
centered on Seoul, Kongju, and Puy in the southwest, and Koguryan
(the Kogury dialect of Korean), centered on Pyongyang in the North,
in order to establish itself as the national language of the Korean Peninsula. Some scholars are of the opinion that, after the establishment of
the Kory dynasty and the rise of Kaesng as the political center of the
country, the Korean language of the central regions became the new,
prestige variety, but it seems clear that a single language was used at
least within the confines of Unified Silla. The period after the late seventh
century must have witnessed a process whereby the language of Silla
pushed out both Paekchean and Koguryan. Depending on how one
imagines it, this must have been a violent process, but it was probably
also a natural process. Sillans probably did not force their Sillan language
on people from Paekche or Kogury; rather, as Kyngju in Silla grew
in importance as a political and cultural center, the linguistic features
of that region must have infiltrated and permeated the entire Korean
Peninsula. And Sillan, for its part, must have taken in elements from
the languages of Paekche and Kogury, thus lending new impetus to its
own evolution. In other words, the Old Korean that was used in Unified
Silla must have beennot just for Paekcheans and Koguryans but also
for Sillansa hybrid language, or a mixed language. But I doubt that
the Unified Sillans felt any regrets about this impure state of affairs in
their language because for everybody, the language they use here and
now is the most comfortable for them and is the language that they have
no choice but to love. The Chinese-character words that had already
started to stream into the Korean Peninsula during the Three Kingdoms
period have continued to mix flesh with and fatten the language of
the Korean Peninsula for nearly two thousand years. At the end of the
Kory dynasty, the Mongolian language contributed numerous words to
Korean that carried over into the Chosn period (13921910). But there
is no evidence that the Koreans of the Chosn dynasty regretted this
96
state of affairs, either (that is to say, the impure state of affairs in the
Chosn dynasty Korean languagenot the political situation at the end
of the Kory period). In that case, there is no reason for Koreans today to
feel regret over the impure Korean wordswords that were unknown
to Koreans only a century agolike radio radio, terebi television,
kmpyut computer, pidio video, and the like.
Because of its size and its distance from the mainland, the island of
Cheju came to possess significantly different linguistic characteristics
from the Korean used on the Korean Peninsula and its smaller islands.
Even today it is difficult for a native Cheju islander to communicate with
a Korean mainlander using his or her own dialect. The linguistic criterion for distinguishing between an independent language and a dialect
is that of mutual intelligibility; if two different people from two different
regions are able to understand each other when they talk, they are
deemed to be using the same language, and if they cannot understand
each other, they are deemed to be speaking different languages. On this
point, the language used by Cheju Island nativesat least, from a purely
linguistic point of viewwould have to be recognized as a language
distinct from that used on the Korean mainland. And yet people accept as
a matter of course that the language of Cheju should be included within
the boundaries of Korean. It goes without saying that this is because
after the seventh century, Cheju Island was incorporated, along with the
Korean Peninsula, into one and the same political community. Because
of this political union, the Cheju language became a dialect of Korean.
From the perspective of Cheju Islanders, the linguistic invasion from
the mainland may even have been seen as an act of violence, but it
was also a natural, cultural development. That Cheju Islanders came to
call toksaekki chicken eggs by the mainland term talgyal and pibari
unmarried young woman by the term chny did not mean an
abrupt end to the history of Cheju Islanders.
It is most obvious in the case of Cheju dialect, but Korean is a
hybrid language composed of various dialects. Now that Seoul and
97
Pyongyang have been established as the centers for two rival standard languagespyojun , or the standard language, in the
South and Munhwa , or the cultured language, in the North
the mass media have spread these standards throughout and across
the peninsula, and the influence of the regional dialects has waned
accordingly. But the fact that the national language called Korean is far
from uniform can be seen clearly from these various dialects. Nor is it
the case that translation from one dialect to another can be achieved
simply through the mechanical replacement of one word here or another
morpheme there. For example, the Chlla Province dialect expressions mg- purss and ttaery- purss correspondmorpheme for
morphemeto the Seoul dialects mg- pryss and ttaery pryss,
respectively, but these latter Seoul expressions would not be accurate
renditions of the sense of the original Chlla dialect expressions. This
is because the auxiliary verb pryss in Seoul dialect is not used as
ubiquitously as the cognate auxiliary purss is used in Chlla dialect.
In other words, whereas in Chlla dialect the auxiliary verb pul-da is
virtually unmarked, in Seoul dialect the auxiliary verb pri-da is marked.
Thus, in most contexts a more appropriate rendition in Seoul dialect of
the Chlla expression mg purss would be simply mgss ate it.
An analogous situation pertains in the way North Koreans say kj smneda. A mechanical rendition into South Korean would be kj smnida, but in many cases this would be off the mark. Not only do South
Koreans use the adverb kj far less than North Koreans do, but nowadays (news broadcasters excepted) the formal hamnida style is used far
less frequently in South Korea. It would be more accurate to drop the
kj and change the speech level to polite hae yo style. Or, if the speaker
of the -smneda form was a teenage youth, the sentence could be cast in
the new final ending in -kdn yo for even better equivalence.
In any case, the point is that Korean is a hybrid mixturea huge jumble
encompassing within it various and divergent dialect elements. Korean is
not unique in this respect; generally speaking, no natural languages are
made up internally of completely uniform systems of signs. Nor is this
98
point something that becomes conspicuous only in the case of dialects.

For starters, even people living in regions designated by linguistic geographers as belonging to the same dialect region do not all use the exact
same uniform speech. Just as the speech of Pusan is different from the
speech of Kimhae, native Seoulites speak differently from people native
to Mapo and Wangsimni. Moreover, peoples speech also differs in
subtle ways depending on other social factors like gender, education,
and generation. As pointed out earlier, where the older generation still
uses the formal hamnida style and the mature generation uses the polite
hae yo style, young South Koreans today tend to use -kdn yo indiscriminately. In the standard language, use of -kdn as a final ending
is allowed for expressing reasons, but young people nowadays use it
outside this context.
In the extreme case, one can say that every individual uses his or own
languagewhat linguists call an idiolect. Even more radically, it can be
shown with phonetic science that one and the same speaker never utters
the same utterance in the same waythe physical attributes will always
differ slightly each time. A detailed phonetic analysis of the same speaker
saying I love you once every five minutes will reveal differences in
each utterance. Ferdinand Saussure, the father of modern structuralist
linguistics, called this sort of speech realized in a concrete discourse
context parole, whereas the aggregate of all these different paroles that
Koreans conventionally think of as Korean make up something he called
langue. The thing that accommodates and encompasses all these little
differences in parole and makes them into the language called Korean
is the possibility of communication, of mutual intelligibility. The reason
one can say that a Chlla dialect speaker and a Kangwn dialect speaker
speak the same language is that they are able to communicate with each
other. Communication is the first and last reason for the existence of
language. In the absence of communication, language atrophies and dies.
And speakers of a language naturally strive to expand their communicative horizons in their daily linguistic life. Interestingly, those Koreans
who criticize the seepage into Korean of foreign loans and other impu-
99
rities do not seem to base their criticisms on any worries about the
possibility of communication. This is because foreign elements with no
communicative possibilities or with weak communicative abilities naturally disappear. The reason they criticize foreign loans is an obsession
with an imagined purity. I touch on this again later, but because of this
obsession with purity, these critics are in fact willing even to sacrifice
communication. They lament the present, impure state of the language
and imagine some pure Korean from the past. But what is pure Korean?
The pure Korean words as defined by these language nationalists are
those entries in the Korean dictionary that lack etymological indications pointing to either Chinese characters or other foreign scripts. But
even among these supposedly pure Korean words there lurk, deep down,
numerous words with etymologies that lead back to China and Mongolia.
I have said that what is now called Korean is an evolved form of
the language spoken in Silla in the seventh century. But that evolution was a process that involved the adoption of an overwhelmingly
large number of foreign elements. If all those words from China, Japan,
and Europe had not entered the language, Koreans today would never
have come to possess the serviceable language that they do. And this
mixing of the flesh with foreign elements is by no means unique to
the history of Korean. Virtually every known language of civilization
has experienced the same mingling of the flesh with foreign elements.
Moreover, this hybridization has enriched these languages. To give but
one obvious example, recall that nearly half the vocabulary of English
was borrowed from French. And then there is the question whether the
Korean language used in seventh-century Silla was the same language
as the Korean of today. I have already noted that the criterion for distinguishing languages from dialects is mutual intelligibility. But the chances
that a seventh-century Sillan and a modern-day Seoulite could communicate with each other in their respective languages are nil. This also
means, then, that Sillan and Korean are, in effect, different languages.
This goes not just for the language of Silla but also for the language
of Chosn in the fifteenth-century, when hangl was invented: based
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on the same criterion of mutual intelligibility, fifteenth-century Middle

Korean and the Korean of today would have to be acknowledged as separate languages. Even fifteenth-century Koreans used a language quite
different from the Korean used today. Based solely on the magnitude of
Sino-Korean vocabulary or loanwords originating in Europe, fifteenthcentury Korean was likely more pure than Korean today is. But that
more pure Korean was a different language from the todays Korean.
This means that however great the desire for purity may be, there is no
way to return to that pure language of the past. To return to that pure
state would be to abandon present-day Korean and to cross over to a
world where communication is impossibleto a foreign-language world.
There are, in fact, cases in which Korean language purists abandon the
possibility of communication because of their obsession about purity. I
have in mind cases when the purists pluck from an obscure corner of
the dictionary words that have long since died out in actual usage and
insist on using them. In their communicative effect, such words are no
different from words in a foreign language. Why do they do this? And
for whom?
Hybrid Is Beautiful
Here is just one example. The obituary column in the Hangyoreh daily
news carries the heading kutkin sosik (). The word kutkin was
so unfamiliar to me that the first time I saw it I thought it was a typo,
but when I looked it up in my Korean-Korean dictionary, I discovered
that the verb kutki-da means to suffer death; die. This pure Korean
verb kutki-da must be appealing to the purists. And thanks to them, I
was able to add a new, pure Korean word to my vocabularynot a bad
thing at all. And because hardly a day passes without news (sosik) of
somebody kutki-da-ing, any Hangyoreh subscriber will likely be familiar
now with the meaning of kutki-da. But I doubt that the day will soon
come when this kutki-da or the expression kutkin sosik will find pride
of place in everyday Korean. To my mind, kutkin sosiks lease on life is
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much weaker certainly than that of the usual Sino-Korean pugo ,

weaker even than that of obichweri (obituary). And Ill bet that the individual responsible for picking out this word kutki-da and creating the
expression kutkin sosik doesnt use it on a regular basis outside the newspaper office, either. If it is impossible to breathe life into a word even
when a major daily newspaper deploys it as the heading of one its more
widely read columns and even when readers go to the trouble of reading
it every day, one has to conclude that the chances of Korean language
purists realizing their dream of elevating the purity level of Korean
vocabulary to a much higher degree than todays are close to zero. Moreover, the ethical basis of this entire enterprise is weak; after all, what
the purists are doing is taking advantage of their superior position and,
while using words that only they and a tiny minority of their like-minded
comrades know, adopting the attitude, If you want to understand what
Im saying, learn this word! A great many of these language nationalists
also make populist gestures, but their actual linguistic behavior in practice is decidedly antidemotic. In their effect, the words that they rescue
from the dictionary are no different from words that they might have
newly concocted at their desks. Who gave them the right to force their
own idiolect on Korean society? It is a kind of idiocy. The only kind of
society in which such idiolects could gain currency in popular language
would be that of a lovely, brave, new world (to cite our friend George
Orwell again).
An important new target has been added recently to the lines of
attack of these puristsso-called Internet language, or chat language.
The purists point out that the deviant bits of language being scattered
here and there via the Internet, personal computers, and cell-phone textmessaging are casting the Korean language into chaos by destroying
Korean language norms, starting first and foremost with orthography.
As these low-level linguistic deviations have gradually intensified, some
people have even gone so far lately as to label them alienese. This is
not to say that criticisms such as these are completely devoid of merit.
It is rather difficult to consider as refined, polite language the mlange
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of abbreviations, slang, secret language, mimetics, and emoticons that

comprises Korean chat language. Moreover, this language is no longer
confined to its original homeland in cyberspace but is spreading into
print magazines aimed at young people. It would be strange if the purists,
with their love for the national language, did not at least cock an eyebrow
or scowl at this phenomenon.
There are several reasons Korean in cyberspace is different from
normative Korean. First of all, I should point out that the primary users
of chat language are (for the most part, anyway) members of the younger
generation. Even if there were no cyberspace, the new generation would
still be creating and propagating its own secret language and slang
its what young people do. Chat language is simply a transferal of this
phenomenon to the online world. But precisely because of this online
feature, the speed with which this type of language moves is phenomenally fast. There is a Korean proverb that a mal without feet travels
a thousand li, playing on the homophone mal, which can mean either
horse or words; language. But in cyberspace those words travel tens
of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of miles in a split second. In
addition, I should also point out that online conversations straddle the
border between spoken language and written language. Actually, most
writing on the Internetas long as it isnt high-level scholarly writing
posted on academic sitesis usually just talk in written form. It exists
in a no-mans-land between or is a fusion of written language and colloquial, spoken language. This is no doubt what accounts for the labeling
of chat language as tchamppong-style, pibimppap-style, and so on, these
names being based on two popular Korean food dishes characterized by
mixing. But I do not believe that the seductive blossoming of this breed
of hybrid language is anything to worry about. All that this lively form
of language does is lend a sense of release and liberation to its users. The
feeling of liberation when one escapes for a moment from the real world
the off-line world with all its strict rules and regulationsand catches
ones breath. It is impossible to imagine that the same young people
who chat online with their pals or their boyfriends and girlfriends would
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turn around and deploy the same type of language in the self-introduction that they attach to their applications for employment. Of course,
some elements of current chat language could someday be incorporated
into the standard languagewhen and if, that is, the majority of Korean
speakers deem those elements standard. And should this happen, there
is nothing problematic whatsoever about those elements being incorporated into standard Korean because the ultimate arbiters of what is
correct language and what is not are the speakers themselves.
As I noted earlier, the thing that is referred to as Korean is, even
from a synchronic perspective, full of internal variations and aberrations both great and small and is far from being something uniform.
The national language is, as it were, a linguistic supersetan aggregation of variants such as regional dialects and social dialects (dialects like
secret languages or specialized languages based on social conditions).
Chat language combines features of both regional dialects and social
dialects. That it is conditioned by a sort of place called cyberspace makes
it a kind of regional dialect, whereas that Internet surfers from a wide
variety of different regional backgrounds use it makes it a kind of social
dialect. If one understands dialects not as some form of virus to be eradicated from languages but as flowers and branches that enrich and beautify a language, then chat language is one such creature. Its not a big
deal.
At the risk of repeating myself, language is predicated on communication. People who use social dialects like chat language have already
determined whom they wish to communicate withthey do not use that
social dialect with just anybody. By using this social dialect with fellow
members of the social grouping to which they feel they belong, they reaffirm, perform, and construct their identity. This is no different from the
way in which, in certain discourse contexts, people express their identity
through the use of regional dialects. Unlike the Korean language purists,
those using chat language do not force their own personal dialect on
the entire language community. More than anything else, this alienese
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quite in contrast to its nameis filled with aspirations toward communication. Those who would campaign for digging up and reviving pure
Korean words are so caught up in their pathetic, thoroughbred selfconceit that they have put aside the will to communicate. Moreover, their
neurosis about pure bloodlines is full of egotism and self-indulgence.
Contamination and infiltrationmixing, mingling, jumbling, miscegenation, and hybridityare unavoidable prerequisites for both cultural and
biological evolution. Pure Korean is a bogeyman that exists only in the
imagination. Even if one were to allow that such a thing existed, a
linguistic system formed exclusively on the basis of pure Korean would
be a ghastly, totalitarian language. The quest for a beautiful, pure Korean
is not a beautiful thing at all. Beauty resides in contamination and infiltration; it lives in the hybrid and the impure.
Inmul kwa sasang 30 (Spring 2004)
105
Notes
1. The custom of calling ones nations language the national language is
not all that widespread. In schools in England, the language used on a
daily basis by the English is called English, and in schools in France,
the language used on a daily basis by French people is called French. In
fact, the custom of calling ones nations language the national language
seems confined to just a few countries in East Asia. When Koreans call
their language kug and Japanese call their language kokugo (), one
must take into consideration (in addition, that is, to a certain amount of
self-indulgence) the fact that both Korea and Japan are rare examples of
monolingual societies in which the equation one language, one nation
holds better than almost anywhere else on earth. English and French are
simply the first official languages in England and France, respectively,
whereas Korean and Japanese aremore or less true to the wordthe
national languages in Korea and Japan. But any Korean mature enough
to engage in objective self-reflection would refer to his or her language
as hangug (Korean) and not kug (the national language). For more
extended discussion, see my essay Kug, Hangug, Chosn, in Kug
i punggyng tl [Scenes from the national language] (Seoul: Munhak
kwa Chisngsa, 1999), 1519.
2. Purssgi or linearized hangl orthography would write a name like
(Kang Chunman) as . Apparently, Kim Tubong
and other North Korean leaders were planning such an orthographic
reform in the early years of the North Korean regime but deferred implementation until after unification. The general contours of this effort
can be gleaned from Kim Il Sungs two famous Conversations with
Linguists: There have been several controversies about linguistic problems, in particular the problem of script reform. Some people advocated
immediate implementation of script reform, but we opposed this decisively. How would things be if, as they advocated, we were to implement
script reform now? If Koreans in the north and south come to write with
different scripts, they will not be able to read each others letters or publications like newspapers and magazines. This would destroy the common
national characteristics of the Korean people and ultimately would bring
about the dire consequence of dividing the Korean race in two. They
envisioned only their script reform and could not see the sundering of
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3.
4.
5.
6.
their own people. We are not opposed to script reform per se. Insofar as
there are certain defects in our script, we need to engage in research to
remedy those defects in future. But even if we should undertake script
reform, we should do so only after north and south have been unified,
and after our scientific technology has reached a world-class level. Kim Il
Sung, Chosn rl paltchnsikigi wihan myt kaji munje [Some problems concerning the development of the Korean language], 1964; cited
from Kim Minsu, Pukhan i kug yngu [Research on Korean linguistics
in North Korea], revised and expanded edition (Seoul: Ilchogak, 1997),
136137. Insofar as possible, it would be good to linearize our orthography and thereby make typing easier and make it easier to recognize
words. We must begin a plan for script reform now, bring it to maturity,
and complete it before the unification of the fatherland. If all goes well,
it would also be good to teach the reformed script little by little in the
schools. If we prepare ourselves in this way, once the level of the peoples
technical culture has been raised and the fatherland is unified, we should
do away with our current blockish script and make it so that people can
use the newly reformed script. Kim Il Sung, Chosn i minjok-chk
tksng l olke sallynagal te taehay [On correctly preserving the
national characteristics of Korean], 1966; ibid., 137.
Any serious attempt at a linearized and desyllabified hangl orthography would have to do away with the ing or the placeholder circle
graph () that occurs at the beginning of a syllable that commences with
a vowel. This is precisely what Choe Hynbae proposed in his Hangl
karossgi tokpon [A reader in linearized hangl] (Seoul: Chngmsa,
1963).
Note also that the general inability to realize linguistic purism in practice in South Korea obtains becausecontrary to first appearances
linguistic purism is, in fact, inimical to democratic values.
For more discussion of this issue, see the chapter in this book Disposable
Legacy, Indispensable Heritage: Thoughts on Chinese Characters.
The term wago refers to indigenous Japanese lexical items that are
neither Chinese-character words nor loans from Western languages.
They are also sometimes referred to as yamatokotoba (). Words
borrowed directly from Chinese and words invented in Japan on the
basis of Chinese characters read in their on or Sino-Japanese pronunciations are called kango (). Thus, wago corresponds to native Korean
words and kango to Sino-Korean words.
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7. For example, in the first edition (1981) of his work nhak [Linguistics]
(Saem munhwasa), one finds neologisms like trri nopim (kymyangpp = hearer deference), ttnaegisori patang (unyul chajil
= prosodic feature), sorihyungnaemal (isng =
phonomime), momtchit-hyungnaemal (itae = phaenomime),
chari (kyk = grammatical case), purimmal (mokchg =
object), kiummal (po = complement), tchak-mal (pandae
= antonym), sumtong (kigwan = trachea), papchul (sikto
= esophagus), soktchimsae (simchng kujo = deep
structure), kyttchaimsae (pyomyn kujo = surface structure), ttt patang (imi chajil = semantic feature), sori
patang (msng chajil = phonetic feature), holsorigorum
(mom chohwa = vowel harmony), kenggim holsori (kinjangmom = tense vowel), ap-holsori (chnsl mom
= front vowel), twi-holsori (huslmom = back vowel),
hymari sori (kwnsrm = retroflex), apkaji (chptusa
= prefix), twitkaji (chmmisa = suffix), hritkaji (chbyosa
= infix), putdalmm (injptonghwa = proximal assimilation), ttrjydalmm (kangyktonghwa = distal assimilation), kyptalmm (ijungdonghwa = double assimilation),
chidalmm (ykhaeng tonghwa = regressive assimilation),
naeridalmm (sunhaengdonghwa = progressive assimilation), tallajim (ihwachagyong = dissimilation), namumjik-ssi
(tadongsa = transitive verb), taggi (chpkun = approach),
taki (milchak = contact/touch), puri chogak (ssulbu =
predicate), and so on.
8. For a discussion of North Koreas ambitious attempts at lexical reform
and an appraisal of the process and results of their experiments, see
my essay Salgyundoen sahoe, wisaengchridoen n [A disinfected
society and a sanitized language], in Sldansang (Seoul: Kaemagown,
2002), 372424.
Chapter 5
We Are All Greeks

On the English-as-Official-Language Debate
Pok Kil is my teacher. I learned from him that anti-Communism is not
a shameful conviction and that safeguarding the rights of those in the
minority is as valuable as it is difficult. And I also learned from him
that the pursuit of good in the name of the collective can frequently be
destructive for the individuals that make up that collective.
He was not the first teacher to awaken me to such facts. Even before
I met Pok Kil, I had learned from various foreign teachers something
of the value of individual liberty and of the virtues of liberalism and
individualism. But because those teachers were not Korean, it was not
easy for me to embody their teachings (Im Korean! My situation here in
Korea is different from theirsthe sleek words that they throw around
in the name of universalism are all just sugar-coated imperialism and
colonialism!).
Because the period of my intellectual growth coincided exactly with
South Koreas period of militarist fascism, and because that militarist
fascism took anti-Communism as its Slogan Number One, the antiCommunism in my heart was always attended by a sense of guilt. The
word chayu (freedom, liberty) trotted forward in the names of
110
various fascist organizations like the Chayu Chng-yonmaeng (General

Alliance for Freedom) and the Chayu Minju Minjok Hoei (National
Council for Freedom and Democracy) joined with the liberal view of
history touted by the fascists across the Korea Strait to create a bizarre
harmony that always draped shame over the liberalism in my heart. The
mainstream South Korean writers, with their suspicious views of literary
interventions into society, their save the individual mantra, and their
embrace of military fascism, turned the individualism inside me into
something shameful and scandalous.
It was at that time that a teacher with yellow skin appeared before me.
He spoke of anti-Communism, of liberty, and of the individual, but to
my amazement he was not one of the fascists that I had grown so sick
of in South Korean society. He said to me, Youre no different from a
foreigner. They, you, all of uswere all individuals. All we are is individuals: the ultimate minority. There is no such thing as a truth that is
right for them and wrong for you. Just because a foreigner also happens
to claim as truth something that you espouse does not mean that you
have to change your ideas.
In other words, what Pok Kil taught me was neither anti-Communism nor liberalism, nor can I say exactly that it was individualism. What
he taught me was cosmopolitanism, and through that cosmopolitanism I
was able to free myself from the sense of shame that was oppressing my
anti-Communism, my liberalism, and my individualism. I found my true
self. He is both my master of ideas and my primary consciousness raiser.
In the future no matter what I write, his shadow will lurk between the
lines, and his voice will echo between my words. And this will always
remain a matter of pride for me. Perhaps it was Camus who said once
of Grenier, I always used to surprise myself when I would be talking
about something and then suddenly realize it was my teachers voice
speaking. Just as Camus took pride in the voice of Grenier within his, I
too am proud that Pok Kils voice lurks in my own.1
We Are All Greeks
111
In Defense of an Ingrate
But some of my teachers views puzzle me. For example, when he
stands by indifferently even though mass preferences have become the
most important criterion in literary criticism, or when he goes even
further and embraces the best-seller phenomenon as something that
will make the publishing industry more responsive to consumers, I feel
puzzled, and not just because these sorts of populist or demotic views run
contrary to my own. More than anything else, it is because such views
are fatal to the liberalism and individualism that Pok Kil espouses.
For example, the novel Mugunghwakkochi pissmnida (The rose of
Sharon has bloomed) proved that the general populace is already on its
way to becoming the sole judge of books. The ultranationalist message
spread by this book is unrealistic to achieve in practice, full of logical selfcontradictions, and ethically indefensible, yet numerous readers seized
upon it. The pitiful readers, stupidly intoxicated with the fantasies of
fascism and militarism, spouted on and on ridiculously about recovering
our ancient territories to the North and military retaliation against
Japan, and in the process failed to notice their ugly selves exploiting,
mistreating, and raping migrant laborersdespite, that is, the obvious
logic that as soon as wild notions of pukpl (punitive expeditions to
the North) and chngwae (subjugating the Japs) and the like cease
to be idle fancies and are put into practice, all constituent members of
the ethno-nation in their entirety would face the danger of destruction.
Encountering a reality now where the best-selling books are the best
books, one cannot simply stand by idly and watch, let alone embrace the
situation. I am talking not about the degree of artistic accomplishment of
novels today but about their message (even if, at some deeper level, the
two are inseparable). What is certain is that any time a novel carrying
an ultranationalistic message achieves commercial success, for whatever
reason, such a book can turn its readers into victims of collective autism
and shake the foundations of liberalism.
112
Liberalism as I understand it is the spirit that refuses to acquiesce when

everybody else is embracing fascism or supporting Bolshevism. A liberal
according to this definition is somebody who is prepared to use criticism and, failing that, even to resort to violence in order to demolish
absolutism. A liberal embraces the free market of ideas but cannot be
magnanimous with ideologies that would fundamentally deny the free
market of ideas. From this perspective, liberals are sometimes antidemocratic. The excessive democracy that I occasionally see in Pok Kils
writing puzzles me.
I am also puzzled when Pok Kil brings up President Chn Tuhwans
bold liberalization policies and gives high marks to that administration for its economic policies. Ultimately, it was probably correct for the
Chn regime to have pretended to lower trade barriers and give more
play to market forces than the Pak Chnghui regime did, even if it was
primarily in reaction to external pressure. But despite this pretense, the
fact remains that the Fifth Republics regime (19801988 under president Chn Tuhwan) intervened massively in the market, directly and
violently. As Pok Kil himself has pointed out, the economic policy of
the Fifth Republic, with the administrative controls it imposed on almost
every sector of the market, the limits it placed on competition through
amalgamations and mergers of companies, and its sanctioning of price
cartels, and so on, was not particularly friendly to the idea of markets
based on the principle of free competition. But even if the Fifth Republics
economic policies could be described as bold liberalization, it needs to
be emphasized that the regime itself was the antithesis of political liberalism. The melding of a loose control of the market with an absolutist
control of the political sphere is precisely the most commonly seen face
of fascism. Who is Chn Tuhwan? Was it simply that the actions he
took in coming to power contributed significantly to a lowering of his
evaluation? Were, as Pok Kil claims, his administrative accomplishments as president so great? Insofar as the appraisal of Chn Tuhwan is
concerned, at least, I am more in sympathy with Kim Yongoks views
than with Pok Kils.
We Are All Greeks
113
It is a bit long, but the following passage written in 1987 by Kim

Yongok in his typically cynical and derogatory style is worth citing in
full:
In a few days we shall have to express our deepest gratitude
to Mr. President when he steps down. We should put aside any
thoughts of beating him to death, and instead treat him generously so that he might stretch out and live in peace in this land.
We must congratulate him for his hard work and allow him to live
peacefully in this land until such time as he realizes clearly just
how wrong the acts were that he committed in this land. There is
one immense accomplishment that President Chn Tuhwan has
achieved in Korean history. Anybody can be president. No need
to speak of Doctor Syngman Rhee, Chang Myn, PhD, Teacher
Kim Ku, or the like; he has achieved the amazing accomplishment
of revealing to the nation that being president is something that
truly anybody can doany ignoramus (hypothetically speaking)
and lowlife Philistine. This is something that nobody in Korea
ever since the time of Tangun has been able to show Koreans
and is quite literally an accomplishment even more splendid than
those of King Sejong. We should all erect a monumental statue
in President Chns honorwith donations from all forty million
Koreans, right in front of the Independence Memorial Hall in my
hometown of Chnan!2
Insofar as this passage by Kim Yongok is taken from a larger context in
which he criticizes politicians in general, it may not be entirely appropriate for me to cite it in a discussion of Chn Tuhwan, but for me, even
Kim Yongoks assessment of Chn Tuhwan is too mild. Chn Tuhwan
did far too many great things to be caricatured like this in Kim Yongoks
estimation. For me, Chn Tuhwan is not simply the culprit who threw
military discipline into disarray and slaughtered civilians in the Kwangju
Uprising but also the fascist mastermind who turned Korean society for
the first eight years of the 1980s into a frozen wasteland. And the phrase
fascist mastermind is the one phrase I could find that reflects my personal
feelings about Chn Tuhwan while remaining neutral. I can think of
114
plenty of other phrases that fit both him and my feelings and attitudes
toward him.
A few years ago when An Tuhi was assassinated and in certain
sectors of society an atmosphere of embrace for his assassin formed to
the extent even that some democratic personages were exalting the
assassin as a patriot and publicly demanding that he be exempt from
prosecution, I wondered to myself if at this rate Korea was not doomed
as a nation. Some time later, after reading the essay A New Framework
for a Source of Social Authority in Pok Kils In Defense of the Minority
(Sosu rl wihan pynmyng), I once again confirmed my sense of pride
in belonging to the same species of human as my teacher. According to
Pok Kil, the attempt to change government by laws to government
by terror can never be justified. For once government by terror begins,
nobody can live with peace of mind.
Yet the way I see it, South Korean society for the eight years under
Chn Tuhwan was truly a society governed by terror rather than by
lawnot just symbolic terror but actual, physical terror. In those days,
too, the law prohibited torture, but even Chn Tuhwan himself would
never believe that there was no torture in those days. Worse, victims of
terror, the most vile forms of terror, were degraded in status to that of
a minority faction and treated with scorn by the general publicas if
having been tortured had come to function as some sort of scarlet letter.
The horrific things endured by Kim Kntae and Kwn Insuk ended up
sometimes as conversation pieces for the public. I have no doubt that the
ultimate responsibility for this kind of pannational breakdown in ethics
lies with Chn Tuhwan. Here and there in his writings, however briefly,
whenever Pok Kil touches on Chn Tuhwan and shows good will or
at least sympathy for this assassin of Korean democracy, I cannot help
feeling bitterness at the mere mention of this name and am unable to
maintain any sense of objective detachment in my heart. In other words,
whenever I encounter in Pok Kils works an occasional deficiency of
democracy, his cool detachment puzzles me.
We Are All Greeks
115
There are still other times when I feel puzzled reading Pok Kilwhenever he sympathizes with the chaebl conglomerates that have turned
into rampant social villains and whenever he is overly critical of the
labor unions who are the true villains holding back our economy. I am
more or less in agreement with his criticisms of Korean labor unions. As
he notes, allowing companies the freedom to release excess labor freely
is hugely beneficial for society; but more importantly, it is because I think
that an ideally fair society is a society where, at least in principle, there
are no alliances composed of individual citizens. It is too easy for the
small interests of a combined minority to oppress the much larger interests of a dispersed majority.
I agree that in the contemporary market economy, labor unions are the
one last remaining legally guaranteed monopolistic forcethat by interfering with the rational and efficient distribution of resources, which
is the fundamental function of the market, they lower the quality of
labor and through wage decisions arrived at via collective bargaining,
they adversely affect prices and ultimately increase unemployment. That
is why I think it desirable to take back the labor unions monopolistic
power by adjusting legislation in the direction of protecting laborers
rights and expanding the social welfare net. Basically, I acknowledge
the virtues of the market and of competition, but then what about the
chaebl conglomerates? I think the chaebl conglomerates are just as
guilty of paralyzing the market as the labor unions are. That is, just as the
labor unions deserve blame for limiting competition by monopolizing
the supply of labor, the chaebl conglomerates (and here I really do mean
chaebl and not companies) deserve censure for limiting the role of the
market and limiting competition by strengthening their monopolistic
positions through their intragroup networks and their cozy relationship
with political power.
Its not so much that I have a different opinion from Pok Kils on
labor unions as that I have a different opinion from him on chaebl
conglomerates. I am hoping not that he will become softer on labor
116
unions but that he will become harder on chaebl conglomerates. It has

always weighed on my mind that Pok Kil, who thinks that the market
should strive to be as competitive as possible, should be so magnanimous
to the chaebl conglomerates that have used every means possible to
pursue incomplete competition. Chaebl conglomerates are not simply
passive partners in Korean societys structure of corruption. The exact
details of the so-called Hanbo scandal are still far from clear, and we
may never know all the details of this sordid case, but based on what
we do know, can anybody claim that Hanbo was merely the passive
partner of a corrupt and incompetent regime? And the same can be said
of any number of other conglomerates besides Hanbo Steel. Even if it
might be a slight overstatement to characterize South Korean capitalism
as a ruling alliance of the state and chaebl conglomerates, it needs
to be emphasized repeatedly that the one sector that has gained the
most from taking advantage of governmental controls over the economy
under every regime since Pak Chnghi has been the chaebl groups.
Pok Kils view of the labor unions and the chaebl conglomerates is not
very fair, in my view. This lack of fairness that pops up in his work, albeit
rarely, is puzzling.
When Pok Kil embraces best sellers, one can catch a glimpse of his
love for the masses and the general public. When Pok Kil expresses his
sympathy for what happened to Chn Tuhwan under the Kim Yngsam
regime and claims, Kings do not kill kings, one can read in him a
preestablished (however it may have been established) respect for power
and authority. And when Pok Kil shows different reactions to the
market distortions of the labor unions and the chaebl, it leaves a bad
taste in my mouth, along with the suspicion that the measuring sticks
he uses to measure the world are not entirely uniform.
It may well be that in my criticisms of (or at least my puzzlement
about) Pok Kil, I am a hater of the masses and the general public, a
derider of authority, and an inflexible complainer. But it was Pok Kil
who taught me that hatred of collectivities, ridicule of authority, and lack
We Are All Greeks
117
of harmony with the worldall liberal and individualist traits, even if

they are innate within meare valuable things. In which case I may well
be an ingrate and a traitor, stabbing my teacher with the sword he gave
me. Perhaps I am just an unworthy student. Or perhaps too faithful a
student
International Languages and the

Ethno-National Language (Minjog)
I wrote this chapter in the first instance in order to engage Pok Kils
collection of essays, The Ethno-National Language in the Age of International Languages (Kukche sidae i minjog; 1998) and the debate that his
book triggered. But in the process of engaging Poks books, I also wish
to examine a few points that were missing from his book and the debate
about it. Needless to say, these points are not completely unrelated to
my original purpose.
If the first polemic between Pok Kil and Chng Unyng about Poks
collection, Reality and Intentionality, was a debate about liberalism,
the debate on The Ethno-National Language in the Age of International
Languages was a debate about ethno-nationalism. Most people have
branded this the English-as-official language debate, and insofar as the
debate has tended to focus on Pok Kils views on that question this is
understandable; but because all participants in the debate, whether they
are with Pok Kil or against him, develop their arguments on the basis
of their attitudes toward ethno-nationalism, dubbing it an ethno-nationalism debate seems more inclusive.
Besides, the views expressed in The Ethno-National Language in the
Age of International Languages are not confined to the question of
English as an official language. Although the title includes the words
international language and ethno-national language, the book first and
foremost targets that most powerful of ideologies in South Korean
societyethno-nationalism. Of course, as the author points out, ethno-
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national languages are one of the main traits that distinguish one ethnonational group from another, and ethno-nationalism often grows and
takes shape on the basis of the ethno-national language, meaning it is
only natural that in his desire to suppress ethno-nationalism with this
book, Pok should make mention here and there of the ethno-national
language.
Still, the book is divided into two partspart 1, titled Ethno-Nationalism in the Age of Global Empire, and part 2, titled The EthnoNational Language in the Age of Global Empireand of the various
essays included in both parts, the only ones that make explicit mention
of the ethno-national language appear in part 2, as the title would
suggest, and among these, the only ones treating the English-as-official-language question are the last two, titled Reflections on the International Language and How Are We to Greet the Twenty-First
Century? (though it also needs to be said that because ethno-nationalism and the ethno-national language are so intimately interconnected,
the boundary lines between parts 1 and 2 of the book are not entirely
clear).
Because the very notion of English as an official language is so
perverse-sounding and so provocative for the average Korean, most
Korean dailies, too, from considerations of commercial self-interest,
framed the debate primarily around this question, but I should emphasize for the sake of a fair evaluation of Poks book that his aim was to
discuss not simply the ethno-national language but ethno-nationalism
more generally.3
Actually, if one puts aside for a moment the two essays that explicitly deal with the English-as-official-language question that sparked the
most debate and glances over the other essays in Poks book, there are
no obvious statements so provocative as to rend asunder the universal
net of reasoning that all people possess, even if his essays deviate somewhat from the discursive practices dominant in South Korean society.
To be sure, and as Pok Kil himself has noted, ethno-nationalism in
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119
Korean society is not only powerful but also largely indiscriminate, with
the result that many readers experience a certain amount of psychological discomfort reading his arguments. Nationalism is such a sensitive
topic in South Korea that it renders cool, detached discussion impossible.
As soon as the word nationalism comes up, the equations nationalism =
patriotism and nonnationalism = treason pop up as well, and the conversation stops there. But Pok Kil tells readers that the conversation should
not stop there; his hope is that continuing the conversation on this sensitive topic will help mitigate that sensitivity.
I think his hope may already have been realized to a certain extent.
The debate surrounding his book seems to have popularized the topic
somewhat; any reader that was able to endure the psychological discomfort and read the book to the end will have realized that nationalism
is not some sacred and inviolable doctrine and, moreover, that it is an
extremely dangerous and damaging ideology. Of course, just because
readers may have realized this does not mean that they will lightly
shed their nationalist garb becausejust as Pok Kil himself has noted
nationalism assumes the form of a doctrine when it is, in essence, an
emotional state.
Liberalism and Ethno-Nationalism

