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Koreans are fighters, certainly, but no more than anyone else, I don’t think, and it’s not like it’s a cherished part of Korean culture or anything. What is a part of Korean culture is to ignore people who are outside your circle of personal friends/acquaintances/family. If someone’s not in your circle, they are an unperson, so a) their feelings are not considered b) you can be unembarrassed about airing your dirty laundry, in whatever form.

So if these folks are indeed Korean, making friendly overtures so that you impinge on their humanradar (depending on how old-skool Korean they are (ie if they hew fairly closely to the usual Korea-Korean norms, it’ll work)) might just make you a person to them, in which case they’ll be too ashamed to make all that noise.

Someone else suggested in no uncertain terms that they thought my suggestions were bigoted, which completely shocked me (and pretty much everyone else). After one of those interminable long arguments about what constitutes racism and what doesn’t, it seemed like my use of the word ‘unperson’ had triggered a strong response, which wasn’t intended. I should probably have used a word a little less emotive. Live and learn. In the course of that argument, which ended up involving a good hundred people, I offered the following mini-essay about some Korean Kultural Konstructs, and I thought I’d share it here.

So this is what I said. It was off the cuff, and I was angry, so I’ll apologize upfront for inaccuracies.

Go:

[Have a look at some background material], and then I’ll try to pull some threads together into a nice package:

Some of the forces at play in molding some of the ways in which some Koreans tend to perceive both themselves (that is, their own identities) and others with whom they interact (as well as Korean Identity as a whole) are the concepts of chemyeon (face, sort of), neunchi (sensitivity to social subtext), kibun (personal mood+life force), bunuiki (group mood), cheong (loving attachment to one’s immediate circle), and han (sorrow and rage angainst injustice). All of the translations I’ve offered are weak and inaccurate. For the most part, none of these words translate well (or at least pithily) into English: we know the feelings, perhaps, but they are very difficult indeed to discuss. I believe one of the strengths of Korean, and one of the reasons Korean folks can speak of cultural norms so easily, is that they have single words to describe them.

Each of these deals with the way one interacts with the group, or the way the group impinges on one’s identity and emotions. This is no accident. Koreans are brought up (this is changing, as all things are, but not as much as much else in the country) to understand their indentity within various overlapping circles, the first, of course, being strongly-connected family. Marriages are the binding of families, not individuals (many marriages in the past were arranged: some still are), for example. Extended families are still the norm. The elderly (less so, again, than in the past) are almost never put in retirement homes or the like. Brothers and sisters share a generational name (one syllable amongst the three syllables that constitute 95% of all Korean names). The list goes on. As I said here:

Relationship words are blanket nouns denoting relationships between people that are commonly used in informal conversation between people, rather than given names – older brother, younger sister, uncle, auntie, grandmother and so on. (In the slummy, thin-walled building I used to live in in Busan, it was de rigeur on Saturday nights to hear sounds of passion and female cries of ‘Opa! Oh, opa! (older brother)’ from the playboy-next-door’s apartment.) These extend to the common practice of referring to a woman as ’so-and-so’s mother,’ rather than using her given name.

In a restaurant, on the street, wherever: one calls people (in Korean) ‘uncle’, or ‘auntie’ if they’re older, or ‘grandfather’ or ‘grandmother’, regardless of their relationship. There are a thousand variations.

This and more stands in contrast to the western tradition of identity being predicated on the individual, on him or her first, followed by context. In Korea, it’s context first. (It is amusing to me at least to note that when we say something like ‘hey buddy’ to someone we don’t know in English, it’s usually in an aggressive tone or situation.)

Another thread to this, and part of the reason this is so, is that Korea is the most Confucian country in the world. Confucian ideas are relevant here because (as I also wrote earlier)

Confucius focused on the need to maintain social order though willing or unwilling submission to the five primary relationships :

1. Ruler and subject
2. Parent and child (teacher and student)
3. Husband and wife
4. Older and younger person
5. Friend and friend

All of these relationships are explicity hierarchical, excepting, significantly perhaps, the last, although friendship of a Confucian bent is a considerably more meaningful proposition, it may be argued, than ‘buddies’ in North America might be.

Confucian beliefs permeate Korean society, for better and for worse (egregious sexism is a downside, for example). Regardless, here it is again one’s relationships that define who you are, and what you can and cannot do. Note (because it’s unfortunately necessary, it seems to say so) that these are generalizations about an entire nation, not a taxonomy of the beliefs of any given individual.

It might be said that Buddhist beliefs have some influence (honoring the god inside the other) here, and that may be the case, but Korea is about 45% Christian, and both Buddhism and Christianity are just veneers on the old animist beliefs, to an extent, anyway, so I won’t go there.

