The Grand Narrative

(“Learning the Art of Bowing” by bhophoto)

Normally I’d be at Starbucks with my Korean tutor now, but instead I’m recovering from being given the worst cup of coffee in my life by my wife last night. It’s not her fault, it was the heat ruining the 두유 or Soy Milk that I put in my coffee (I’m allergic to milk). Unlike milk, for most of the year you can leave unopened soy milk in cupboards for weeks or months, although I’ve long suspected that Korean soy milk is a bit dodgier than the SoGood I used to drink in NZ, but in this heat the soy milk must have fermented and mutated so much I’m suprised it hasn’t been getting up and turning on the air-con itself before finding itself in my coffee.

So, now that I’m back home from trying not to throw up on my students at work, I’m not moving much from this computer for the next few hours. I have a lot of blog-related stuff I planned to do, so watch this space, but first I noticed this at the Marmot’s Hole. In brief, he mentions that there are two syllables in Korean that you can add to a noun to mean a fan of it. The first, ‘광’,  is originally Chinese and has positive connotations; the second, ‘보’,  is Korean and is negative, meaning more someone who does something to excess than a fan. But they virtually mean the same thing, and like he alluded to, it’s kind of sad (and suprising) that no matter how nationalisitic Koreans are often considered, and how much they extol the virtues of hangul, they still have such an inferiority complex about their own language. Today you can see it with the wholesale adoption of English, to the extent that if I say I want 두유 in my coffee at Starbucks for instance, I’ll get blank faces, but if I say I want “Sohy-yuh” I’ll have no problems.

The reason this is right up my alley, no pun intended vis a vis the purgative effect of yesterday’s soy milk of course, is that I’ve mentioned the implications of this linguistic cultural cringe earlier here (if you’re impatient, scroll down in that post to 2a and 2b). It also means that I’d disagree with commentator #3 bumfromkorea on the Marmot’s post for example: it’s not overanalysing to extrapolate features of the modern Korean psyche from attitudes towards languages, and in my earlier post I argue that even the briefest analysis of how and why Chinese was used in Korea demolishes popular but wholly false notions of a sense of Korean nationhood streching back 6000 years. See that earlier post for the full argument.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::