Like his earlier collections of essays, Pok Kils The Ethno-National
Language in the Age of International Languages is not exactly a systematically organized work. It seems more like a gathering of the various
short essays he had written previously here and there on the subject
of nationalism, but (again following his early collections) all within the
broader framework of liberalism and with his usual keen insights into
the problem of nationalism in world history.
For example, when he expresses concern about the news that zainichi
ethnic Koreans in Japan plan to build a Koreatown in Kawasaki City
along the lines of Chinatown and pronounces that the ultimate goal of
120
emigration is for the people going to live in a strange land to become

complete members of the new society and live without discrimination;
or when, as soon as the Tokto/Takeshima problem broke out with Japan,
he criticized then president Kim Yngsam for opting for provocation
diplomacy in the form of a show of arms and warned, There are limits
to the amount of damage a president ignorant about the economy can do
to the economy, but a political leader who uses nationalism to his own
political ends at the drop of a hat can ruin an entire nation in short order;
or when he criticizes as disgusting defeatism the way in which antiJapanese sentiment in some corners of South Korean society goes so far
as admitting the attitude that we should build a wall around ourselves
in our relationship with Japan and preserve our national pride, even
if it means incurring certain losses and reminds Koreans that when
we build walls around ourselves in our relationships with neighboring
countries, we are not choosing not to have relations with them, but
to have the worst possible relationship with them of all; or when he
enlightens Koreans as to the lack of judgment behind orders to manufacture goods with national citizenship and points out that the national
citizenship of a work of art carries no value in and of itself; rather, it
carries value only within the limits of the extent to which it raises the
works artistic value; or when, in cases where the frequently vague and
poorly defined notion called by the name national interest needs more
clarification, he recommends asking Whose private, individual interests
are ultimately served by such national interests?statements like these
are so contrary to the mainstream intellectual discourse in South Korea
and to the South Korean media, so permeated with nationalism, that Pok
Kil no doubt makes some readers feel uncomfortable. But it requires
only a little reflection to realize that such statements leave little room
for criticism.
The background to Pok Kils critique of nationalism comprises the
individualism and cosmopolitanism that for him serve as a psychological equivalent to the economic and political liberalism that he espouses.
According to Pok, compared to the totality of features that make
We Are All Greeks
121
humans human, the features that distinguish ethno-nations from one

another are, in many cases, so insignificant as to be safely ignored.
But the roots of nationalism in South Korean society are thick and
resilient. And the roots of what the word nationalism indexes run just
as deep and thick as the roots of the word itself do. Thats why in his
essay The Path toward Suppressing Nationalism Pok speaks of open
nationalism in order to reconcile liberalism and nationalism. Under this
view, there exist both an open nationalism that aims for a free society
and a closed nationalism that invokes an exclusive, repressive society,
and these two types of nationalism are always in conflict with each other.
So there are two kinds of nationalism: good nationalism and bad nationalism. If so, then one should be able to salvage some portion of nationalism. That is, one should be able to help the word nationalism function less as a target of aversion. This distinction is repeated in part 2 of
Poks book in the essay The City: Full of Good Will toward the International Language, in which he distinguishes between an open nationalism that aims for a society where all people, regardless of race, citizenship or language can thrive and an absolutist or exclusive closed
nationalism.
But I think that the author here is compromising in order to wrest
away from nationalists the word nationalism, so beloved by the general
public. In other words, I think that by draping the phrase open nationalism over his own liberalism, Pok seeks to enter the good graces of a
general public fond of the word nationalism. In my usage, open nationalism is an oxymoron, like, say, acutely dull, and the closed in closed
nationalism is redundant. All nationalisms are closed. Closedness is one
of nationalisms most fundamental features. An open nationalism is no
longer nationalism. Like Bolshevism, nationalism is one of the worst
forms of particularism.
As examples of open nationalism, the author cites revolutionary
America and French nationalism, as well as the nationalisms of smaller
nations since the nineteenth century. It is true that nationalism was
122
the driving force behind those two political revolutions in the eighteenth century and behind the movements for national liberation since
the nineteenth century, and many would agree that there are quite
a few other cases in which nationalism became a stepping stone on
the way to freedom. Such views hold that nationalism, in combination
with certain historical contingencies, can be a progressive force. But I
am not particularly attracted by this form of common sense in world
history. To my mind, what helped make postrevolutionary America
and France free were the liberal, democratic ideas like the doctrine of
natural rights and sovereignty of the peoplenot nationalism. The same
goes for the national liberation movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The flourishing of nationalism may bring independence
to a people, but it cannot make the individual members comprising
the newly independent nation free. History proves this. How often has
nationalism, whether in the case of large nations or of small, brought
with it outwardly focused attempts at domination and inwardly focused
collectivism? In other words, that which gave freedom to individual
Americans, individual Frenchmen, and individual citizens in newly independent states was not liberal nationalism but liberalism. Even if one
concedes that it was liberal nationalism, the key word is not nationalism
but liberal.
Open Languages and Translation

The main point of the essays in part 2 of The Ethno-National Language in
the Age of International Languages, apart from the question of English as
an official language, is to advocate an opening up of the Korean language.
To put it another way, the essays advocate liberation of the Korean
language from the coercion of linguistic purism. In this regard, Pok Kil
raises the issues of foreign words of ultimate Japanese origin and of
Western-language translationese style. Not only am I in complete agreement with his recommendationthat Korean should be opened wide to
both made-in-Japan foreign loanwords and Western-language transla-
We Are All Greeks
123
tioneseI also believe that this problem requires just as much profound
discussion as the question of English as an official language does. So I
would like to elaborate at some length on several of the points Pok Kil
touched on his short essays. Readers may find this somewhat tedious but
should considerate it a warm-up to the related question of English as an
international language.
There is one period in the history of human culture that has always
held me in its thrallnot the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans,
which formed the basis of European culture, not the glorious times
of Tang China, with its refined and aristocratic culture that boasted
literary geniuses like Li Bo, Du Fu, Han Yu, and Liu Zongyuan, not
the European Renaissance, with its polymaths and well-rounded prodigies, nor the Korean equivalent of the Western Renaissance in the form
of the Sirhak (practical learning) School at its height under the
reigns of King Yngjo and Chngjo. Prominent cultural efflorescences
like these have their attractions for me, but what moves me even more
are the Japanese Rangaku (Dutch learning; i.e., the intense scholarly research into Dutch texts) episodes from the mid-Edo period and
the boom in translation that occurred during the Meiji period and after.
This is because between them, the Edo-period Rangaku movement and
the Meiji-period translation boom represent a brilliant chapter whereby
Eastern and Western cultures came into conversation with each other in
the form of a harmonizing of the hanmun civilizational sphere and
the Graeco-Roman civilizational sphere.
When, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Rangaku movement
officially began with the translation by Sugita Genpaku and
others of a Dutch anatomy manual by the title of Kaitai shinsho
, it soon expanded from the medical works of the early period to
include chemistry, physics, astronomy, military science, and more, until
ultimately it had laid the foundations for turning the entire world into
a single civilizational sphere. At this time, East Asia was the one region
on earth where the footprints of Europeans were still scarce. The great-
124
ness of the Japanese lay not in putting the finishing touches on the globalization of European culture but in voraciously absorbing that culture
and, in the process, completely assimilating it into Chinese characters,
the common legacy of East Asian civilization.
The first contacts between Japan and the West go back as far as
1543 and the Tanegashima incident (when Japan acquired two
firearms from some Portuguese who put ashore at Tanegashima Island,
to the south of Kysh; soon these weapons became widespread in Japan
and wreaked havoc in Korea during the Hideyoshi invasions of 1592
1598), but full-fledged cultural contacts did not get under way until the
eighteenth century and the compilation of a Dutch-Japanese dictionary
by the interpreters in Nagasaki under orders from the Bakufu.
The crux of the Rangaku enterprise undertaken by the Rangaku
scholars in the Bakufu in Edo (modern-day Tokyo) with the assistance of the interpreters in Nagasaki was translation. The Rangaku
scholars worked laboriously in order to translate into Japanese European concepts from Dutch (and from other European languages refracted
through Dutch), and after the Meiji Restoration, these efforts were
expanded into a much larger translation project on a vast scale that led to
the full-scale importation of European culture. These various translation
activities were by no means easy. After all, they had to absorb European
culture in an unmediated and independent fashion, rather than through
China, which had established contacts with European civilization much
earlier than Japan had. Besides, even if they had wanted to use China
as an intermediary, Chinas absorption of European culture was far too
insufficient to satisfy the intellectual demands of the Japanese. To put it
another way, there was no easy model for the Japanese to follow.
Today, for example, Korean lexicographers responsible for compiling
English-Korean dictionaries and French-Korean dictionaries have a
frame of reference in previously published English-Japanese and FrenchJapanese dictionaries. But there were no such frames of reference for
the interpreters in Nagasaki or for the Edo Rangaku scholarsin order
We Are All Greeks
125
to translate a Dutch word into Japanese, they had to first investigate its
etymology, its changes through time, and its contemporary usage before
choosing corresponding Chinese characters and creating a new equivalent. And because in many cases, even if the book being translated was
in Dutch, the work itself might have been translated from another European language, the interpreters and Rangaku scholars were also obliged
to dip their toes into other European languages, as well as into the classical languages of Greek and Latin.
Table 4. Words first created through translation from the Dutch.
In cases where Japan or East Asia already had vocabulary for similar
concepts, the problem was not so great, but because the majority of the
Dutch words the scholars were attempting to translate were alien to
126
Japanese and East Asian cultural tradition, their troubles were that much
greater. It was a labor requiring extreme passion and talent, and the
interpreters and Rangaku scholars carried it out successfully. Words like
the ones seen in table 4, which are still in use today, were first created
through translation from the Dutch by the Edo interpreters and Rangaku
scholars.
In cases where no satisfactory translation could be found, they sometimes also imported the word in toto. For example, instead of translating
the Dutch natuur (now J. shizen = K. chayn), they imported it as
natsuuru.
At the end of the Bakufu period, the center of ygaku (Western
studies = K. yanghak) shifted from Rangaku to eigaku (the study
of Western culture through English), but in accordance with the socalled Datsua ny (Out of Asia, into Europe = Reject Asia,
embrace Europe) line, Western studies reached its zenith in the years
following the Meiji Restoration (1868), during which countless calques
were created. As early as the end of the Bakufu period, several thousand volumes of Western books would arrive each month in the port
of Nagasaki, but after the Meiji Restoration this trend strengthened
and Western culture overwhelmed the Japanese archipelago in wave
after wave. Profound research followed, not only into the Netherlands,
England, and America but into all of Europe and its languages, and the
resulting new calques were even better elaborated than before. Tables
5a and 5b show some examples of these new calques.
We Are All Greeks

Table 5a. New calques from European languages.
127
128
Table 5b. New calques from European languages (Continued).
Some of the new equivalents to Western words were created by selecting

from the Chinese classics preexisting words thought to have vaguely
similar meanings or at least some semantic connection, but the majority
of them were created by the Japanese by combining individual Chinese
characters into new words, as seen by the examples in tables 6a6c.
We Are All Greeks
129
Table 6a. Neologisms created by the Japanese by combining Chinese characters into new words.
130
Table 6b. Neologisms created by the Japanese by combining Chinese characters into new words (Continued).
We Are All Greeks
131
Table 6c. Neologisms created by the Japanese by combining Chinese characters into new words (Continued).
For the most part, the calques created by the Edo-period Rangaku
scholars, especially the European words translated since the Meiji period,
were coined using Chinese characters and were absorbed as Sino-Korean
forms into Korean; a huge number of them were also reexported back
to China, the country of origin of Chinese characters. It is interesting
132
to note that the vast majority of the words cited here are familiar to
educated Koreans when presented in Chinese characters.
If, as some Korean purists advocate, Koreans were to purge from the
Korean language all remnants of the Japanese languageincluding even
made-in-Japan Sino-vocabularyKoreans would hardly be able to utter
a sentence and would be limited to single-word utterances. The vast
majority of words listed in Korean-Korean dictionaries are Sino-vocabulary items, and the vast majority of these Sino-vocabulary words were
created in Japan. The word nationalism, the theme of the book that was
the point of departure for my discussion in this chapter, is also a Japanese
invention, and the lovely essays by the Korean language purists urging
Koreans to banish Japanese-language elements from Korean are all made
up of words from Japan.
This is an unfortunate thing for Koreans. It would have been so much
nicer if the translations undertaken by the Japanese Rangaku scholars
and Meiji-period scholars of Western civilization had also been undertaken by our own early modern Korean ancestors. But Japan beat Korea
to the punch in terms of contact with the West, and it was the Japanese
with their amazing appetite who absorbed Western culture first and
metamorphosed it into Chinese characters, and because Japanese got to
play the role of national language on the Korean Peninsula from the
time of annexation in 1910 until liberation in 1945, Koreans missed their
chance to adapt Western culture independently and incorporate it into
the Korean language system. Like it or not, and thanks to the labors of the
Japanese, Koreans have traversed the path of Sinographicized Western
culture with relative ease. And one thing is certainprecisely because
they used the medium of Chinese characters, the countless neologisms
coined on the Japanese archipelago ever since the Meiji period were
absorbed immediately into Korean, thereby doubling the Korean lexicon
and greatly elevating Koreans consciousness of the wider world. That
all of this was not achieved through Korean efforts does not change the
We Are All Greeks
133
fact that the ensuing enrichment of the Korean language and epochal
change in Korean consciousness was a good thing for Koreans.4
That the Edo-period interpreters in Nagasaki, the Rangaku scholars
from the same period, and the Meiji scholars of Western culture who
followed them all translated Western concepts using Chinese characters is extremely important. There were many reasons for them to use
Chinese characters in translating Western concepts. First and foremost
must have been the remarkable word-formation power of Chinese characters, but a certain respect for Chinese culture must have played a reinforcing role, too. Indeed, just as most of the Sino-vocabulary in Korean
comprises high-level concept words, whereas native Korean words tend
to be basic vocabulary, in Japanese, too, kango (words imported
directly from China, or else words created in Japan using Chinese charactersi.e., the equivalents of Sino-Korean vocabulary) are mostly conceptual words, whereas wago (words assumed to be neither SinoJapanese nor Western loanwords, hence native Japanese, also referred
to as Yamato kotoba ) comprise most of the basic vocabulary. It must have been only natural that Rangaku scholars and their
descendants chose kango rather than wago in order to translate new
Western concepts in such a cultural and linguistic atmosphere. Their
choice must have been an unpalatable one to the ultranationalists who
worshipped the so-called Yamatodamashii , or Japanese spirit,
but it was precisely their unpalatable choice that eventually lent Japanese
the greatness and glory it enjoys today.
The Vitality of Made-in-Japan Sino-Vocabulary

As all Koreans know, most words that the Japanese either newly created
or adapted from the Chinese classics with newly added semantics were
imported into Korean. Moreover, many of these were imported into
Chinese. Why were so many words imported from Japanese into modern
Korean and Chinese? To be sure, one must acknowledge that Japans
134
cultural (and political and economic) power was greatest among the
three East Asian nations beginning at the end of the nineteenth century.
Besides, for a substantial portion of the first half of the twentieth century,
Koreans had to learn Japanese as the national language, so it is hardly
strange that many Japanese words should have entered Korean.
But if the Japanese had created their neologisms based on native
Japanese rather than on Chinese characters, would those new words
have been imported on the same grand scale into both Korean and
Chinese? I think it would have been impossible. Even if a certain
number of such words had been imported, most of them would have
been pushed out immediately by so-called language-purism movements.
Indeed, the language-purification movements pursued in both North and
South Korea after liberation managed to drive out most of the nonSino-vocabulary words that had crossed over from Japan. Words like
nedabai (J. netabai) swindling, cheating, ssri (J. suri) pickpocket,
and nawabari (J. nawabari) domain, stomping grounds, bailiwick still
remain, but there are few such cases, and their days are numbered. Moreover, because most such words tend to be confined to professional jargon
or slang, it is difficult for them to penetrate beyond the outer periphery
of Korean. But made-in-Japan Sino-vocabulary is completely different.
These words will maintain their vitality as long as both Korean and
Chinese continue to exist.
One of the important reasons for this state of affairs is that neither
Koreans nor Chinese think of these words as Japanese. It is possible to
write them in Chinese characters, but because one reads the characters
in either their Sino-Korean or Mandarin pronunciations, there is virtually no worry of clashes between such words and preexisting Korean
or Chinese vocabulary. In fact, without specialized knowledge, average
Koreans and Chinese have no way of knowing whether a Sino-vocabulary item was coined in China, Korea, or Japan. Even though the made-inJapan Sino-vocabulary that began pouring into Korean after the opening
of Korean ports must have struck Koreans at the time as newfangled,
We Are All Greeks
135
it did not strike them as being Japanese. This was all the more true
because the words entered the language mostly in written form rather
than via spoken language. Even Koreans with absolutely no knowledge
of Japanese were able to incorporate these words into their vocabularies with ease, and using the words occasioned none of the psychological burden of using a foreign language or foreign loanwords. As far as
Koreans back then were concerned, the words were not Japanese vocabulary but simply Sino-vocabulary of the sort that Koreans had already
been using for nearly two thousand years.
That this was so is confirmed by the fact that wago words (native
Japanese words, as opposed to Sino-Japanese words = kango ) could
be imported into Korean and would stick, with the proviso that their
kundoku (vernacular Japanese) readings were jettisoned in favor of SinoKorean pronunciations based on the Chinese characters with which they
were written in Japanese. In other words, Japanese wago written in
Chinese characters and read with kundoku vernacular readings
entered Korean as written loans and were read with mdok SinoKorean pronunciation, as seen by the examples in tables 7a and 7b.
It is words like these in particular that have been targeted by Korean
language purists, who, for example, wish to change susok to chlcha,
or taemaechul to (English!) pagensseil bargain sale, but this type of
imported word wont go away easily because words like these are
read according to their Sino-Korean mdok pronunciation, which is
completely unrelated to the original Japanese kundoku reading, and have
therefore become Koreanized. If these words had been imported from
Japanese in their kundoku readings, it would have been difficult for them
to survive for long.
136
Table 7a. Japanese wago imported with Sino-Korean pronunciations.
We Are All Greeks
137
Table 7b. Japanese wago imported with Sino-Korean pronunciations

(Continued).
For Koreans in general, with their strong sense of linguistic nationalism

(not to mention the Korean language purists), bringing in words from
Japanese (of all languages) and using them as is would have posed a
substantial psychological burden, and they would have been replaced
in short order with Korean equivalents. But because these words were
imported not via speech but via their written formsusing Chinese charactersand converted into Korean shapes, they have managed to maintain their vitality in Korean until today. As long as such words are
borrowed through the medium of Chinese characters and pronounced
according to their Sino-Korean readings, as far as Koreans are concerned
they are Korean words, not Japanese wordsthis is where one can
confirm the universal appeal of Chinese characters within East Asian
cultures. To put it another way, the un-Japanese choice of the Rangaku
scholars played a decisive role in spreading the glory of the Japanese
language beyond the Japanese archipelago.
138
European Languages and Their Graeco-Latin Base

One can observe a similar situation in the case of the European
languages. As is well known, most of the difficult conceptual words in
European languages come from either Latin or Greek. In the case of
Romance languages like French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese that
have evolved from Vulgar Latin, to say that the overwhelming majority
of difficult conceptual words derive from Latin may sound meaningless,
but nothing could be further from the truth.
Take, for example, French: whereas the difficult conceptual words
preserve their Latin shapes relatively well, many of the basic vocabulary items, even though they are etymologically Latinate, have become
so changed in form that the similarity with their mother language is
no longer immediately obvious. The reason for this is that whereas
French basic vocabulary words have evolved from spoken Vulgar Latin,
suffering the vicissitudes of time, the conceptual words are words
borrowed by scholars in much later times from classical Latin texts. This
is why French has numerous cases in which two French words originate
from the same Latin word. Pairs of French words like these are called
doubletsone is the result of changes to the Vulgar Latin used in the
marketplace, and the other was borrowed from the classical Latin used
by Roman literati. Romance philologists call the former formations populaires (popular formations) and the latter formations savantes (learned
formations). These pairs are not necessarily exactly synonymous but are
more or less semantically close.
For example, with the passing of time, the Latin verb coagulare,
meaning to congeal, coagulate became the modern French cailler, but
scholars borrowed this from Latin texts as coaguler. Both words mean
congeal, coagulate, but the formation savante in coaguler belongs to a
higher register than the formation populaire in cailler. If one were to insist
on Korean equivalents, cailler would be kutke ha- harden, solidify, make
congeal (with the native Korean stem kut- hard + the periphrastic
causative pattern in -ke ha-), whereas coaguler would be nggo siki-
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139
make solidify. with the Sino-Korean nggo solidification, congelation + causative siki- make do/be. Likewise, whereas the Latin
verb auscultare listen attentively evolved into the modern French
couter listen, it was also borrowed from texts in the form ausculter.
Whereas the formation populaire in couter more or less preserves the
Latin meaning, the formation savante in ausculter has taken on the more
specialized meaning of listen via auscultation/stethoscopy. The Latin
frigidus cold evolved into the French froid id., but was borrowed
in the form of frigide (indifferent, cool) from texts; the Latin navigare
(navigate) evolved into the French nager swim, whereas the textual
borrowing naviguer retains the original Latin meaning. There are also
cases in which the semantics of these doublets are quite different. The
Latin articulus, meaning joint, evolved into the French orteil, which
means finger, whereas the textual loan has the shape article, which
means clause; provision, (grammatical) article, and (newspaper)
article, in addition to its original Latin meaning. In cases where the
doublets are similar in their semantics, the popular forms tend to belong
to colloquial language, and the scholarly forms belong to written or
literary language.
To be sure, evolution from Vulgar Latin and borrowings from classical Latin are not the only routes that produce doublets. Though they
are somewhat less common, there are also several other routes whereby
modern French has come to have doublets. For example, in doublets
in table 8, both modern forms have evolved from the same textual
borrowing (formation savante). Doublets like these have come about
through different developments of the same Latin suffix in French.
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Table 8. Doublets in French evolved from textual borrowing.
Yet other doublets came about through survivals of the Old French
nominative and accusative case forms; see table 9 for examples. And in
the doublet consisting of djeuner lunch and dner supper, the same
etymon has come to designate two different mealtimes.
Table 9. Doublets from the Old French nominative and accusative case forms.
There are also cases in which the formation savante hails not from
Latin but from another Romance language. The popular form noir black
has evolved from Vulgar Latin, but its doublet formation savante in ngre
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(as well as ngro black person) is a loan from Spanish negro black. Of
course, the etymological source of both Spanish negro and French noir
is Latin nigrum (the neuter gender of niger black). In similar fashion,
the formations savantes corresponding to the popular forms in cheval
horse ~ chevalier knight ~ chevauche cavalcade are cavale mare
~ cavalier cavalryman ~ cavalcade cavalcade, all of which are loans
from Italian. Ditto for the learned form cadence rhythm, beat, which
has a doublet in the popular form chance luck; opportunity. Sometimes
languages outside the Romance language group participate in doublet
pairs. The popular form voeu oath; wish is thought to form a doublet
with vote vote, an English loan; like the French voeu, the English word
vote, which first appeared as a political term in the fifteenth century,
has its origins in the classical Latin votum, meaning supplication, oblation. In the case of some doublets, one of the pair retains the form of the
original Latin word intact (or at least with the bare minimum of French
makeup), as seen in table 10.
Table 10. Doublets where one word retains the original Latin shape.
Some cases attest not doublets but triplets; see table 11 for examples.
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Table 11. Triplets from Latin roots.
Quite a few doublet forms originate in ancient Greek, albeit via the intermediary of Latin. For example: amande almond and amygdale tonsils
Latin amygdale Greek amugdal; blme blame, reproach and
blasphme blasphemy Latin blasphemia blasphemy Greek blasphmia verbal abuse, slander; cercueil coffin and sarcophagie stone
coffin, sarcophagus Latin sarcophagus grave Greek sarkophagos
flesh-eating; colre anger and cholra cholera Latin cholera
bilious illness; irritability Greek cholera diseases of the digestive
organs, including cholera; parvis front yard and paradis paradise
Latin paradisus land enclosed in a wall Greek paradeisos
land enclosed in a wall Persian pardez land enclosed in a wall;
safre cobalt oxide and saphir sapphire Latin sapphires Greek
sappheiros. Some doublets go back to non-European languages, such
as Arabic: chiffre number, numeral and zro zero Arabic sifr
empty; zero, mir emir, and amiral admiral Arabic amir prince;
commanding officer; leader.
In some doublets, both words are loans but were borrowed at different
times. For example, communier take communion and communiquer
inform, be in contact with, relate communicare share with; form
a relationship with. Or in opposite cases, both words in a doublet
have evolved from a common etymological source but have ended up
in different phonetic places by chance. For example, pavilion pavilion;
barracks and papillon butterfly are both from the Latin papilio (genitive papilonis) meaning butterfly; tent, canvas.
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But doublets formed via routes like these represent the minority
in French. Most French doublets have come about through retentions
and developments of Vulgar Latin forms into formations populaires and
borrowings from or neologisms based on classical Latin as formations
savantes.
There are also cases when doublets are not at all immediately obvious,
because although there are occasionally cases in which both forms are
virtually the same in form and semantics, there are many more in
which these are quite different. And there are almost no rules governing
how and why both form and meaning come to diverge. At the level
of signifiant (signifier), one finds examples like piti pity and pit
piety, piousness that look quite similar, but compare the very different
gaine scabbard and vagin vagina or the case of orteil toe and
article clause, provision, mentioned earlier. Without research into their
etymologies, it is difficult to know that these words share the same
etymological source. In general, one can say that the formation populaire
is shorter because the evolutionary process from Vulgar Latin to French
has typically involved the loss of phonological segments. At the level of
signifi, too, the relationship between the two forms in a doublet is difficult to discern. In rare cases, the two forms are virtually synonymous
for example, geindre and gmir groan, moan; plier and ployer bend,
fold; pieu and pal stake.
In the following cases, the doublets cannot be called synonyms, but the
difference in meaning is more a difference in nuance, and the forms could
be classified in Korean as yui words of similar meaning: grle
spindly, lanky and gracile slender; aigre sour; bitter and cre acrid,
pungent; charbon coal, charcoal and carbone carbon; fal loyal,
steadfast and fidle loyal, faithful; froid cold and frigide cold, heartless, unfeeling; jumeaux twins and Gmeaux Gemini. But doublets
like essaim swarm of bees; large group and examen test, exam, or
orteil toe and article clause, provision are very difficult to link semantically.
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Doublets like this also exist in other Romance languages, including

Italian and Spanish, albeit in different quantities. For example, the Latin
fragilis fragile, easily broken has developed into frale in modern Italian
with the same meaning, but Italian has also borrowed fragile from
written Latin. The two words have similar semantics, but the loaned form
is more literary. Likewise, the Latin verb collocare, meaning put, place,
arrange has evolved into the modern Spanish colgar hang something,
which exists alongside the Latin loanword colocar place, arrange.
In other words, in the daughter languages of Latin that are the
Romance languages, one finds at least two lexical layerswords that
have evolved in spoken language from Vulgar Latin and words borrowed
from classical Latin. Likewise, there are at least two lexical layers in
Japanese and Koreanindigenous vocabulary and Sino-vocabulary.
So does Korean have doublets of the sort that I have been discussing?
Absolutely. There are quite a few words in Korean that began life as
Sino-vocabulary but that after passing from mouth to mouth among
the general populace lost their association with their Chinese characters
and underwent changes in form that led to their being treated as native
vocabulary. This latter native-like form and the original Sino-Korean
word that spawned it can be said to form a doublet. Examples would be
kwang and kobang storeroom and sanyang and sanhaeng
mountain excursion; hunting. Both kwang and sanyang have resulted
from changes in shape to the Sino-Korean kobang and sanhaeng, respectivelychanges that mean it is no longer possible to write the words
with the original Chinese characters and that render the words more
native-like. Whereas the doublets in the Romance languages trace their
etymological roots back to a common Latin word, the Korean doublets
go back to a common Sino-vocabulary item. Following the example of
the Romance languages, one can term the forms kwang and sanyang
popular forms (formations populaires) and the original Sino-vocabulary
items kobang and sanhaeng learned forms (formations savantes). Like
the Romance-language doublets, Korean doublets differ slightly on the
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level of signifiant and often on the level of signifi, too. Kwang and
kobang shared a nearly identical signifi, but the signifis for sanyang and
sanhaeng are rather different. As can be seen in the case of kwang and
kobang, Korean popular formsjust like the popular forms in Romance
doubletsare frequently shorter than their learned counterparts because
the process whereby formerly learned forms change into popular forms
involves not just sound change and the loss of segments but often the
loss of entire syllables. But Korean doublets and Romance doublets also
differ in certain respects. First of all, in the case of Korean doublets,
both forms are loanwords. The popular forms undergo so much change
in shape that it becomes impossible to write them with Chinese characters, which means they are usually regarded as native forms, but
etymologically speaking they are still loans. In contrast, in the case
of the Romance languages, the learned forms are borrowed from classical documents, and the popular forms have evolved from the vernacular. This is why the learned forms in the Romance languages are
loans (even though the source of the loans is the mother language), and
the popular forms are indigenous or native. Of course, this difference owes to the fact that whereas the Romance languages are daughter
languages of Latin, Korean is genetically unrelated to Chinese. Second,
whereas in the Romance languages most of the learned forms are of relatively late provenance (compared to the popular forms), in Korean the
popular forms came about later than the learned forms didthe popular
forms are simply learned forms that have undergone morphological
and semantic change and distortion. Finally, in Korean the popularlearned doublets are frequently in a relationship that is better described
as loose synonymy than as true synonymy. The same phenomenon is
not unknown in the Romance languages but is rarer. For more examples
of doublets showing loose synonymy like kwang and kobang, see tables
12a12b; and for more examples along the lines of sanyang and sanhaeng
with somewhat more divergent semantics, see tables 13a13c.
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Table 12a. Examples of doublets showing loose synonymy like kwang and
kobang.
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Table 12b. Examples of doublets showing loose synonymy like kwang and
kobang.
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Table 13a. Examples along the lines of sanyang and sanhaeng with somewhat
more divergent semantics.
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Table 13b. Examples along the lines of sanyang and sanhaeng with somewhat
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Table 13c. Examples along the lines of sanyang and sanhaeng with somewhat
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The situation with European languages other than the Romance

languages is similar to that of Japanese and Korean and easy to follow.
For example, in the case of English, which belongs to the Germanic
family, most of the high-level conceptual vocabulary has roots in Latin or
ancient Greek, and words of Anglo-Saxon stock (words with Germanic
etymologies) form the bulk of the basic vocabulary. Among English
words with Latin roots, there are both words borrowed directly from
classical Latin and words borrowed indirectly via French. Because the
former were borrowed from documents, they tend to preserve the original Latin shapes, while the latter include many forms borrowed via
contact with French as it evolved from Vulgar Latin, and they therefore include many distortions in form. Of course, those words borrowed
via writingthe forms that preserve shapes closer to the original source
formsare perceived as more dignified.
For example, the English words regal, royal, and kingly are all near
synonyms meaning related to the king. Of these, regal was borrowed
either directly from the Latin adjective regalis, with the same meaning,
or via Old French, which borrowed this same regalis as regal. The English
royal is a borrowing from the Old French roial (cf. modern French royal),
in which the original shape of the Latin regal is already quite distorted.
The English kingly is an indigenous Germanic word. Although these
three words cannot be called perfect synonyms (if there is such a thing
as a perfect synonym), if one assumes that their meanings are nonetheless broadly similar, the form in regal, which best preserves the original
Latin shape, is the most high-register expression, followed by royal, with
its Latinate (but battered Latinate) shape, and the indigenous Germanic
word kingly comes in last as the plainest form of all. That is to say, in the
case of words with similar meanings, those with roots in Latin or Latin
via French are generally perceived as belonging to a higher register than
indigenous Germanic words in English. This state of affairs parallels that
of Korean, in which the Sino-vocabulary items in similar Sino-versusnative doublets always belong to the higher register.
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In German, thanks to the spirited language-purification movement

prosecuted in the early modern period, Germanic vocabulary has come
to occupy a significant portion of conceptual words, but the overall
framework of Graeco-Latin words for conceptual vocabulary and native
Germanic words for basic vocabulary still remains in place. The situation is broadly similar in other European languages, too. Of course,
there are rare languages, like Icelandic, that have insisted on linguistic
purism and incorporated most foreign words into their own language
almost exclusively via translation, but most European languages have
a healthy smattering of words with Graeco-Latin roots that tend to be
cultural vocabulary designating intellectual terms. This state of affairs
owes to the fact that the roots of European culture lie in ancient Greece
and Rome, but the more direct reason is that the sway of the Roman
Catholic and Orthodox churches over Europe knew no national borders,
and these churches used both Latin and Greek as their ritual languages
for centuries.
Ever since the time of the Rangaku scholars, whenever Japanese
scholars have either translated European conceptual words or given
names to new concepts, they have used Chinese characters; in much
the same way and in similar circumstances, European scholars when
creating new conceptual words have relied on ancient Greek and Latin.
There are differences depending on the fieldfor example, Greek tends
to dominate in the medical field, whereas Latin dominates in the
botanical fieldbut in any case, these two languages are relied on for
new terminology. Scholars who count Latin as their mother language
(scholars, say, in the French- or Italian-speaking areas) use not the
formations populaires, with their time-battered shapes, but the formations savantes, with their shapes virtually unchanged from classical Latin,
to create new specialized terminology. Whenever a new phenomenon
appears that they wish to name, they borrow directly from the ancient
Greeks and Romans if they used a similar word, and if there are no
likely candidates in the classic texts, the scholars create new words by
putting together word stems from these classical languages. The process
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is parallel to the way the Japanese, in translating Western conceptual

words, either borrow from the Chinese classics or combine Chinese characters to create neologisms.
Graeco-Latinate neologisms like these are created in all of Europes
languages. To be sure, more of them are created in those cultures with
the greatest cultural power. There was a time when such words were
created primarily in France and a time when they were created mostly
in Germany. For example, in the early days of modern chemistry, most
of the chemical terminology, starting with the names of the elements,
was created in France, whereas a huge number of the technical terms
coined for biochemistry and medicine from the nineteenth to the early
twentieth century count Germany as their home. Now most such terms
are coined in the English-speaking world, with the proviso that Englishspeaking world here indicates the United States rather than England.
From the natural sciences extending across all scholarly fields, the leadership of the United States is now uncontested, meaning that most new
terminology and Graeco-Latin neologisms are perforce being born in the
United States, in English.5
And these neologisms spread immediately to all the European
languagesallowing, of course, for minor changes in endings and the
like in conformance with the morphology of each language. This is
exactly what used to happen in the past when such neologisms were
created mainly in France or Germany. As a result, specialized terminology like this is broadly similar in form, regardless of the language, and
specialists can understand the meanings of new words even when they
encounter them for the first time. Again, this is completely parallel with
the situation in East Asia, where specialized terms created with Chinese
characters are immediately recognizable to specialists in the relevant
field, be they Korean, Japanese, or Chinese.
Just as the majority of the neologisms created in Japan with Chinese
characters were imported back to China, the original homeland of
Chinese characters, there are numerous examples of neologisms based
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on Greek in various European languages being imported back to modern

Greece. For example, see table 14 for French words created from Greek
roots or borrowed from ancient Greek that have been borrowed into
modern Greek. Even neologizms, meaning new word, has found its
way back into modern Greek from the French nologisme. One might say
that the things which are Caesars have been rendered unto Caesar.
Table 14. French words created from Greek roots.
But that such neologisms based on Latin and Greek are being created
in European languages, too, is extremely important. Much as was the
case with the Japanese Rangaku scholars and their descendants who
have created new Sino-vocabulary based on Chinese characters out of an
abiding respect for Sinitic civilization, European and American scholars
creation of new conceptual vocabulary using Latin and Greek roots
reflects their respect for ancient Greek and Roman culture. This practice is perhaps somewhat unsatisfactory for those European scholars
who speak a language more distant from these classical languages (e.g.,
speakers of Germanic or Slavic languages), but this nonnational, nonegocentric choice of the scholars actually lends prestige and glory to
their mother tongues. If the new words created by scholars from the
Germanic- and Slavic-speaking spheres had not been based on Latin and
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Greek, they would hardly have been able to spread so quickly to other
languages.
For example, suppose that American scholars with particularly strong
feelings of allegiance for English as a Germanic language created new
terms based on Germanic roots. Of course, because the United States
is such a powerful country, such terms would likely spread beyond the
Anglophone world. But they would not spread as quickly as new words
based on Latin and Greek do and would create a greater psychological burden on their users. If scholars were to create the new words
using native English (Germanic) roots, French and Polish speakers (for
example) would perceive them as completely foreign. But everything
changes if the neologisms are created on the basis of Latin and Greek.
Whoever creates such new words, and whatever language the creator
of such new words speaks, they are accepted as somehow familiar by
speakers of European languages because such neologisms are just additional items added to a long list of words with classical roots encountered
in all these languages for more than a millennium. In other words, just as
Chinese characters are not the unique possession of Chinese speakers
but function instead as a common cultural resource binding East Asian
peoples together, Greek and Latin lexical roots are a cultural resource
binding together speakers of European languages. In a sense, then, just as
all East Asians are Chinese, all Europeans are Greeks. Equally important
to remember is that, just as the overwhelming majority of Sino-vocabulary loans in East Asia have taken place via writing (through texts), the
vast majority of Graeco-Latin loan vocabulary in European languages,
too, has come in through writing and texts. Needless to say, this is closely
related to the fact that Latin functioned as the common literary language
of Europe for a very long time, and classical Chinese (hanmun , as
it is called today in modern Korea) had the same function in East Asia.
But I will need to revisit this question later, in my discussion of English
as an official language.
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Translation and the Beginnings of Literary Korean

I will not dedicate much space to refuting criticisms about translationese
in Korean literature because Pok Kil has already provided persuasive
counterarguments. But one thing needs to be emphasized: namely, that
the beginnings of Korean as a written language are to be found in translation. Even before the creation of hangl, it was common practice in
government offices to translate hanmun (literary Sinitic) into ichal (a
form of documentary Korean written with a mixture of Chinese characters as both semantograms and phonograms), and Kim Chi and Ko
Sagyngs translation of the Ming law code titled Taemyngnyul chikhae
(1395 CE) into this form of documentary Korean is one of
most representative translations from the early Chosn dynasty. And
this practice continued even after the creation of the new script in the
Hunmin chngm (1446 CE). A replica of the first Korean
sentence ever written in hangl can be seen, carved in large letters on
the wall of Kyodae Subway Station on the Number 3 Line in Seoul; it
is the famous preface to the Hunmin chngm nhae
(Hunmin chngm explicated in the vernacular script), the manifesto
announcing the birth of the new script:
Nala s malssom i TYWUNGKWUYK ey talGa mwuncco lwo selu
somosti ani holssoy
The sounds of our language differ from those of Chinese and are
not easily communicated using Chinese graphs6
This famous first Korean sentence is a translation, the source language
for which was literary Sinitic. The practice of publishing nhae
(vernacular explications) for Confucian and Buddhist classics and
Chinese classical poetry flourished until the mid-Chosn period and
could take the form of either literal, Chinese character-dominant translations along the lines of kugyl interlinear glosses or ichal texts, or of
freer translations with more detailed explanations in Korean. The former
became the basis for more official, documentary styles, and the latter
became the basis for a more general literary style.
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Even after the creation of hangl, literary Sinitic continued to

reign supreme, and the total accumulation of documents in hangl
remained rather modest, but one must not forget that the larger portion
of this modest accumulation consisted of translations. nhae translations of Buddhist sutras like the Nngm kyng nhae
(urangama sutra), the Pphwa kyng nhae (Lotus
sutra), the Kmgang kyng nhae (Diamond sutra), the
Puljngsim tarani kyng nhae (Buddha Coronas
heart dhra sutra), and the Pumo njung kyng nhae
(Sutra about parents deep kindness); nhae translations of Confucian classics like the Samgang haengsilto nhae (Illustrated conduct of the three bonds), the Taehak nhae (Greater
learning), the Chungyong nhae (Golden mean), the Non
nhae (Analects), the Maengja nhae (Mencius), the
Chuyk nhae (Yijing), the Sigyng nhae (Book of
songs), and the Sohak nhae (Lesser learning); and nhae translations of poetry like the Tu si nhae (Du Fus poetry) and
their translationese style comprised the bulk of the meager inventory of
Korean-language documents from the Chosn dynasty and became the
models for Korean literary style. Some Korean scholars hold the view
that the mixed-script style that took hold at the end of the nineteenth
century resulted entirely from the influence of written Japanese, but it
is worth emphasizing that there is clear continuity between nhae-style
writing and mixed-script style.
Thus, the beginnings of Korean as a literary language were in nhaestyle translations, and the many translations into Korean of Ming and
Qing Chinese vernacular fiction known to have existed from documentary sources (but which are mostly no longer extant) must have been
a grand experimental laboratory for Korean literary style during the
Chosn dynasty. For a literary language and style to have its origins in
translation is neither unusual nor shameful. It is well known that modern
German began with Luthers translation of the Bible, and many other
European languages established their first literary norms with transla-
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tions of classical texts. Indeed, I cannot imagine what a Korean literary

style that is not translationese would look like. Some might claim that
such a style would be a case of perfect nmun ilchi , or unification of speech and writing, but putting to one side the question whether
perfect nmun ilchi is even possible, the sort of literary Korean one could
write in such a style would be nothing more than low-level idle chitchat.
Besides, although there exist early sixteenth-century sources like the
colloquial Chinese textbooks titled Nogldae nhae (Vernacular explication of the Old Cathayan) and Pak tongsa nhae
(Vernacular explication of Interpreter Pak) that afford partial glimpses of
colloquial Korean, at the end of the day these are still just nhaes, translations. So the problem is one not of whose style is translationese but
one of whether the literary textwhether it is in translationese or not
falls within the bounds of what the rules of Korean syntax allow. It is
especially pitiful and embarrassing whenever the translationese writing
style in Korean is decried in a shrill voice to find that the critics own
prose is nothing but awkward phrases upon ungrammatical sentences.
It needs to be emphasized that whether it be foreign loanwords or
translationese, the impulse to drive these out and purify Korean artificially is fundamentally absolutist. The purification in national language
purification is the same purification in the early years of the Fifth
Republics notorious Samchng Kyoyuktae (Three evils purification
campaign). In fact, the obsession with puritythe urge to purifyis
frequently an urge to kill. It takes only a quick recollection of the piles of
corpses that obsessions with purity of belief, purity of blood, and purity
of ideology have left throughout history to appreciate how dangerous
the impulse toward national language purification can be.
The Idol and Fantasy of Pure German