But when you put together the confucian primary relationships together with ideas like ‘cheong’ and ‘bunuiki’, and believe deep in your bones that proper, civilized behaviour means acting in accordance with these baked-in ideas, Korean people are left in a deep and difficult-to-resolve quandary: you can’t behave in accordance with these principles with everyone. It’s just not possible to treat the taxi driver and the garbageman, the kid behind the counter at the 7-11 or the guy in the next car at the stoplight as part of your primary relationship group (family, friends, coworkers, bosses, alumni).

So what happens? Well, if you’re not part of one of the groups that count, then you are more or less in my way. I’ll call you ‘uncle’ or ‘auntie’, but that’s as far as it goes. Not all Koreans are rude or unpleasant to everyone not in their circles, of course. This is not what I am saying.

But manifestations of this are everywhere, and it’s only in part hierarchy. People are (to a western eye) shockingly rude to waitresses (there are no male servers, for the most part), to clerks at shops. In their cars, they seem to ignore other drivers, and pedestrians. Neighbours, especially if you haven’t met them, effectively don’t exist. Regionalism has made an internecine battlefield of Korean politics. Park Chung Hee’s graduating class made up most of the government during his military rule, and the same thing happened when Chun Du Hwan took power, with his class, in 1979. Examples of both inside-group and outside-group thinking are everywhere.

That said, Koreans can be amongst the kindest and most welcoming of people, particularly to foreigners who are so far outside the inside-group that they need to be thought in entirely new ways — in other words, as individuals. And once a foreign person becomes part of a cheong relationship — with family, friends, coworkers, whatever — you’ll find it hard to find people as loyal.

Are people outside the circle ‘unpersons’, as I suggested? Well, I think so, even if [my accuser] understood the word to mean ’sub-human’ (I did not). But it’s not a value judgement, it’s a coping mechanism. [My accuser] was overlaying his (reasonable) beliefs, based on his culture (I assume he’s not Korean), about ‘all men being equal’ to the situation, and gleaning a mistaken understanding that there was a boot on someone’s forehead if I was correct, or that I was racist for saying what I did, even though I did not intend my comment to be disapproving, merely explanatory.

So: in general (again, weasel words that are made necessary by the pointing finger of disapprobation) Koreans tend to immediately slot other Koreans into one of two buckets, and the second bucket is the large one. In that bucket is everybody who just doesn’t matter as much, and is treated in that way, because otherwise daily interactions would be untenably complicated, people whose identity, affiliations, family, status, educations and age are unknown, and who therefore can’t jump into the first bucket until some relationship is established. (This is, for example, why every book you read that talks about doing business with Koreans seems confused about why Korean businessmen insist on trying to establish some personal link, and may ask what seem like overly-personal questions. It’s not irrational or sentimental, it’s baked-in to the culture.)

I haven’t made a complete tour here (by any means), and it would take a full book to do justice to the topic, anyway, I think (one which I’ve often thought of writing), but hopefully someone found this useful or interesting.

Note that although most of what I say here is something you could read in any textbook, some of my conclusions and dotted-line drawings are my own.

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Last time I talked about some of the philosophical and design principles underlying the Korean alpabet — hangeul — and introduced the vowels.

This time, we’ll have a look at the consonants, starting with a little background on the elegant design principles behind them. Recall that the Korean alphabet was consciously designed rather than just having evolved, so linguistic elements and relationships were deliberately built into the alphabet.

Design

(If you’re not familiar with the linguistic terms above, velars (variations of k and “hard g”) are formed when the back of the tongue meets the upper back of the throat. Alveolar consonants (n, d, t, “flap r,” l) are formed when the tip of the tongue meets the alveolar ridge, on the roof of the mouth toward the front. Dental consonants (s, sh, j, ch, and similar consonants) involve friction between the tongue and the upper part of the top teeth. Bilabial (p, b, m) means two-lipped; the lips come together and are released. Vowels and glottal consonants (h and ‘ng’ in modern Korean) are formed in the throat.)

Korean consonants can be arranged into five groups based on depending on how the sound is produced within the mouth. Amazingly (to me, at least), each of these representative consonants is a simplified diagram showing the position of the organs of the mouth in forming those consonants. How cool is that?

Looking at the diagram, you should be able to see that there is an element common to all the consonants in a particular row.

The first consonant in each row is the simplest; this is a representative consonant for each group, and is the building block for the other characters in that group. These changes are largely systematic: adding a horizontal line to a simple stop consonant (sounds like the t/d or p/b pairs in English) forms the aspirated consonants (those made with extra air), doubling simple consonants gives us the “tense” consonants (pronounced with glottal tension, for which there is no real equivalent in English).

