Korean words for members of the human genus = awesome

[ljlee]

Yesterday I was curled up in the school library reading an atlas of Korean history when I came across Korean names for different hominids. Even though they're mostly direct translations from the Latin, I loved how vivid and descriptive everything sounded this way. Here's what they said:

Homo erectus = 곧은사람 (The Upright Ones)
Homo sapiens = 슬기사람 (

Comments

[ljlee]

We studied linguistics in college

I did not know that! :D Isn't that sort of unusual for an artist? OTOH another friend of mine who majored in linguistics went on to study art history in grad school and is now a curator, so maybe language and art are more entwined than I know. It seems like a good liberal-arts education is the basis for a lot of different careers, at any rate.

How does Hangul avoid that? Has it just naturally evolved to keep pace with Korean as it's spoken?

It's a combination of evolution and standards-setting, I think. When originally created it had 28 letters, which are now down to 24 letters because the language changed some letters fell out of use. (Some are arguing that they should be brought back because these dropped letters, which sound out "z" and "f" and so on, can increase accuracy in transcribing English and other foreign languages.) New standards have been handed down by governmental or semi-governmental bodies, and some of the battles over new standards have been fierce from what I hear. Take the intensity of the usual geek fight and multiply by the stakes of deciding the linguistic future of an entire nation, and you have a perfect geekstorm. :D

We had an issue similar to "why does hour have an H." When originally created, Hangul used spelling that preserved the roots of the words instead of sounding things out phonetically. So the word for "sit," 앉다, is pronounced andda but the root actually has a silent "j" in there, like an(j)da, with the silent "j" actually hardening the "d" sound that comes after. When conjugated to say something like "please sit," 앉아라, it's pronounced anjara.

The question was whether to spell the word like it sounded, an/dda, or to spell out the silent letters and the structure of the word, like anj/da. When originally created Hangul was desired to do the latter, but pretty soon it became strictly phonetic, likely because the intellectual class largely ignored it and the people who did use it--commoners, traders--were ruthlessly practical about its use. This would be the equivalent of spelling hour as "ower."

In the late 19th century, however, a new standard was promulgated to spell out the roots of the words as originally designed. (The proponent of this standard actually did not know this was the original intent: He later discovered from older texts that the actual creators of the language agreed with him, which was a huge relief.) And that led to one of those aforementioned language-geek fights, probably the bitterest of the Korean standards disputes. Imagine you've been perfectly contentedly spelling "ower" and then some linguist comes along to insist it should be "hour." Oh, them's fighting words.

But... that's so SILLY. That's like claiming we US folks are illiterate to our heritage because we don't read French!

It's politics, really. If the French were an ascendant regional power who had been bullying the US for 4,000 years, that argument would make sense to many French people.

[lb_lee]

That is fascinating! Thanks for sharing all that, that is really cool. Yeah, it sounds like Korean is a bit faster on the ball with spelling reform than the Romance languages are. (French is probably the most infamous, seeing how many letters are SILENT now in the words.) And then you have languages like Icelandic, which change SO slowly that the people there can still read manuscripts a thousand years old without too much trouble.

I did not know that! :D Isn't that sort of unusual for an artist?

Fun fact: we've never been to art school. Haven't taken an art class since middle school, actually, which is a bit embarrassing, because I can see the difference formal instruction makes in my friends who've had it. But I actually fought being a working artist for years, and originally planned to be a translator for national security, or a librarian. FUNNY HOW THAT WORKS OUT.

On the whole, though, I don't regret my linguistics training at all. It's really handy for writing speculative fiction, because I can cobble together a fantasy language (like Pidgin Sign) and know that it flows and feels like an actual language, even if it's not Tolkien level. Also, you'd be amazed how much random history and human foibles you learn just by learning the history of languages!

--Rogan