In this section I examine three different attitudes that speakers can adopt
toward their mother tongue: I call them the German attitude, the English
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159
attitude, and the Japanese attitude. If instead of these proper nouns I

were to adopt special terms, I could also call them the closed, open, and
ambidirectional types. To be sure, I do not mean to depict the national
characters of these countries with these terms, but I use them simply to
designate certain attitudes adopted toward the mother tongue in these
countries at certain historical points in time.
I examine the German case first.
In 1617, Ludwig von Anhalt stood up against Kultursprachen
(languages of culture) like Latin and French and created a group to
purify and enhance the status of German. The society he created,
called the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (fruit-bringing society) or the
Palmenorden (Order of the Palms), opened offices in Kthen (Anhalt),
Weimar, and Halle and brought together patriotic individuals. With
the participation of first-rate intellectuals of the age, including Martin
Opitz, Johann Michael Moscherosch, Friedrich von Logau, Justus Georg
Schottel, and Andreas Gryphius, this fruit-bearing society became the
first of numerous subsequent purist groups (called Sprachgesellschaften,
or language societies) that sprung up all across Germany like mushrooms after the rain. With rustic names like the Faithful Pine-Tree
Society, the Society of Germany Lovers, the Pegnitz Flower Club (Pegnesischer Blumenorden), the Order of the Elbe River Swans, and others, the
core of the Sprachbewegung (language movement) advocated by these
language societies was Verdeutschung (Germanification). That is, the
aim was to Germanize the German lexicon and purify it of languages
that had infiltrated it: the classical languages of Latin and Greek, and
especially French. Through a variety of publications, these groups parodied Alamoderei (the imitation of French lifestyle and manners, or the
mixing of French and Germannot only did numerous French words
come streaming into German during the Thirty Years War and later, but
whole sectors of society, starting with the intellectual class, were either
bilingual in German and French or else used only French) and zealously
set about creating pure German neologisms to replace loanwords.
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For example, Schottel created Sprachlehre (language-ology) instead of

Grammatik, Zeitwort (time-word) instead of Verbum (verb), and Strichpunkt (line period) instead of Semicolon. In like manner, Harsdoerfer
created Briefwechsel (letter-exchange) instead of Correspondance and
Irrgarten (confusion garden) instead of Labyrinth. Among these contemporaries, the most zealous Germanizer of all was Phillipp von Zesen. He
was intent on ousting with his neologisms even those loans that had been
borrowed so long ago that they had been thoroughly nativized, and in
his overzealousness he was more or less spurned by the general public,
but it is a fact that a substantial number of the new words he created
have survived the centuries and are still in use today. For example,
Mundart for Dialekt (dialect), Gewissensfreiheit for Libert de conscience
(freedom of conscience), Verfasser for Autor (author), Gesichtkreis for
Horizont (horizon), and Sinngedicht for Epigramm (epigram) are all words
created by Zesen. The time was the Baroque, and frequently the craze for
Germanization went to excesses. Some of the new creations failed to gain
traction among the creators contemporaries, though others survived for
a brief time only to fall out of use shortly thereafter. Today there are
no Germans who say Gesichtvorsprung (face-protuberance) instead of
Nase (nose), Zeugemutter (evidence-mother) instead of Natur (nature), or
Zitterweh (shiver-pain) instead of Fieber (fever). In fact, insofar as Nase
is actually an indigenous Germanic word, by misidentifying it as foreign
the purists ended up creating a ridiculous word.
Neologizing was not the only activity these language activists engaged
in; their efforts extended across various fields, including the unification
of orthography and the establishment of grammatical norms. Because
most of these purists were Protestants, the German that they propagated
as standard was the German of Luthers Bible. With this text as their base,
they waged war on the various dialects and established standard New
High German. They expended especially great efforts on the establishment of orthography. The growing interest in German historical linguistics that began with Schottel also contributed to the establishment of
orthography, in which process German grammarians paid attention not
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simply to pronunciation but also to questions of etymology that arose in

their historical investigations. They got rid of many digraphs, replaced
the old horizontal line that used to demarcate sentence breaks with the
comma and the period, and introduced the rule whereby the first letter
of nouns was to be capitalized in order to help clarify the grammatical
constituents of sentences.
The purist grammarians were not satisfied with driving out the foreign
elements that had entered the German lexicon, unifying the morphology,
and rationalizing the orthography. Their ambition was to refine German
into a language of culture and raise it to the level of French. Thus,
poetry and literary style became the primary focal point of the language
activists research. It is clear that their efforts made an enormous contribution to the establishment of German as a language of classical literaturethe language that would be perfected by Goethe and Schiller, who
followed them.
But it is also clear that the very first concern of these purists was
the Germanization of the German lexicon. The efforts of this languagepurification movement continued unabated until the beginning of the
nineteenth century, when German no longer faced threats from other
languages of culture. This purism, which continued to gain strength
despite sometimes being derided as a Fremdwortjagd (hunt for foreign
words), reached its zenith at the beginning of the nineteenth century
with the completion of two different dictionaries compiled by Joachim
Heinrich Campe. Through his Wrterbuch der deutschen Sprache (1807
1812, 5 vols.) and Worterbuch zur Erklarung und Verdeutschung der
unserer Sprache aufgedrungenen fremden Ausdrucke (Dictionary for the
explication and Germanization of foreign expressions that have invaded
our language; 1813), Campe maintained that the majority of loanwords
could be expressed in pure German and gave detailed examples to prove
it. A significant number of the neologisms that he either created or
advocated succeeded in replacing French- and Latin-derived words or,
even if they did not push out the loanword in question, are still in
162
use today. For example, Campe succeeded in installing the following

words in the German lexicon: Umlauf for Zirkulation (circulation),
Freistaat for Republik (republic), Bittsteller for Supplikant (petitioner,
applicant), Stelldichein for Rendezvous (date, rendezvous), Zerrbild for
Karikatur (caricature), Esslust for Appetit (appetite), and Herrschau for
Revue (parade of troops). Campes colleague, Friedrich Jahn, famous as
the father of German gymnastics, also contributed to the Germanization of the German lexicon by creating Volkstum for Nationalitt (nationality) and Besprechung for Rezension (book review). But behind these
success stories also lie many neologisms that never gained acceptance
and were consigned to oblivion after the very briefest of existences.
The German language-purification movement that began in the seventeenth century succeeded in incorporating a significant number of pure
Germanic words into the German lexicon, and it also succeeded in
ousting from the language nearly as many words of French, Latin, and
Greek origin. But the purists fell far short of their original goal of
complete Germanization of the language. As anyone can readily ascertain by opening up a German dictionary today, there are still plenty of
French, Latin, and Greek words in the German language. This is because
the purists poured all their purifying energies into the outer linguistic
skin of German while ignoring any stylistic goals.
The issue is not that their ultimate goal of complete Germanization
failed but that every time in German history that nationalist fervor
grew to the point of becoming dangerous, these purists used it to their
advantage. The purism that had been quiet for a time since the beginning of the nineteenth century reared its head again after Germanys
victory in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and with the advent of a
unified German Empire. Language associations and societies sprang up
again as they had at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and a
series of ten Verdeutschungsbcher (Germanization books) was published
between the end of the nineteenth century and the early years of the
twentieth century. One typical language society led by Hermann Riegel
We Are All Greeks
163
boasted thirty thousand members, including a significant number of civil

servants. Heinrich Stephan, the postmaster general, became an honorary
member of this society in 1887 in recognition of his conversion of 760
words related to communications into pure German. It was Stephan
who was responsible for changing Telefon (telephone) to Fernsprecher
and recommandieren (send by registered mail) to einschreiben.
But Fernsprecher was still not able to oust Telefon from the German
language, and ordinary citizens preferred to use the loanword Telefon
in everyday colloquial speech. The force of habit was one thing, but
another reason was that this word existed not in isolation but as a
word that had spawned a network of many derived words within the
German lexicon: words like telefonieren (to telephone), telefonisch (telephone-related), Telefonist (operator, telephonist), Telefongesprch (telephone conversation), Telefonhrer (telephone receiver), and Telefonbuch
(telephone book) were all closely connected to one another, and because
abandoning the word Telefon meant abandoning the derived words, too,
this was inconvenient for the general populace.
But buoyed by the nationalist fervor that swept through Germany
during the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm, the purists succeeded in Germanizing many foreign words. Germanization during this period introduced
a certain level of divergence between the German of Germany and the
German of Austria and Switzerland, where there were no parallel purist
movements to speak of. For example, in the field of transportations and
communications, Austria and Switzerland use words like Perron (platform) or Coup (partitioned passenger seat) that have been used for
quite some time, are easily understandable to foreigners, and are still
in use today, but in Germany these words were replaced as early as in
Kaiser Wilhelms time with the pure German words Bahnsteig and Abteil,
respectively.
No longer satisfied with remaining amateurs during the period of
the two World Wars, these German language purists organized political
movements. During the First World War, Germans who failed to use
164
pure German were condemned as spiritual traitors, and slogans like

Nur ein deutschsprechendes deutsches Volk kann Herrenvolk werden und
bleiben (Only a German-speaking German Volk can become and remain
a master race) prevailed. Under Hitler, when German nationalism was
at its most virulent and the language societies were at their peak, the
onset of World War II emboldened the societies to proclaim themselves
mother-tongue strike forces and to declare war on the foreignized,
de-Germanized Marxist-Democratic parliamentary language that they
claimed German had become. For them, German at this time had become
a language degraded by the influence of Jews and Western Europe.
Linguistic purism in Germany succeeded in replacing Radio with
Rundfunk, Television with Fernsehen, and Journal with Zeitschrift, but the
price it paid for this success was a corner in German history where a
language fetishism that worshipped the idol of pure German took root.
The Magnanimity That Made Todays English

English, a sister language of German in the Germanic language family,
adopted an attitude toward foreign languages and foreign loanwords
that was completely different from that of German. English was already
adopting Latin vocabulary on a wide scale in the Old English period, and
in 1066, with the conquest of England by William, Duke of Normandy,
French also began to make deep inroads into English. The ruling
class used only French (properly speaking, a dialect of Old French
called Anglo-Norman) and English was the lowly language of the
ruled classes, but this lowly language received continuous transfusions
from the language of the ruling class such that the percentage of the
English lexicon occupied by French- and Latin-derived words gradually increased. Without two special events, English would likely have
been overwhelmed by French and might have disappeared from England
altogether. The first event was Englands 1204 loss of its territory in
Normandy. The English courts loss of its former homeland in this Fran-
We Are All Greeks
165
cophone region on the European continent to the French king severed

the territorial connection between England and French-speaking continental Europe. The second event was the Hundred Years War, which
continued from 1337 to 1453. By intensifying English patriotism, this war
also aroused sentimental attachment to the lowly English language.
English was able to regain its status as official language during the
middle of the fourteenth century as the Hundred Years War raged on,
but this Middle Englishor at least more than half of its lexiconhad
turned into Old French.
Nevertheless, the English did not attempt to drive out the French
words that had penetrated so deeply into their language. That French
was used in the courts and in some sectors of the royal court even after
English had become the official language was one reason for (or perhaps
one result of?) this magnanimity. Englands courts did not abandon
French in favor of English until the eighteenth century (1731). In effect,
English and French coexisted on English soil for nearly seven hundred
years. This is why English continued to receive transfusions of new
words from French even after English had been restored as the official
language. These words were distributed across the entire superstructure, including politics, law, administration, the arts, science, and religion. Most relatively high-register words in English today have origins
in French.
But even more important was that these transfusions of French words
led to the formation of semantically similar word families in English. In
essence, a Francophone layer was placed on top of the original AngloSaxon base, leading to countless doublets of semantically similar words.
To give just a few examples from verbs: answer vs. reply, begin vs.
commence, breathe in vs. inhale, breathe out vs. exhale, bury vs. inhume,
end vs. finish, feed vs. nourish, foretell vs. predict, help vs. aid, lengthen
vs. elongate, sell vs. vend, understand vs. comprehend, uproot vs. eradicate,
sweat vs. perspire, outrun vs. surpass, give vs. donate, keep up vs. maintain,
spit vs. expectorate, and hinder vs. prevent. The list of such doublets is
166
long enough to fill a sizeable dictionary. English has the richest vocabulary of all the languages ever known, and the most important reason for
this is to be found in the fact that English has been fundamentally open
to foreign loanwords.
And the most important such foreign loanwords have been those
from French and Latin. That the Anglo-Saxon words in these semantically related doublets tend to be more familiar everyday words whereas
the French-derived words are typically more serious and official can
be readily seen from the examples just listed. Of course, the AngloSaxon word dale is a more literary and difficult word than the Frenchderived valley, but for the most part the nuances of the French-, Latin-,
and Greek-derived words are weightier than those of their semantically
similar Anglo-Saxon counterparts. It goes without saying that the SinoKorean words on the left in the list in table 15 are similarly weightier and
more official sounding than the native Korean equivalents on the right.
We Are All Greeks
167
Table 15. Sino-Korean words weightier and more official sounding than the
native Korean equivalents.
In Korean, too, one can find exceptions, like the native Korean pal and
the Sino-Korean chok (), meaning foot, in which the latter has a
more vulgar feeling to it than the former, but such cases are rare. Just
as the Norman invasion of 1066 led to an invasion of French words that
nourished English, the invasion of Sino-vocabulary since ancient times
(whether the invaders were from China or Japan or were made-in-Korea
words) has swelled the Korean lexicon and added to it a myriad of refined
nuances. And until the end of the nineteenth century when the language
nationalists and their purism movement began to advocate ousting the
Sino-vocabulary from Korean, Koreans viewed Sino-vocabulary as an
integral constituent part of the Korean language, an attitude much like
that the English took toward French-derived vocabulary.
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The absorption into English of foreign words did not end with French.
Starting with the Renaissance, English took in countless Latin words, too
sometimes directly via Latin documents, sometimes via the medium
of Frenchand Anglicized them. Naturally, Greek words already assimilated to Latin were also imported. And of course, humanists added many
Greek works to English through direct contact with Greek texts.
English never showed any resistance to French or the European classical languagesor to any foreign language, for that matter. Even back
when England was still the epicenter of English, there were already
words in English with pedigrees traceable to every corner of the world,
and when the United States became the new epicenter for the English
language at the beginning of the twentieth century, American English
had been borrowing words from Native American languages, too, for
hundreds of years. A similar situation held for the varieties of English
that had put down roots in other parts of the world. This was truly a boon
for the English language. The rich stock of vocabulary borrowed into
English from numerous languages lent a fine-grained texture to English,
thereby contributing massively to its ongoing refinement.
To be sure, purism was by no means absent among Anglophone
literary figures. Writers like Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Gerard
Manley Hopkins, and George Orwell praised the strength and beauty
of Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. It was in the nineteenth century, in particular, when Romanticism swept through Britain, that the poet William
Barnes (18011886), in an effort to protect the Anglo-Saxon purity of
English, considered it his duty to drive French, Latin, and Greek words
from the language. He revived Old English inwit to replace conscience
and used the neologism birdlore in place of ornithology. He even made
up the word mate-wording to replace synonym. Most Anglophone lexicographers today ignore his effortsthe Oxford English Dictionary lists
only his speechcraft (for grammar) and starlore (for astronomy).
Actually, Barnes had a predecessor in the sixteenth-century humanist
and classical scholar John Cheek (15141557), who in the course of
We Are All Greeks
169
translating the Bible into English used mooned for lunatic, hundreder for
centurion, foresayer for prophet, crossed for crucified, and gainrising for
resurrection. Likewise, in the eighteenth-century, Joseph Addison (1672
1719), poet and founder of the Spectator magazine, launched a campaign
to purify English of French words.
But whether by chance or owing to something in the English temperament, language-purification movements in England remained at the level
of salient intermittent personal efforts and fleeting episodes, never developing into group movements as they did in Germany.
It is not just the influence of foreign languages to which English has
been indifferent. English has also been wholly unconcerned with the
entire notion of language degradation. That neither England nor the
United States has ever felt the need for a language-protection agency
along the lines of the language associations that were all the rage
in Germany, the Italian Academia Crusca, and the French Acadmie
Franaise reflects this open posture of English speakers.
But England was not completely without attempts at such organizations. Jonathan Swift, famous author of Gullivers Travels, was incensed
with the degradation that he perceived in eighteenth-century English
and proposed creating an academy. What most concerned him was
the craze for abbreviated words, and he cited concrete examples like
rep for reputation, incog for incognito, plenipo for plenipotentiary, pozz
for positive and mob for mobile vulgus. In the last example, the vulgus
(popular masses) dropped away, leaving just mobile (noisy), which in
turn was abbreviated to simply mob, which then gained its current
modern meaning. It is often thought that such forms are the creations of
twentieth-century journalism or the inventions of new generations, but
in fact they are specimens of popular linguistic wisdom from as early
as the eighteenth century. Despite Swifts criticism of abbreviated forms
like these, abbreviation is gradually spreading not only in English but
in other languages, too. Swift would have been annoyed to see that the
170
form in mob he vehemently decried has now won the day and pushed
out mobile vulgus entirely.
Swift proposed the establishment of an academy to institutionalize
corrective mechanisms for the degradation he perceived, but after much
acrimonious debate, the English opted to do nothing. Instead, they
set about compiling a dictionary. The dictionary compiled by eighteenth-century Englands Samuel Johnson (17091784) and the dictionary of American English compiled by nineteenth-century Americas
Noah Webster (17581843) became models for the countless dictionaries
that appeared after them in the Anglophone world. Ultimately, the work
performed by these dictionaries was similar to that performed by academies insofar as it helped establish language norms, but there is a fundamental difference: whereas academies (or dictionaries compiled by them)
assert leadership over a language, dictionaries produced by ordinary citizens, like those of Johnson and Webster, follow the languages lead. In
other words, whereas the English and the Americans gave their language
free rein, the Germans, by fetishizing and idolizing their language for a
considerable period of time, evinced a much different attitude.
Japanese between Purism and Laissez-Faire-ism

The Japanese case has been somewhat schizophrenic, oscillating
between the German and English types. The so-called kotodama
(spirit of the language) discourse in Japan has attributed special magical
powers to Japanese since ancient times, and even in Japans oldest
anthology of poetry, the Manysh , one finds Japan referred
to as the land where the kotodama brings bliss. This solipsistic and
self-absorbed view of language received support in the mid-Edo period
from kokugaku (national learning) scholars, who dressed it up in
academic clothes. It is not at all unusual to find ancient human societies
that hold special beliefs about language, but Japan is unusual in that
such beliefs about language have persisted throughout history to the
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171
present day. In the early Shwa period (19261989), Tokyo University professor of Japanese History Hiraizumi Kiyoshi used to
preach to students in his lectures as follows: It is only natural that there
are no languages genetically related to Japanese. For Japan is a shinkoku
(realm of the gods) and Japanese is a descendant of the language
of the gods.
This bizarre linguistic mysticism has left strong traces even today to
the extent that there are even some language specialistslinguists in
Japanwho maintain that Japanese is somehow special and is different
from any other language in the world. In 1979 a scholar by the name of
Tsunoda Tadanobu wrote a book titled The Japanese Brain, in
which he claimed that Japanese people use their brains in a completely
different way from people in other nations and in which he claimed
to have found physiological evidence for the special features of the
Japanese language. Even after this linguistic mysticism was refuted by
mainstream linguists, attempts have persisted until today to emphasize that, for example, the Japanese language is unique in the world
in using several different writing systems like Chinese characters, hiragana, katakana, and Arabic numerals all at once or that Japanese is
unique in its reading of Chinese characters in that it uses not only SinoJapanese ondoku readings but also vernacular Japanese kundoku
readings, and so on. But it is hardly the case that the essence of
these unique featuresorthographic variability (e.g., hito person can
be written three ways: as the Chinese character , with hiragana
, and with katakana ) and variability in pronunciation (e.g., the
Chinese characters spring and autumn can be read as haruaki or
shunj; if one adds to this the completely ad hoc way in which personal
names are read, it is basically difficult to know with 100 percent certainty
how many Chinese characters are to be read, even in the case of many
common words) somehow reveal the linguistic genius of the Japanese
people. If anything, they reveal the immaturity, if not of the Japanese
language itself, of Japanese orthography.7
172
When Japanese literary critic Karatani Kjin , citing Lacan

in the context of a discussion of vernacular kundoku readings of
Chinese characters in Japanese, characterizes vernacular kundoku readings as the elimination of symbolic castration, one sees thatbroadly
speakinghe is in the thrall of the same linguistic mysticism. In an essay
titled An Analysis of the Japanese Psyche published in the Korean
literary journal Changjak kwa pipyng (no. 101, Fall 1998), Karatani
claims that any attempt to explain Maruyama Masaos notion
of absence of the subjectthe system of irresponsibility as the core of
the imperial system must take its point of departure from the Japanese
orthographic system. His essay can be summarized as follows:
The difference between Korea and Japan with respect to China is
the way in which they have accepted Chinese characters. This is
not simply one difference among many; all differences come back
to this one difference, and this one difference is the difference
that has created difference until the present day. The main difference between Korea and Japan is that whereas in Japan they have
adopted a system whereby Chinese characters are read not only
for sound but are also read with vernacular kun pronunciations, in Korea they read only for sound and do not read them with
vernacular hun pronunciations. In Japanese, Chinese characters are internalized via their kundoku readings whereby
the writing system as a whole remains on the exterior dimension. Because of this, anything written in Chinese characters is
perceived as foreign and abstract. The acceptance of Chinese in
Korea entailed castration; a subject was brought about through
this oppression, but because of kundoku in Japan, castration
mitigation occurred and the subject was insufficiently formed.
Lacans castration is the entrance to the world of symbols, i.e.,
the world of language (culture), and kundoku is simultaneously
a way to enter that world and a way not to enter that world.
Castration creates a subject through oppression, but at the same
time neurosis attaches to the subject. On the other hand, the mitigation of castration creates an insufficiently formed subject and
brings on neurosis (schizophrenia). That is, through the different
manners in which Korea and Japan have accepted Chinese char-
We Are All Greeks
173
acters, one has become neurotic and the other psychotic. The
castration experienced by Koreans in the course of accepting
Chinese characters is a typical phenomenon of peripheral ethnonations that come into contact with more advanced civilized
nations. In this respect, one might say that the Koreans are easier
for Westerners to understand than the Japanese, and precisely
for this reason, Koreans pose no mysteries. Japan is different.
Only Japan distinguishes the etymological source of words with
three types of writing. This typically Japanese feature is the key
to understanding not just Japanese literature but all manner of
Japanese institutions and thought.
The original title of An Analysis of the Japanese Psyche was Japan and
Foucault, Japan and Lacan, and it was only the Japan and Lacan that
was translated into Korean for publication in Changjak kwa pipyng.
But even this short excerpt contains numerous incongruities with fact
and inconsistencies of logic. The first point to emphasize is that kundoku
, despite any misunderstandings easily occasioned by its constituent
Chinese characters, is not a reading method but a writing method.
Reading Chinese characters with non-Chinese vernacular pronunciations (kundoku in Japanese, hundok in Korean) was adopted for a time
and to a certain extent by Koreans and is used today by Japaneseagain,
to a certain extent. It is not a reading method but simply a clumsy means
of writing (Korean or Japanese using Chinese characters) engendered by
the lack of an indigenous writing system suitable for writing an agglutinating language. Nor is Karatani ignorant of this point. This is why
he claims that the Japanese first internalized foreign Chinese characters via kundoku. In order to explain the meaning of internalize, Karatani
kindly comments that Japanese people no longer think they are reading
Chinese characters in their kun readings and instead simply believe they
are expressing Japanese through Chinese characters, but quite apart
from what Japanese people might think, this is precisely the essence of
kundoku~hundok. Whereas Japanese persists in using this clumsy orthographic practice, Korean has long since outgrown it.
174
If kundoku~hundok were a means of reading, Karatanis claim that

Japanese hieroglyphics (the unconscious) also appear consciously (in
terms of phonetic language) might have a leg to stand on, in which case
perhaps his elegant turn of phrasethe mitigation of castrationmight
actually mean something. But insofar as kundoku is a means of writing
Japanese (yamatokotoba/wago), whether it is a form of castration or the
mitigation thereof is irrelevant from the start (in the case of sentences
as opposed to wordsfor example, in cases where one reads a classical Chinese text, such as the Analects, in Japanesekundoku indicates a method of reading through translation, in which case what is
really meant is traditional kanbun kundoku interpretation, and
Karatanis logic might actually make sense).
Moreover, even if one follows Lacan and Karatani in understanding
Japanese kundoku as a mitigation of symbolic castration, the problem
of the countless ondoku Chinese characters in Japanesekango
remains. If one takes what Karatani says about Korea and applies
it to Japan, at the time all these countless kango entered Japanese along
with Chinese characters there should have been castration in Japan,
too, as well as the creation of a subject via oppressionin which case
Japan should likewise have left no mysteries for Westerners. Thus, it is
actually quite unclear whether Japan, in accepting Chinese characters,
experienced castration or not.8
But it gets worse. Insofar as there exists a method of inscribing
yamatokotoba (native Japanese elements) using Chinese charactersi.e.,
kundoku), statements by Karatani like anything written in Chinese characters is perceived as foreign and abstract and [Japan] distinguishes the
etymological source of words with three types of writing (the emphasis
is mine) are at odds with reality. First of all, yamatokotoba inscribed via
Chinese characters are by no means seen as either foreign or abstract,
and second, this is precisely why the fact that they are written in Chinese
characters is of absolutely no help in distinguishing their etymological
source.9
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175
What Karatanis statements presume is not yamatokotoba but kango

not Chinese characters read in kundoku but Chinese characters
read in ondoku. In order to rationalize mitigation of castration, Karatani
starts off discussing kundoku, but as soon as he reaches the bits about
the exterior dimension of the writing system (Chinese characters) or
three types of writing distinguishing the etymological source of words,
he suddenly switches his discussion to ondoku. His argument collapses
before readers even turn the page. At the risk of repeating myself,
this supposedly uniquely Japanese featureusing three kinds of writing
system to distinguish the etymological source of wordsthe ignorance
of which (according to Karatani) renders impossible an understanding of
not only Japanese literature but also Japanese institutions and thinking,
has nothing to do with Japanese reality.
Presumably, what Karatani wanted to say was that wago (native
Japanese elements) are written in hiragana, that kango (Sino-vocabulary in the broad sense) are written with Chinese characters, and that
other foreign words like ygo (Western loanwords) are written in
katakana, but such a statement is miles away from reality in Japanese,
where the overwhelming majority of wago (with the exception of function words) are written in Chinese characters using kundokuwhat
Karatani, relying on Lacan, mooted in order to prove his claim about the
mitigation of castration.
If one revises Karatanis statement to fit the realities of Japanese, all
one can say is that, broadly speaking, Japanese has three lexical layers
consisting of wago, kango, and ygo. But this is not something unique
to Japanese, and much the same state of affairs can be found in Korean,
too. Looking further afield, one soon finds that similar very un-Japanese
states of affairs can be found in many of the worlds languages, starting
with English and its Anglo-Saxon, (Graeco-)Latin, French, and other
foreign-derived lexical layers. Ignoring the kundoku facts (although this
renders Karatanis entire essay meaningless), even if one says that
etymological origins and orthography in Japanese can be paired along
176
the lines of wago ~ hiragana, kango ~ Chinese characters, and ygo ~

katakana, there is nothing uniquely Japanese here at all. If it is a question
of using various writing systems to clarify or emphasize word origins,
one need only think, for example, of the way typical immature Korean
middle and high school students keep their notebooks or write letters. A
representative example would be this:
22 bus
je 22-bn bus rl tago chip e toraomy iran ke mwlkka

komgom saenggakhaess
Yesterday I rode the number 22 bus home and pondered the question, What is ?
The claim that the imperial system was a system of irresponsibility
sounds reasonable, and there is nothing blameworthy in delving into
this question from the perspective of cultural history. But Karatanis
attempt to find the keys to this problem in kundoku and in three types of
writing that distinguish the etymological source of words seems excessive. I smell in his writing the type of flamboyant cultural theory, fancy
rhetoric, and self-orientalism preferred by the likes of Yi ryng (1934).
Because Westerners exoticize and mysticize Japan(ese culture), Japanese
scholars like Karatani play along and exoticize and mysticize their own
culture, too! Kundoku is not a mitigation of castration; it is simply a
clumsy writing system. And the notion of distinguishing the sources of
words with three different kinds of writing has nothing to do with the
realities of the Japanese language. Even supposing it did, this would not
qualify as anything unique to the Japanese language.
Standing on the opposite side of this quest for the special and unique
features of the Japanese language and things Japanese in Japan is a
fervor for foreign cultures and foreign languages. Both the importation
of countless Sino-vocabulary forms starting in ancient times and, especially, the importation of words from European languages starting from
the Meiji period are unmatched among non-European languages in their
We Are All Greeks
177
scope and scalethe katakana forms indexing foreign loans in modernday written Japanese are so numerous as to make ones head spin. The
foreign words that entered Japanese from the warring-states period until
the end of the Bakufu came mostly from Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch,
whereas those that entered the language in great numbers starting in the
Meiji period came from major European languages like French, German,
Russian, and Italian, but of course the overwhelming majority of these
European loanwords came from English. A substantial number of these
European loans were also imported into Korean after Japans annexation
of Korea in 1910.
The fondness of the Japanese language for foreign loanwords (and
foreign languages) is not restricted by occupational group, and government agencies, in particular, stand at the vanguard, spreading this
linguistic laissez-faire-ism. For example, in the 1980s the postal administration came up with a teretopia (teletopia) project, and the Ministry of
Construction developed a plan called sheipu appu mai taun (shape up my
town). Moreover, the Japanese have adopted a liberalism in pronunciation whereby they summarily chop off the ends of European loanwords for conveniences sake and create new words like depto from
department store, sando from sandwich (which then becomes a homonym
with sando from sand), panku from puncture, and terebi from television.
Foreigners complain that they find learning European loanwords like
these even more difficult than learning wago or kango. Just as a considerable number of wasei kango (made-in-Japan Chinese-character
words) were created between the time of the Rangaku scholars in the Edo
period and the time when the huge numbers of translated words were
created during the Meiji, numerous new Japanese-style English words
have been created in Japanese. On top of this, the Japanese have also
created many hybrid words that combine, willy-nilly, native Japanese,
Sino-Japanese, and foreign elements. It is as if Japanese cannot make
up its mind among German-style exclusionism and xenophobia and
English-style laissez-faireism.
178
For me it is obvious which of these three different attitudes toward

language is most desirable: the English laissez-faire model. Just as the
best cultural policy of all is no policyto simply leave culture alone and
let it run its coursethe best language policy is to leave ones language
alone. No policy is the best policy. And if having no policy is unrealistic
or impossible, then it is absolutely necessary to keep policy to the bare
minimum.
Pok Kils Reflections and Proposals

I have come around in a big circle, and now it is time to examine
Pok Kils two essays advocating English as an official language in
Korea: Reflections on the International Language and How Are We
to Greet the Twenty-First Century? But first, even though it does not
specifically advocate English as an official language, I examine another
essay titled The Future of Writing because it makes certain predictions about the future of English and Korean in Korea. In this essay,
Pok Kil supposes that in the future when one unified world civilization comes into being, an international language used in all societies will
also come about, and that the language today with the highest probability of becoming that international language is English. In this future
society virtually all authors will write in the international language
presumably in Englishand a natural result of this will be that the entire
world will become one literary market. Ethno-national languages will
not completely disappear from the future world that Pok Kil sees. A
small minority of authorsespecially literary writerswill continue to
write in their ethno-national languages, but their influence will wane.
These ethno-national languages will gradually fade away from the life
of the general public and turn into museum languages protected and
cultivated by a small group of scholars and literary writers. These ethnonational-languages-turned-museum-languages will be unable to evolve
in step with changing society and will be preserved in the form of
written documents and audio recordings. After composing this essay,
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179
Pok Kil published his Reflections on the International Language, in

which he concluded that, if current trends continue at their present
pace, the chances that English will become the official language in the
majority of societies within five generations are extremely high. And in
his essay How Are We to Greet the Twenty-First Century? he takes
this argument one step further, predicting that within a few decades it
will become a difficult burden for people to maintain an ethno-national
language (other than English) as their mother tongue.
If this is the world of the future, what are we Koreans to do? Pok
Kils answer is for us to adopt English alongside Korean as an official
language. Using English alone would be preferable, but Korean societys
vehement nationalist sentiment will not permit such a thing, and besides,
because Korean citizens of the generations that have heavily invested in
learning Korean would risk actual and psychological losses through the
adoption of an international language, Poks prescription is for Korean
and English to coexist for a substantial period of time. But he proposes
to allow unborn generations to choose for themselves which language
will be better for their lives as mother tongueEnglish, the international language, or Korean, the ethno-national language. This proposal
sparked the so-called English-as-official-language debate in Korea. I now
examine how this debate played out on the pages of the Chosn ilbo.10
An examination of the way this debate unfolded in the Chosn ilbo
is an excellent reminder of just how sensitive the issue of nationalism
is in Korean society. Would you rather live in peace as a slave or be
your own master and live as you like, even if you are economically challenged? (historian Han Yngu [1938]); Even if my mother were a
leper, I would not trade her for Cleopatra (novelist and translator Yi
Yungi [19472010])it is truly difficult to turn emotional responses like
these into logical persuasion. What Pok Kil is actually advocating is not
living peacefully as slaves but (if possible) living peacefully as our own
masters; nor is he proposing that we trade in our mothers for Cleopatra
he is proposing to free our children and their mothers from the torment
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of illness (if possible). Even supposing that Koreans were to abandon

Korean and adopt English, they would not thereby become slaves. Moreover, whereas Han Yngu is talking at the level of collective identity,
Pok Kil is talking about identity at the individual level. This renders
communication between the two of them difficult. Likewise, Yi Yungis
arresting metaphor of the leper mother misses the mark. I was truly
perplexed to see Yi Yungi citing this moving phrase from Kim Souns
(19071981) Mokkn tongsin (Letters to Japan), which I had read twentyodd years ago with such interestPok Kil is not saying his mother is
a leper. Nor did Kim Soun say that because his mother was a leper the
disease should be passed down from one generation to the next.
Paradoxical though it may seem, there is a passage in Yi Yungis essay
that deserves close attentionhis warning to the globalizers:
There is something that the globalizers do not know.
Humankinds most natural emotion, the condition for the blossoming of human potential and what gives meaning to human
existence, what makes one most comfortable and most human, is
not an abstract worldliness but a concrete locality and ones relationship with specific local things like home, neighborhood, and
friends. This local-ness is not necessarily diametrically opposed to
worldliness nor need it be sacrificed to worldliness. Rather, worldliness becomes possible because of and on the basis of locality.
Because this statement is as unclear as it is resonant, it is difficult to
gauge exactly what Yi Yungi is trying to say, but at least it cannot be used
as a critique of Pok Kilas long as Yi Yungi is not just using locality
as a replacement for the walled-in ethno-nation. Pok Kil is proposing
to liberate the home, hometown, neighborhood, and friends of which
Yi Yungi speaksin other words, those concrete conditions that allow
human potential to bloomfrom the oppressive might of nationalism.
Yi Yungi speaks of an abstract worldliness, but for me the imagined
community that is usually called a minjok (ethno-nation; Volk) seems
no less abstract than the world. Pok Kils worldliness (to be sure, Pok
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181
Kil didnt actually use the expression worldliness) is just another word
for individuality, and this individuality is more concretemore local, to
borrow Yi Yungis phraseologythan any collective properties, ethnonationality included. If Yi Yungis concrete locality can be subsumed
within individuality, then Yi Yungi (whatever his original intention may
have been) is supporting Pok Kil. But if Yi Yungis concrete locality
means only the walled-off ethno-nationin other words, if what he
means is our home, our native place, our neighborhood, and our friends
must never go beyond the enclosures of our ethno-nationthen the last
two sentences in this passage are disingenuous.
Chng Kwaris Defense of Pok Kil

Gets It Only Half Right
Weak logical reasoning is a problem also for those who defend Pok
Kil. Literary critic Chng Kwari (1958) writes that people understand this debate as a confrontation between nationalism and cosmopolitanism (segyejui), but in actual fact it is not, and in actual fact he is
right, at least as long as this cosmopolitanism means individualismthat
is, citizen-of-the-world-ness (segyesiminjui). Moreover, Chng Kwari
writes that Pok Kils prescription, paradoxically, incorporates a fervent
nationalist passion and that therefore this debate is a confrontation
between nationalism in theory and nationalism in practice, but I did
not see anything in Pok Kils book about fervent nationalist passion or
nationalism in practice.
What Chng Kwari misreads in Pok Kils position as fervent nationalist passion or nationalism in practice is a concern for the welfare of
each and every individual in the makeup of collectivities of various sizes,
including ethno-nations (Pok Kil usually discusses the Korean ethnonation in his works, but it could be any ethno-nation). This concern for
the welfare of individuals, even if the concrete individuals mooted by Pok
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Kil happen to be Koreans, cannot be called fervent nationalist passion

or nationalism in practice.
Moreover, Chng Kwari writes that the question posed by Pok Kil
is not about accepting the Pax Americana. What Pok is urging us to
do is simply to reflect on the inevitable conditions for survival being
demanded of Koreans in the context of dual globalization, but this is
only half right. Pok Kil accepts the Pax Americana. And on this basis
he reflects on the conditions for survival of each and every individual.
Chng Kwari also writes that Pok Kils advocacy of English as an official language is a different concept from that of English as a mother
tongue, but this, too, is only partially correct. Pok Kil thinks that, ultimately, English as a mother tongue is the path that Koreans must choose.
Recall the thought experiment proposed by Pok Kil in his How Are
We to Greet the Twenty-First Century?:
Suppose that your newborn child were given the opportunity to
choose between English and Korean (Chosn) as mother tongue
which language would you recommend to your child? On one
hand is a life where using English fluently allows your child to
get along easily with all people in the world, to suffer no handicaps in daily life or at work, and to access with ease cutting-edge
information and numerous examples of cultural heritage realized
in English. On the other hand is a life where your child enjoys
the pleasures of perpetuating the Chosn used by our ancestors
but has to compete with the people of the world while finding the
use of English difficult and distressing, avoiding social situations
with people from other countries, suffering a handicap all through
life, practically unable to enjoy various types of cultural heritage
realized in English, unable to receive in real time information that
needs to be up to the minute and second, and therefore always
getting that information late, via translations full of errors and in
quantities that represent only a tiny fraction of the usable information available. So which kind of life would you recommend to
your child? Would you rather take this choice away altogether?
Especially if your child has yet to ever learn or use Chosn, has
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183
made no psychological investment in Chosn, and has no great

affection for Chosn? (192193)
However each individual might answer this question, Pok Kil
assumes that English as a mother tongue is the ultimate destination. This
is why he says, [Because] it is difficult for us to just start using English,
even though it is the international language; because Korean societys
vehement nationalist sentiment will not permit such a thing; because
Korean citizens of the generations that have made such investments in
learning Korean would risk actual and psychological losses through the
adoption of an international language; therefore, voices opposing the
adoption of the international language are bound to be vociferous; it
is desirable for Korean and English to coexist for a substantial period of
time; and for this to happen, the most realistic solution is to take steps
to adopt English as an official language (179180). In this respect, Nam
Yngsin, who really is in the thrall of nationalist fervor and therefore
refuses to engage in level-headed debate, is actually reading Pok Kil
correctly.11
Of course, if I were to go out of my way to look for reasons why Chng
Kwari might misread Pok Kil, I could probably find some. Pok Kils
book is not one of those works that systematically develops an elaborate
and considerate logical argument, on top of which is the fact that he
speaks here and there of open nationalism and closed nationalism.
But anybody who has read Pok Kils book closely will know that his
open nationalism is nothing more than a veil for individualism or liberalism. Thus, I do not think that Chng Kwari, who is one of the more
intelligent writers on the Korean literary scene, misread Pok Kil unintentionallyhe is misreading him on purpose. For unless one sets out to
misread Pok Kil intentionally, one must ultimately face the irritation of
embracing his position.
Here again I confirm the resilience of the nationalist sinews that bind
even our most outstanding intellectuals in Korea so tightly. Chng Kwari
could defend Pok Kil in name but was unable to embrace Pok Kil
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in essencenamely, his critique of nationalism. He concludes his essay

with the remark that we must undertake a dual task: preparations for
English and the refinement of hangl.12 They are two sides of the same
coin. This is a welcome suggestion, but is not a defense of Pok Kil
Pok Kil has nothing to say about the refinement of hangl. Be that as
it may, I concur with Chng Kwaris suggestion.
The Sophistry of Choe Wnsik