So, looking at the top row of the diagram, ㄱ( called ‘kiuk’) is a basic consonant. It sounds most like a hard ‘g’ in English (but has long been romanized as both ‘g’, ‘k’ and ‘c’, and so we have kimchi and gimchi, for example).
ㅋ(called ‘kiut’) adds an extra horizontal line, and gives us a more aspirated ‘k’ sound.
ㄲ (called ’ssang kiuk’ where ’ssang’ means double), the doubling of the basic consonant, gives us a slightly strangled (glottal tension added) ‘k’ sound, sometimes romanized ‘kk’.

Looking at the diagram, you might notice that there are other triplets as well — ㄷ ㅌ ㄸ (roughly and usually romanized d, t and dd), ㅂ ㅍ ㅃ (b, p and bb), ㅈ ㅊ ㅉ (j, ch and jj) — and one doublet ㅅ ㅆ (s, ss), the regular and aspirated ’s’ sound.

It is important to notice, if you’re serious about all of this, that there is no consistent differentiation between voiced and unvoiced consonants in Korea, as there is in English. Most English consonants appear in unvoiced/voiced pairs — t/d, p/b, k/g, s/z, sh/zh, f/v and so on — but in Korean, we have triplets — basic, aspirated, and tense. Voicing does appear in Korean, but as a function of location — for example, when a consonant appears between two vowel sounds in a syllable. This is, in my opinion at least, one of the root difficulties, almost universally ignored or misunderstood, in pronunciation interference for both Koreans learning English and English-speakers learning Korean. If you are a teacher, having a good understanding of this fact — that aspiration and glottal tension are the fundamental differentiator in Korean consonants, with voicing not contributing to meaning, while the exact opposite is true in English (and voicing has a strong effect in English on syllable length) — can be invaluable in helping your students understand how to clarify their pronunciation in a systematic way.

One thing that we have to note before going on: I mentioned that Korean vowels are invariant in the last article, but that is not true for consonants. The good news, though, is that the changes, based on position within syllables, are quite consistent.

A Note On Romanization

Romanization is a somewhat complicated issue, unfortunately, and the revised romanization instituted by the Korean government in 2000 (not without criticism) to replace the McCune-Reischauer system of 1984 has not percolated in any systematic way through the country yet. The new system eschews use of diacritics and other non-alphabetic symbols (other than the hyphen, occasionally), and was intended in part to make it easier to type romanized Korean on computers. It is far from perfect, but is, in my opinion at least, an improvement. The major strike against it is that it essentially requires one to be familiar with the sounds and conventions of spoken Korean, and so, though useful for Korean speakers, is of limited use ‘out of the box’ to those who don’t speak Korean.

The Korean government site has this to say about that

It is true that most Westerners hear “ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅂ, and ㅈ” as “k, t, p, and ch” when these consonants appear as the first letter in a word. But the problem is that “ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, and ㅊ” also seem like “k, t, p, and ch” to the average Western ear as well, and the differences between each of these vowels are important in Korean. The Korean phonological opposition must be given first priority in a Romanization system designed for Korean, even if to foreign ears these differences are not easily recognized. In addition, when the differences between “ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅂ, and ㅈ” and “ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, and ㅊ” are written with consistency, it makes non-native pronunciation of Korean more distinguishable to native speakers.

and I tend to agree with them.

English Equivalents

Here, then is a table showing rough equivalents for the consonant sounds in English,which you can compare with the diagram earlier:

Putting It Together

OK, let’s look at a couple of examples of putting together letters to make a syllable. There are consistent rules for making syllables, which we’ll look at in Part 3, but for now, a few sounds to flex our Korean muscles.

Let’s take ㄱ + ㅏ = 가.

ㄱsounds like a hard ‘g’. ㅏ sounds (always) like ‘ah’ (this is not romanization, but phonetic rendering for clarity). So

ㄱ + ㅏ = ‘ga’ (which has in the past often been written ‘ka’). It’s the root of the verb ‘to go’.

How about another?

ㅅ + ㅗ + ㄴ = 손

ㅅ sounds like a soft, lightly aspirated ’s’, ㅗ is always the monophthong ‘oh’ and ㄴ is exactly equivalent to ‘n’.

ㅅ + ㅗ + ㄴ = 손 = ’sohn’, romanized ’son’. It’s the noun ‘hand’.

At this point, I will leave you once again with this link to give you some audio help. Try the first few lessons again to get try and nail down your sounds. Don’t worry if there are things you don’t get yet, like the logic behind the position of characters within syllables — I’ll be covering them in future. At this point, though, with some practice, you should be able to sound out most (but not all, because we haven’t talked about consonant positional variation yet) syllables you see.

As an exercise, try to sound out this:

안녕하세요?

When you’ve got it, you’re able to greet someone, to say hello in mid-level formality, in Korean, the first thing everybody learns.

(Spoiler: it sounds like an yeong ha sae yo, with the syllables run together, following closely on one another.)