The person who evinced the worst attitude of all in the Chosn ilbo debate
was probably literary critic and professor Choe Wnsik. He begins his
essay with the snide remark, Frankly speaking, I have some doubts as to
whether there is even a need for so many people to speak up and debate
Pok Kils views on English as an official language, then moves on to a
citation from Kim Suyngs poem, Kdaehan ppuri (Great roots) and
ends with a paean to tradition. If he thinks there is no need for debate,
all he need do is keep his silence. I cannot fathom why Choe Wnsik
felt the need to join this unnecessary debate.
Choe Wnsik praises tradition because a new model that goes
beyond the idols of the nation-state and the marketplace will emerge
from this tradition. Choe Wnsik is not the first to use the words a
new model that goes beyond the idols of the nation-state and the marketplace, but I am getting sick and tired of people without their own
opinions and people trying to shirk responsibility forever using it as a
kind of place of refuge and as the justification for deferred decisions.
(I wonder when this marvelous but marvelously vague new model will
appear. It really needs to come out while the people who are hunting
for it are still alive. However, it seems that as long as it doesnt materialize, they will still be able to keep pretending to be busy. Cant we just
take what we have, fix it up a bit, and use that? Why do these people
like replacing things so much?) In the end, Tony Blairs Third Way and
Gerhard Schroeders New Middle, too, were well within the limits of a
We Are All Greeks
185
liberalism that embraced a mixed economy. Mainstream liberals have

always been interested in social welfare systems. What we really need
to get beyond is the idol of the new model. Because Pok Kil is such a
genuine and earnest person, he does not wax sarcastic about new models
as I do. Instead, he stands up to those who seek such new models and
calmly tells them in good faith the following:
Once the realities of Marxist command economies became better
known, it was confirmed that mixed economies based on the free
market were the best among currently existing economic systems.
But alternative societies remain highly attractive in South Korean
society. The reason for this is probably that because they are
imagined, idealized societies that do not actually exist, they are
compared with the actually existing but highly imperfect systems.
If such an alternative society were to materialize, there is no
chance it would be even as good as a Marxist command economy.
The only mechanisms known for organizing complicated modern
societies and economic activities to date have been the bureaucracies of the marketplace and the nation-state. Compared to a vague
and unrealistic alternative economic system, a Marxist command
economy is quite clear and realistic. At least it was able to survive
for more than seventy years while solving some social problems
in its own way.
Nor is using tradition to critique Pok Kils critique of nationalism
very effective. Pok Kil is not proposing to abolish tradition; rather, he
is saying that much of the culture that has its origins in Europethe
governmental tradition, actuallyhas already become part of our own
tradition. According to Pok Kils view, what has created the Korea of
today is not just Korean or East Asian history but also Western history.
But what annoys the reader most in Choe Wnsiks insincere essay is
the sophistry he uses to trip up his opponents in statements like Westernism and ultranationalism are not simply opposites but are like opposite sides of the same coin, the flipside of Westernism is ultranationalism, and [Pok Kils] Westernism may well be a very special kind
186
of nationalism. Thanks to Choe Wnsik, Pok Kil has received the

honor of being dubbed both a nationalist and an ultranationalist. Turns
of phrase like A and B are like two sides of the same coin, the flip side
of B is A, and B is a very special kind of A are fancy blends of logic and
rhetoric that resonate deeply with listeners. And it is a fact that in some
contexts and on a deep level, these sorts of intellectual propositions so
beloved by fancy intellectuals in their dispositions sometimes contain a
grain of truth. But the truths of those contexts and that level are truths
about which there is hardly any need to speak. And when the context of
the statement in question is not that deep level, it becomes sophistry.
For example, I can borrow Choe Wnsiks phrasing and say something like this: Pak Chnghui and Chang Chunha were not simply opposites but were like opposite sides of the same coin, the flip side of novelist
Kim Tongni was Kim Chnghan, and literary critic Paek Nakchng is a
very special kind of Kim Hyn. Heck, because all things are constantly
changing in this world, liberalism can become fascism, fascism can
become democracy, democracy can become Bolshevism, Bolshevism can
become anarchism, and as the saying in the Heart Sutra goes,
: Form is emptiness, and the very emptiness is formso why
are you gentlemen fighting if its all the same? Irresponsible turns of
phrase like these are allowed for Daoist adepts or sage Buddhist monks,
but not for secular writers with a responsibility to treat reality with
discerning judgment.13
Of all the people who participated in the Chosn ilbo debate, the one
who put forward the most reasonable views was probably philosopher
Pak Imun (1930). He fully supports Pok Kils critique of nationalism
because nationalism is like the trees for which one cannot see the forest.
But he is less generous with his support when it comes to Pok Kils
views on English as an official language because, he claims, the Korean
situation is different from that of medieval European intellectuals who,
for the sake of learning and civilization, turned their backs on their
vernaculars and chose Latin as their common languagea choice that
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187
was both wise and unavoidable for them. Even if one concedes that
English as an official language is necessary in Korea, he adds, it will
be possible only several centuries later in a situation where English has
spread far and wide naturally. And, he says, even if one supposes that
English as an official language is possible in Korea, there needs to be
intense discussion as to whether it would be a rational choice to replace
the ethno-national language that carries the spiritual heritage of seventy
million people with a foreign language. Pak Imun also points outin a
premise similar to Pok Kilsthat language does not exist simply as a
tool. I seem to be vacillating between Pak Imun and Pok Kil.
Latin as a Universal Language

The two most obvious comparisons with English as a latent universal
language are Latin as the common literary language of medieval Europe
and hanmun, or literary Sinitic, as the common literary language of
East Asia, although the sociolinguistic situations of these two classical
languages were quite different from that of modern English.
Even after the fall of Rome, in most European countries Latin remained
the language of the educated class and of teachers and students for
many centuries. Until at least the eighteenth century, this language
was the international language of scholarship, and therefore not only
scholarly publications but also the letters exchanged between scholars
were composed in Latin. Moreover, Latin was the official administrative language of the church until the middle of the twentieth century.
Officially speaking, Latin was the ritual language of the Roman Catholic
Church until the Second Vatican Council of 1963. Within the traditional hierarchy of languages in Europe, using the vernacularthat is,
the ethno-national languagewas tantamount to self-excommunication
for intellectuals. Abandoning Latin was no different from departing the
world of learning and the republic of letters. Besides, it also meant
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remaining anonymous and exposing oneself more easily to the risk of

plagiarism.
The Renaissance was an especially glorious period for Latin. During
this period, Latin rose to the status of universal language of humanism;
insofar as the Renaissance meant a return to the values of the classical
age and because humanists, strictly speaking, were above all scholars
of classical languages and editors of classical texts, this was an entirely
natural development. Thus, Latin dominated Europe until the end of the
Renaissance and retained its authority and prestige even later in certain
fields.
During the Renaissance, writing in Latin was the philosophical and
aesthetic duty of all first-rate writers, regardless of nationality; Erasmus
published his Stultitiae laus (The praise of folly) in Holland in 1508,
Machiavelli published The Prince in 1532 in Italy, and Thomas More
wrote his 1516 Utopia in England, all in Latin. The Imitation of Christ, first
published anonymously in Latin in 1438 (but thought to be the work of
Thomas Kempis) had undergone six thousand printings by the beginning of the twentieth century.
Scientists in particular were unable to imagine writing in a language
other than LatinLatins universality not only allowed scholars from
different language areas to communicate with each other but also
afforded stability and longevity as a kind of museum language. Almost all
the great authors who contributed to the development of modern science
wrote in Latin. Copernicus, Tico Brahae, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo
in the field of astronomy, as well as Andreas Vesalius and William
Harvey in the fields of anatomy and biology, are typical examples. Even
after scholarly societies like the Royal Society in England (established
1662) and the Acadmie des Sciences in France (established 1666) had
begun conducting their business in their respective vernaculars, Latin
continued to show remarkable vitality. Isaac Newton wrote his Principia
in Latin in 1687, and Carl von Linn (Carl Linnaeus) wrote his Systema
naturae in Latin in 1735. If Linnaeus had not created his system of termi-
We Are All Greeks
189
nology in Latin, it would never have been able to take root as the definitive international system of botanical binomial nomenclature.
It needs to be emphasized that scholars adoption of Latin for their
works was not simply a matter of prestige; communication and propagation were also key motivations. Both Galileos Dialogue Concerning
the Two Chief World Systems (1632) and Francis Bacons Sylva sylvarum
(1627; a kind of scientific encyclopedia, the title of which means forest
of forests in Latin but which was originally composed in English) were
translated into Latin after their authors deaths, and Descartes translated
his own Discours de la mthode into Latin in 1644. In tandem with the
rise of the vernaculars as languages of publishing, books published in
the vernaculars were also frequently translated into Latin. Translation
into Latin was the only way to make these works available to foreign
readers; besides, authors also had to keep in mind those scholars in their
own communities who worked only in Latin.
Thus, Latin was used as the language of science until the beginning
of the eighteenth century, and lectures in theology and classics were
conducted in Latin until the beginning of the twentieth century. Use of
the vernacular in university science education did not begin until 1740 in
Germany (and then only partially) and in France not until after the revolution in 1789. But Latin continued to be used, if only partially, in French
universities right up to the middle of the twentieth century. And the
requirement in colleges of humanities to write ones graduation thesis in
Latin was not abolished until 1908. In other words, Latin as the language
of science and philosophy completely monopolized higher education, a
state of affairs aided in no small part by the aura lent to Latin by its
status as the direct heir of Roman philosophy and as the vessel of Greek
philosophy. It was not even possible to find university texts composed
in the vernaculars.
In 1687 Christian Thomasius (16551728) at the University of Leipzig
was the first professor in the history of German universities to deliver
a lecture in German, but it would not be until the nineteenth century
190
that German language and literature became objects of study in German

universities and courses were regularly taught in German.
Even after scholars had stopped using it, Latin (and Greek) persisted in
scientific terminology. As scientists in nineteenth-century Europe gave
new names to new fields of research and entire new fields of study, they
relied on Latin (and Greek) because this was a way to ensure international standards while avoiding confusion across languages. Today, the
international terminologies of botany, zoology, and anatomy are still
predominantly Latinate. In other scientific fields, too, one frequently
encounters words either borrowed from Latin or formed from Latin
roots. Thus, strictly speaking, Latin is not a dead language.
Hanmun (Literary Sinitic) as a Universal Language

Just like Latin in Europe, classical Chinese, or literary Sinitic (known
as hanmun in modern Korean), was the common international
language of intellectuals in East Asia. Not only in China, but also in
Korea, Vietnam, and Japan, literary works, historical works, diplomatic
documents, and so on, composed in hanmun comprise a significant
portion of the cultural heritage of each of these countries. In China, the
vernacular language (baihua ), under the banner of democracy and
science, did not gain a foothold as a written language until the literary
revolution at the beginning of the twentieth century. Much the same
was also true of Chinas neighbors that had adopted Chinese characters
and literary Sinitic at an early date. In Korea, even after literary work
in vernacular Korean became possible with the invention of the Hunmin
chngm in the fifteenth century, literary Sinitic persisted as the mainstream written language and relinquished its place of honor only at the
end of the nineteenth century. Just as in Europe with Latin, writing in
vernacular Korean in premodern Korea was tantamount to withdrawing
from intellectual society. As a result, a strict diglossia took root among
Korean intellectuals: they spoke in Korean, but they wrote in hanmun.14
We Are All Greeks
191
Even in Japan, with its relatively older and more substantial literary
tradition whereby composing waka poetry had become part of the daily
life of the aristocracy as early as the ninth century, and where a type of
narrative fiction called monogatari had appeared at the beginning of the
tenth century, education in literary Sinitic (called kanbun in Japanese)
was the mark of an intellectual. The ability to read and write texts in
literary Sinitic was an essential feature of the cultivated person.
Thus, even though East Asian intellectuals had no knowledge of the
vernacular languages of their counterpart nations, they were able to
communicate with each other via the common literary language of
literary Sinitichanmun was an Esperanto for the eyes. Just as Latin
served as a universal language for Europeans, so hanmun was a universal
language for East Asians. And now English seeks to bind together Latin
and hanmun, intellectuals and the general public.
America: Metropolis of the Global Empire

Among the various claims that Pok Kil has made, three in particular
have become controversial. The first is that at some point in the not-toodistant future, English will become the international language and will
be used as an official language in all the worlds societies; the second is
that ethno-national languages will gradually fade away from the lives of
the general public until they become museum languages preserved only
by a few scholars and writers; and the third is that South Korea should
adopt as an official language the language that is currently developing
into the standard language of all humankindEnglish. The key term in
examining these controversies is the word used by Pok Kil in his book:
global empire. His claim is that as national borders become less relevant
and more permeable and the world becomes a smaller and more interconnected place, a new order with empire-like features has come about,
and the actual center of this empire is the United States.
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The global empire that readers are used to encountering in science

fiction and futurology books is different from the situation they are
witnessing now. Pok Kil himself, as one might suspect from the scare
quotes he puts around the term, is not deploying global empire in any
strict sense. But even if it is different from empires of the past like
the Roman or Chinese Empires, there is no question that the world is
changing into a new form of empire, one perhaps more akin to the
loosely bound city-states of ancient Greece, orto speak more boldly
loosely bound pluricentric empires like the medieval Holy Roman
Empire or even the Austro-Hungarian Empire just before the beginning of the twentieth century. Of course, there could be any number of
different opinions as to the speed of this change, but if one understands
Pok Kils global empire as a single civilizational sphere that goes by the
name of empire, it is difficult to deny that this is the big-picture trend.
And the ever-increasing levels of trade and capital transfer will only feed
this trend. Besides, a world government is also the ultimate ideal.
And it is also clear that the metropolis of this symbolic empire is the
United States. Throughout history the greatest talents have always gathered in the centers of empires, and today the worlds greatest talents,
irrespective of field, are gathering in the United States. Or at least any
major talent that hasnt debuted in the United States has trouble gaining
international recognition. And whether ones headquarters is in the
United States or not, any publication that is not written in English
especially in the scientific fieldshas trouble reaching a world audience.
The one language at the top of the pecking order of world languages
is English, and in the not-too-distant future using ones ethno-national
language instead of English will come to entail banishing oneself from
the world of knowledge and information.
Pok Kils predictions that the chances of English becoming the official
language in most societies within five generations are incredibly high
and that within only a few decades anybody using an ethno-national
language (other than English) will find it an increasingly difficult burden
We Are All Greeks
193
to bear sound quite bold, but to me they actually seem too cautious. In
fact, even now it is already a significant burden, at least for anybody
professionally concerned with knowledge and information, to speak an
ethno-national language other than English, and if one understands the
expression most societies loosely, it doesnt seem to me that it will take
as long as five generations for English to become the official language.
When it does happen, and when those people who have come to use
English as their official language find out not only that somebody called
Pok Kil in Korea had already suggested English as an official language
at the end of the twentieth century but also that he encountered vociferous criticism at the time, they probably wont believe itthey will find
incredible, that is, both the eminent sensibility of the suggestion and the
resistance that it encountered.
Nation, National Language, Nation-State

But the idea that ethno-national languages will fade away from the lives
of the general public and become museum languages preserved only by
a few scholars and writers is a separate problem. If I have read him
correctly, Pok Kil does not seem to posit a very long time between
the imminent total internationalization of English and the museum
language-ification of the ethno-national languagesthat is, the actual
disappearance of ethno-national languages. But I think that the total
internationalization of English and the disappearance of the ethnonational language are discrete problems. That is, I believe that English
and the ethno-national language will coexist for a long time and that
those for whom English is not a mother tongue will become bilingual. For
myself, I cannot even imagine the disappearance of our ethno-national
language. I am saying not that ethno-national languages shouldnt disappear but that they likely wont go away so easily.
And this, more than anything else, is because neither ethno-nations
nor the nation-state will go away so easily. Even after a more-than-
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seventy-year socialist experiment that sought its destruction, if only in

theory, the nation-state has managed to survive. I do not believe that the
nation-state, characterized by this sort of survivability, will simply blow
away before the winds of globalization. Thus, even if nation-states and
ethno-national languages do not always go hand in hand, I rather doubt
that the ethno-national language will disappear easily, either.
What jumps to mind more than anything else are Chinese and Arabic.
Even if one declines to buy into the perspective of a clash of civilizations in the twenty-first century, I find it difficult to imagine billions of
Chinese packing off their language to the museum anytime soon when
they have to stand up to the simultaneous centripetal pressure and integrative pull of Western civilization. The same goes for Japanese, with its
intimate connections to Chinese characters. Somehow I doubt that 127
million speakers of Japanese will ditch their language in favor of English.
Much the same goes for the Islamic world. Its constituents will become
incorporated into the global empire at a much faster pace than now, but
even supposing they were to adopt English as an official language, they
are highly unlikely to abandon their own language and its prestige as the
language of the Quran. It is the holy text of the Quran that has bound
together all the different forms of Arabic until now, and this will remain
the case as long as the religion of Islam continues to exist. Somehow I just
cannot picture Arabs performing their religious ceremonies in English.
As long as Islam exists, (classical) Arabic will remain in the Muslim world
alongside English, of course.
The same goes for Europeans. The number of English-speaking
Russians, English-speaking Spaniards, and English-speaking French will
gradually increase, and at some point in time they might all be able to use
English, but even then, their languages will not be going to the museum.
And the same is true for us Koreans, who are much weaker when
it comes to both our ethno-nation and our language. Whether because
compared to Europeans our history of ethno-national formation runs
We Are All Greeks
195
deeper and stronger or because we have long become accustomed to

a special situation of one nation, one nation-state, and one language,
our attachment to the ethno-nation and ethno-national language runs
strong and stubbornKorean will survive at least as long as or longer
than any European language. To be sure, the current situation cannot last
forever. Korea, too, will likely become a multiethnic nation-state at some
point in the future, and even if the ethno-nation itself does not disappear, the sense of belonging to an ethno-nation could thin out precipitously. But such a situation would invoke yet another, different nationalist reaction, and thus the ethno-national language as the strongest
marker of the ethno-nation will likely survive for a long, long time, albeit
with less force than now. To be sure, there exist even now quite a few
ethno-national languages so weakened that they will likely be pushed by
English into becoming museum languages in the not-too-distant future,
but many ethno-national languagesKorean among themwill stubbornly cling to life. This is why other (non-Anglophone) societies with
ethno-national languages other than English will likely become diglossic
societies in which the ethno-national language is used alongside English.
The status of English as a latent international language is currently
unchallenged (and unassailable) by any other contender, and it seems
certain that this will be the case for the foreseeable future. And the
speed with which English is approaching the status of mega-international language will only grow faster.
After World War I (American) English crossed the Atlantic and landed
on the beaches of Europe, and after World War II it became an international language of communication connecting not just Europe but the
entire world. The collapse of the Soviet bloc afforded yet another opportunity to English, but it has to be emphasized that the world domination
of the English language had become an irreversible fait accompli even
before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The English wind that blew through
Eastern Europe and the rest of the Communist bloc had kicked up long
before the flames of perestroika were ignited. Riding the wave of glob-
196
alization in economics, science, and technology and leading the intricate network of media and advertising, English has draped itself in the
mantle of a conveyor of modernity and spread first to Europe and then to
the entire world. Just as Latin was the universal language that conveyed
science and culture in the middle ages, English is well on its way to
becoming the universal language of our times.
Class Implications of Opposition to English as an

Official Language
Of course, the sociolinguistic status of medieval Latin and modern-day
English are different. Whereas Latin was the sole working and cultural
language for a limited number of intellectual elites, English is acquired
in more or less superficial ways and used for limited purposes and activities by many people all around the globe without regard to occupation. Whereas the intellectual education of medieval and early modern
European elites was conducted entirely in Latin, in todays advanced
nations the ethno-national languages serve as the medium of instruction
in schools and as the basic working languages and languages of expression.
Another way in which medieval Latin and modern-day English differ
is that the legitimacy of Latin, unlike that of English, was based in a belief
in classicalness. For Europeans, Latin was the conveyor of a common
symbolic capital to all Europeans. This is quite different from the attitudes and postures assumed by people today toward English. At least
for now, the majority of people in non-English-speaking Europe access
their classical resources via their ethno-national languages rather than
via English. That is, in todays world English functions not as a supranational language but as an international auxiliary language. This is all
the more true because English also happens to be the ethno-national
language of several nation-states and therefore cannot claim the same
We Are All Greeks
197
neutrality that Latin enjoyed in the age of classicism. This is a weakness

for English.
But English has plenty of strengths to make up for this weakness.
When medieval intellectuals used either Latin or hanmun, they must
have felt like they were enjoying a kind of special privilege or right.
And even after these classical languages were confronted by the vernaculars, these intellectuals through their use of words with their roots in
Latin and hanmun clearly must have evinced an attitude of enjoying the
privileges of the education they had received. Indeed, this was one of
the contexts that facilitated acceptance of movements advocating use of
or purification of the vernacular. But English is different from medieval
Latin and hanmun; it has drunk deep of Greek and Roman nutrients yet
cannot boast the same prestige and authority of these classical languages.
If knowledge of Latin in medieval Europe was a badge of privilege, the
proposals today to use English as an official language are part of an effort
to abolish privilege. This is an extremely important point.
Among the various factors that have facilitated the spread of English,
many single out the demotic and populist characterthe antielitismof
the Anglophone world as represented by the United States. Besides the
economic and political factors that facilitate the spread of a language,
cultural and (more precisely) image-related factors also play a surprisingly important role. For example, in the eighteenth century, French
confronted Latin and went on to become the universal language of
Europe. The Berlin Academy published all its proceedings in French
and even went so far as to sponsor a competition for the best essay on
why French had become the universal language. Until the end of the
nineteenth century, the Russian Royal Court used French. But none of
this was because of the economic and political might of France. It was
because of the quasi-universal image of French culture held by Europeans. During the Cold War, Russian was an obligatory subject at all
levels of education in Eastern Europe, but that the people learning it
harbored psychological resistance toward Russian is proved in that as
198
soon as the Cold War ended, people in this region ditched Russian in
droves. For Eastern Europeans, Russian was associated with the image
of Russia in tsarist times.
Some point out that one reason for the establishment of the hegemony
of English in Europethe home of those languages that might actually
have had a chance at challenging English brieflyis that the linguistic
frontline on this continent has congealed between English and French.
If this frontline had also formed in other places, say, between English
or French and German, or between English and French or Spanish, the
establishment of the hegemony of English would have proceeded more
slowly, but because only French stood up to the giant that is English, it
has been easier for English to advance across the continent.
So how did it come about that mighty languages in the recent past like
German and Spanish fell from power and ended up confined within the
borders of their countries? One reason is that these are the languages of
politically fallen countries and cultures. When a language becomes the
conveyor of ideologies like nationalism, racism, or absolutism, people
imagine the traces of these ideologies to reside in the languages themselves. When a language becomes the expression of a people unjustly
enjoying certain privileges or occupying certain territory, or if that
language is used as a tool to propagandize racial purity, it loses its
basis for any claim to universality. And yet German and Spanish played
precisely these roles in the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s. In the case
of Spanish, the language continued to play this sort of role even after
the war and until the death of Franco in the mid-1970s. When World
War II ended with the defeat of the Axis Powers, German lost forever
its former prestige as a language of culture. And the fact that people in
Catalonia continue to resist Castilian Spanish while resolutely defending
their own language of Catalan has everything to do with the image of
Spanish under Francoism. And so English came to fill the void left by
German and Spanish.
We Are All Greeks
199
What, then, is the image of English? As with any society, there are
many dark stains on parts of the Anglophone world, starting first and
foremost with the United States, so there are bound to be differing opinions, but it is a fact that the image of English is associated with aspects
of American society like its multiethnicity, multiculturalism, religious
pluralism, openness, populism, progressivism, antielitism, secularism,
liberalism, and individualism. The imperialist image of the United States
that has formed in the third world and in other places and its image as
an international cop is neutralized to a great extent by the more positive images just listed. As mentioned briefly, this counts as a strength of
English vis--vis the classical languages. For new learners of English, any
historical baggage that might evoke psychological resistance has been
erased with relative ease.
Thus, principally by the logic of the economy, and partially also owing
to additional political and cultural factors, English in the not-so-distant
future will turn most people of the world into bilinguals. Even if one
supposes that the United States falls from its position at the center of the
global empire sooner than predicted, the language of the empire will still
be English. Latin persisted in Western Europe even after the fall of Rome,
and even after Greece as a nation became completely insignificant, Greek
remained for a long time the language of the Eastern Orthodox Church.
If this is the case, then there would appear to be no pressing reason
to delay the adoption of English as an official language. The important point is not to interrupt natural trends, and English as an official
language is one such natural trend. If active promotion of English as an
official language is somehow unnatural, then trying to stop the trend
toward it by artificial means is just as unnatural. Simply because we can
stave off this trend by building a wall around ourselves made of bricks
called nationalism does not mean that the waves of English will simply
stop outside our wall. The zeal of Koreans to learn English today has
not been forced on them by legislation, and just as in many other nonAnglophone societies, it is gaining momentum with each passing day.
200
Any effort to thwart this trend is futile. If one starts teaching children
when they are young, it is not so difficult for them to become bilingual.15
One thing that needs emphasizing here is the class implications behind
opposition to English as an official language. To oppose English as an
official language means to allow certain groups to monopolize knowledge and informationjust as the medieval elites who were able to read
and write Latin and hanmun monopolized knowledge. Information is
power. Whether English is made an official language in Korea or not,
members of the Korean ruling elite will eagerly teach English to their
children. And their children, with their familiarity with English, will
continue to rule over the children of the general Korean public who
are alienated from knowledge and information because of their unfamiliarity with English. Democracy as I understand it does not take kindly
to special groups monopolizing knowledge in this way. Questions of
democracy aside, there are many differences between societies in which
all members of society share in knowledge and societies in which only
a special class can acquire knowledge.
We Are All Individuals

After we Koreans have become bilinguals, and after our ethno-national
language has become a museum language at some unimaginable point
in the distant future, and when, ultimately, the Korean ethno-nation has
disappeared, we may briefly encounter an identity problem. But I am not
very worried about this problem. Just because our ethno-nation disappears does not mean that we lose our identity. All we will lose is our
identity as an ethno-nation. And in compensation for losing our identity
as an ethno-nation, we will gain a new identity as citizens of the world
and a new identity as human beings; with the release from the oppression of nationalism on various levels of our human relations, we will
gain new identities. The language we will be speaking then (if it is called
English) will be an English that has imbibed not just Greek and Roman
We Are All Greeks
201
culture but all of human culture, East and West, from ancient times until
that moment; it will be a partially regionalized English. And the society
that we live in then, unlike Korea today, will not be a monoethnic society.
We will learn how to make friends with neighbors who do not have the
same blood as we do, and we will also learn how to share our blood
with them. The word honhyrin ( person of mixed blood) will not
have the same nuance of contempt that is has now, and instead miscegenation will be so common that honhyrin might even disappear from
the dictionary. To be sure, all this is far in the future, in a distant future
that is hard for us to imagine.
We are all Greeksjust as we are all Chinese and Koreans. And I dont
mean in the distant future. Even now, we are all Greeks. And I dont
mean this simply in the sense that the English we Koreans start learning
in our early teens is filled with European culture starting from the time
of the Greeks. European culture ever since Greece (or Egypt, for that
matter) is now a fundamental part of our institutions, our daily life, and
our thought. It has already become (as Pok Kil has noted) our dominant
tradition. That it is a foreign civilization is not a problem. The traditional civilization, many parts of which were pushed out by this foreign
civilization, was hanmun civilization, which in turn was yet another
foreign civilization that we just happened to adopt even earlier. In other
words, the foreign civilization that we have adopted from Europe is just
another traditional civilization that we accepted a bit later.
The temporal difference between these two foreign civilizations or
between these two traditional civilizations is little more than a thousand
years and a few centuries. And when reckoned in the light of the time
since humans left behind their natural state and began to create culture,
those thousand years and a few centuries are not a very long time. It
needs to be pointed out that, in terms of temporal density, those thousand
years and a few centuries are far more compact than the tens of thousands of years that preceded them. And the temporal density of the last
century or so, during which Koreans have made European civilization
202
a part of their own tradition, is again incomparably denser than that of

the preceding thousand years and a few centuries. More importantly, the
features that distinguish the Greeks from us Koreans, like the features
that distinguish the Chinese from us, are so infinitely small compared to
the features that bind us together as fellow human beings as to be safely
ignored. To say that we are all Greeks is to say that we are all individualsindividuals, that is, as the basic unit of humanity, and individuals
as the ultimate minority.
Pok Kil once said that it is the fate of all religious knowledge systems
to be locked within the philosophical framework of the world into which
they were born because they exclude the possibility that they might be
wrong. But this does not apply only to religious knowledge systems that
expose themselves in all their gory detail. Is it inevitable for knowledge
systems to be locked within the philosophical framework of the world
into which they were born when virtually all of them take on religious
characteristics to a certain extent? Like the views I have critiqued in this
chapter, my own views criticizing them are likely constrained within the
philosophical frame of todays world. My only hope is that in this essay,
I have not completely drowned out my teachers voice.
Inmul kwa sasang 8 (October 1998)
We Are All Greeks
203
Notes
1. Pok Kils collection of essays, Hynsil kwa chihyangHan chayujuija i sigak [Reality and intentionality: A liberals perspective] (Seoul:
Munhak kwa chisngsa, 1990), published at the beginning of the 1990s,
counts as one of the most important books published in Korea after liberation in 1945. All the other essay collections that Pok Kil has published
since are simply variations on this book. As he frequently reminds
others, concrete predictions are always dangerous, so, for example, the
timing he imagined for US troop withdrawal from Korea in his chapter
Things to Do before the US Army Exits Korea was, in retrospect,
premature. But this does not detract in any way from the appropriateness of the change in perception concerning the US Armed Forces
in Korea as a positive choice of the Korean people, suggested in the
same essay. Moreover, rather in contrast to his own modest worry, the
themes treated in the essays in this book have by and large retained their
significance until today, and the liberal perspective he adopts in treating
these themes will retain its timeliness well into the future. At present
there is too little liberalism in South Korean society, and this is likely to
be the case for quite some time into the future.The criticism that this
book is not original; the ideas that Pok Kil is expounding in this book
are common in Europe and the United States does not detract significantly from the books value. The important point is that this book was
written in Korean for Korean readers with the Korean social situation
in mind. Besides, the Korean in it, too, even if it can be criticized for
being an extreme form of Western translationese, is a neat and beautiful Korean that is hard to find on the Korean literary scene. To put it
another way, this book can be read as a literary text. But of course the
reason I am saying that this book was the most important postliberation
Korean book that one could read is not its literary charms. This book
mitigated the predilection for left-right collectivism forced upon Korean
society by the experience of colonialism and division and opened up a
path (however narrow) toward the individual. Broadening that path, as
Pok Kil occasionally notes so sardonically, will be extremely difficult,
but just opening it up in the first place was even more difficult. There
are plenty of intellectuals in South Korean society who fancy themselves
liberals, but there are very few who are unaffected by either populism or
204
fascism. And among those few rare souls, I daresay Pok Kil is the only
one to have made any deep investigation of what liberalism really is. The
reason for this lies in the oppressive ideological climate of South Korean
society, but this is precisely what accentuates Pok Kils intellectual
independence. The brief polemic waged between Pok Kil and Chng
Unyng about Reality and Intentionality (judging, at least, by the tone
of the remarks they exchanged) was one of the most beautiful episodes
created by the collision of individual versus universal and collective
versus particular in the history of South Korean polemics. That this beautiful episode was so short-lived, ending up merely a minor illustration
attending the publication of the book, is connected to the autism and selfsatisfaction of South Korean intellectual society. Pok Kils misfortune
is not simply that the disquieting radicalism of his liberalism is viewed
with such disdain and alarm by society but that he has also never met
his equal among his critics. For the most part, and with the exception
of Chng Unyng, Pok Kils critics have been individuals whose spirits
were infinitely smaller than that of the object of their criticism. If I occasionally criticize Pok Kil in this book, the same applies to me. Its not
that there are no individuals in South Korean society with the intellectual
wherewithal to meet him on an even playing field, but they shy away
from involving themselves in this sort of debateit is always safer in the
case of a daunting opponent to pretend he doesnt exist and ignore him
than it is to take him seriously and meet him head on. Thus, the task of
getting blood on ones hands has fallen to the intellectual midgets. This
is why the debates about Pok Kil, rare though they be, always end up
resembling a series of bizarre non sequiturs.
2. Kim Yongok, Sae Chunhyang tyn [New tale of Chunhyang] (Seoul:
Tongnamu, 1987), 242243.
3. In fact, the liberalism debate of the early 1990s and the nationalism
debate eight years later were fundamentally the same. This is because
Pok Kils main weapon in his new book is his liberalism, and his critics
are attacking his liberalism, just as they did in the early 1990s. Of course,
those who attacked his liberalism in the early 1990s were on the left of
the political spectrum, whereas those who attacked his liberalism eight
years later were on the right, so the arguments against him in both cases
are different. If eight years ago the liberal Pok Kils antipopulism was
accentuated, eight years later it was his antinationalism. Nonetheless,
both debates were still fundamentally debates between the universal and
the particular. In any case, that in the course of an eight-year period Pok
We Are All Greeks
205
Kil was attacked from both the left and the right shows just how narrow
the space for liberalism in South Korea is (although Pok Kil would claim
that space is narrow in any society).
4. Sad to say, but in writing definitions for Sino-vocabulary in KoreanKorean dictionaries, postliberation Korean lexicographers have more or
less plagiarized Japanese-Japanese dictionaries (evading the headaches
of observing Korean language realities in the process). And this applies
in equal measure even to the Urimal kn sajn (Great dictionary of
the Korean language) compiled by the Hangl Hakhoe, the leaders
of twentieth-century Korean linguistic nationalism. It is a well-known
fact that compilers of South Korean bilingual dictionaries (EnglishKorean, French-Korean, Korean-English, Korean-French, etc.) have been
hugely reliant on the parallel bilingual dictionaries published in Japan
in completing their projects, but it has rarely been pointed out that
even South Korean monolingual dictionaries are dependent on Japanese
dictionaries. That the inventories of Sino-vocabulary in modern-day
Korean-Korean and Japanese-Japanese dictionaries look like twins can
be ascribed to certain well-known linguistic and extralinguistic factors,
but that Korean-Korean dictionary compilers have habitually referred to
Japanese-Japanese dictionaries when writing definitions of Sino-Korean
vocabulary is also a secondary reason. It is by no means rare in cases
of borrowing for the borrowed words to undergo certain distortions in
their semantics when they are absorbed into the lexicon of the new
host language, but the Sino-vocabulary borrowed into Korean from
Japanese beginning with the enlightenment period in the 1890s did
not undergo much semantic change. On the contrary, preexisting Sinovocabulary items in Korean with the same shape but different meanings
from their Sino-Japanese counterparts lost their original Korean meanings and acquired new, Japanese meanings. Even now the Sino-Korean
and Sino-Japanese entries in Korean and Japanese monolingual dictionaries are virtually identical, as are a substantial portion of the definitions recorded for them. Needless to say, the primary reason for this is
the linguistic and political influence that Japan has (and the Japanese
have) exerted on Korea for the past century and more, but this linguistic
naisen ittai (Japan and Korea as one) has been aided and
abetted in no small part by the expediency and opportunism of Korean
lexicographers who have preferred to copy from Japanese dictionaries
rather than trace in detail the way individual Sino-vocabulary items
have participated in Korean semantic networks. The earliest Korean-
206
Korean dictionaries were copied from Japanese dictionaries, and the next
generation of dictionaries after these was copied from the first generation. Lexicographers themselves, who know how excruciatingly difficult dictionary compilation is, would not applaud this opportunism, but
by the same token, they would not simply denounce it, either. After
all, the cultural conditions during the Japanese colonial period and in
the years of national rebuilding after liberation were far more desperate
than one can imagine today. And that the Sino-vocabularies of modernday Japanese and Korean have come to resemble each other so much is
neither a good thing nor a bad thing in and of itself.
5. That it is the United States, rather than a European nation speaking a
Romance language, that has become the most important producer of
Graeco-Latin neologisms is comparable to the way in which, ever since
the end of the nineteenth century, Japan rather than China has become
the most important producer of neologisms based on Chinese characters.
6. Translation from Peter H. Lee, ed., Sourcebook of Korean Civilization:
From Early Times to the Sixteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), vol. 1:516.
7. One thing that renders even Sino-Japanese ondoku pronunciations unpredictable is that Sino-Japanese pronunciations reflect Chinese
pronunciations from different periods in Chinese history. In the case
of Sino-Korean pronunciations, scholarly opinions are divided as to
whether they reflect any particular Chinese period or regional pronunciation, but the overall system has basically solidified as one Sino-Korean
reading per each Chinese character. One cannot exclude the possibility
that in certain individual Chinese characters or Sino-Korean words the
pronunciations reflect differences according to period, but Sino-Korean
pronunciations do not reflect such chronological differences in any sort
of three-dimensional or systematic way. Thus, excluding a very small
number of Chinese characters with more than one Sino-Korean reading,
such as (pungnyk puk = north vs. taranal pae = flee) and
(pungnyu ak = music vs. chlgil lak = enjoy vs. choahal yo = like),
for the most part, Chinese characters in Korean have just one fixed SinoKorean pronunciation. That is, even if it turns out that Sino-Korean
pronunciations in their internal system somehow reflect a particular
time or region in China, outwardly they present a unified system of
readings. But in Japanese, the Sino-Japanese (ondoku) readings for both
individual Chinese characters and Sino-vocabulary items not only retain
internal systematic traces of the regions from which and the times at
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207
which they were imported from China, but they also betray these in their
outward appearances. Thus, depending on when a Chinese character (or
the word in which a certain Chinese character occurs) was imported, one
and the same Chinese character in Japanese can be read with a variety
of pronunciationsthe Sino-Japanese readings are a three-dimensional
representation of the history of the importation of Chinese characters
and Sino-vocabulary into Japan. The different Sino-Japanese pronunciations are usually called koon old readings, goon Wu readings, kanon Han readings, ton Tang readings = son
Song readings, and kanyon customary readings. That
Sino-Japanese pronunciations were never unified must be related to the
fact that Japan was a typical feudal system with only a weak tradition
of centralized authority.
8. In cases where some of the Chinese characters in set phrases are read
via kundoku and others via ondoku, Karatanis claim sounds even more
farcical. There are quite a number of compound words in Japanese
written with Chinese characters that are read partially in ondoku and
partially in kundoku. Words where the first character is read in kundoku
and the second character is read in ondoku are called yut-yomi
(yut readings), and words where the first character is read in
ondoku and the second character in kundoku are called jbako-yomi
(jbako readings). The word yut refers to lacquerware
used in Buddhist temples or Shinto shrines to drink hot water from after
meals and has become the metonym for yut readings, while jbako
means nesting boxes and likewise has become the metonym for
jbako readings. That is, in the word yut , is read with its
kun reading yu, whereas is read with its on reading t, and
in the word jbako , is read with its on reading j, whereas
is read with its kun reading bako. Other examples of words in
the yut-yomi category are yhan (supper, evening meal),
mihon (sample merchandise), aitai (face-to-face meeting),
nimotsu (luggage), and kuromaku (black curtain; behind-the-scenes
story); other examples of words in the jbako-yomi category are
rygae (currency exchange), ttori (boss; bank director), dango
(rice cake dumpling covered with bean paste), zki (shrubs),
maiasa (every morning). Actually, whether they are read as yutyomi or as jbako-yomi, in essence these words are simply compounds
made up of kango (or kanji ) and wago elements. So in other words,
in compounds made up of a combination of Chinese characters (Sino-
208
vocabulary) and native Japanese morphemes, those where the native

Japanese element comes first are called yut-yomi readings, and those
where the Sino-form comes first are called jbako-yomi readings. Setting
aside the orthographic aspects and focusing solely on the word-formational aspect, these are no different from the not uncommon compounds
in Korean composed of indigenous Korean and Sino-form elements. For
example, words like ssajn rice store and papsang small dining table,
in which an indigenous Korean morpheme precedes a Sino-form, correspond to yut-yomi, and words like changsal latticework and punnae
the smell of face powder, in which a Sino-form is followed by an indigenous morpheme, correspond to jbako-yomi. However that may be, if
one considers the inscriptional aspect, yut-yomi and jbako-yomi words
are both part kundoku and part ondoku. So honestly, when the Japanese
first created or learned these words, did they undergo castration? Or
maybe only the ondoku parts underwent castration? Or just the kundoku
bits?
9. For it is not only the so-called kango , which came over from China,
that can be written in Chinese characters but also yamato kotoba (i.e.,
wago ). To put it another way, this is because Japanese has the
custom of kundoku readings for Chinese characters in addition to
ondoku readings.
10. I think that any educated person should read the Chosn ilbo, if only to
curse it. When I was bumming around in Franceof course, Im still
pretty much a bumI subscribed to the Chosn ilbo so as to curse it.
And so as to better prepare ammunition for my cursing, I subscribed to
the Hangyre, too. Subscribing to two different Korean newspapers at
once in Paris represented a significant economic burden for me, but in
any case since neither the Hangyre nor the Chosn ilbo was delivered
for free, I paid my money and subscribed to both. And whenever the
opportunity presented itselfwhether I was eating a meal, drinking with
friends, talking to Korean friends, or meeting with foreigner friends, I
heaped abuse upon the Chosn ilbo. After I came back to Seoul, I discontinued my subscription to the Chosn ilbo. I could have subscribed to
the Chosn ilbo in Seoul for a much cheaper price, but I was tired of
cursing it. Or maybe it was because of the insidious fear that if I had
continued reading the Chosn ilbo I would have died before my time of
pent-up rage. I remember that some business-card scandal broke in the
paper while I was in France, but I returned to Seoul only to learn that
the scandal had been a fabrication of the Korean CIA in collusion with
We Are All Greeks
209
the Chosn ilbothe anger in me actually made me quite sick. Speaking

of business-card scandals, it would appear that the only two groups in
the Republic of Korea that prefer the word chosn to hanguk are the
executive boards of the Chosn ilbo and the Hanchong-ryn (Confederation of Korean University Student Councils). As somebody who is
a firm believer in the legal and historical legitimacy of the Republic of
Korea, I find the student leaders who rather cluelessly style themselves
Chosn youths both annoying and exasperating, but the Chosn ilbo
with its stubborn attachment to the chosn in its title is equally dubious.
For more than half a century since the founding of the Republic of Korea,
this newspaper has clung stubbornly to the chosn that figures in the
name of our enemy to the north; this is no ordinary problem. Only a
political criminal guilty of thought crimes could do this, yet they show
not the slightest sign of wanting to recant. I wonder if this newspaper is
not denying the legitimacy of the Republic of Korea. It seems they work
hard at praising the fascist leader Pak Chnghi in order to disguise this
fact, and come to think of it, this Pak Chnghi character was actually a
real Commiea real Commie who was executed for Commie acts. Maybe
it was because being a Commie weighed on his mind that Pak Chnghi
would brand anybody he didnt like a Commie and kick them out; thats
exactly what the Chosn ilbo does. Their perverse love for chosn is so
bizarre that it drives them to brand anybody they dont like as Commiethis and student-activist-that. This newspaper, which has benefitted so
greatly from the Republic of Korea, should repent of its ways and give
up the chosn in its name; its never too late to repent. Changing the
chosn to hanguk or taehan would be best, but since others have already
used up those names, the executives at the paper will need to come up
with something else. Whats up with all the patriotic watchdog groups in
Korea that they let a Commie rag like this get away with this stuff? This
really makes anti-Communists like me nervous. Nowadays, I subscribe
to the Hangyre and the Tonga ilbo. And my mental health seems to
have improved significantly since discontinuing my subscription to the
Chosn ilbo. Thank goodness for that, at least. But I am evil. Like they
say, plus a change, and who knows if in the meantime the Chosn ilbo
has not undergone a complete makeover? Besides, its not like I dont
know a few people at the Chosn ilbo. Whats strange is that those people
are mostly decent people with a modicum of common sense and have
no connection with what appears on the pages of the Chosn ilbo. Or
maybe I know only the special reporters at the Chosn ilbo? In any case,
210
for health reasons I keep a safe distance from the Chosn ilbo these days
and learned through a friend of the debate about Pok Kils book that
had erupted on its pages. This friend is yet another person who reads the
Chosn ilbo only in order to curse it. I was curious as to the contents of
the debate but out of consideration for my health concluded it was best
not to buy the Chosn ilbo. Thats why I read the texts only quite some
time after the debate had finished, thanks to the assistance of Munhak
kwa Chisng Publishing.
11. In fact, any user of Korean (myself included) would think that it is impossible to take Nam Yngsin to task on questions of language. As a conscientious and talented lexicographer, he has contributed as much as any
contemporary literary figure and Korean language scholar to the development and promotion of Korean language and culture. I hope I have
the opportunity someday to pay homage to him at length in writing.
12. It annoys me that certain individuals on the Korean literary scene maintain the bad habit of using hangl where one ought to use Korean
language. But Chng Kwari will likely not change his speech habits just
because I keep harping on this.
13. I have no idea why Choe Wnsik writes for the Chosn ilbo. The reason
I am making a point of picking him out from all the other participants
in the debate is that Choe Wnsik is the only one who labels himself
as being in the progressive camp. I have a low opinion of anybody
who writes for the Chosn ilbo (except for dyed-in-the-wool fascists),
but I have a particularly low opinion of anybody who writes for the
Chosn ilbo while throwing around the word progressive. Sociologist and
political commentator Kang Chunman (1956) has already gone on ad
nauseam in various venues about why these people are even worse, so I
will not elaborate here. When Choe Wnsik sticks the progressive label
on his forehead and contributes to the Chosn ilbo, cant he hear the
laughter in the fascist camp and the sighs in the antifascist camp? If the
Chosn ilbo is so disgusting to the liberal in me, it is truly bizarre that
the progressive Choe Wnsik should like the Chosn ilbo so much.
And the reason I can say that Choe Wnsik likes the Chosn ilbo so much
is not just because he writes for it. Its because I know just how hard
he works as editor of the leading literary and critical journal Changjak
kwa pipyng to place articles connected with his journal in the Chosn
ilbo and only in the Chosn ilbo.The liberal in me hates the Chosn ilbo
because I believe this paper is the enemy of an open society and of
liberalism; I have no idea why the progressive Choe Wnsik likes the
We Are All Greeks
211
Chosn ilbo. Perhaps (to give him the benefit of the doubt) he is thinking
back to the time when the Chosn ilbo was a great newspaper, for the
Chosn ilbo clearly had its own period of greatnessthe period of the
Singanhoe (19271931), that great model of left-right cooperation that
Choe Wnsik likes so much. Is Choe Wnsik really thinking of the
Chosn ilbo from those days? If so, Choe Wnsik is seriously behind the
times. If not, then according to his logic, because fascism and progressivism are two sides of the same coin, his journal Changjak kwa pipyng
must be a very special kind of Chosn ilbo. But surely this is not what
he is saying? How silly of me not to know the deeper significance of
his love for the Chosn ilboIm still not quite sure what it is, but it
is probably closely connected to the search for a new model. Whatever
that deeper significance is, I think that Choe Wnsik must realize more
than anyone that he is no longer the Choe Wnsik of the past. Back
then, when he was just one of many editors at Changjak kwa pipyng,
and when he was just a humble working literary critic, his love for the
Chosn ilbo could have been interpreted as an individual quirk or preference. But now he is the editor-in-chief of Changjak kwa pipyng. Whatever his personal predilections and intellectual capacity may be, he is
the lead editor at the journal responsible for a huge portion of South
Koreas progressive intellectuality. He needs to be conscious of the fact
that whatever he writes now is no longer just a question of his personal
literary output or activity but can also be interpreted as representing the
position of Changjak kwa pipyng. I think he needs to be more cautious
about the venues in which his contributions appear, and to my mind,
the Chosn ilbo is not an appropriate medium for the editor-of-chief of
Changjak kwa pipyng.
14. When an individual or groups of individuals use two different languages
at the same time, this is called bilingualism (bilinguisme in French).
This is bilingualism in the broad sense. Some Francophone sociolinguists divide this bilingualism in the broad sense into bilingualism in the
narrow sense and diglossia. Bilingualism in the narrow sense (henceforth, just bilingualism) refers to situations in which an individual or a
society uses two different languages, and those two different languages
show little or no difference in their social functions. For example, in
the province of Quebec in Canada, both French and English are used,
and most individual Quebecois use both languages. Moreover, these
two languages are virtually the same in functional terms. This is bilingualism. By contrast, diglossia is when an individual or a society uses
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two different languages, but those two languages show differences in

their social functions. For example, the Koreans living in Koreatown
in Los Angeles receive their education in English and conduct their
official business in English, but when they host a party with their
neighbors or play Korean cards, they use Korean. Here the function of
Korean is different from that of English. This is diglossia. Because in
medieval Europe and in Korea until the end of the nineteenth century,
Latin and the vernaculars and vernacular Korean and hanmun coexisted with different social functions, these were cases of diglossia. And
because both the medieval European intellectuals who knew Latin and
the Chosn dynasty Korean intellectuals who knew hanmun used these
languages in social contexts different from when they used their vernaculars, this again qualifies as diglossia. In bilingual societies where the
two languages in use are more or less equal in status and in function,
an individual who knows just one of the two languages has little to lose.
For example, if a person living in Quebec knows only either English or
French, he or she will experience no major difficulties in life. But in a
diglossic society, if an individual knows just one of the two languages,
he or she stands to lose a great deal. For example, Californian Koreans
who know no English experience all kinds of difficulties. If at some point
in the future South Korea becomes a society in which both English and
Korean are used, it will likely be closer to diglossia than to bilingualism
in its sociolinguistic typology. This is an extremely important point to
note.
15. Of course, some children will find it difficult, and certain aspects of the
process could also be difficult. What if it were my child in this situation?
My answer to Pok Kils thought experiment in this case is clear: I will
neverupon pain of deathwrite professionally in a foreign language
(because, try as I might, any language that I have learned as an adult
will never be as good as my Korean), but if it becomes clear that my
newborn child for whatever reason can never become bilingual, and if
my child is presented with a choice between either Korean or English
as his or her mother tongue, as my childs guardian I would not hesitate to choose English. English is not just a tool, but it is in fact a tool
before it is anything else. The attempt to view language as something
more than a tool has been a current in human intellectual history starting
with the language mysticism of ancient times and persisting all the way
up to Sapir and Whorf in the Anglophone world and the ethnology,
philosophy, and linguistics of the German-speaking world. Frequently
We Are All Greeks
213
heard remarks about the indigenous characteristics of the world view

and culture embodied in and expressed by a language and Benjamin
Lee Whorfs assertion that we divide up the natural world according
to what our mother tongue tells us are good examples of this view of
language. One illustration is always raised in the context of the SapirWhorf hypothesis and its formalization of the notion that world view
is dependent on language: the Eskimoes supposedly have more than
ten signifiants for snow. So the claim is that Eskimoes can distinguish
different kinds of snow that Koreans and Europeans simply cant see.
Moreover, adherents of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis also claim that the
number of colors that people can see in rainbows with the naked eye is
dependent on how many words for the colors of the rainbow are available in their language. While claims like this are probably not without
evidence, I doubt they are sufficient to justify or prove the dependence
of world view on language. The same goes for the hypothesis that
Spaniards are more detailed in their reflections on existence because
they have two verbs (ser and estar) corresponding to the English be, and
for the idea that East Asians have a special view of ownership because
East Asian languages use verbs meaning exist to express possession
where English uses have. It is clear that language reflects the categories
of basic human sensory perception and cognition in fixed ways, but by
the same token, it is difficult to claim that language actually defines them.
The relationship between language and mind is not a one-way street, and
each acts on the other in ways that continue to be researched, but generally speaking, it is probably safe to say that the mind is the free variable,
whereas language is a function of mind. To sum up: the basic categories
of perception and cognition are characterized by certain universals independent of the surface structure of languages, and it is probably correct
to view those languages that reflect such universals of perception and
cognition as sharing the same grammar in deep structure (as linguists
ever since Chomsky have supposed). In which case, those features of
language that make it more than just a tool are probably not fundamental
to language.
Chapter 6
Disposable Legacy,
Indispensable Heritage
Thoughts on Chinese Characters
On the evening of October 24, 1998, EBS (the Educational Broadcasting
Service) aired a live discussion program titled The Fifty-Year War of
Writing Systems: Hangl-Only vs. Mixed Script. I was channel-surfing
and only happened upon the program by chance, so I was unable to
watch it from the beginning, but ignoring my second sons bored expression, I watched the discussion to the end. The reason I kept the channel
on EBS was not that the topic was interesting per se but that I recognized
one of the panelists. Nonetheless, I watched the program until the end
because I immediately became curious as to how the discussion would
develop and conclude.
Much as with the past fifty years, the discussion that day did not end
in victory for either side. The opinions from both sides ran along the
same old parallel lines, and the two opposing opinions regarding which
writing system to adopt were reflected directly in questions of education.
That is, all those on the side arguing for Hangl-Only maintained that
Chinese characters should not be taught in elementary schools, whereas
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those advocating Mixed-Script orthography insisted, without exception,

that Chinese characters should be taught from the elementary level.
To me, this was all rather curiousI have always thought it only
natural to use Hangl-Only for writing the Korean language, but I have
also believed that any and all Korean-language speakers need to learn
Chinese characters from as early an age as possible. Some may criticize my position as a feeble compromise, but as far as I am concerned,
it entails no logical contradiction. This is why for me, Hangl-Only
orthography and Chinese-character education are not mutually exclusive. Besides this particular issue, the EBS program also made me think
about a number of other issues. This essay is a rambling account of the
fragmentary thoughts occasioned by the program that evening.
People with Poor Interpersonal Communication Skills

The first issue concerns the culture of discussion and debate in Korean
society today. This has been pointed out many times before, but Koreanlanguage education in Korean schools has neglected speaking and
writing. It is true that writing seems to have been taught to a certain
extent more ever since essays became an integral part of the university entrance exams, but this still isnt enough. As for education in
speaking, it seems fair to say that it is completely nonexistent. This
is a major difference from language education in Western countries.
In Western countries, training students to express their thoughts in a
logical manner, whether in speech or in writing, accounts for the lions
share of the language education curriculum. Naturally, then, Westerners
raised in this way are good at discussion and debate. European television airs far more talk shows and discussion programs than do Korean
stations, and most of the European panelists are remarkably fluent and
eloquentsometimes sickeningly so. Compared to them, Koreans in
formal contexts are quite clumsy in their spoken skills; they are poor
communicators. One major reason for this is that Koreans do not receive
Disposable Legacy, Indispensable Heritage
217
any education in communication in schools, but it is likely also because

Korean culture does not regard eloquence as a virtue. Much the same
goes even for politicians, for whom public speaking is a professional
requirement. Just think of all those politicians who sound reasonably
articulate in news or magazine interviews but are capable of only idiotic
monosyllables when they appear on television. Even the panel members
in the discussion program on October 24despite the fact that they were
mostly involved in Korean-language education or journalismwere not
particularly skilled in communication. Generally speaking, they were
unable to express their ideas clearly and repeatedly veered off topic.1 In
contrast, that the discussion proceeded in a lively and animated manner
made it fun to watch. Some impolite or intemperate words were even
used at times, but it seemed to me that these rawer moments actually
galvanized the discussion. In fact, if you try to be polite and beat around
the bush, your argument loses its edge, and the discussion ends up in a
boring Im nice; youre nice stalemate.
The Charms and Weaknesses of Chinese Characters

The second issue is that of the charms and attractions of Chinese characters. Here are some key points worthy of attention.
The aesthetics of different script styles

Consider the transformation of script styles, starting with the oracle
bone inscriptions that served as the divination records of the Shang
dynasty, progressing to the bronze inscriptions of the Zhou dynasty,
then on to the Great Seal script and the Guwen script of the
Spring and Autumn Warring States period, and the Small Seal script
of the Qin dynasty, the clerical (official) script, Kaishu
regular (standard) script, Cursive (Grass) style, and Semi-cursive
(Running) script that developed after the Han dynasty. Chinese
characters are perhaps the only script system that turned the writing of
individual graphs (not simply writing, but the writing of each and every
218
grapheme) into a unique artistic genre. Although there is such a thing as

hangl calligraphy, it is but a mere shadow of Chinese-character calligraphy. Most other writing systems that have developed cursive styles
separately from printed script were unable to develop the writing of individual graphemes as an art form to the same depth.
Matching signs with reality through liu shu

The so-called Six Categories or six [forms of] scripta typology of
Chinese characters that dates back to the last decades of the first
century BCEcomprise the four methods of forming Chinese characterspictogram ( xiangxing, lit. representing the form), ideogram
( zhishi, lit. indicating the matter), combined ideogram (
huiyi, lit. conjoining the sense), and phonetic compound ( xingsheng, lit. formulating the sound)plus the two methods of character redeployment: transfer character ( zhuanzhu, lit. revolved
and redirected [graphs]) and loan characters ( jiajie, lit. loaned
and borrowed [graphs]).2 Although Chinese characters, like all other
writing systems, are only the shadows of phonetic language, the unique
process of Chinese-character development sometimes creates the illusion that each character is a real thing. Among all the worlds writing
systems, Chinese characters seem the most closely connected with the
world represented by the systemillusion though this may be.
The continuous and ongoing elaboration

of new Chinese characters
Starting with the more than 9,300 characters in the Shuowen jiezi
from the Later Han dynasty (100 CE) and moving on to the
47,000-some characters in the Kangxi zidian (1716) and to the
56,000 characters in the Hanyu da zidian of the Peoples
Republic of China (19861990), more and more characters have been
added to the lexicon throughout various dynasties whenever new dictionaries were published. Of all the worlds writing systems, Chinese characters are the sign system with the largest number of characters, and
219
they also represent the system with the longest continuous process of
evolution and creation. And this process of evolution and creation is not
finished yet. Some characters are struck from the records, and new characters receive new identities. So it has been in the past, and so it will
continue in the future. Most of this process of evolution and creation has
happened through the category of phonetic compound ( xingsheng)
that is, through the combination of semantograms (graphs indicating
meaning) and phonograms (graphs indicating sound)and this process
will continue in the future. Some one hundred new characters for chemical elements, including (Sino-Korean yu, uranium) and (SinoKorean s, selenium), were created at the beginning of the twentieth
century. All of them are phonetic compounds ( xingsheng).
The remarkable historical continuity of Chinese characters

Ever since about 1300 BCE, when the oracle bone script was used,
Chinese characters have maintained essentially the same system for
more than three thousand years. Among all the writing systems
currently in use, Chinese characters have the longest continuous history.
Even the Roman script, which is the most widely used script today and
the root of Western civilization, is only about 2,500 years old. The Korean
alphabet, which is a much more advanced system in terms of the stages
of script development, is only some 560 years old.
The ideographic nature of Chinese characters
Forms correspond not only to sounds but also to meanings, and each
syllable is also a morpheme. Along with the unique process of Chinese
character development already mentioned, this combination of ideographic elements and phonographic elements in one grapheme leads
to Chinese-character fetishisma temptation as dangerous as it is
irresistible. Each and every individual Chinese character is a unit of
meaning. In other words, they are morphemes. And each and every
individual Chinese character is a syllabic unit. Chinese characters are
also partially phonetic. The phonetic compounds ( xingsheng) that
220
comprise the overwhelming majority of Chinese characters represent

the curious beauty of the scenery in the kaleidoscope of Chinese characters as phonetic writing.
The existence of numerous variant forms

Many different variant forms of Chinese characters have existed
throughout history, such as the simplified characters under the rule of
the Guomindang, the simplified characters under modern-day Communist rule, and Japanese-style abbreviated characters. This is a feat of
graphological acrobatics that goes far beyond facts like the Roman letter
I and J stemming from the same root or V and U sharing the same root.
Among all the worlds writing systems, Chinese characters are the most
extravagant.
The existence of made-in-Korea Chinese characters and
made-in-Japan Chinese characters created outside of China
That the two countries on either side of the Korea Strait still partially use
Chinese characters today, along with the existence of these foreign-made
Chinese characters, makes Chinese characters something that does not
belong to China alone. To this one might add, although it does not belong
entirely to the area of writing system, that there exist countless Japanese
neologisms created using Chinese characters as morphemes starting in
the Edo period with Rangaku and especially during the craze for ygaku,
or Western studies, ever since the Meiji Restoration. Most of these were
borrowed into Korean, and many have been reexported back to China.
The existence of these made-in-Japan Sino-vocabulary words, in addition to countless traditional Sino-vocabulary words that have existed in
Korea and Japan for more than a thousand years, means that Chinese
characterswhich were originally just Chinese writingnow also count
as both Japanese writing and Korean writing.
Among these various charms and attractions, some are often raised as
disadvantages of Chinese characters. But they are really just the vestiges
221
of the colorful adventures experienced by one and the same writing

system over such a long period of time. When I think of these vestiges
of the adventures undergone by Chinese characters, these signs of great
adventures never experienced by any other writing system thought up
by humankind, it sometimes blows my mind. Yes, I admit itI have
always been infatuated with Chinese characters. I love Chinese characters.
Hangl: Temptress of Chinese Characters

In writing Korean, shall we use exclusively hangl, or shall we mix
hangl and Chinese characters? When we write privately, we are free
to choose either wayit is a matter of personal liberty. Besides Chinese
characters, we can even write with the Roman alphabet or Japanese kana.
For example, although it may look rather unsightly, we may write a
private letter to a friend as follows:
program .
je -es naebonaen k program-n ssk
kwaenchanass
The program put out by (EBS) yesterday was pretty
good.

K -ga -e haes aju swipke hae chudgun
The geologist explained the tsunami in a very easy-to-understand
way.
Furthermore, even if doing so is not necessarily for private correspondence, the questions whether to use Chinese characters and if so, to
what extent, can perhaps be dismissed as a matter of the individual
writer or of the individual writing styles of certain kinds of composition.
Chinese characters might be used depending on individual proclivities
or on the literary style intended for a particular written piece. In short,
we cannot prevent people from using Chinese characters through legis-
222
lation (though we can always tease such people: Look whos trying to
show off his hanja knowledge!)
Actually, the temptation to use Chinese characters is built right into
the hangl writing system and orthography. Although Korean is a
phonemic writing system, it groups individual letters into orthographic
syllables housed in an imaginary square and uses so-called syllabocombinatory spelling. In other words, whereas other phonemic scripts
connect individual letters in a string to form words, Korean first collects
individual letters into a syllable block and then creates a word by
combining similarly formed syllabic blocks. Thus, Korean spelling is
also a kind of orthography of assemblythe Korean word for spelling;
orthography is matchumbp, derived from the verb stem matchuassemble; cobble together. This assembly is a process of creating words
by forming syllables with phonemes and then creating words from the
syllables.
Insofar as the actual deployment of hangl is essentially syllabic,
one hangl syllable can easily correspond to one Chinese character
because in Chinese characters one character also constitutes one syllable.
If Korean had been written from the very beginning by stringing the
individual hangl letters along in a linein other words, if little room
had been left between the level of phoneme and word for syllablesthere
would have been less room for Chinese characters to mix with Korean.
Just recall the ungainliness of Chinese characters mixed in among texts
written in Roman script (as in my earlier example). But because hangl
is written in syllabic blocks, there is plenty of room for the inclusion of
Chinese charactersthat is, for Mixed-Script orthography. To be more
precise, the creators of hangl had already envisioned something like
Mixed-Script orthography from the very beginning. Thus, it was not
by some coincidence that hangl orthography was syllable-based and
therefore amenable to the incorporation of Chinese characters, but by
design: hangl spelling was conceived of in syllabic blocks precisely in
order to accommodate the integration of Chinese characters into Korean
223
writing. This is unfortunate for Korean. Because both Chinese characters

and hangl syllables occupy the same notional squarish space, Chinese
characters interspersed among hangl syllables hardly seem out of place
at all. Even though Chinese characters and hangl are clearly fundamentally different types of writing, that fundamental difference is mitigated by the syllable-block spelling of hangl. In this way, the temptation to mix Chinese characters in written Korean is already built into the
syllabic nature of hangl, and any Korean who knows a few Chinese
characters will have felt this seductive pull at one time or another.
Hangl-Only Orthography:
Model Inscriptional System for Korean
However, in my personal opinion, it is probably fair to say that at least
official publications should use Hangl-Only orthography. For example,
if the earlier quotes were dialogues in a play or novel, they could be
written in hangl alone. In fact, whether one engages in spirited debate
about Hangl-Only orthography or not, the reality is that there has been
a trend toward the Hangl-Only option. Traditionally, Korean fiction
has always used Hangl-Only orthography, and now most newspapers
have also moved in this direction. Much the same goes for academic
publications. It is a natural trend borne of the unconscious desire of the
general public for unification of the writing system.3
In the early days of the Republic of China, Chinese intellectuals
proclaimed a slogan: If Chinese characters do not fail, China will fail.
Copying this slogan, one faction on the Mixed-Script side has come up
with the provocative slogan Unless hangl fails, Korea will fail. But
I fail to see how the success or failure of hangl is related to the rise
or fall of Korea. Hangl-Only publications have been on the rise thus
far and will continue to increase. Because the rise and fall of nations
follows the laws of nature and history, it may well be that someday Korea
will collapse, but if it does, it wont be because of hangl. Actually, that
224
South Korea has done as well as it has owes in no small part to hangl.
The movement to popularize hangl that began at the beginning of the
twentieth century played a great role in reducing illiteracy in Korea. All
one needs to do is place Chinese characters in parentheses next to those
words whose meanings are not immediately obvious when written in
hangl.
But banning the use of Chinese characters in publications is also
rather foolish. There was also the tragic episode in Korean history when
Prince Ynsan (Ynsangun, r. 14941506) banned the use of hangl, but
banning any writing system via legislation is ridiculous, and as long as
people feel the urge to write Chinese characters, this custom will never
be eradicated through laws. The trend is already very much in favor of
Hangl-Only usage, and all that is necessary now is to let the trend run
its course.
If I may be allowed to share another personal opinion, I also think that
textbooks at all levels in Korean schools should be rendered in HanglOnly spelling. Textbooks bring together texts in standard Korean, and
such standardized texts should reflect the model inscriptional system for
Korean. Needless to say, the model inscriptional system for Korean is
Hangl-Only orthography because of the democratic values it represents.
In fact, it is entirely natural for a language to be written in just one
orthographic system. Other than Korea and Japan, few nations jump to
mind that customarily use different writing systems side by side in one
and the same sentence or text. For example, the first official language
of the former Yugoslavia was Serbo-Croatian, which could be written in
either Cyrillic script or Roman script, but even in this case, texts were
written either completely in Cyrillic or completely in Roman script, and
one never mixed both scripts in the same sentence or even the same
document.
225
The Generations Accustomed to Hangl Orthography

Advocates of Mixed-Script orthography claim that the meanings of Sinovocabulary words are clearest when such words are written in Chinese
characters. This claim is not without basis. Depending on the word, and
depending on the context, there are occasions when the ideographic
nature of Chinese characters emerges with great effect. Moreover, in
the case of older generations accustomed to Mixed-Script orthography,
comprehension is easier when Sino-vocabulary is recorded in Chinese
characters than when it is recorded in hangl.
But the generation for whom Chinese characters are more convenient is gradually fading away. Nor is it the case that hangl is
completely lacking in ideographic features. Hangl orthography was
worked out before the field called morphophonemics in Western linguistics was systematized, but is amazingly morphophonemic in design.
That is, in modern hangl spelling each morpheme keeps the same
shape all the time. The example that is always used to demonstrate the
morphophonemic nature of modern hangl orthography is the series of
morphemes pronounced [nat] but written variously as grain,
sickle, - came about, daytime, face, and single item.
The spellings of these forms indicate not only phonetic information but
also semantic informationthey function ideographically, too.
But quite unrelated to this morphophonemic feature of hangl
orthography, it should be pointed out that any phonemic writing system,
once people are used to it, takes on ideographic features.4 For example,
for me the shape of the three syllables haebyngdae (Marine
Corps) reminds me much more directly of the concept Marine Corps
than do the Chinese characters . This is because I am quite accustomed to the graphemic shape carrying the meaning Marine
Corps and less accustomed to the shape . In this case, for me
is much more ideographic than . Of course, this does not
mean that for me each of , , and is more ideographic than , ,
and , respectively. But at least their combination in the word
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is more ideographic for me than . Weor at least Iread words

as chunks of letters or syllables, not by decoding each letter or syllable
separately.
I learned as many Chinese characters as the next kid when I was in
school, but because I am of the generation that is more accustomed to
Hangl-Only orthography than to Mixed Script, plenty of words besides
just register their meanings with me more immediately when
written in hangl than they do in Chinese characters. For example, for
me words written in hangl such as kungmin hoei (national
assembly), chajonsim ([spirit of] self-respect), sukpak
pso (lodging enterprise), chojik pmjoe (organized crime),
chngni haego (downsizing), chaebl kaehyk (reform
of corporate conglomerates), chnsebang (rented room), and
chajng (bicycle) are somehow much more ideographic than the
same words written in Chinese characters: , ,
, , , , , and . Even the word
taehan minguk (Republic of Korea) is more ideographic for
me than . That is, conveys its meaning to me more
directly than does. If this seems exaggerated, then at least I
can say that conveys its meaning in at least as direct a fashion
as does. This is because for me, the shape of the syllables in
is more familiar than (or at least as familiar as) the shape of
the characters in .
To tell the truth, when I see the graphic shapes , the first
thing that comes to mind is the bronze plaque that hangs on the main
gate to the Korean embassies in Tokyo or Beijing. In other words,
for me, at first glance looks more like Japanese or Chinese
(putting aside the technicality that one or two of the characters would
appear in slightly different or abbreviated forms in each of Chinese and
Japanese). This is all an illusion, of course, but I think this illusion is a
phenomenon common to entire generations of Koreans accustomed to
Hangl-Only orthography rather than merely my personal experience.
227
As Hangl-Only texts became more common, hangl itself has acquired

ideographic characteristics. This means we need to acknowledge that for
any South Korean under the age of fifty today, hangl has become a
partially ideographic writing system. For this generation, mixed script is
not only difficult to write but also difficult to read.
The Limits of the Ideographic Nature

of Chinese Characters
Next (and putting aside questions of generation), it needs to be said that
the ideographic nature of Chinese charactersregardless of the word or
contextis never any greater than that of hangl. In other words, it is
not the case that we understand the meaning of words by first grasping
the meaning of each individual Chinese character in Sino-vocabulary
words. We learn the word hakkyo school as a unit, not as a word
composed of hak = plus kyo = , yielding and then back to the
meaning hakkyo school. To put it another way, we learn the meaning
of the word hakkyo as one indivisible whole, not in a series of steps, as
in (1) divide hakkyo into its constituent syllables, (2) establish that hak
is a morpheme meaning learn and that kyo is a morpheme meaning
building, then (3) put the two syllables back together again to make
hakkyo and derive its meaning. This is an extremely important point:
when we learn words and when we use these words, we never do so with
their etymological derivations in mind. In order to appreciate the force
of this point, it is necessary only to examine some examples of traditional Korean Sino-vocabulary that underwent semantic change under
the influence of Japanese after Koreas enlightenment period, from
approximately the late 1880s until 1910.
For example, the word pangsong traditionally meant release
a criminal, but under the influence of Japanese hs it came to
mean broadcast reportage or entertainment via radio or television.
The word palmyng traditionally meant declare and explain ones
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innocence (i.e., like the modern Korean pynmyng), but under

the influence of Japanese hatsumei it now means invention. Thus,
Sino-Korean words originally borrowed from China or created in Korea,
through contact with Sino-Japanese neologisms written with the same
Chinese characters at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
underwent interference from Japanese and came to have the same meanings as the words used by the Japanese. Among the many Sino-vocabulary words that Koreans used on a daily basis, the list of such words
would be very long indeed. Here are a few examples.
The word chungsim originally meant inside the heart, but now,
under the influence of Sino-Japanese chsin it has come to mean
center, middle. The word palpyo originally meant dermatological protuberance, but now, owing to the influence of Sino-Japanese
happy , it means announcement; oral presentation. The word
parhaeng originally meant set off, depart, but under the influence
of Sino-Japanese hakk has come to mean issue (a newspaper,
book or other printed item; certificates, etc.); float (government bonds,
currency, etc.). The word sinin originally meant newlywed
but now means newcomer, newbieagain thanks to the influence
of modern Sino-Japanese. The word saengsan originally meant
childbirth (i.e., chulsan ), but now, thanks to the influence of
Sino-Japanese seisan , it means production. To be sure, the word
saengsan is still occasionally used in the sense of childbirth even today,
but this has now become a secondary and peripheral meaning with an
additional nuance of old-fashionedness.
Much the same goes for the word sil-nae (lit. inside the room).
Originally, it was a polite and respectable way to refer to another
persons wife, but now that usage has all but disappeared, and instead
under the influence of the Sino-Japanese sitsunai it usually means
indoor(s); interior of a room. The word sanp originally meant
ones possessions or profession, but under the influence of the SinoJapanese sangy it took on its modern meaning of industry. The
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word sahoe originally designated a kind of gathering or grouping

for traditional rituals, but under the influence of the Sino-Japanese
shakai , it has come to mean society. The word chayn originally meantjust as its characters suggestthusly so of its own accord
but now has come to designate the various philosophical and scientific
concepts inherent in nature.
It is not clear whether the combined meanings of the semantics of
the individual constituent Chinese characters in all these Sino-vocabulary items are closer to their traditional meanings or to their modern
meanings. What is clear, though, is that these semantic changes themselves are excellent proof that speakers do not combine the semantics of
individual constituent Chinese characters when grasping the meaning
of Sino-vocabulary words like these. If the meanings of Sino-vocabulary words were simply combinations of the semantics of the individual
Chinese characters, it would be unnatural for semantic changes like
these to occur so often. In short, we learn words, not Chinese characters.5
One of the discussants on the EBS program I saw cited ka house
and choe crime in his praise of the superiority of Chinese characters. The character is composed of a pig beneath a roof, thus
calling to mind the ancient Chinese custom of constructing dwellings
in such a way as to raise pigs under the same roof, and the character
was interpreted as something that was no good [] from all four
[] directionshence, a crime. Maybe so. But is that a reason for us to
use Chinese characters? Knowing the origins of a few Chinese characters sometimes comes in handy for making conjectures about the imagination and lifeways of the ancient Chinese. This is certainly interesting
and often fun enough to spark peoples curiosity, but the vast majority
of Chinese characters fail to elicit the same levels of fun and curiosity.
But even if one were to concede that most Chinese characters did
indeed have the charm and attraction of evoking curiosity and interest
like this in every case, this would not count as an advantage for Chinese
characters as a writing system. Moreover, it certainly would not qualify
230
as a reason for Koreans to use Chinese characters. For most people

who need to write Chinese characters, they function not as the key to
an anthropological understanding of China but as just another writing
system. Perhaps the discussant made his remarks as a joke, but if so, it
wasnt particularly funny.
The Mutual Interdependence of Hangl

and Chinese Characters
So we Koreans should neither learn nor teach Chinese characters? I think
we should definitely learn and teach them, and because we have to learn
and teach them anyway, we might as well do so from as young an age
as possible. Even at a conservative estimate, more than half the Korean
lexicon is composed of Sino-vocabulary, and a significant number of
those words cannot easily be understood without a good knowledge of
Chinese characters. The reason we are able to understand Hangl-Only
texts easily is that we still have a vague knowledge of Chinese characters
to back us up. This is a point on which the opponents of Chinese-character education will never agree. My point here is not that this is true
of all Sino-vocabulary words but that it is true, nevertheless, of quite a
good many of them.
Besides, hangl orthography itself is premised on a knowledge of
Chinese characters. The reason that we pronounce [tongnimmun] for
what is written /tok-rip-mun/ Independence Gate is that it
corresponds to the Chinese characters . A counterargument
might be that hangl orthography writes not because of
any connection to Chinese characters but simply in order to fix the
constituent morphemes. That is, the syllable tok in Korean is a morpheme
with the meaning alone; independently, and the syllable rip is a
morpheme with the meaning stand; therefore, insofar as the first two
syllables of tongnimmun contain these two underlying morphemes, we
should write not tongnimmun but tok-rip-mun. This is all true.
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That is, one does not need Chinese characters to explain the principles
of modern-day morphophonemic hangl orthography. But for Korean
children and for foreign learners of Korean encountering hangl orthography for the first time, it is rather more difficult to explain its morphophonemic principles without the medium of Chinese characters.
To be sure, in the process of learning words like tokhak selfstudy, independent study, tokchae dictatorship, tokchm
monopoly, tokchang vocal solo, tokcha-jk independent and original, tokpo-jk peerless, unrivaled, tokpang
single room, toktan arbitrary decision; dogmatism, toksin
unmarried person, toksn self-righteousness, tokchu
solo recital, tokpaek soliloquy, monologue, kodok solitude, isolation, and tandok independence, separateness, and
so on, one might naturally come to understand the meaning of the
morpheme tok, and likewise, in the process of learning the words kirip
rising, standing up, surip establishment, founding, charip
independence, self-reliance, sllip establishment, incorporation, chorip construction, assembly, taerip confrontation, sirip municipal[ly established], torip provincial[ly
established], and so on, one might naturally come to understand the
meaning of the morpheme rip. And, as already discussed, one could
explain all these words as containing tok = alone, independently and
rip = standwithout the medium of the Chinese characters and .
But in order to explain this without the medium of Chinese characters, one would be forced to resort to long and complicated explanations like this: The tok just mentioned is different from the tok in tokyak poison or haedok detoxification, and is different yet
again from the tok in tokchok urge, demand and kamdok
superintendence; direction, which is also different from the tok in toks
reading books and in aedok read with pleasure, which
is again different from the tok in tokchiga benevolent person,
supporter or widok critical condition (of an illness). One must
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keep all these distinct. Next, the rip just discussed is different from the rip
in soripcha elementary particle (in physics). The rip in soripcha
means grain, granule. Whats more, there is a word sarip meaning
straw raincoat and conical bamboo rain hat, i.e., raingear, but here
the rip means conical bamboo rain hat, so it is yet another rip. There
are several different morphemes with the shape tok and several different
morphemes with the shape rip, all of which need to be carefully distinguished. In other words, in Korean (the same goes for Japanese, too, and
even for Chinese, though to a lesser extent) there are large numbers of
morphemes (in this case, Chinese characters) in Korean with the same
pronunciation. Clearly, in cases like this the explanations become much
more elegant if the Chinese characters are brought into the equation.
Now that I have broached the subject of Chinese characters with
the same pronunciations, I can embark on a discussion of the problem
of homophony in Korean Sino-vocabulary. As a matter of fact, the
single greatest reason for users of Korean to acquire a knowledge of
Chinese characters is precisely the abundance of such Sino-Korean
homophoneswords with the same pronunciations but different meanings. This homophone problem is the trusty fallback argument for all
advocates of Mixed-Script orthography. And every time they raise the
issue, the Hangl-Only advocates reply that all languages have homophones and that words are not learned or used in isolation; they are used
in specific contexts that render understanding easier. In principle, I am
in agreement with the Hangl-Only advocates. Homophones obviously
exist in all languages, and because words acquire their concrete meanings in context, the existence of homophones cannot be a reason for
deploying Chinese characters in a Mixed-Script orthography. In contexts
where the meaning is still vague, it suffices simply to provide the Chinese
characters in parentheses next to the word in question.
But I would not go so far as to say that I am in agreement with those
Hangl-Only advocates who believe that Chinese-character education
is unnecessarybecause we still need some knowledge of Chinese char-
233
acters if we are going to be placing some of them in parentheses in texts

and if we are going to understand those parenthetical Chinese characters.
The more important point is this: the claims of Hangl-Only advocates about homophones in Korean are often exaggerated and distort
the truth. That is, they are not entirely honest on this issue. It is a fact
that homophones in Korean are much more numerous than in other
widely known languages (Japanese aside) and that the overwhelming
majority of these homophones are Sino-Korean. The reason for this state
of affairs is the limited number of Sino-Korean pronunciations corresponding to Chinese characters and the fact that there are so many
Sino-Korean binoms. The example of Sino-Korean sagi, with its nearly
twenty different possible meanings depending on the Chinese characters, is frequently trotted out by the Mixed-Script advocates, but it is a
somewhat exceptional case. However, it is not at all uncommon for SinoKorean shapes to correspond to two or three different Sino-vocabulary
words with different Chinese characters. One can open up a KoreanKorean dictionary to any page at random and immediately identify SinoKorean homophones. It is difficult to claim that this phenomenon can be
replicated in any language.
When presented with the countless examples of Sino-Korean homophones like sagi, some Hangl-Only advocates cite the cases of the
English verbs take and have and point out that these words have dozens
of meanings. But this is not a fair comparison: the cases of Sino-Korean
sagi and English take are fundamentally different linguistic phenomena.
The case of sagi is one of homonymy (same form, same sound, different
meaning) whereas take and have are cases of polysemy. Homonymy is
used when different meanings happen to be associated with the same
form. Thus, homonyms look the same on the surface (share the same
form) but in fact are different signs. In contrast, polysemy designates
situations in which, even though a single word carries various meanings,
all those meanings have branched out from a common, root meaning.
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Naturally, all the various meanings in this case maintain their etymological identities. Thus, in the case of polysemy one is dealing with just one
sign. The question of Sino-vocabulary that concerns me here is one of
homonymy, whereas the cases of the English verbs take and have raised
by certain Hangl-Only advocates concern polysemy. In fact, technically speaking, the various meanings of English take and have are so
closely related to each other that it is dubious whether they qualify even
as polysemy.
Chinese-character education is necessary in order to distinguish these
various concepts represented by Sino-Korean homonyms. And as long as
we concede that Chinese-character education is necessary anyway, the
earlier we start it the betterit is less of a burden to learn the characters
at an age when our memories are still like sponges.
Sure, Chinese characters are difficult to learn. Compared to hangl,
they are very difficult to learn. There are tons of different characters,
and for each character one has to learn its shape, pronunciation, and
meaning(s). But because the vast majority of Chinese characters belong
to the phonetic compound categorythat is, the category of Chinese
characters that includes both a semantic and a phonetic elementit is not
the case that there are no phonetic or semantic connections linking characters to one another. Thus, learning two thousand Chinese characters or
so is not at all one hundred times more difficult than learning the twentyfour letters of hangl or the twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet.
Whereas in the oracle bone script phonetic compounds accounted for
only 20 percent of the characters used, by the time of the Han
dynasty and Xu Shens (30124 CE) Shuowen jiezi , the
first Chinese dictionary, this percentage had grown to 80 percent, and at
present it exceeds 90 percent.6
Moreover, the Chinese characters that we Koreans need to learn do
not run into the tens of thousands. According to one statistic, even
in Chinese publications, just 950 different characters account for 90
percent of all the characters used, whereas 2,400 characters account for
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99 percent. In China in 1988, the National Education Committee and

the China National Language and Character Working Committee (
) issued a jointly published Table of Commonly
Used Characters in Contemporary Chinese () listing
3,500 characters and claimed that these characters accounted for 99.48
percent of the characters in common use.7 They say that even in China
the average educated person knows between three thousand and four
thousand Chinese characters, so we Koreans would not need to know
as many as that. Even a knowledge of two thousand characters or so is
plenty for maintaining ones feel for Korean and Sino-Korean. In fact, the
number of truly productive Chinese characters in Korean is probably no
greater than several hundred. Ones that spring to mind are morphemes
like tae big, large, pul not; un-, mu not exist; non- sng
character; -ness, hwa -ize, -ify, and cha self-.
There Is No Person by the Name of Chnjung

Finally, a few words about the treatment of Japanese proper nouns
in Korean spelling. There are still some Koreans who insist that
the Japanese surname written in Chinese characters should be
rendered Chnjung (following the Sino-Korean pronunciation) rather
than Tanaka (Tanaka)although their numbers seem to have declined
somewhat. The same Koreans are indignant at the treatment of the
Japanese place-names and as Oosaka and Tookyoo and maintain that they should be read in Korean as Taepan and Tonggyng,
respectively (again following the Sino-Korean pronunciations). Do we
Koreans really have to adopt Chnjung instead of Tanaka and Taepan
and Tonggyng instead of Oosaka and Tookyoo? The answer is no. The
name Tanaka is just Tanaka, not Chnjung; Oosaka is just Oosaka,
not Taepan; and Tookyoo is just Tookyoo, not Tonggyng.8
Koreans who claim that Oosaka should be read Taepan point out
that in Japan, for example, the Japanese pronounce the Korean city
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name Taegu according to Sino-Japanese pronunciation as Taiky

and pronounce (Cheju Island) Saisht and who demand that
Koreans, too, assert their linguistic sovereignty (it has been a few years
now, but see, for example, Yi Sungnyngs Tookkyoo hoching-ron [On
the name for Tokyo], 1968).
This argument about linguistic sovereignty can be found in both the
Hangl-Only camp and the Mixed-Script camp. But for starters, it makes
no sense for the Hangl-Only advocates to champion Taepan for Osaka.
The very existence of Taepan as a possible word is predicated on Chinese
characters. Next, for the mixed-script advocates to defend Taepan makes
sense because they always have Chinese characters in mind, and this
aligns with their usual lines of argument. But that doesnt mean that their
advocacy of Taepan is correct. What they forget is that the vernacular
kundoku (K. hundok ) reading tradition that has long since disappeared from Korean is still alive and well in Japanese. Kundoku readings are just as common in Japanese proper nouns as ondoku readings are. For example, Tanaka and saka are both kun readings, whereas
Tky is an on reading. As everybody knows, kundoku is a means of
inscribing indigenous Japanese using Chinese characters, not a means of
reading Chinese characters according to their Japanese kun glosses. Its
not that Japanese read as Tanaka; rather, they inscribe the word
Tanaka middle of the field as . For Koreans to refer to the Japanese
name Tanaka as Chnjung is equivalent to first translating the word
Tanaka middle of the field into Chinese and then reading the corresponding Chinese characters according to their Sino-Korean pronunciations. The name Chnjung generated at the end of this process of translation and transformation is one that belongs to nobody on this earth.
Imagine this: suppose that the Americans adopted Chinese characters
and adopted the custom of using kundoku readings as the Japanese do. If
so, then they would write the name for the famous Watergate building as
(water-gate). That is, they would write but read it as Watergate (such is the essence of kundoku readings, a practice that disap-
237
peared from Korean ages ago but lives on persistently in Japanese). In

this case, do we Koreans have to refer to the building called Watergate
in English as Sumun? Both the Republic of South Africa and Australia
have cities called Newcastle. If the South Africans and the Australians
had imported Chinese characters and established the custom of kundoku,
they would write the name for these cities as . Here, too, they would
write but read Newcastleso would Koreans then have to call these
cities Sinsng?
The proposal to call Tanaka Chnjung and Osaka Taepan is no
different from proposing to call Watergate Sumun and Newcastle
Sinsng. Whether one inscribes the name of this famous building as
Watergate or as , it is only natural to call it Wtgeit in Korean.
And whether one inscribes the name of the industrial cities in Australia
and South Africa as Newcastle or as , it is only natural to call it
Nyukaesl in Korean. There is only an indirect semantic connection
between Watergate and Sumun and between Newcastle and Sinsng
there is no phonetic connection whatsoever. In which case, Koreans
should call Osaka Oosaka and Tanaka Tanaka. If we have to call Tanaka
Chnjung, we should also have to call the philosopher Whitehead Paektu
.
So how are Koreans supposed to render Japanese proper names that
use Chinese characters according to their ondoku readings? In other
words, what to do in cases where there are clear correspondences in
Korean? For example, in the case of Japans capital, both Tookyoo and
Tonggyng go back to the same roots; cant Koreans just call it Tonggyng? In principle, yes. But to distinguish between kun readings and
on readings in the place-names for every proper noun in the case of the
same country and to read the ondoku proper nouns according to their
Sino-Korean pronunciations but the kundoku proper nouns according
to their Japanese pronunciations would be far too complicated. Thats
why I, for one, think thatfor the sake of maintaining consistency in
the reading of foreign namesKoreans should simply read all Japanese
238
names according to their Japanese pronunciations. To be sure, customary

usage trumps theoretical principles. The name Tonggyng for Tokyo is
already familiar to Korean speakers, so there is no point in banning its
usage. And one can be certain that the day when Koreans call Japan
Nihon or Nippon instead of Ilbon will not come any time soon.
Let Us Respect Their Names

What to do with Chinese proper nouns? Chinese-character pronunciations in Mandarin, like the ondoku of Sino-Japanese readings, share the
same roots as Sino-Korean pronunciations. So at first blush it would
seem only natural to read Chinese proper nouns according to their SinoKorean pronunciations. And that is precisely the custom that Koreans
followed for a very long time. The Chinese sage (Confucius) was
called Kongja rather than Kongtch, and (the Qin emperor) was
called Chin sihwang rather than Chinshuang. Much the same applies
to modern Chinese namesfor example, Koreans have tended to refer
to Mao Zedong as Mo Taektong rather than Mao Tchttong and to
Zhou Enlai as Chu n-lae rather than Chunlai. This contrasts
with the situation regarding the names of modern Japanese politicians,
which tend to have been rendered according to their Japanese pronunciation. That Koreans tend to refer to Japanese names according to their
Japanese pronunciations while referring to Chinese names according to
their Sino-Korean pronunciations probably has something to do with
the Japanese custom of kundoku readings already mentioned (given that
the Japanese kundoku readings are completely different from the SinoKorean readings) but also seems to owe to the fact that Koreans are that
much more familiar with Japanese than with (Mandarin) Chinese.
According to the current regulations for spelling foreign words,
Japanese personal names are to be written according to their sound,
without reference to past or present. But in the case of Chinese personal
names, a distinction is made between past and present: Chinese personal
239
names from the past are rendered in their Sino-Korean readings, whereas
personal names of contemporary Chinese are supposed to be rendered
according to their Chinese (Mandarin) pronunciation. Thus, the Qin
emperors prime minister, Li Si , is Yi Sa rather than Li Ss in Korean,
and Jiang Zemin , the former general secretary of the Communist Party and president of the PRC is Chang Tchmin rather than Kang
Taek-min. This represents a compromise between the traditional Korean
custom of rendering foreign proper nouns in their Sino-Korean pronunciations and the current trend of rendering them according to (or in an
approximation of) their native pronunciation, and on the whole I think
this is a reasonable approach. Sometimes the requirement to distinguish
historical Chinese personal names from contemporary Chinese names
seems a bit forced, but in fact, a similar custom has been tolerated in
European languages.
It is not exactly 100 percent comparable with the situation of the three
East Asian nations and their respective Chinese character pronunciation systems, but baptismal names in European languages that share
the same etymological roots often have slightly different forms in the
modern languages. For example, the English Charles is Charles in France,
Karl in Germany, Carlos in Spain, and Carlo in Italy. If one compares
only English and French, the two languages most familiar to Koreans,
the English Peter, Stephen, John, Joan, Henry, and Mary correspond to
Pierre, tienne, Jean, Jeanne, Henri, and Marie in French. And in the
cases of many well-known historical figures, names are often rendered
differently depending on the European language. For example, Joan of
Arc is known as Jeanne dArc in French. But contemporary individuals or otherwise unknown people are simply referred to according to
(an approximation of) the pronunciation of their names in their home
languages without any changes in form. For example, the famous English
economist Joan Robinson is known in France as Joan Robinson. An ordinary Englishman John Smith is just John Smith in French, and the ordinary Frenchman Pierre Dupont is simply Pierre Dupont in English.
240
One could produce examples like this ad infinitum. William the

Conqueror, who led the Norman invasion against England in 1066, is
Guillaume in French and Wilhelm in German, but the average modernday Englishman by the name of William who has nothing particular to
distinguish him (or even if he does have something to distinguish him,
the point is that he is alive now) shows up in French-language newspapers or German-language magazines as simply William. Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, the two great masters of Renaissance art,
receive the new names of Michel-Ange and Lonard de Vinci in French,
but if two artists in modern-day Italy with the same names were to
become famous now, the French newspapers would record their names
in their original Italian shapes. Boccaccio, the author of the Decameron,
becomes Boccace in France, but an ordinary Italian with the name
Boccaccio would be just Boccaccio in French, too. The ancient Greek
philosopher known as Aristotelles in Korean is Aristotle in English
and French, but the ordinary modern-day Athenian with the name
A would be just Aristoteles in French. The way the French
call the philosopher Aristotle, Julius Caesar Jules Csar, Marcus Aurelius
Marc Aurle, Pythagoras Pythagore, Michelangelo Michel-Ange, and
Boccaccio Boccace is comparable to the way in which Koreans refer to
historical Chinese figures by the Sino-Korean readings of the Chinesecharacter names.
That is why I think the current guidelines for treating Chinese proper
nouns are basically reasonable. We cant really up and change the
Korean names of Confucius and Mencius, whom Koreans have always
known as Kongja and Maengja, to Kongtch and Mngtch, but for their
less-distinguished offspring with the surnames and , it would be
best to respect their names by sticking with the versions closer to the
modern-day Mandarin pronunciation.
241
Why Koreans Need to Learn Chinese Characters

Let me sum up. Chinese charactersjust as their name suggestsare
a writing system of the Chinese, just as Roman script is the writing
system of the ancient Romans. But just as the Roman script did not
belong only to the Romans, Chinese characters do not belong only to
the Chinese. This means that their Chineseness is no reason for Koreans
to reject them. In fact, our Korean ancestors used Chinese characters
to write Korean. That the ancient Korean songs written in hyangchal
script and the countless administrative documents written in idu all
used Chinese charactershowever clumsilyas their mode of inscription amply demonstrates the substantial role of Chinese characters as an
inscriptional system in the history of the Korean language.
But Chinese characters are nonetheless a writing system with an intimate connection to the language called Chinese. The typological features
of Chinese as a monosyllabic, monomorphemic language of the isolating
type are infused into the characters. This makes them a very inconvenient inscriptional system for a polysyllabic, agglutinating language like
Korean. This was not the only reason for its invention, but in any case
hangl appeared on the scene approximately five hundred years ago.
And hangl fits Korean like a glove, which means that it is only reasonable to abandon Chinese characters as an inscriptional system and adopt
hangl.
The history of struggle between hangl and Chinese characters is
precisely the history of the struggle between democracy and feudalism.
We Koreans should use hangl not because it is Korean but because
using hangl accords with democratic values.
Still, we cannot not learn hanja. For the past two thousand years, the
Korean language has borrowed countless Chinese and Japanese words
through the medium of Chinese characters, and these loanwords are
naturally deeply connected with Chinese characters. Chinese characters borrowed into Korean have unique (Sino-)Korean pronunciations
242
different from the readings in either Chinese or Japanese, and thus the
Sino-vocabulary items borrowed from Chinese or Japanese are neither
Chinese nor Japanesethey are Korean. For example, the word chnji
heaven and earth is neither Chinese nor Japanese; it is Korean
and Korean only. If one says chnji to somebody from China or Japan,
there is no way for them to understand it as , meaning heaven
and earth. Sino-vocabulary items like these make up the majority of the
Korean lexicon.
In order to understand the many Sino-Korean words like these that
have penetrated so deeply into Korean, it is essential for Koreans in quite
a number of cases to have knowledge of Chinese characters. To deny
this fact would be dishonest. Even supposing that in most cases a knowledge of Chinese characters is not necessary for an understanding of Sinovocabulary, it remains that knowledge of Chinese characters nonetheless
helps with the understanding of Sino-vocabulary. This is why elementary schools in Korea should be teaching Chinese characters starting in
elementary school. If this can help with understanding the Sino-vocabulary items that comprise more than half the Korean lexicon, the learning
of two thousand Chinese characters or so can hardly be described as
unjustified mental torture.
Munhak tongne (Winter 1998)
243
Notes
1. I myself am also very poor at communicating. Whenever there is a TV
camera in front of me, it feels like my tongue freezes up.
2. See William Boltz, The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese
Writing System, American Oriental Series 78 (New Haven, CT: American
Oriental Society, 2003), 143149, for a discussion of the liu shu .
3. There are huge implications in the fact that the hangl movement in
modern times began with translated versions of the Bible during the late
Chosn period and continued with modern fiction. One might say that
Hangl-Only spelling has been the outcome of a desire to communicate
with the wider public. Hangl-Only orthography is deeply connected
with democratic values.
4. Actually, when distinguishing phonographic writing from ideographic
writing, one typically abstracts away certain key features of each system,
but in fact it is not the case that phonographic writing is always only
phonographic or that ideographic writing is only ever ideographic.
There are ideographic elements in phonographic writing and phonographic elements in ideographic writing.
5. To be sure, we mustnt push this point too far. In most cases, there is
actually a clear semantic link between the meaning of Sino-vocabulary
words and the semantics of their constituent characters. What I am criticizing here is the simplistic view that severs the meanings of Sino-vocabulary items from their social context and sees them solely as a function
of the semantics of the constituent characters.
6. The (zi) in the title of the Shuowen jiezi indicates precisely
this type of character. The title of this work means literally Explanations
of and elucidations of . According to Xu Shen, refers in the main
to characters that imitate or resemble things according to their shapes,
while appeared later as combinations of shape and sound. In other
words, refers to pictographs and to phonetic compounds.
7. See Choe Yngae, Hanjahak kangi (Seoul: Tongnamu, 1995), 21; and
Choe Yngae, Chunggug ran musinga (Seoul: Tongnamu, 1998), 161.
8. My argument here does not concern the official orthography for foreign
words. That is, I am not concerned with whether we render the name
of Japans capital () Tokyo, Tokkyo,
Tookyoo, Tookkyoo, or Tookkyoo. Thus, the ques-
244
tion whether to render the Japanese surname Tanaka,

Tanakka, Tanaka, or Tanakka, or whether
to render as Oosaka, Osaka,
Oosakka, or Osakka is not the pointthough of course this is
an important problem. But the point I am raising here is whether to
pronounce the name of the Japanese capital according to its SinoJapanese pronunciation or according to its Sino-Korean pronunciation.
Chapter 7
France
From Pullans ~
Pmnans to Prangs
I spent the latter half of my thirties in France. It was a rather decadent
period for me, but because I had no specific goals from the outset, my
decadence was in some ways premeditated. I dragged my family all the
way to Paris on a lark and returned to Seoul in the wake of various
minor calamities. My two children who had boarded the flight to Paris
as elementary school pupils returned to Seoul as a middle schooler and a
high schooler. And my wife and I were now in our forties. Our childrens
French had become quite fluent, but their Korean had become clumsy.
My wife and I were now clumsy in both Korean and French.
When I returned to Seoul, I had no job and no place to live. I was
unable to return to the position I had abandoned five years earlier for a
prolonged picnic in France. I was grateful for any writing commissions
that came my way, regardless of the venue or genre, and with financial
assistance from my mother and older sister I was able to put a roof over
the heads of my wife and children. When I lie down beside them at night
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to sleep, I sometimes dream of France; I guess I miss the placeand those

decadent days
The Image of Pullans, the Image of Prangs

The country that my wife and I sometimes call Pullans and sometimes call Prangs is simply Prangs to our children. And my mother
always calls it just Pullans. She will probably call it Pullans until the
day she dies. And my children will probably always call it Prangs
after theyre all grown up. Me? Ill probably keep going back and forth
between Pullans and Prangs. In which case Pullans and Prangs
qualify as excellent generational markers. If one takes Prangs as the
standard form, sociolinguistically speaking, Pullans becomes a kind of
social dialect in the sense of a speech form used by persons over a certain
specific age. When I am speaking with people my own age or older, I
usually refer to France as Pullans. And when Im talking with my kids,
I adjust to their speech habits and call it Prangs. Of course, when Im
writing in Korean, I stick with the official spelling guidelines and write
Prangs.
Actually, for me the word Pullans is much more familiar and cozy
than Prangs. This could well mean that my speech habits are more
conservative and classical than those of other Koreans my age. After
all, most friends my age prefer Prangs. I probably first heard of the
country called France when I was in elementary school. And I almost
certainly first learned the countrys name as Prangs. I dont remember
what grade I was in, but I do remember that in my social studies textbook
the countrys name was recorded as Prangsjust like the country I
refer to every day as Togil (Germany) was recorded there as Toichillant
(for Deutschland). That both Pullans and Togil are more familiar to
me than either Prangs or Toichillant suggests that my everyday
extracurricular reading trumped my social studies education by far.
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Few Koreans my age and even very few Korean children refer to
Germany as Toichillant, but in the case of the two words for France
it seems that Pullans is gradually being pushed out by Prangs.
Still, for me, Pullans films, Pullans optometrists, Pullans cuisine, and
Pullans bakery all sound more French to me than Prangs films,
Prangs optometrists, Prangs cuisine, and Prangs bakery. The
word Prangs just doesnt give me the same tingle that Pullans does.
With Pullans, I feel the power of a dynamic history and refined culture,
but with Prangs I sense only the veneer of modernity symbolized by
the TGV and Mirage jet fighters. But so much for personal impressions.
The original Chinese characters behind Pullans are a sound
translation created by the Japanese. Nowadays in Japan they just write
the countrys name in katakana: (huransu). Thus,
is quite outdated in Japan, too. In any case, the same , read
according to its Sino-Korean pronunciation as Pullans, qualifies as yet
another linguistic relic left by the Japanese in Korean.
The Gradual Disappearance of Proper Nouns

Rendered as Sinographic Sound Translations
The recent trend to render foreign proper nouns, such as country names,
as close to their original pronunciations as possible is probably irreversible, so Pullans will not be able to hold out against Prangs for
much longer. But it isnt likely to disappear any time soon, either. The
word Pullans does not exist in glorious isolation in the Korean lexicon
but is tightly connected to words like pur French language,
pulmunhak French literature, pur-han sajn FrenchKorean dictionary, and han-bul sajn Korean-French dictionary. As long as words like pur, pulmunhak, pur-han sajn, and han-bul
sajn persist, the word Pullans will likely eke out an existence alongside them. The word Pullyng Indojina for French IndoChina (now rendered in Korean Prangs-ryng Indochaina) is hardly
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used at all nowadays, but I seem to recall hearing it occasionally when I

was a child. And of course we are still in the habit of referring to translation into French as puryk .
Nonetheless, the broader trend is to render country names according
to the pronunciation of the name in its original language. Those countries for which the common Korean names today still use sinographic
sound translations (sound translations based on Chinese characters) are
just Chungguk (China), Ilbon (Japan), Wllam (= Wlnam, i.e., Vietnam), Miguk (America), Yngguk (England),
Togil (Germany), Hoju (Australia), Monggo (Mongolia),
Indo (India), Taeguk (Thailand), and Hirap (Greece).
Of these, the names for China and Japantwo fellow members of the
Chinese-character cultural spherewill probably remain Chungguk and
Ilbon for a long, long time. Until such time as Korean cuts its ties to
Chinese characters (and this will never happen), one will never see
Koreans call China Chonggw or Japan Nippon or Nihon.
Although it is true that Vietnam also used to be a member of the
Chinese-character cultural sphere, after Chinese characters were abolished there and replaced with a Romanized script under French colonial
rule, the ties between Vietnamese culture and Chinese characters have
worn very thin. This is not the only reason, but in any case Koreans are
gradually adopting the custom of referring to Vietnam with a term closer
to the original pronunciation in Vietnamese: Petnam. Older-generation Koreans are still more comfortable talking about the Wllam-chn
than about the Petnam-chn Vietnam War, whereas younger generations refer to the country simply as Petnam. And the mass media
support this usage, too. Yet the word Wllam is also unlikely to disappear any time soon. This word, too, is far from isolated in the Korean
lexicon and is tightly bound to words like wlmaeng Vit Minh
(League for the Independence of Vietnam), pawl changbyng
Korean soldiers dispatched to Vietnam, chuwl tukpawn
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Vietnam media correspondent, wllam siktang Vietnamese restaurant, and so on.

The names Chungguk, Ilbon, and Wllam in Korean for China, Japan,
and Vietnam are fundamentally different from other country names
based on Chinese characters in Korean. The names for the other countries written in Chinese characters were originally sound translations
created in either China or Japan approximating the countries names
in their original languages then imported to Korea and read there
according to their Sino-Korean pronunciationsthey are sinographic
sound translations. But because the countries designated by the names
Chungguk, Ilbon, and Wllam either once used or still use Chinese characters, their names did not undergo any separate sinographic soundtranslation processthey are simply the same traditional Sino-vocabulary words used as self-designations in each of the respective countries but read according to Sino-Korean pronunciation. One might say
that Chungguk, Ilbon, and Wllam are authentic sinographic country
names. The surprising longevity of these three country names in the
Korean lexicon is almost certainly connected in part to this sinographic
authenticity.
But Some Things Will Never Change

However, just because a country name is a sinographic sound translation doesnt mean it is doomed to a short life. Thanks to the power
of customary usage, the names Miguk (America), Yngguk (England)
and Togil (Germany) look set to last a long time. The mi in Miguk for
America ( or ) is a sound translation of the second syllable me in
America, but Koreans are unlikely to be referring to America as Amerika
anytime in the near future. Of course, when referring to America in
official contexts, Koreans might also call it Mi-hapchungguk
or Amerika hapchungguk, but this is simply a translation (partially,
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anyway) of the United States of America. In other words, it isnt the way
Americans normally refer to their own country.
The name Yngguk for England is also likely to last a long time. The
word Yngguk is a partial sound translation of Inggllaend; thus, on a
purely etymological level, Yngguk and Inggllaend are homonyms. But
in modern Korean the terms Yngguk and Inggllaend refer to different
things: Yngguk designates the island of Great Britain and Northern
Ireland combined as the United Kingdom, whereas Inggllaend refers
to only the English portions of the island of Great Britain, minus Scotland and Wales. This more fine-tuned usage is especially salient when
each of these different regions fields its own independent team at international soccer tournaments. Thus, there is no Yngguk team that takes
to the field during the World Cup. Rather, there are teams representing
Inggllaend and Skotllaend.
Nor will Togil for Germany yield any time soon to Toichillant.
Among other reasons, Toichillant is simply too long in comparison
to Togila reason that also applies to Hoju for Australia. The name
Ostreillia is just too long compared to Hoju. Whats more, Ostreillia
is easily confused with the name of the central European nation Ostria
Austriayet another factor lending longevity to the name Hoju.
The name Monggo for Mongolia will also continue to be used because
of the historical weight it carries. The original characters for Monggo
are , a sound translation first coined by the Chinese during the
Tang dynasty as an approximation of the word Mongol, the self-designation of the Mongols. Some linguists insist on keeping the words Monggo
and Monggol conceptually discrete in Korean; to be more specific, they
want to distinguish Monggo- from Monggol-, where Monggo (Mongolic) designates the entire family of different languages used by
Mongols throughout their history until the present and Monggol- designates standard Mongolian as used at present in the Mongolian Peoples
Republicso-called Khalkha Mongolian. According to this distinction,
the sound translation Monggo carries the broader sense of Mongolic,
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whereas the form in Monggol closer to the original Mongolian pronunciation is narrower in scope and refers to contemporary Mongolia.
This practice owes to influence from the customary usage of Japanese
scholars and is not followed by all South Korean scholars, but I daresay
the attempt to create a conceptual distinction of a scholarly nature based
on the difference between a traditional sound translation and a newer
name closer to the original language is rather elegant.
The word Indo India also seems destined for a long life. South Korean
school textbooks of all levels use the (somewhat distorted) English name
India, but the mass media prefer the name Indo. In contrast, Taeguk
for Thailand has a weaker lease on life than Indo does. Taeguk is still
holding on stubbornly in the speech habits of the older generations, and
younger South Korean speakers will also inadvertently use Taeguk, but
newspapers and other mass media seem to be switching over gradually
to Tai. Taeguk kunbu for Thai military is gradually losing
ground to Tai kunbu, and Taeguk kugwang for Thai king is
ready to yield to Tai kugwang. The same goes for Hirap for Greece
for most South Koreans today the English word Kris feels more natural
than the sinographic sound translation Hirap, the original characters
for which were , a sound translation not of Greece but of Hellas, the
Greek word for Greece.
Besides these, there are yet other countries whose Korean names
are sinographic sound translations: Pullans as discussed earlier, Itaeri
for Italy, and Hwaran for Holland. But these names
are also gradually being pushed out by Prangs, Itallia, and Nedlland. The word Hwaran is similar to Yngguk in that its Dutch-language
source, Holland designates only the western region of the Kingdom of
the Netherlands, whereas in Korean Hwaran refers to the entire Dutch
kingdom, including Holland. Of course, this probably also reflects the
fact that European nations, too (including the Netherlands), often use
Holland to refer to the entirety of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. But
there is a clear difference between the Korean word Hwaran and its
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etymological source, Hollandthe Korean Hwaran is simply a synonym

for Nedlland and is never used as Holland is to refer to the western
region of the Netherlands.
In addition to these examples, older Koreans sometimes use placenames like Piyulbin (Philippines), Aegp (Egypt), Toigi
(Turkey), Ojiri (Austria), Sbana (Spain), Podoa
(Portugal), Aeran (Ireland), Paran (Poland), Ss
(Switzerland), Sjn (Sweden), and Chngmal (Denmark), but
these names carry with them a distinct archaizing and antiquarian flavor.
In everyday Korean speech, Piyulbin has been replaced with Pillipin,
Aegp with Ijipt, Toigi with Tki, Ojiri with Ostria, Sbana with
Spein, Podoa with Portugal, Aeran with Aillaend, Paran with
Polland, Ss with Swis, Sjn with Sweden, and Chngmal with
Tenmak.
In the case of Spain, the original Spanish name, Espanya, put up some
resistance to the English Spein, but that struggle seems to have ended
in victory for Spein. The only South Koreans who call Spain Espanya
appear to be scholars of Spanish literature and Spanish studies.
Names That Have Been Changed Twice

Actually, of the place-names that used to be rendered as sinographic
sound translations, many have been replaced not by new names closer to
the place-names in the original languages but by place-names borrowed
from (and often somewhat distorted from) English. Austrian country
bumpkins with no knowledge of English would never dream that their
countrys name was Ostria. For Austrians like these who know only
German, their countrys name has always been and always will be the
Empire in the Eastthat is, sterreich. The country that the Finns call
Suomi we Koreans call Pilland, and the country that the Hungarians
call Magyarorszg we call Hnggari. The Korean words Rsia (Russia),
Polland (Poland), and Kris (Greece) likewise have nothing to do with
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the original appellations for these lands in their original languages but
are connected to the names used by speakers of English (albeit slightly
distorted).
But attempts to change these back to names closer to the appellations
in the original languages are likely futile. What determines a words
fate is not the set of clear principles laid out by specially designated
language legislators but the (at times capricious) customary usage of the
people who employ the word. These English place-names have already
put down deep roots in the speech habits of South Korean speakers. On
one hand, this speaks to the enormous influence that English has exerted
upon Korean throughout the course of the twentieth century, but on the
other, it also shows the extent of the influence of the Japanese language
on Korean. The Korean habit of calling foreign place-names by their
English-style appellations is a result of the direct influence of English
but owes just as much to Japanese influence, too.
Foreign proper nouns, including country names, first came to be
imported in great numbers into Korean at the end of the nineteenth century. To be sure, one can find foreign place-names in
earlier Korean documents, as well: for instance, Kwawa (Java
in the fifteenth-century Korysa ) and Pasa (Persia in
Kim Manjungs seventeenth-century Spo manpil ). And the
travelogues written by Korean envoys to the Qing capital of Beijing
during the late Chosn period also include place-names such as
(K. Ynggilli, Mandarin Yingjili = England) and (K.
Abiriga-ju, Mandarin Yafeilijia-zhou = American continent). Names like
these are sound translations created by Chinese and then imported
into Korea. Thus, even before the Korean enlightenment period, a
number of foreign place-names were by no means unfamiliar to Korean
intellectuals. But it was during the enlightenment period after the
opening of Korean ports in 1876 that the names of all the worlds
countries and still other foreign proper nouns were systematically
absorbed all at once into the Korean lexicon. In various documents
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from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including

school textbooks, newspapers, and new novels (sinsosl), one finds
countless examples of place-names that had never appeared before in
Korean documents: country names like (idaeri Italy),
(Pmnans France), (Paran Poland), (Hyungari
Hungary), (Arasa Russia), (Tanmaek Denmark),
(Sjn Sweden), (Ss Switzerland), (Hirap Greece),
(Aegp Egypt), (Podoa Portugal), (Sbana
Spain), (Hwaran Netherlands), (Paegii Belgium),
(Hotaeria Australia), (Tgiji Germany),
(Toigi Turkey), (NYegaraga Nicaragua),
(Paragwi Paraguay), (Pinaesuwlla Venezuela),
(Pallibia Bolivia); city names such as (Pari Paris),
(Paesayu Versailles), (Masaengni Marseilles),
(Riang Lyons), (Paengnim Berlin), (Ryundon London),
(Ajn Athens), (Hwasngdon Washington),
(Chigago Chicago), (Pilladalpia Philadelphia),
(Milga Mecca), (Pasadon Boston), (Poragaengna
Bologna), (Okkksabptal Oxford), (Nyuyuk New
York), (Idanbo Edinburgh), (Paltaemo Baltimore),
(Posudam Potsdam), (Amsurodam Amsterdam),
(Rongnodam Rotterdam), (Purasl Brussels),
(Andogap Antwerp), (Hambok Hamburg), (Mininhyn Munich); and personal names like (Sogyngnaj
Socrates), (Porapto Plato), (Aryksadadgi
Aristotle), (Pisagarasa Pythagoras), (Agimijsa Archimedes), (Hama Homer), (Kabaengni Copernicus), (Karirga Galileo), (Paegn Bacon),
(Ryukkk Locke), (Tkka Descartes), (Kamdk Kant),
(Higri Hegel), (Ruro Luther), (Kalbin Calvin),
(Kochnboji Gutenberg), (Majillan Magellan),
(Purangngnyn Franklin), and (ijsun Edison).
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Because these names were created by Chinese speakers on the

basis of modern Mandarin Chinese-character pronunciations, when
read according to their Sino-Korean pronunciations they sound quite
different from the place-names as read in the respective original
languages. Of course, in rare cases like Pari for Paris, the SinoKorean pronunciation still approximates Paris, with the result that nowadays when Koreans call the French capital Pari it is no longer clear
whether it is simply a hangl rendering of the original French pronunciation or an old sinographic sound translation read in its Sino-Korean
guise. Among city names, cases like Paengnim for Berlin are still
familiar to older Korean speakers. Thus, the incident in the 1960s when
the Korean CIA under the Pak Chnghi regime trumped up espionage
charges against South Korean scholars and artists residing in Europe is
remembered better as the East Paengnim Affair than as the East Perllin
Affair.
Chaos in Hanmun Orthography

As seen with the case of Pullans ~ Prangs, even today there is variation in the spellings of foreign place-names, but the chaos in spelling
during the enlightenment period, when these words first entered Korean,
was much worse. Back then, too, there were occasions when foreign
names were rendered in hangl spelling in an approximation of the
pronunciation in the original language (or of the English names), but
most foreign proper nouns then were rendered as imported sound translations from either Chinese or Japanese and written in Chinese characters. Sometimes those sinographic sound translations were rendered
in hangl in their Sino-Korean pronunciations. With this mix of sinographic sound translations borrowed as is from China and Japan and
hangl spellings trying to approximate the original languages or the
English forms of the names, there was little consistency in the rendering
of foreign place-names in those days.
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For example, sticking just with this chapters point of departure, the
country of France was rendered variously as Pullans,
Pmnans, Ppkuk, Pullyansy, Pullansy,
Pmnansy, Hrans, Pranss, and Prangss.
As mentioned earlier, the name Pullans originated as a Japanese
sinographic sound translation, whereas Pmnans was a sinographic sound translation coined by the Chinese, of which Ppkuk
is an abbreviation. Even today, France is rendered Faguo in China.1
The Korean terms Pullyansy and Pullansy are
hangl renditions of the sinographic sound translation from the
end of the nineteenth century, and Pmnansy is the hangl
pronunciation of from the same period. Hrans,
Pranss and Prangss were attempts to render the original French pronunciation of France in hangl spelling, and Hrans
appears to have been influenced by Japanese pronunciation.
Chinese versus Japanese sinographic sound translations were not the
only source of differences in spellings. Often there were multiple and
competing sound translations for the same proper noun, and because all
this was happening before hangl orthography had been unified and
standardized, the chaos in hangl spelling was much worse than it is
today.
I examine sinographic sound translations of foreign proper nouns first.
Sound translations are similar to the jiajie (loaned and borrowed
[graphs]) category of the six traditional categories of Chinese characters (liu shu ); that is, semantics play almost no role, and instead
the characters are chosen for their sounds. This means that even in the
country that first invented sinographic sound translations (as well as in
Japan), it is not unusual for the same proper noun to have multiple renditions in writing. Small wonder, then, that there should have been such
chaos after these various forms were imported into Korea.
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For example, in documents from the Korean enlightenment period

(approx. 1880s1910), the word for Italy is rendered Idaeri,
itaeri, idaeri, Itaeri, Iguk, and so on,
in addition to idaeri and Itaeri (the latter spelling
being familiar to older generations even today). Renditions of the word
for Germany were also quite varied: besides Tgiji, there
were also Tkkuk, Togil, Tokkuk, and Iriman
(a sound translation of German). For Denmark, in addition to
Tanmaek already mentioned, there was also Chngmal, still familiar
to elderly Koreans today, and for Russia there was Rosa and
Aguk, besides the more usual Arasa. The same sort of variety
obtained for city names, too. For Paris, apart from the form in
Pari, enlightenment-period documents also show Pary (still in
use in Chinese today), and Boston could appear as Pasadon,
Pasadon, or Posudon. Likewise, New York showed up
as either Nyuyuk or Nyuyak.
The chaos in personal names was even worse. In addition to
Pisagarasa, Pythagoras could appear as Pisagarasa,
Piagarasa, or Pildalgarapsa and could also
be shortened to just Pitaekko or Pildalgo.
Pitaekko and Pildalgo are loans into Korean from the Chinese
sound translation of Pythago-. And examples like these are by no means
rare. For example, a near-complete sound translation of Aristotle gave
the form in Aryksadadgi seen earlier, but usually he
was simply referred to as Arisu, Arisadk, or
Arisada, these being sound translations of the shortened versions Arisor Aristo-.
In the case of names that felt too long, it wasnt just personal names but
also place-names that were shortened. As already discussed, Australia
was sound-translated as Hotaeria, but this was usually shortened to just Hojua word that keeps the first syllable Ho- of
Hotaeria but adds the character -ju, meaning continent. Thus,
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strictly speaking, the place-name Hoju designates not Australia as

a nation but the continent of Taeyangju (Oceania)in the same
way that the word Kuju designates the European continent and
Miju designates the American continent. But just as the word Hoju
today is used more often to refer to the country than to the continent,
so was it used a century ago. In other words, when Koreans during
the enlightenment period used the word Hoju, New Zealand, Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia were excluded from its purview. This
serves as additional proof that a words denotation is more dependent
on customary linguistic usage than it is on any linguistic factors like
etymology.
Chaos in Hangl Orthography

The same chaos arises even when proper nouns are rendered in hangl
rather than in Chinese characters so as to approximate the pronunciation in the original language. For example, Budapest was rendered variously Spudapest, Spudapessd, Spudapyesst, and Spstapesus
(with the traditional convention of hangl s-clusters to render the tense,
unaspirated consonants); Brussels was rendered Sporu.ssel, Sporus.sel,
Spurus.sel, Spsrus.sel, Spsrusel, Spurussel, Sprassil, and Spuressil; and
Austria was rendered Ostria, Osyutria , Osyutyuria
, Ostyuria , Osstria , Osstri
, or Ostas. Indeed, the spellings were so varied and different
from modern-day spellings as to pose a serious challenge now to
both the McCune-Reischauer Romanization and to Microsoft Words
anemic hangl input system. Yet another example comes from the
word for Europe, the sinographic sound translation for which was
Kurapa: other hangl renderings that tried to approximate the
pronunciation better were Yurop , Yurobu , Yuroba
, Yuropa , Yuroppa , and Yoropko . A similar
state of affairs pertained to personal names. Thus, the conqueror of
the ancient kingdom of Macedonia, Alexander the Great, shows up in
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enlightenment-period documents as Alleksand , Alneksand

, Areksand , Alleksandn , Aryksand
, and Alneksan , whereas Goethe was rendered variously
Skoede, Skoeede, Skwete, and Skyede (again, Microsoft Word is challenged by pre-1933 hangl orthography). That even hangl renditions
of foreign names were so chaotic in their spellings at this time owed in
the first instance to the lack of standardization of hangl orthography
and spellings of foreign words but also to the insufficient knowledge
about foreign countries and their languages at that time in Korea. The
confusion that Koreans today feel when trying to write foreign proper
nouns is in part an extension of the same confusion present over a
century ago during the enlightenment period.
Over the course of the last century and more, the Korean treatment
of foreign proper nouns has gradually moved from the importation of
sinographic sound translations from China and Japan to hangl renderings that try to approximate the pronunciation in the original language
(or in English). To a certain extent this trend appears to have been
influenced by Japanthe Japanese, too, rendered foreign place-names
as sound translations using Chinese characters at first but have gradually been switching over to katakana renderings that approximate either
the pronunciation in the original language or the English pronunciation
of the foreign proper noun. The principle of approximating the original
sound of the source language is a natural one, and now that Koreans
have a unified, standardized hangl orthography alongside a standardized policy for rendering foreign names, they experience far less difficulty writing foreign proper nouns than they did during the enlightenment period. But the spelling policy on foreign proper names is still far
from perfect and is often honored more in the breach than in the observance.
I now discuss the problem of excessive adherence to the original sound
of the source language. I would like to distinguish two types of original-soundism. The first is original-soundism in the broad sense and
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abandons the enlightenment-period practice of sinographic sound translations read according to their Sino-Korean pronunciations in favor of
hangl renditions that approximate the pronunciation in the original
language. In principle, this type of original-soundism is both correct and
natural. One cannot refer in writing to Denmark as or Chngmal,
nor can one refer to Washington as or Hwasngdon. Yet even
here there are exceptionsexceptions owing to customary usage. Just
as we can never change Ilbon Japan to Nippon or Chungguk China
to Chonggw, it will not be easy to change from Togil Germany
to Toichillant or from Hoju Australia to Ostreillia. And original-soundism will probably never be a powerful enough principle to
force changes in customary usage. As long as one accepts this point,
original-soundism in the broad sense is correct.
The Dilemmas of Original-Soundism in

Changjak kwa pipyng
This broader notion of striving to reproduce original pronunciations
contains within it a narrower version of the same principle. This second
principle of original pronunciations advocates rendering foreign proper
names in hangl as closely as possible to the pronunciation in the source
languageinsofar as hangl allows. I propose to call this narrower
version of the principle fanatical original-soundism or fundamentalist
original-soundism. I find it very difficult to agree with this fanaticism
or fundamentalism in striving for approximations of source-language
pronunciation. If taken to its logical extreme, this principle engenders
a range of problems. Those who would prosecute this quest for original-soundism in a fundamentalist way overlook three problems. First,
they think only of the physical characteristics of sounds while overlooking the phonological system that these sounds create in each individual language. Second, they overlook the fact that the ultimate arbiters
of linguistic norms are the popular masses that actually use the language.
This is the problem of customary usage mentioned a moment ago.
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Third, they forget that there are limits to peoples knowledge of foreign
languages.
Probably the most representative among contemporary South Korean
media that ignore the current regulations concerning the spelling of
foreign words in Korean and advocate a narrow original-soundism is the
literary journal Changjak kwa pipyng (Creation and criticism; henceforth, Changbi). In this journal, the French capital is Ppari, and
the author of la recherche du temps perdu is Prustt.
Because the voiceless stops in French, unlike English, are unaspirated, it
should be Ppari rather than Pari, and because the same voiceless stops revert to being aspirated in front of r, it should be
Prustt instead of Pprusttat least, such are the justifications of the Changbi editorial team. And this is by no means incorrect.
But these original-sound fundamentalists are so wrapped up in putting
South Korean readers through their paces in elementary French that they
ignore the fact that in French the p in Paris and the p in Proust are one
and the same phoneme. If they were to push to its logical conclusions
their principle that the first sound in Ppari and the first sound in
Prustt should be kept apart, they would have to render
English spy as sppai rather than spai, and style as
sttail rather than stail. After all, the sounds p, t, and k in
English are regularly deaspirated after s as long as they are not followed
by r. But the editors at Changbi seem not to have reached agreement
on this point yet. It is hard to guess at their intentions, but for now the
Changbi editors are still writing spai and stailit
makes no sense at all.
Fundamentalist original-soundism would probably have Koreans
change rilloti (reality) to riaelliti, and
Inggllaend (England) to Inggllnd. But we render the
English reality as rilloti not because we are unaware that the
words pronunciation is closer to riaelliti. The real reason is
that the word rilloti is tightly bound in Korean to another
262
loanword ril (borrowed from the English real). And Koreans

render England as Inggllaend likewise not because they are
unaware that the word is pronounced something like Inggllnd but because of the connection they make to the latter part of the
word in -laend (from English land).
Is it advisable to destroy such lexical connections in an attempt to
cleave to original-soundism? Suppose that it is. Even so, a number of
problems remain. In order to stick to the principle of original-soundism,
one would have to be an expert in the phonetics and phonology of all
foreign languages. This is an impossible featnot just for any individual
but even for an entire academic organization. The fine print in any set
of spelling rules meant to satisfy the demands of such a fundamentalist
original-soundism would run into several hundred volumes.
That such a feat is impossible is proved by the spellings in Changbi
itself. The only languages in which Changbi attempts to apply original-soundism are a handful of European tongues that are relatively
familiar to Koreans (including English and French), and Japanese. Original-soundism is not applied to any other languages. Why not? Because
the editors dont know those languages. But even in the case of French
names, not everybody knows how to handle every name. Thus, the name
that should be rendered Altwiser (Althusser) according to
the official spelling rules for foreign words appears in Changbi as
Alttwisse. The change of twi to ttwi and of se to sse is
a result of the journals policy of original-soundism, and dropping the
r occurs because the editors at Changbi are unaware that French
speakers actually pronounce the final r in this famous philosophers
name. And just because a name happens to be English doesnt necessarily
make it any easier. Who besides members of their immediate family
would know that the English surname Marjoribanks is read
Masibaengks, or that Featherstonehaugh is read Paensyo?
France
263
The Chaos Risked by Reckless Experts

The efforts to reform the Korean renditions of Portuguese proper nouns
during the 2002 World Cup soccer championships were also cause for
concern. The name of a certain soccer star that, in the old days anyway,
would have been rendered Ronaldo suddenly reappeared in the
guise of Honaudo. This change in hangl orthography must
have owed to the interference of some great expert in Portuguese
language. This expert presumably wanted to educate the ignorant
Korean masses that in Portuguese (putting aside changes in vowel
quality depending on the position of word stress), r in word-initial position and after certain consonants is realized as something close to a
Korean h, and that the Portuguese l in syllable-final position becomes
a so-called dark l and turns into the vowel u (especially in Brazilian
Portuguese). But in fact, what he did was take a situation with foreignword spelling that was already confused enough and throw another pile
of garbage on top of it. Thanks to this expert, Koreans now have to
distinguish the pronunciations h and l for written Portuguese depending
on the position of orthographic r in a word and also have to distinguish
the pronunciations l and u for orthographic l depending on its position
in a Portuguese word. Whats worse, insofar as the degree to which
syllable-final l darkens depends on a regional difference (Portuguese
Portuguese vs. Brazilian Portuguese), Koreans now also have to determine a Portuguese speakers regional origins before they can spell his or
her name correctly in hangl.
Thanks to this Portuguese experts blazing the way, we will probably
soon see Korean experts in British English declaring that the name of the
author of Paradise Lost should be rendered in hangl not as Miltn
but as Mitn. After all, in most regional varieties of British
English, syllable-final l is realized as a dark l or changes to a vowel. No
doubt, some specialist in French language will also come forth and tell us
about that the French city of art and fashion, Ppahi (Pari = Paris), and the
famous French politicians Mittehang (Miterang = Mitterand), Hokkah
264
(Rokar = Rocard) and Sihakk (Sirak = Chirac). No doubt the next

academic conference on this problem will conclude with a recommendation by the same expert in Portuguese that we render Honaudos
homeland as Prajiu rather than Prajil.
Even if all were so well versed in foreign languages as to be able to
satisfy fundamentalist original-soundism in foreign-word spelling, one
cannot ignore popular practice and preexisting customary usage. This
is true even when the preexisting customary usage contradicts either
original-soundism or current spelling regulations for foreign words. Just
because the hangl rendition Perkson (Bergson) rather
than Pergsong is closer to the original pronunciation does
not mean that Koreans should be forced to abandon Pergsong in favor of Perkson. When writing unknown foreign
names in hangl for the first time, it should be possible to render them
quite close to the original pronunciation, but in the case of names like
Pergsong that are already so widespread as to have become
Koreanized, it will never be possible to one day suddenly change over
to Perkson.
The same goes for the editorial principle in Changbi whereby, when
transcribing European languages, the editors ignore the official foreign
word spelling rules and render s before vowels as ss rather than as
s. The ss in Stevenson and Sanders are all the same phoneme, so
attempting to keep them apart in hangl transcription seems excessive.
It would be better for Changbi to keep the Korean ss in reserve for
occasions when it is truly necessary. If one follows the Changbi-style
renditionsmuch the same goes for the official foreign-word spelling
regulations, toothe Korean spelling for the borrowed English word
bus is ps. Actually, I think that this spelling should be changed.
However the English or the Americans may pronounce bus, we Koreans
call this form of mass transportation ppss. As long as this is not
an English word but a foreign loan borrowed into (and naturalized as)
Koreanthat is, as long as it is a Korean wordwe should write it as
France
265
ppss rather than as ps (ditto for nyuss news and

propan kas propane gas). And it is precisely in cases
like these that we really need the Korean ss and pp. We dont need
them for Ppari (Paris) or epissod (episode).
The one thing that prevents this principle of rendering foreign names
as close as possible to their original pronunciations, whether applied
in the broad sense or in the narrow sense, from turning into absurd
oppression is an attitude of respect for customary usage. For the most
part, we do in fact maintain such an attitude of respect for customary
usage, at least subconsciously. In preferring Togil to Toichillant for
Germany, Koreans mock this principle in its broader sense, and in
speaking of spai spies, stail style, and
Amerika America instead of sppai, sttail, and merik,
Koreans ridicule this principle in its narrower sense. These are words
in their natural linguistic environments. If this attitude of respect for
customary usage ever puts down deep roots, even the most stubborn of
original-sound fundamentalists will not dare to suggest calling Hnggari
Majarorsak or Okllahoma Oukllahoum because they are incorrect pronunciations.
When I write, I render France as Prangs in Korean. I might
opt for Pullans in personal correspondence or in essays like this where
the word itself is my topic, but be that as it may, in anything I write for
general public consumption, I use Prangs. Because I believe
that if there is an established, public orthography that has been determined via rational procedureshowever much that orthography might
contradict my personal standardsit is only right to strive to honor that
orthography in practice. But I still think that Pullans is better than
Prangs. And because that falls within the bounds of my own personal
tastes, nobody can tell me otherwise. The country that pops up every
so often in my dreams, and that I may yet visit again one day, is not
Prangs but Pullans.
Sindonga (April 1999)
266
Notes
1. This is somewhat off topic, but it is interesting that China and Japan
rendered the first syllable of the word for France with the Chinese
characters and , respectively. Each country must have selected the
Chinese character based on what worked best for the sound translation on the basis of their respective Chinese-character readings, but it is
curious that both characters agree in their semantics. means Buddha
and means (among many other things) Buddhist truth; Buddha
dharma. In essence, both China and Japan attached a Buddhist image
to Francethe country often called the oldest daughter of the Roman
Catholic Church was turned into a solidly Buddhist state by Chinese and
Japanese. If the character in Japanese is pronounced butsu, it means
Buddha, and if it is pronounced futsu it means France. Thus, if the
word is pronounced butsugo it means Buddhist terminology
or Buddhas words, and if pronounced futsugo it means French
language. The same goes for words like (Buddhist/French books)
and (Buddhist/French studies)the meaning changes depending on
the ondoku reading of .
Chapter 8
Random Thoughts on Nuije Ka

I have been reading Nuije ka, thought to have been written by the Silla
monk Wlmyng . It is a song known more frequently by the name
Che mangmae ka Requiem for my dead sister. The book
Im reading is North Korean scholar Hong Kimuns Hyangga haesk
(Hyangga interpretation; Pyongyang, 1956though Im reading the 1990
reproduction by Ygang Publishing in Seoul), but he gives it the name
Nuije ka. Che mangmae ka is not the only ancient song in Hongs book for
which he gives a name different from the one used in customary practice in South Korea. For example, Hong calls the song commonly known
as Hnhwa ka Song of offered flowers Kkothl ka, and what
South Koreans learn as Wnwangsaeng ka Hong calls Talha
ka. Not all of Hongs new names for the hyangga songs can be judged
successful, but it is fair to say that for the most part they are shorter,
less complicated, more transparent, and easier to understand than the
names we learn in the South. Perhaps I am fickle, but recently I have
come to prefer Hong Kimuns names to the old ones that we all grew
accustomed to in childhood. Hongs reasons for creating these names
are likely tied in the first instance to his own personal proclivities and
philosophy, but North Korean academic culture, especially as pertains to
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fields of national studies (national language, national literature, etc.)

must also have played a certain role.
Pros and Cons of National Characteristics

The ideology that props up North Korean academic culture can be
summarized crudely as a blend of nationalism and populism. Populist
nationalism has been a powerful ideology and driving force in modern
history, and it is a fact that the eruption of populist nationalism in
the right time and right place in various locales has facilitated positive
historical transformations. It has frequently served as the spiritual fuel
for liberation and revolution.
But as with all particularisms, whenever populist nationalism has
become too extreme in its biases or when historical conditions have
changed, it has easily degenerated into a negative autism and ignorance.
North Korean national studies, insofar as outsiders can grasp its otherwise vague contours, evinces precisely this kind of autism and ignorance.
It is a simplistic philosophy where the whole universe is divided into us
and them, and we are equated with good, whereas they are equated with
evil. It is as if the Manichean dichotomy of good and evil combined in the
worst way possible with an autistic fantasy called revolutionary romanticism or economic egotism. For adherents of this philosophy there is no
distinction between what is and what ought to be, and the hell that they
are unwittingly constructing for themselves is justified by the good will
they used to harbor. A national studies that started off with self-respect
has arrived at self-closure and autism.
This is a trap into which not only North Korea but also Japanese kokugaku (national studies) ever since the Edo period has frequently fallen.
And it has also proved to be a temptation that is difficult for South
Korean national studies to resist. In fact, the very notion of national
studies contains within itself, to a certain extent, the seeds of autism.
269
Let me pursue this topic a bit further. The objective name of the
language used on the Korean Peninsula and its surrounding islands is
hangug : Korean. In the school curriculum it is called kug
(national language), but the custom of calling the language of ones
country the national language is not very widespread. In English schools
they refer to the language they use on an everyday basis as English, and
the French also call their language simply French. In fact, the custom
of calling the language of the land the national language seems to be
specific to just a few nations in East Asia. Just like Koreans referring to
Korean history as kuksa (national history) and to Korean literature
as kuk-munhak (national literature), the custom of calling the
Korean language kug, the national language, betrays the dynamics of
a certain self-respect or self-conceit.
Moreover, in these words can be heard the echoes of the seventeenth-century and later Japanese kokugaku movement that strove to
enhance the indigenous Japanese spirit and culture through research
into classical Japanese documents. Just as Japanese kokugaku
scholars (kokugakusha ) ever since the Edo period have made
chajon an independent, self-respecting stancevis--vis Chinese
culture the psychological basis of their scholarship, so have Korean
kukhak (national studies) scholars relied on chajon vis--vis foreign
culture in establishing their academic field. Thus, the ideological expression of this chajon, this independence and self-respect upon which they
rely, whether one of resistance or of hegemony, can be called a kind
of nationalism. When the chosn (hak) () (Chosn language
[studies]), chosnsa (hak) () (Chosn history [studies]), and
chosn munhak (Chosn literature) practiced during the
Japanese colonial occupation regained their old names of kug(hak),
kuksa(hak), and kuk-munhak after liberation in 1945the names they
had held during the brief Kuhan malgi period at the very end
of the Chosn dynasty, the model for the change in names was Japanese
academic custom.
270
Besides the egotism and narcissism that underlies the Korean practice
of calling their language kug and the Japanese practice of calling their
language kokugo (or of calling the related academic fields kukhak and
kokugaku), one should also note that both these countries are rare examples of monoethnic or monolingual societies. English and French are
simply the first official languages in England and France, respectively,
whereas Korean and Japanese truly are, just as the term indicates, the
national languages in their respective countries. And even if one admits
that the shadow of Japanese kokugaku hangs over Korean kukhak to
a certain extent, the roots of Korean national studies are to be found
in the late Chosn Sirhak movement or in the quasi-national-oriented
scholarship of the period just preceding it, not in Japanese kokugaku.
Besides, when one considers that North Korean academia, which prefers
chosnhak, chosn, chosnsa, and chosn munhak to kukhak, kug kuksa,
and kuk-munhak, is actually much more blatant in its autism and selfabsorption, one can see that the term kukhak in and of itself need not
always imply a national studies autism.
In any case, whether it is North Korean chosnhak or South Korean
kukhak, one should try to avoid rashly branding what are clearly
universally available epistemologies with the labels of imperialism and
colonialism. The magic wand of national characteristics is a tempting
weapon, and kukhak in particular finds it difficult to resist the temptation to wield it. But as soon as one gives in to that temptation, scholarship turns into ideology.
But the new name Nuije ka that Hong Kimun gave to Che mangmae
ka has taken me away from my original topic. Actually, Hongs new
hyangga names were simply the excuse for this little digression and are
by no means symptomatic of the autism or ignorance of North Korean
national studies. As I mentioned earlier, I am rather more fond of Hongs
new hyangga names than of the old ones. This is especially true of the
name Nuije ka, for the (Sino-Korean) word mangmae deceased
271
sister is too funereal and lacks the loving affection inherent to the
(native Korean) word nui (boys) older sister.
In any case, let me conclude this long digression with what I fear will
be an immodest observation (well, this entire essay is really just one
long digression, but anyway). It is quite interesting that both North
and South Korea, at virtually the same time, have had a great national
studies scholar with the given name Kimun. The Chinese characters
for one Kimun are and for the other . Needless to say, I am
speaking of Hong Kimun in the North and Yi Kimun in
the South. If I could be so presumptuous as to hazard an observation
on the work of these senior and distinguished scholars, I daresay that
where in the North is broader in the scope of his scholarship,
in the South is the more meticulous of the two. How interesting that the
Northerner Kimun hails originally from Chungchng Province in what
is now South Korea, whereas the Southerner Kimun was originally from
the northwest. In effect, they have switched homes.
The Beauty of Songs That Confront Death

Not all of the fourteen surviving hyangga songs from Silla count as
literary masterpieces. There are a few among them that are noteworthy
only for the glimpses they give as to what Old Korean must have been
like. Compared to songs like these, Nuije ka is a superb composition in
every sense. Its beauty is to be found in the way it confronts death.
Death is the business of religion, at least in the first instance. But
along with love, it has also long been the business of the expressive arts.
Nuije ka sings of the universal human confrontation with both of these:
love and death. This universal confrontation is the desperate struggle of
human beings as living beings with the sense of powerlessness in the
face of (their own) destiny, which is (an older sisters) death, as well as
a struggle to overcome that death through the transcendental tool of
religion and achieve reunion with loved ones. On the strength of this
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universality, this eighth-century song can still stir the hearts of modern
readers after more than a millennium.
Hong provides the following loose translation of the song:
Saengsa kil iran
Ygi issuryna issul su ps

Na nn kandann malssm to

Irji mothago kabrinn ka?

n kalnal irn param e

Irijri ttrjil namunnip chrm

Han kaji es ttnasn

Kann kot mornnguna

Aya
Mitachal es mannal ksini

Nae to takka kidaririra

On the path of life and death
I want to stay here, but cannot.
Am I simply to leave
Without so much as a goodbye?
Like the leaves that will fall
One fall day in the early autumn wind,
I fall from a branch
And go I know not where.
Alas!
Until we meet again in Amitbhas Pure Land,
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I will cultivate myself and wait.

If there is any meaning to history, then there must also be some
meaning to the lives of individualsat least to the extent that individuals help in the making of history. Conversely, if there is no meaning
to history, human existence, too, must be meaninglessin which case
human existence, whether relatively long or short, bitter or sweet, fancy
or plain, would be nothing more than a dream generated randomly by the
universe. Unfortunately, I cannot glean any meaning from the history I
have read, and so am unable to find meaning in my life or in the lives of
others. History is meaningless, and life is meaningless.
This misfortune of mine comes from the fact that I am neither a Protestant nor a Marxist. If I were a Protestant, I would have found meaning
in history and life in the form of providence. And if I were a Marxist, I
would have found meaning in history and in the form of laws. I could
have claimed that even this bitterest and plainest of lives, if it had been
mediated in history by providence or by laws, would have had at least
some modicum of meaning. Unfortunately, I am an atheist and an antiMarxist. History is meaningless, and life is meaningless.
My scorn for providence and laws comes from my observations of
life, such as they are. But this scorn does not simply push me toward
nihilism; it pushes me toward a taedium vitae and misanthropy. Generally speaking, I hate people. Of course, the first target of my hatred is
myself. I just cant bear to look in the mirror. All I see there is an ugly,
lowly, base, abject, greedy, uptight, and egotistical beast. Dont they say
that if you cant love yourself, you cant love others? Thats me. I dont
know if I have ever truly loved anybody. My problem is that I dont think
my ignominy is my problem and my problem alone. I generalize my own
ignominy and dwarfishness, lay the blame for it on others, and try to
drag them down with me. I constantly tell myself that humans are ugly,
lowly, base, abject, greedy, uptight, and egotistical beasts. I hate my life
and the lives of others.
274
The Will to Live and the Fear of Death

So why do you bother to live? you might ask. I have nothing to say in
reply other than From force of habit. I could also call it the instinct for
survival present in all living things or the blind will to live. In any case, I
do not live because I find some meaning in my life or because I discover
meaning in a history that my life might help forge. The strangest part of
it is that, as much as I believe in neither providence nor laws, and as much
as I believe that neither history nor individual lives have meaning, my
attachment to life is actually all the stronger. Because my life is meaningless, I am more attached to life. I hate it, but I cling to it.
I just turned forty, which means that I have already lived longer in
the past than I am likely to live in the future. When I look back on my
life thus far, it has not been a particularly enviable one from a worldly
point of view. For the most part it has been a peripheral existence, even
more so now, as I pass the days as a bum. But I probably wont commit
suicide. I cant guarantee it, but for now I have no such plans. Buoyed
by the insurance1 that I can always commit suicide, Ill probably live
to be quite the old geezer.
The will to live is just another way of saying the fear of death. There
are probably differences depending on ones character, personal makeup,
and age, but the fear of death is a universal human emotion. That fear
may be somewhat lesser for sincere believers or hardened revolutionaries, but there is probably nobody who is completely free of the fear of
death. For atheists and counterrevolutionaries like me, the fear is even
greaterbecause, at the risk of repeating myself, there is no prospect of
eternal life or historical value added after life here. This meaningless life
is the only one I have; I lament each and every morning on this earth
that I will never get back.
But just as it is for other people, fear of death is the least of my worries.
Otherwise, I would not be able even to maintain my day-to-day existence. My day-to-day existence never comes into question. And so, while
275
living my day-to-day life, I forget about death. In the course of this dayto-day existence, I do things like get together with friends to enjoy tasty
drinks and fatty foods, play word games with my children or my wife,
curse the Chosn ilbo, and read worthless books.
The times when we suddenly wake up from the anesthesia of everyday
life and think about death are when we or our close friends are terribly
ill, or else when we suddenly lose a close friend. It is not just our own
deaths that we fear; we also fear the deaths of others close to us. When
someone close to us dies, we are sad. This goes even for me, with my
taedium vitae. In which case, perhaps my taedium vitae still has a way
to go. Perhaps there is still a friend or older sister out there for me to
love. Maybe.
The clich expression I feel like Ive lost my right arm is frequently
used to describe the grief felt by those who have suffered the death of a
close relative; this is neither an unmotivated nor exaggerated figure of
speech and does not necessarily pertain only to family members, either.
When a dear friend leaves this world, we truly feel a pain as if we have
lost one of our limbs. This is not because of our altruism but because of
our egotism. Actually, if all altruism is just expanded egotism, we could
probably say that it is because of altruism after all.
When we bury a family member or friend and grieve, it is not grief
for the family member or friendit is grief for ourselves. When we bury
a family member or friend, we bury a part of ourselves with them. We
bury the past that we shared with them. We bury the future possibilities
that we would have shared with them had it not been for their death.
The sadness we feel after the funeral of a close friend is precisely the
sadness induced by the loss of that part of our selvesin which case the
love that I prepared for my older sister may, in the end, be simply the
love that I prepared for myself. Im back where I started.
276
The Sadness of Those Who Bury the Possibilities of

the Past and the Future
The eighth-century song Nuije ka is a requiem sung by somebody who
has lost a close relative for that deceased relative. Or, in fact, it is a dirge
for that lost limb of the bereaved, a song for the mourner himself.
In this song, which Wlmyng is said to have composed and
performed as part of the Buddhist memorial service for his older sister,
the most heart-rending lines are probably One fall day in the early
autumn wind / I fall from a branch / And go I know not where. This
is precisely the grief for a lost limb, the grief that comes after burying
the past he has shared with his older sisterand the sadness that comes
after burying the future possibilities that he could well have shared with
his older sister.
This song is superb from the very first line. The powerlessness of the
poet, who has to pretend in vain to take a philosophical view of his older
sisters death, comes to life in the first two lines: On the path of life and
death / I want to stay here, but cannot.
What Hong Kimun renders as cannot [stay] in his free translation
corresponds to in the original, and both Hong and the hyangga
researchers before him have all interpreted this as chhi-go. As is well
known, chhi- in fifteenth-century Korean meant threaten, frighten.
Our lives are like leaves in the wind, and nobody knows when death will
summon. Our lives are always under threat. Humans are powerless to
see death even when it is but one inch from their noses.
Jacques Preverts poem Les feuilles mortes (Autumn leaves), set to
music by Joseph Kosma and made famous as a chanson, is highly reminiscent of Nuije ka, especially in the following lines:
Mais la vie spare But life separates
Ceux qui saimentthose who love each other
Tout doucement Quietly
277
Sans faire de bruit Without a sound

Parting always comes at an unexpected moment; all partings are sudden.
Fate always threatens.
But Nuije ka does not have exactly the same texture as Les feuilles
mortes. When the autumn leaves in the latter fall, singing of the waves
washing away the footprints left in the sand by the parted lovers, Nuije
ka seeks to overcome the fate of death through religion. Whereas the
poet in Les feuilles mortes is simply hopeless, the poet in Nuije ka
like the pious ancient that he wastries to compensate for the parting
in this life with the promise of a meeting in the next. For him, there is
another life besides the life in this worlda life in the Pure Land in the
west where the Amitbha Buddha is said to live, a life in Amitbhas
Pure Land and Buddhist Paradise, where he will be reborn after his own
death. And so he cultivated himself in order to meet his older sister in
the land of the Amitbha Buddha.
But there is no Pure Land in the west for me. I dont believe in providence or laws, either, and so dont bother to cultivate myself. Probably
wont in the future, either. And so, dear older sisterdear beloved sister,
who has just passed forty: please dont be in a rush to go anywhere I
dont know. At least for another ten years or so. I wonder, when will the
day come when we can sit across from each other and enjoy a glass or
two of red wine?
Chillichayu (Fall 1998)
278
Notes
1. I learned this idea from mile Cioran. He once said that he never felt
despair, no matter how hard life became, because he knew that if life ever
became so difficult as to be unbearable, all he needed to do was commit
suicide. He lived a long and healthy life and died peacefully.
Chapter 9
On the Peripheries
of Sgyng pylgok
Song of the Western Capital
The newspapers in November 1998 reported that Ko Kn, mayor of
Seoul, on the occasion of the ground-breaking ceremony held on
November 6 at the Seoul World Cup Stadium in Sangam-dong, Mapogu, pronounced the following: In order that the 2002 World Cup might
become an opportunity for North-South reconciliation and cooperation and expeditious unification, I have presented, as mayor of Seoul,
a proposal to the chairman of the Pyongyang Peoples Committee to
revive Seoul-Pyongyang soccer. His proposal was to use the first exhibition match in the new World Cup Stadium to recall the annual KyngPyng, or Seoul-Pyongyang, soccer games that alternated between the
two cities during the Japanese colonial period. The obstacles to realizing
such a proposal were many, but even just imagining Pyongyang soccer
players in Seoul or Seoul soccer players in Pyongyang was cause for
excitement. It was even more exciting to imagine the prospect of Seoul
fans cheering on Pyongyang players and Pyongyang fans cheering on
the Seoul team.
280
I have never thought of myself as a nationalist. In fact, not all Koreans

are nationalists, and there is no need for all of us to be such. Considering
the magnitude of nationalism in Korean society, whether in the North
or the South, it is probably more accurate to say that we need to have a
little less of it. But blood is thicker than water, and the pull of a common
bloodline is one of the most natural human emotions. Whatever anybody
else might say, people in Pyongyang and people in Seoul are of the same
flesh and blood. Even if all Korean history prior to 1948 were to be lost,
it would not be difficult at all to prove that Kim Kapsun in Pyongyang
and Pak Kaptol in Seoul are of the same race. The language they use, the
writing system they use, their appearance, their traditional customs, and
so forth, would all give them away as coethnics.
It is by no means obligatory that one and the same race form one
nation to live in, but it is certainly ugly when members of the same race
snarl at each other in mutual hostility. In fact, any such snarling is ugly
to look at under any circumstances, but it is all the more so when it
happens among kith and kin. If we cannot get along nicely with our
Northern brothers, how will we ever get along with foreigners, whose
bloodlines are completely different? Whether it had been the city of
Seoul, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, or the Ministry for Unification, it would have been nice if somebody had had the patience to
work with the North Korean authorities on this question of reviving the
Kyng-Pyng soccer rivalry so that Mayor Kos proposal could have
been more than just an empty gesture.
The phrase Kyng-Pyng is short for Kyngsng-Pyngyang, where
Kyngsng ( capital city) is an old name for Seoul that clearly
indicates its status as capital. But the name Pyongyang has no such
meaning. Even if the Kyng-Pyng games were to be revived, the North
Koreans would likely not be very excited about the old term KyngPyng. First is the problem that the Kyng precedes Pyng, but most
of all is the problem of the meaning of Kyng = capital. The native
Korean word Seoul also means capital, of course, but if the Kyng-
On the Peripheries of Sgyng pylgok
281
Pyng games were to be revived, it would probably be safer to call

them either the S-Pyng games or the Pyng-S games, abbreviated
from Sul-Pyngyang and Pyngyang-Sul. Following the example of
the rivalry between Yonsei and Korea Universities in Seoul, whereby the
games are called the Yn-Ko Games when hosted at Yonsei University
and the Ko-Yn Games when hosted at Korea University, we could call
them the S-Pyng games when they are held in Seoul and the PyngS games when they take place in Pyongyang, in order to avoid any
wrangling over the name.
The Feeling Imparted by the Name Sgyng

Actually, I much prefer the old name Sgyng, or western capital,
to Pyongyang, even though I am fully aware that Pyongyang has a
much older pedigree than Sgyng does and that the city of Pyongyang
has been called Pyongyang for most of its history. Indeed, the name
Pyongyang is full of historical significance. But perhaps that is precisely
why I have so much trouble warming up to it. For me, Pyongyang is
the capital of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea before it is
anything else. For me, Pyongyang brings to mind overpowering monuments like the Juche Tower, Kmsusan Memorial Palace, and the great
bronze statue of Kim Il Sung at Mansudae, which in turn remind me of
the absolutist regime that these massive structures symbolize, along with
the lifeless cookie-cutter human beings who have to live in this absolutist regime, which has had all the air of freedom sucked out of it. Of
course, this could also be a side effect of the anti-Communist indoctrination I have been subjected to ever since my childhood days, but even
if there is some hyperbole in that anti-Communist education, and even
if I acknowledge that hyperbole, I dont think I will be able to change my
preconceptions about Pyongyang as the capital of North Korea.
If I try to think of the city in the days before it succumbed to a Stalinist regime, the name Pyongyang does not leap to mind. If anything, the
282
name Pyongyang for me is associated mostly with vernacular phrases

like Pyongyang kamsa (Pyongyang magistrate ~ governoralthough
this is a mistake for Pyngan kamsa), Pyongyang kisaeng (Pyongyang
courtesan ~ dancing girl), Pyongyang soldier (from the proverbial
phrase Pyngyang pyngjng palssagae katta like a Pyongyang soldiers
leggings, indicating something really dirty or ugly), Pyongyang hwanggojip (an incredibly stubborn person). Of course, if I think back to
Pyongyang during the time of Kogury (37 BCE668 CE), the associations improve briefly, with images of ancient East Asias leading
power crushing marauding Japanese forces and going toe to toe with
Sui and Tang China, but because the spirit of martial prowess that made
Kogury so great was a form of militarism, my associations quickly
move on to Japanese militarism, Pak Chnghis militarism, and Kim
Il Sungs militarism. In other words, it is not only the North Korean
capital of Pyongyang but also the Kogury capital of Pyongyang that just
doesnt do it for me. Of course, I love to eat Pyongyang naengmyn (cold
noodles), but that doesnt change my feelings about the name Pyongyang.
But the name Sgyng is different. For starters, it is unfamiliar and
therefore evokes a strange exoticism in me. Besides, it also echoes the
names of capitals in neighboring countries, like Tky (eastern
capital) and Beijing (northern capital) and just sounds imposingly
capital-like. But what drives my affection for the name Sgyng more
than anything else is the nostalgia in me for the Kory dynasty.
Everybody carries deep inside him- or herself an affection for a certain
historic period. That period is typically so idealized as to bear little relation to historical reality, but it both reflects and prescribes the bearers
world view. For Confucius, it was the Zhou dynasty; for Europeans of
the Renaissance period, it was the ancient Greek and Roman period;
and for Stendhal, it was the French Empire in the Napoleonic age. For
me it is the Kory dynasty. Of course, I have no deep historical knowledge to back up my nostalgia for the Kory dynasty. What supports this
nostalgia of mine is merely a vague conception that I have about that
283
period. And the substance of that conception is a shallow knowledge base

derived from freshman-year-college Korean history. The conception of
the Kory dynasty that my freshman-year Korean history class created
is one with features like these: a free spirit and lack of inhibitions in both
thought and customs of the sort that neo-Confucianism later squeezed
out of our human sensibilities; a national identity different from the one
later when sadae kyorin (serve the great and cultivate friendship with neighbors) hardened into an unchanging diplomatic principle;
Koreas first truly unified kingdom, bringing together Silla in the south
and Parhae in the north; and an internationalism that had become part
of everyday life through interaction with foreign countries.
These notions may well be removed from reality. And even if these
notions match up with historical reality, the Kory period must have
been one that also harbored various kinds of medieval barbarisms. There
is no question that Kory society was a crass, status-based society, that
it had no free elections, no national assembly, and no independent judiciary and that it boasted no computers, telephones, washing machines,
televisions, automobiles, or sit-down toilets. Commodities like food must
have been woefully inadequate to fulfill the needs of the general populace, and such commodities as there were must been have been distributed in a highly inequitable fashion. Basically, with my dependence on
the cultural and technological amenities of the turn of the twenty-first
century, I would never be able to go back and live in the Kory dynasty,
even if I had a time machine.
And yet the Kory dynasty has always tugged at my heart. So the
nostalgia that I feel is not for the realities of the Kory dynasty but more
for a certain perception of the Kory dynasty. I would not know my
way around the streets of Pyongyang, yet I dislike itbecause I dislike
the name Pyongyang. I would not know my way around the streets of
medieval Pyongyangthat is, Sgyngeither, but somehow I like it
because I like the name Sgyng.
284
Kasiri and Sgyng pylgok

Among the various songs that take Sgyng as their background, the
most famous is Sgyng pylgok . According to the information recorded in the Sngjong sillok (Veritable records of
King Sngjong), this song was typical of Kory-period namny sangyl
chi sa (), sometimes explicit songs of male-female mutual
pleasure, but when compared to other songs of this genrefor example,
Ssanghwajm (The dumpling shop) or Manjnchun pylsa
(Spring fills the hall)it is rather tame. In fact, even the most
puritanical Public Performance Ethics Committee member from the Pak
Chnghi and Chn Tuhwan eras would have been unlikely to do something so barbarous as to ban Sgyng pylgok. Moreover, this song
would probably not have seemed lascivious or lewd at all to people
during the Kory dynasty, when it was actually sung, either. If it had
been perceived as lewd then, it would never have survived as a favorite
lyric of the royal court. The only people to have found this song (and
many other Kory popular songs like it) lewd were the neo-Confucian
scholars of the Chosn dynasty. My heart stings to think of all the Kory
popular songs that were never recorded but were instead consigned to
the dustbin of history thanks to their puritanical bigotry.
Sgyng pylgok is usually listed (along with Kasiri Do you
go?) as a typical Kory popular song about the parting of lovers.
In fact, if one goes beyond the confines of Kory popular songs and
looks more broadly throughout the entire corpus of premodern Korean
songs and poetry, there are probably no lyrics that evoke so ardently
the sorrows of parting as these two songs do. Critics typically find that
Sgyng pylgok is somehow inferior to Kasiri in its quality, and
there is a certain amount of truth to this. Compared to the controlled
emotion shown by the speaker in Kasiri and her feminine grace, the
speaker in Sgyng pylgok shows a raw, unfiltered, and explosive
emotion and delivers a heartfelt, uninhibited lament. But for me, the
285
wretched outbursts of Sgyng pylgok are more moving than the

controlled grace of Kasiri.
Love has been the stuff of artistic creation since time immemorial, and
most artistic works depicting love deal with parting. Love is such a major
part of human life, yet it does not always proceed smoothly. The attitudes that people can take toward love are various. For some people it is
simply an episode in life, and for others it is life itself. For the speaker in
Sgyng pylgok, love is life itself. Moreover, for her, promises about
the future are not important. What matters to her is love in the present
moment, and the collapse of that love means the collapse of life itself.
She is ready to throw away everything for the sake of love. Here are the
lyrics to Sgyng pylgok in both modern Korean and English, minus
the refrains:1
Sgyng-i Sul-ijimann

Tatkon te sosnggyng koyoemarn

Yhaemron kilssambe prisigo

Koesirande urgom chotninoida

Though Sgyng is the capital
And a place rebuilt,
Ere I lose you I would leave my weaving there.
If you will give me love, I shall cry but follow you.
Kusr-i pawi e tisindal

Kinh-ittan kchriitka

Chmn hae-rl oeogom nysintal

sin-ittan kchriitka
286

Though pearls be dashed upon a rock,
How would their string be broken?
Though I go alone one thousand years,
How would my faith be broken?
Taedonggang nbndi mollas

Pae nae nohanda sagong-a

Ne kaksi rmnandi mollas

Nyl pae e ynjnda sagong-a

Taedonggang knnpyn kkoch-l

Pae tadlmyn kkkkriida

Forgetting the width of the Taedong River,
You ply your trade, oh boatman.
Forgetting the lewdness of your wife,
You take on my beloved as passenger, oh boatman.
When my beloved reaches the other shore,
He will pick flowers.
The speaker in Sgyng pylgok is a woman. Readers have no idea

why, but the moment of parting with her beloved has come. The man
is about to depart from Sgyng, leaving her behind. The speaker in
Sgyng pylgok loves Sgyng. Its probably where she was born and
grew up. But if only her beloved loves her, she is ready to leave Sgyng
and follow him. She is ready even to leave behind her livelihoodher
weaving. But her beloved is heartless. Maybe his love for her has cooled?
She is willing to leave behind her beloved home and her livelihood of
weaving, but her beloved will not allow her to accompany him.
287
In the second stanza the speaker accepts as reality the parting. And
so she sings, Though pearls be dashed upon a rock, how would their
string be broken? Though I go alone one thousand years, how would
my faith be broken? This second stanza sings of the ideology that in
Western literary history is often called romantic love. The notion that
each person has one soul mate, that the identity of that one mate is preordained millions of years in advance, and that therefore each must remain
faithful to that one person is the basis of romantic love. Romantic love
like this is the same ideology enshrined in the Korean proverb Im to hana
yo tal to hana daTheres only one beloved and only one moonand
in the same philosophy of hypocrisy and oppression that supported the
medieval and modern European family system.
The speaker in Sgyng pylgok sings of the eternity of this love
and seems to gesture as if to brace herself. But although this is an oath to
the speaker herself, it is also a plea: My love for you is firm, and you are
all I have: please turn your heart and stay with me. The second stanza
of Sgyng pylgok also happens to be the final stanza of yet another
Kory popular song by the name of Chngsk ka (Gong and
chime). In other words, this pearl stanza was a pattern that appeared
frequently in love songs of this period. Whether in the case of Chngsk
ka or that of Sgyng pylgok, the theory that these songs are blends
composed of two or more different songs is based on this pearl stanza.
In any case, through this second stanza depicting the firmness of her
love, the speaker in Sgyng pylgok declares that she belongs to her
beloved and to him only, and through this declaration she tries to turn
her beloveds heart. But her beloveds heart does not turn. He is determined to abandon the speaker and cross the Taedong River, whereupon
the speakers fury erupts again, revealing that her calm and collected
grace in the second stanza was nothing more than a tactical gesture
designed to turn her beloveds heart. As soon as this gesture fails, the
speakers emotions lose their balance and erupt in a violent lament.
288
The Beauty of Those Who Seize the Present

The speakers resentment is directed not only at her beloved, who is
about to leave her, but also at the poor anonymous boatman. She cries
out: Forgetting the width of the Taedong River, you ply your trade, oh
boatman. Forgetting the lewdness of your wife, you take on my beloved
as passenger, oh boatman. If the Taedong River is wide, it will take
some time to cross it. The boatman will have no choice but to leave his
wife alone for that period of time. And the boatmans wife, left alone at
home, could well fall into adulterous temptation. Such is the speakers
claim, and it is not made with any knowledge that the boatmans wife is
adulterous. Rather, as long as the boatman stays tethered to shore, the
speakers beloved will be unable to cross the Taedong River and will be
able to stay by the speakers side; thus, it is a vain effort on her part
to manipulate the boatman, whom she resents so much for taking her
beloved aboard as his passenger. And so she vents her spite to the poor
boatman and his wife: Oh boatman, now is not the time to take on this
passenger and earn a few cents. Your wife will commit lewd acts as soon
as you leave the house. Hurry back home!
Here, in the speakers statement that the Taedong River is wide,
one can feel the full weight of the separation of the speaker and her
beloved. The Taedong River is indeed wide. Its not easy to cross. Once
the speakers beloved crosses the Taedong River, the two will grow
distant from each other. It will not be easy for the speaker to cross the
river, and it will be just as difficult for her beloved to cross the river and
return to her. The speaker senses that the spatial distance will turn into
a psychological distance between her and her beloved. She knows that
although her love for her beloved is firm, his love for her is not. And so,
immersed in grief, she wails that her beloved will pick flowers once he
has crossed the Taedong River.
The emotion that the speaker shows here is intense jealousythe
fretful mix of hatred and frustration felt when the person one loves loves
another. According to the Song of Solomon in the Old Testament, jeal-
289
ousy is as cruel as the grave and has a most vehement flame. It abjectly
acknowledges the futility of its position, but it is the source of passion,
without which any real love is impossible. The speaker in Sgyng
pylgok already knows that her beloved will pick flowers as soon as he
has crossed the river.
The phrase picking flowers means sleeping with other women. Flowers
symbolize women, both in the East and in the West. A number of Korean
proverbs compare women to flowers and men to butterflies in order to
express love between a man and a womanfor example, Kkot pon nabi
pur-l hearirya (The butterfly that has seen the flower is oblivious to fire)
and Kkot pon nabi-ga tam ani nmgalkka (The butterfly that has seen
the flower always flies over the wall). The proverb Kot pomyn kkkko
sipta (When you see a flower, you want to pick it) was created in exactly
the same context as will pick flowers in Sgyng pylgok. Note also the
English expression deflower: etymologically speaking, it means to pick
flowers, but it is only ever used now in its metaphorical, sexual sense.
The speaker in Kasiri whispers a quiet pledge for the future:2
Chapsawa turimanan

Snhamyn ani olsera

I would seize you, but I fear
You would not soon return.
Srun nim ponaeomnani

Kasinan tat toshosos

Sad, I will send you love but, pray,
Ere gone, come back to me!
290
She wants to seize him and hold him back, but because that might anger
him and cause him never to return, instead she swallows her sorrow and
sends him off with a request that he come back as soon as he arrives.
She controls herself to the very end, thereby creating the possibility that
her beloved might return. The speaker in Sgyng pylgok is different
from this. She has no future, so this parting is forever. Unable to restrain
herself, she speaks her mind. The wiser and more realistic of the two
in terms of love is probably the speaker in Kasiri. Because she sends
her beloved off with good memories of their parting, she leaves open the
possibility of his return. By contrast, the speaker in Sgyng pylgok
closes off all such possibilities with her furious tirade and risks losing her
beloveds affection entirely. But for me the speaker in Sgyng pylgok
seems more beautiful. She knows that all of life is here and now, in the
present moment.
Chillichayu (Fall 1998)
291
Notes
1. The translation of the first two stanzas is adapted from that by Marshall
Pihl in his A Reader in Traditional Korean Literature: From Myth to
Oral Narrative (unpublished manuscript, 1993), 6768.
2. The translation of the first two stanzas is adapted from that by Marshall
Pihl in his A Reader in Traditional Korean Literature: From Myth to
Oral Narrative (unpublished manuscript, 1993), 67.
Glossary
An Tuhi (19171996): Northerner by birth, military man, and

industrialist in the ROK after liberation. Assassinated the reunification
activist and last president of the provisional government of the Republic
of Korea, Kim Ku, in 1949 in what many believe was a right-wing
conspiracy linked to President Syngman Rhee and the American CIA.
Ayugai Fusanoshin (18641946): Eminent Japanese philologist
who specialized in Old Korean language and writing.
baihua : Written vernacular Chinese (not to be confused with spoken
Mandarin Chinese).
Bakufu : Shogunate. Feudal administrators called shoguns ruled Japan
from the twelfth century until the Meiji Restoration of 1867.
binom: A compound noun composed of two elements.
calque: Loan translation.
Changjak kwa Pipyngsa : Creation and Criticism
Publishing Co., a leading publisher of progressive literature in South
Korea known for its critical stance; called Changbi for short.
Chayu Chong-ynmaeng : General Alliance for Freedom; a
conservative right-wing activist organization in South Korea formed originally by President Syngman Rhee (in office 19481960).
Chayu Minju Minjok Hoei : National Council for
Freedom and Democracy, a right-wing organization created by hardliners
in Kim Yngsams government (19931998) to oppose his overtures to
North Korea.
Cho Sehi (1942): South Korean novelist and author of Nanjangi
ka ssoa ollin chagn kong (A small ball shot up in the air by a dwarf; 1978).
Famous for his uncomplicated and unpretentious style and for depicting
the lives of exploited laborers in the 1970s.
294
Choguk Tongil Pm-Minjok Ynhap : Pan-Korean

Alliance for Unification: NGO formed in 1990 to promote Korean unification along lines similar to those proposed by North Korea.
Choe Hynbae (Oesol) (18941970) : Leading kughakcha grammarian and anti-Japanese nationalist during the colonial period (1910
1945) and later professor at Yonsei University in South Korea.
Choe Inhun (1936): Distinguished South Korean novelist and playwright.
Choe Wnsik (1949): Leading South Korean literary critic and
public intellectual active in Changjak kwa Pipyngsa.
Choe Yun (1958): Distinguished female South Korean novelist and
professor of French literature at Sgang University in Seoul.
Chnggyechn : Famous stream that ran through Seoul in earlier
days and was recently restored by President Lee Myung-bak (in office
20082013) while he was serving as mayor of Seoul (20022006).
Chng Kwari (1958): Leading South Korean literary critic; formerly
professor of French literature at Chungnam University and professor of
Korean literature at Yonsei University.
Chng Unyng (19442005): Famous progressive/Marxist South
Korean economist and public intellectual.
Chn Tuhwan (1931): ROK Army general who seized power in
1980 and ruled as twelfth president from 1981 to 1988. Sentenced to death
in 1996 for his role in brutally suppressing the Kwangju Uprising but later
pardoned by president Kim Yngsam.
Chosn ilbo : Leading South Korean daily newspaper notorious
for its right-wing views.
chosn munhak : Chosn literature; the term for Korean literature under Japanese colonial rule.
chosn : Chosn language; the term for the Korean language
under Japanese colonial rule.
Chosn Hakhoe : Academic society founded in 1921 with the
purpose of conducting research on all aspects of the Korean language.
Glossary
295
Pioneered the new hangl orthography in the late 1920s and 1930s.
Renamed as the Hangl Hakhoe in 1949.
Chosn Ynguhoe : The Chosn Hakhoe went by this name
from 19211931.
chosnsa (hak) (): Chosn history; the term for Korean history
under Japanese colonial rule.
Chu Si-gyng (18761914): Grammarian and patriot considered the
grandfather of national language studies in Korea.
Cioran, mil (19111995): Romanian philosopher and essayist who wrote
mainly in French after 1945 and whose works are famous for their lyricism
and pessimism, skepticism and nihilism.
diglossia: Sociolinguistic situation characterized by the use of two different
linguistic codes used in complementary distribution: a high code and a
low code.
Edo period: Also known as the Tokugawa period; the period from 1603
1868, when Japan was ruled by the Tokugawa shogunate.
Hanbo scandal: Also known as Hanbogate; a multibillion dollar scandal
involving Hanbo Iron & Steel Co. in which South Korean president Kim
Yngsam and his second son, Kim Hynchl, were implicated.
Hangl Day: The national holiday celebrated today in South Korea in honor
of Koreas indigenous script, hangl. Hangl Day was first implemented
by the Chosn Ynguhoe in 1926 and is celebrated today on October 9
in South Korea.
Hanguk ilbo : Leading South Korean daily newspaper.
Hangl hakcha: Scholar of hangl; term used to refer to scholars of
Korean and Korean grammarians who work in a more traditional national
language studies framework.
Hangl Hakhoe: The post-1949 incarnation of the Chosn Hakhoe in
South Korea.
Hanhinsaem: The ho, or courtesy name, for Korean patriot grammarian Chu
Si-gyng (18761914).
296
hanmun : The modern Korean term for literary Sinitic, or classical

Chinese.
Hideyoshi invasions: The Japanese invasions of Korea led by Hideyoshi
Toyotomi, 15921598.
Hiraizumi Kiyoshi (18951984): Ultra-right Shintoist professor of
the study of the nations history (kokushigaku) at Tokyo Imperial University who dominated the field of Japanese history in Japan from 19351945.
Hong Kimun (19031992): Korean grammarian and historical
linguist active during the colonial period who went North after liberation
and became a leading figure there in Korean language and linguistics.
H Ung (19182004): Distinguished grammarian, historical linguist
and national language studies scholar who served as professor in the
Department of Linguistics at Seoul National University 19531984 and as
president of the Hangl Hakhoe from 1970 until his death in 2004.
hundok : Korean vernacular reading of a Chinese character or characters.
Hunmin chngm : Correct sounds for the instruction of the
people; the name of the document that promulgated the indigenous
Korean script in 1446 and also the name of the script itself.
Hunmin chngm nhae : Vernacular explication of the
correct sounds for the instruction of the people; the Hunmin chngm
glossed in vernacular Korean. The earliest known edition is from 1569.
Hwang Chiu (1952): Leading South Korean poet and critic.
hyangchal : Form of orthography using Chinese characters as both
phonograms (for their sounds) and semantograms (for their meanings)
deployed to write native Korean songs called hyangga under the Unified
Silla dynasty (668935).
hyangga : Native Korean songs from the Unified Silla dynasty (668
935). Only twenty-five songs survive, recorded in two texts from the
Kory dynasty (9181392).
ichal : See idu.
idiolect: Form of speech peculiar to one individual.
Glossary
297
idu ~: A premodern means of writing Korean that used Chinese

characters as phonograms (for their sounds) to represent nominal particles, verbal endings, and some native Korean nouns, all in Korean (as
opposed to Chinese) word order. Also known as ichal .
Kaesng : City in what is now North Korea that once served as the
capital of the Kory dynasty (but with the name Songdo); famous for
ginseng.
kana: Blanket term for the two Japanese syllabaries: hiragana and katakana.
kango : Sino-vocabulary in Japanesethat is, Sino-Japanese vocabulary.
Kangxi zidian : The Kangxi dictionary, commissioned by the
Kangxi emperor and completed in 1716. Contains 47,035 Chinese characters and the now-standard 214 radicals.
kanji : The Japanese word for Chinese character; pronounced hanja
in Korean.
Karatani Kjin (1941): Leading Japanese philosopher, literary
scholar, and public intellectual. Author of Origins of Modern Japanese
Literature.
Katharevousa: Lit. puristic [language]. The high form of Greek in
modern Greeces diglossic language situation, as opposed to demotic, the
low form.
KCIA: (South) Korean Central Intelligence Agency.
Kim Kntae (19472011): South Korean democracy-movement
activist and later politician. Tortured in 1985 by the KCIAs notorious Yi
Knan.
Kim, Richard (Kim n-guk) (1932): Prominent Korean American novelist
and author of The Martyred and Lost Names.
Kim Sngdong (1947): South Korean writer and novelist famous
for works on religious themes.
Kim Soun (19071981): South Korean poet who was active in
Korean-Japanese literary relations.
298
Kim Tubong (18891961): Korean Communist and grammarian

active in the colonial period who rose to high office in North Korea after
national division but was purged by Kim Il Sung in 1958.
Kim Wanjin (1931): South Korean linguist and kughakcha
specializing in Korean phonology, Korean historical linguistics, and especially hyangga interpretation. Now professor emeritus at Seoul National
University.
Kim Wnu (1947): South Korean novelist and younger brother of
novelist Kim Wnil. Currently serving as professor of creative writing at
Kyemyng University in Taegu.
Kim Yongok (1948): Harvard-trained South Korean philosopher,
intellectual historian, and public intellectual.
Kim Yngsam (1927): Fourteenth president of the Republic of
Korea (19931998) and first civilian president after a series of dictatorships.
King Hyosng (? ~ 742 CE, r. 737742): Thirty-fourth monarch to
rule the kingdom of Silla; second son of King Sndk and Queen Sodk.
King Kyngdk (r. 742 ~765): Thirty-fifth ruler of the kingdom of
Silla; known for his support of Buddhism, he ordered the construction of
Pulguksa Temple and Skkuram Grotto.
King Sejong (13971450, r. 14181450): Also known as Sejong the
Great; fourth king of the Chosn dynasty and the driving force behind
the invention of Koreas indigenous script.
Kogury : Ancient Korean kingdom located in what is now
Manchuria, the Russian Maritime region, and North Korea. Traditional
dates are 37 BCE668 CE.
Koguryan: The language of the ancient Korean kingdom of Kogury.
kokugaku : National learning or nativist learning; a wide-ranging
intellectual movement in Tokugawa-period Japan characterized by philological and philosophical studies of ancient Japanese sources in an effort
to redefine Japanese indigenous cultural identity vis--vis China.
Kory : Korean dynasty that succeeded Unified Silla and preceded the
Chosn dynasty; dates are 9181392 CE.
Glossary
299
kotodama : Japanese for spirit of the language, meaning some mystic

quality inherent in the language that supposedly only racially Japanese
people can appreciate.
kughak : Lit. national language studies; Korean language and
linguistics as an academic discipline in postliberation Korea.
kughakcha : Lit. national language studies scholar; a scholar
engaged in teaching and research in Korean language and linguistics in
postliberation Korea.
kug sunhwa undong : National language-purification
movement; a government-sponsored purist movement in South Korea in
the 1970s and 1980s under the Pak Chnghi and Chn Tuhwan regimes.
kugyl : Interlinear glosses in the form of phonograms derived
from abbreviations of Chinese characters used as phonograms (for their
sounds) to assist premodern Korean readers in understanding and interpreting texts in hanmun (literary Sinitic) by indicating native Korean
nominal particles and verbal endings.
kun : Vernacular Japanese reading of a Chinese character.
kundoku : Vernacular Japanese reading of a Chinese character. Also the
technique of reading/interpreting into vernacular Japanese texts written
in literary Sinitic.
Kwn Insuk: A fourth-year student at Seoul National University in 1986,
Miss Kwn was the victim of sexual torture at the hands of a detective in
the Puchn Police Department in what became a highly publicized and
notorious example of the excesses of the Chn Tuhwan regime.
Kyngju : Coastal city in southeast Korea in North Kyngsang
Province; formerly the capital of the Silla kingdom.
Li, Mirok (Yi Mi-rk) (18991950): Also rendered Yi Miryok. Famous
Korean writer who spent much of his life in exile in Germany and also
published stories in German. Yi published his autobiographical novel, The
Yalu Flows: A Korean Childhood, in 1946.
liu shu : The six traditional categories or six [forms of] Chinese characters.
300
Manysh : Lit. Collection of ten thousand leaves. Oldest existing

anthology of Japanese poetry, compiled in the late eighth century, and an
important source for Old Japanese.
Maruyama Masao (19141996): Eminent Japanese political scientist and political theorist whose works on prewar Japanese militarism,
fascism, and ultranationalism have become classics in the history of
Japanese political thought.
McCune-Reischauer Romanization: The system for Romanizing Korean
used in most Western academic works in Korean studies. Created in
1937 by Americans George M. McCune and Edwin O. Reischauer with
significant input and assistance from Korean grammarians active in the
Chosn Hakhoe.
Meiji Restoration : The series of events and upheavals that
brought an end to the Tokugawa shogunate and restored imperial rule in
Japan in 1868.
minjog : Lit. ethno-national language; a racialized term often used
by Korean nationalists to refer to the Korean language.
minjok : Lit. ethno-nation; a term calqued on the German Volk with
heavy racial overtones.
minjok munhak : Lit. ethno-national literature; a racialized term
often used by Korean nationalists to refer to Korean literature.
Mixed-Script style: An orthographic style that mixes Chinese characters (for
Sino-vocabulary) with the indigenous Korean script (for native Korean
words).
moassgi: The traditional style of Korean spelling that gathers together
hangl letters in syllable blocks rather than string them out one by one
in a line. The latter style of spelling (never implemented) is called karo
purssgi.
monophthongization: Process whereby two vowels become one. For
example, Middle Korean /ay/ modern Korean //.
Munhwa: Lit. cultured language; the term used by North Korea today to
designate its official standard version of Korean.
Glossary
301
Nam, Yngsin (1948): Prodigious and independent South Korean

kughakcha, lexicographer, and language purist. Critical of the South
Korean governments language policy.
Ogura Shinpei (18821944): Pioneer Japanese scholar of Korean
language and linguistics active during the Japanese colonial period. Left
behind major works on Korean dialectology, hyangga interpretation, and
Korean historical linguistics.
ondoku : On reading; Sino-Japanese reading of Chinese characters.
nhae : Lit. vernacular explication; a genre of textual annotation and
exegesis developed in Korea after the promulgation of the vernacular
script in order to facilitate the study and understanding of canonical texts
in literary Sinitic.
nmun ilchi : Lit. identity (unity) between speech and writing;
the new ideal of linguistic modernity that was meant to overcome the
gap between literary Sinitic in written language and vernacular Korean in
spoken language at the turn of the twentieth century and into the colonial
period (19101945).
Paekche : Ancient Korean kingdom located in what is now southwest
Korea. Paekche elites played a key role in the introduction of literary
Sinitic literacy to Japan. Traditional dates are 18 BCE660 CE.
Paekchean: The language of the ancient Korean kingdom of Paekche.
Pak Chnghi (19171979): Republic of Korea Army general and
leader of South Korea from 1961 until his assassination in 1979. Dictator
who oversaw South Koreas economic miracle.
Pak Yongsu (1934): Poet, documentary photographer, democracy
movement activist, Korean-language scholar, and prodigious independent lexicographer.
palatalization: Sound change whereby a sound comes to be pronounced
closer to the palatal place of articulation, often under the influence of a
neighboring palatal vowel such as i or y. In Korean, the older [tsi], for
example, came to be pronounced [i].
Pok Kil (1946): South Korean novelist and public intellectual who
created an uproar in 1998 with the publication of his book The Ethno-
302
National Language in the Age of International Languages, in which he

suggested that Koreans should abandon Korean in favor of English.
pukpl : Punitive expeditions to the North, an idea popular with
some late-Chosn intellectuals and Ming loyalists who opposed the rise
to power in China of the Manchus and fantasized about overthrowing the
Qing dynasty and restoring Ming orthodoxy.
purssgi: Linearized hangl orthography that writes the hangl letters
side by side in a row, as opposed to the usual moassgi. Also called karo
purssgi.
pyojun : Standard language; used in South Korea to refer to the
official standard language but avoided by North Korea in favor of the term
Munhwa (cultured language).
Rangaku : Lit. Dutch learning, and by extension, Western learning.
The body of (esp. scientific) knowledge and book learning accumulated
and translated by Japanese scholars as a result of contact with Europeans
through the Dutch enclave of Dejima during the years 16411853 when
Japan was officially closed to the outside world.
Rhaeto-Romance: A subfamily of the Romance family of Indo-European
languages spoken in north and northeastern Italy and Switzerland.
Silla : Ancient Korean kingdom in what is now southeastern Korea.
Traditional dates are 57 BCE935 CE, of which Unified Silla occupied 668
CE935 CE.
Samchng kyoyuktae : Lit. Three purifications educational
brigade; a notorious military organization established by Republic of
Korea Army general and dictator Chn Tuhwan in 1980 with the alleged
goal of controlling the cabinet and rooting out societal evils.
Samguk yusa : Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms; an important thirteenth-century Korean collection of legends, myths, folktales,
and historical accounts relating to the ancient Korean kingdoms of Silla,
Paekche, and Kogury. Compiled by the Buddhist monk Iryn (; 1206
1289).
Shwa : The period of Japanese history corresponding to the reign of
the Shwa Emperor, Hirohito, from December 25, 1926, through January
7, 1989.
Glossary
303
Shuowen jiezi : A Han dynasty Chinese dictionary from the

second century CE. This was the first Chinese dictionary to give an
analysis of the structure of Chinese characters and is the source of the
traditional liu shu typology.
sijo : A vernacular Korean poetic genre consisting of three lines of
fourteen to sixteen syllables each, for a total of forty-four to forty-six
syllables.
Sinpagk : A theatrical form imported from Japan around 1910 and
popular until the end of the Japanese colonial period in 1945.
sktok : Another term for vernacular reading; reading Chinese characters or literary Sinitic texts in vernacular Korean.
Sugita Genpaku (17331817): Famous Japanese Rangaku scholar
known for his translation of the Western anatomy treatise Kaitaishinsho
(New book of anatomy).
Taemyngnyul chikhae : Idu translation of the great Ming law
code completed in 1395.
Tokto/Takeshima/Liancourt Rocks (): A small group of rocks in the
East Sea, sovereignty over which is disputed by Korea and Japan.
mdok : m reading or Sino-Korean pronunciation of a Chinese character. Similar to ondoku in Japanese.
wago : Native Japanese words, as opposed to kango, Sino-Japanese
words. Also referred to as Yamato kotoba.
waka : A genre of classical Japanese poetry.
wasei kango : Sino-vocabulary coined in Japan.
yamatokotoba: Native Japanese words or language.
Yang Chudong (19031977): South Korean philologist and scholar
of Korean and English literature famous for his pioneering studies in
hyangga interpretation.
Yi Insng (1953): Prominent South Korean novelist; retired as
professor emeritus of French language and literature, Seoul National
University, since 2006.
304
Yi Kimun (1930): Distinguished South Korean philologist and

historical linguist; now professor emeritus in Seoul National Universitys
Department of Korean Language and Literature.
Yi Kngno (18971982): Korean grammarian, language activist, and
leading member of the Chosn Hakhoe during the Japanese colonial
period who subsequently made his career as a scholar of Korean language
and linguistics in North Korea.
Yi Mungu (19422003): South Korean writer notorious for writing in
a rustic literary style purged of Sino-Korean elements that is also impossible to understand.
Yi Odk (19252003): Prolific South Korean author and critic of
childrens and juvenile literature. Known for his linguistic nationalism,
populism, and purism.
Yi ryng (1934): Prolific but rather bombastic and flamboyant
author of artistic, literary, social, philosophical, and political writings, the
Republic of Koreas first Minister of Culture, and still a prominent public
intellectual in South Korea. He is professor emeritus at Ewha Womens
University.
zainichi : Lit. resident in Japan. Used to refer to the ethnic Korean
minority that lives in Japan.
Index
Anglophone, 155, 168, 170, 195, 197,

199, 212, 307
anthropology, 230
baihua, 190
bilingualism, 211212
Buddhism, 156157, 186, 207, 266,
276277
Chinese, 1, 35, 66, 9293, 95,
157158, 177, 192, 201202,
238240, 243, 250, 253, 257, 269,
307, 311
Chinese characters, 23, 5,
7, 1011, 3839, 46, 48,
5051, 54, 5657, 5960,
63, 76, 8385, 87, 8991,
99, 106, 124125, 128135,
137, 144145, 152154, 156,
171176, 190, 194, 206208,
215237, 241242, 247249,
255256, 258259, 266, 271
Classical Chinese, 2, 3637, 45,
48, 155, 174, 190
Choe Hynbae, 1920, 33, 35,
7981, 92, 106
Choe Wnsik, 184186, 210211
Chn Tuhwan, 34, 112114, 116,
284
Chng Kwari, 181184, 210
Chosn Ilbo, 179, 184, 186, 208211,
275
Christianity, 36, 89, 152, 157, 160,
169, 187, 243, 266, 273
Chu Si-gyng, 33, 35, 7981, 87,
Chu Si-gyng (continued), 9192

communism, 109110
Confucianism, 283
cosmopolitanism, 10, 110, 120, 181
democracy, 110, 112, 114, 186, 190,
200, 241
dialects, 4142, 71, 73, 94, 9699,
103, 160
dictionaries, 9, 21, 2630, 33, 3740,
124, 132, 161, 170, 205206, 218
diglossia, 190, 211212
doublets, 138147, 151, 165166
Dutch, 123126, 177, 251
English, 57, 911, 18, 2326,
2829, 5758, 6465, 7071,
7375, 80, 83, 8586, 90, 93, 99,
105, 109, 118, 122124, 126, 135,
141, 151, 153, 155, 158, 164170,
175, 177180, 182184, 186187,
189, 191201, 205, 211213,
233234, 237, 239240, 250253,
255, 259, 261264, 269270, 285,
289
English-as-Official Language
Debate, 117
ethno-national language, 74,
117119, 122, 179, 187, 192196,
200
fascism, 9, 33, 109112, 186, 204,
211
globalization, 7, 10, 124, 182,
306
globalization (continued), 194195

Graeco-latin, 10, 138, 152153, 155,
206
Greek, 2223, 64, 6971, 8586,
125, 138, 142, 151152, 154155,
159, 162, 166, 168, 189190, 197,
199200, 240, 251, 282
hangl, 5, 7, 1011, 2021, 3334,
36, 4447, 5960, 76, 7990, 99,
105106, 156157, 184, 205, 210,
215216, 218, 221227, 230234,
236, 241, 243, 255256, 258260,
263264
Hangl Hakhoe, 21, 3334, 44,
8084, 205
hanja, 222, 241
hanmun, 1011, 36, 4546, 48, 123,
155156, 187, 190191, 197,
200201, 212, 255
hiragana, 171, 175176
H Ung, 7981, 92
Hong Kimun, 4851, 76, 267,
270271, 276
Hunmin chngm, 46, 51, 54, 76,
156, 190
Hwang Chiu, 6062, 64
hyangga, 8, 10, 4652, 74, 76, 267,
270271, 276
hyangchal, 4648, 51, 76, 85, 241
hybridization, 99
Japan (continued), 5658, 66, 74,

83, 89, 9192, 99, 105106, 111,
119120, 122, 124125, 132134,
153, 167, 170174, 176177, 180,
190191, 205, 207, 220, 224, 235,
237238, 242243, 247249,
255256, 259260, 266
Japanese colonial period, 33, 39,
82, 206, 279
Japanese, 57, 9, 11, 23, 33, 3537,
39, 48, 56, 58, 7374, 77, 8283,
85, 9092, 105106, 120,
122126, 128137, 144, 151154,
157, 159, 170177, 191, 194,
205208, 220221, 226229,
232233, 235238, 241242, 244,
247, 251, 253, 255256, 259, 262,
266, 268270, 279, 282, 311
idiolect, 98, 101

idu, 4647, 5051, 85, 241
international language, 117118,
121, 123, 178179, 183, 187,
190191, 195
internet language, 5, 42, 101
kana, 7, 85, 221

kanbun, 2, 7, 174, 191
kango, 106, 133, 135, 174177,
207208
kanji, 2, 91, 207
katakana, 171, 175177, 247, 259
Kim Yongok, 112113, 204
Kim Yngsam, 116, 120
Kogury, 95, 282
kokugo, 4, 82, 105, 270
Korean Language Society, 21, 80
Korean literature, 6, 910, 31, 39,
4546, 7475, 156, 269, 291
Kory dynasty, 95, 282284
kug, 1, 7, 9, 20, 26, 34, 3839, 80,
82, 92, 105106, 269270
kugyl, 85, 156
kundoku, 2, 135, 171176, 207208,
236238
Japan, 24, 67, 1011, 3536, 38,
Latin, 10, 23, 45, 64, 66, 6870, 73,
Index
Latin (continued), 83, 8587, 90, 125,
138145, 151155, 159, 161162,
164, 166, 168, 175, 186191,
196197, 199200, 206, 212
lexicography, 9, 21, 3738
liberalism, 10, 109112, 117,
119122, 177, 183, 185186, 199,
203205, 210
linguistics, 1, 6, 89, 2628, 39,
49, 6465, 6769, 72, 79, 98,
106107, 160, 212, 225, 311
literary Sinitic, 23, 7, 910, 45,
156157, 187, 190191
linguistic nationalism, 5, 7, 10, 21,
33, 37, 81, 8687, 137, 205
linguistic purism, 3334, 37, 106,
122, 152, 164
literary Sinitic, 23, 7, 910, 45,
156157, 187, 190191
loanwords, 5, 28, 33, 5859, 72, 74,
84, 90, 100, 122, 133, 135, 145,
158159, 161, 164, 166, 175, 177,
241
Mischsprachen, 72
mixed languages, 7172
mixed script, 215, 226227
minjog, 74, 117
munhwa, 41, 97
Nam Yngsin, 27, 33, 3739, 183,
210
nationalism, 5, 7, 10, 21, 31, 3334,
37, 81, 8687, 91, 117122, 132,
137, 164, 179186, 198200,
204205, 268269, 280
national language, 1, 7, 9, 2021,
2627, 29, 3337, 40, 74, 7982,
92, 9495, 97, 102103, 105,
117119, 122, 132, 134, 158, 179,
307
national language (continued), 187,
192196, 200, 235, 268269
neologisms, 35, 41, 44, 5859, 92,
107, 129132, 134, 143, 153155,
159162, 206, 220, 228
North Korea, 3334, 4142, 93,
106107, 268, 281
Ogura Shinpei, 48, 50
ondoku, 171, 174175, 206208,
236238, 266
nhae, 36, 156158
orthography, 11, 40, 84, 8790, 101,
105106, 160161, 171, 175, 216,
222226, 230232, 243, 255256,
258259, 263, 265
Paekche, 95
Pak Chnghi, 19, 112, 116, 186,
209, 255, 282, 284
Pak Yongsu, 27, 33, 37
phonogram, 51
Pok Kil, 10, 31, 109112, 114120,
122123, 156, 178187, 191193,
201205, 210, 212
populism, 199, 203, 268
pyojun, 41, 97
racism, 198
rangaku, 10, 56, 123126, 131133,
137, 152, 154, 177, 220
romanization, 41, 76, 258
romanticism, 65, 168, 268
Sanskrit, 23, 6465
semantogram, 51
sijo, 75
Silla, 10, 4648, 51, 56, 59, 76,
9495, 99, 267, 271, 283
Sin Chung, 4748, 5964, 74
308
sinograph, 27, 11, 247249,

251252, 255256, 258260, 311
sino-japanese, 56, 106, 133, 135,
171, 177, 205207, 228229, 236,
238, 244
sino-korean, 33, 35, 51, 5455, 82,
84, 9193, 100101, 106, 131,
133137, 139, 144, 166167,
205206, 219, 228, 232240, 242,
244, 247, 249, 255, 260, 270
sino-vocabulary, 56, 10, 3536,
5459, 74, 132135, 144, 151,
154155, 167, 175176, 205207,
220, 225, 227230, 232234,
242243, 249
South Korea, 7, 10, 29, 33, 42, 97,
106, 109, 119120, 134, 191, 205,
211212, 224, 267, 271
Sprachbund, 7172
standard language, 41, 9798, 103,
191
Three Kingdoms Period, 54, 9495
translation, 4, 910, 29, 3536,
4950, 5253, 76, 83, 89, 97,
122126, 152, 156157, 174, 189,
translation (continued), 206, 236,

247251, 255258, 266, 272, 276,
291
translationese, 9, 31, 34, 3637, 122,
156158, 203
mdok, 51, 135
vernacular, 36, 10, 46, 5051,
76, 82, 91, 135, 145, 156158,
171173, 187, 189191, 197, 212,
236, 282
Vietnam, 3, 8586, 190, 248249
wago, 91, 106, 133, 135137,
174177, 207208
writing system, 23, 60, 76, 8081,
8384, 8687, 8990, 172173,
175176, 215, 220225, 227,
229230, 241, 243, 280
yamatokotoba, 106, 174175
Yang Chudong, 48, 50, 76
Yi Kngno, 33, 82
Yi Odk, 44
Yi Yungi, 179181
Cambria Sinophone World Series

General Editor: Victor H. Mair
(University of Pennsylvania)
The Sinophone world refers to Sinitic-language cultures and communities born of colonial and postcolonial histories on the margins of geopolitical nation-states all across the world.
The members of the editorial board are:
Ann Huss (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Xiaofei Kang (George Washington University)
Jianmei Liu (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
Haun Saussy (University of Chicago)
Tansen Sen (Baruch College)
Shu-mei Shih (UCLA)
Jing Tsu (Yale University)
David Der-wei Wang (Harvard University)
Books in the Cambria Sinophone World Series include:
The Chinese Prose Poem: A Study of Lu Xuns Wild Grass (Yecao)
by Nicholas A. Kaldis
Modern Poetry in China: A Visual-Verbal Dynamic
by Paul Manfredi
Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary
Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations
by Karen An-hwei Lee
Sinophone Malaysian Literature: Not Made in China
by Alison M. Groppe
Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in the
Nanyang Literary World by E. K. Tan
Confucian Prophet: Political Thought In Du Fus Poetry (752757)
by David K. Schneider
310

A Study of Two Classics: A Cultural Critique of The Romance of
the Three Kingdoms and The Water Margin by Liu Zaifu
(translated by Shu Yunzhong)
Gao Xingjian: Aesthetics and Creation by Gao Xingjian
(translated by Mabel Lee)
The Classic of Changes in Cultural Context: A Textual Archaeology
of the Yi jing by Scott Davis
About the Author
Jongsok Koh is a well-known South Korean essayist, novelist, critic and

public intellectual. After earning his BA in 1983 from Sungkyunkwan
University in Seoul in Law, he went on to earn an MA in Linguistics
from Seoul National University in 1986. He then worked briefly for some
years as a journalist, but in 1992 he went to Paris to pursue a PhD in
Linguistics at the cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales. That
particular project was cut short by the eruption of the IMF financial crisis
in Korea, and he returned to Seoul in 1997 (sans PhD). Subsequently he
worked as a columnist for the Hanguk Ilbo (Korea Times) until 2005,
and as a freelance writer until 2013, when he announced his retirement
as a professional writer. Though highly regarded as a writer of creative
fiction, Koh is also the leading exponent of n pipyong or language
criticism, a unique form of critique, in Korea.
About the Translator
Ross King is Professor of Korean and Head of the Department of

Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver,
Canada. He earned his BA in Linguistics (Japanese and Korean) from
Yale University and his PhD in Linguistics from Harvard University. Dr.
King is the coauthor of Elementary Korean and Continuing Korean, a
popular textbook series for the teaching of Korean as a foreign language,
as well as of the extensive web teaching and learning resources for
Chinese, Japanese and Korean developed by UBC Asian Studies. He
has also pioneered the study of the history and language of the ethnic
Korean minority in the former Soviet Union and currently focuses his
research on the history of language, writing, and linguistic thought in the
Sinographic Cosmopolis. Dr King founded Sup sogi Hosu, the Korean
Language Village at Concordia Language Villages, in Bemidji, Minnesota
in 1999. He continues to serve as Dean Emeritus and Senior Advisor of
the Village in the summers.

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Infected Korean

Cambria Sinophone World Series

Copyright 2014 Cambria Press

List of Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Table 1: Reversal of made-in-China sequencing of the Chinese

Infected Korean Language

Table 7b: Japanese wago imported with Sino-Korean

Infected Korean Language

himself, for all his progressive inclinations, would raise an eyebrow at

Koh Jongsoks Infected Language

literary Sinitic in traditional China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam (among

Infected Korean Language

Was vernacularization in Korea a project of derivative modernity?

Language Ideology, De-Sinographicization,

Koh Jongsoks Infected Language

traditions and so on. This is why inconsequential or marginal

Infected Korean Language

ters in Korean education, Korean literature, and Korean language and

Koh Jongsoks Infected Language

Infected Korean Language

comes away with a healthy skepticism about the dominant language

About the Author

Koh Jongsoks Infected Language

collections of social and political commentary (see the references at the

Infected Korean Language

Images of Korean the language, especially as concerns the growing

Koh Jongsoks Infected Language

of writing in Japan and the idea that Chinese writing needs to be

Infected Korean Language

Koh Jongsoks Infected Language

. 2007. Language and National Identity in the Koreas. In Language and

Infected Korean Language

. 2003. Historia [Historia]. Seoul: Mam Sanchaek.

Koh Jongsoks Infected Language

. 2010. Tokko Chun: Ko Chongsk changpyn sosl. [Tokko Chun: A

Infected Korean Language

Min, Chnggi. 2005. n hoengdanjk silchn: munhak, minjok munhak,

Preface to the Revised Edition

Infected Korean Language

whether along the lines of Korean-language purification or English as

A Clumsy Confession of Love

Infected Korean Language

I bought my copy in one of the secondhand bookshops that used to line

My Dream of Compiling a Dictionary

A Clumsy Confession of Love

linguistic nationalism of the Korean Language Society (Hangl Hakhoe,

My University Days: A Sea of Languages

Infected Korean Language

A Clumsy Confession of Love

The Fantasy of Writing in a Foreign Language

Infected Korean Language

But it didnt take me long to realize the constraints of English. English

A Clumsy Confession of Love

Infected Korean Language

Actually, it might be more accurate to say that Korean is the only

Dictionaries: Repositories of the Knowledge

A Clumsy Confession of Love

After giving up on my hope of becoming a scholar of national language

Infected Korean Language

naries explaining the origins of names for French individuals, places,

A Clumsy Confession of Love

Infected Korean Language

the painstaking efforts that go into compiling dictionaries that will be