Stay tuned for Part 3, where we’re going to start pulling everything together, and the real power of hangeul starts to shine.

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Korean is a very different language, structurally, from English and many European languages. For Korean students of English, and for speakers of other languages trying to learn Korean, it’s a hard slog getting beyond the basics. To my continuing shame, although I can read and write the language with some facility, after nearly 10 years of exposure to it (and, I’ll admit, study of it that has been at best haphazard and desultory), I’m very far indeed from fluency.

The good news, though, is that reading it is literally a snap. A few hours with the basics, and almost anyone can be up and running. Or walking, at least. The writing system is about 14,000 times simpler to learn (scientifically speaking!) than Chinese or Japanese, and truly elegant in its design, philosophy, and suitability for capturing the sounds of the spoken language.

Before we begin with the basics, you’ll need to be able to actually see the Korean text in this page. Tutorials on how to install East Asian fonts (if you don’t have them already) can be found at Wikipedia, for a variety of common operating systems.

If you can’t see this — 안녕하세요! — then go and install the fonts, and come back. It’s OK, I’ll wait.

History

Right, let’s begin with some background.

King Sejong was the 4th King of the Choson Dynasty. In 1446 (dates vary, as do details of the story), scholars of the government office chip’yon’jon, or the Pavilion of the Assembly of Sages, were appointed by the King to invent a new writing system for Korean. Until that time, Chinese characters had been used to represent the sounds of the syllables of spoken Korean (The characters are called hanja, and still sometimes used to this day in print. Learning a basic set of 1800 of them was until recently a compulsory part of the education of all South Koreans, and they still play an important part in place names and personal names).

Writing had for centuries been the province of the educated elites, and this new system (although scorned in early days as writing for ‘women and children’) was created with the aim of spreading literacy. It was a success — Korea now has a literacy rate of 97.9 percent, one of the highest in Asia.

A book of instruction for the new writing system was published, called Hunmin Chongum: “The proper Sounds for the Instruction of the People”. The script it introduced later became known as 한글 (in the new romanization, hangeul).

If there is sound natural to Heaven and Earth, then there should certainly be writing natural to Heaven and Earth. Thus the men of antiquity relied on sounds and designed characters, thereby to convey the circumstances of the Myriad Things and to register the Way of the Three Germinants, we of later generations cannot change them. However, the winds and soils of the Four Quarters diverge, one from the other and sounds and breaths, following them, are likewise different. Presumably because the outer kingdoms have their sounds but lack characters for them, they have borrowed the characters of Chinese to take care of their needs. This has been like a handle that ill fits the hole; how could they have been applied with out obstructions?
-Hunmin Chongum

The Vowels

Besides its simplicity and elegance, one of the most fascinating things about the Korean alphabet is its grounding in the philosophical principles of the time, and its deliberate connections to the physical configurations of the organs of speech.

There are ten vowels (and eleven diphthong vowel combinations) and fourteen consonants (and five doubled consonants) for a total of 40 phonemes. Characters are shaped with symbols (dots and circles, horizontal lines, and vertical lines) that represent the fundamental elements of the cosmology: respectively heaven, earth and humanity. Heaven is a round dot, Earth is a horizontal line and the symbol of mankind is a vertical line. All the vowels in the Korean language are combinations of dots, horizontal and vertical lines. These signs are further balanced into the the opposing energies of yang (bright) sounds and yin (dark) sounds.

Here are the vowels:

The ten basic vowels are those with only one long straight vertical or horizontal line (earth and human): ㅏ and ㅑ, ㅗand ㅛ, ㅓand ㅕ, ㅜ and ㅠ, ㅣ and ㅡ.

If the dot (represented in this font as a shorter perpendicular line) is to the right of the vertical, we get some of the “bright” vowels: ㅏ ㅑ ㅐ ㅒ. If it’s above the horizontal, we get the last two brights: ㅗ ㅛ.

If the dot (represented in this font as a shorter perpendicular line) is to the left of the vertical line, we get the “dark” vowels: ㅓㅕ ㅔ ㅖ. If it’s below the horizontal, we get the other two darks: ㅜ ㅠ.

If there is no dot, the vowel is neutral:ㅣ and ㅡ

Adding a second dot (short perpendicular) to a vowel adds a “y” before the basic vowel sound(”ah” becomes “yah”, for example): ㅑ, ㅒ, ㅕ, ㅖ, ㅛ and ㅠ.

A horizontal vowel (ㅗ or ㅜ) can be paired with a vertical vowel to form a diphthong. The horizontal vowel always comes first in the pairing, and this results in a “w-” sound in front of the pure vowel to give us sounds like “wah,” “weh,” “wi,” and so on: ㅘ ㅙ ㅚ ㅝ ㅞ ㅟ and ㅢ.

So far, we haven’t matched any of the characters to their actual sounds, so don’t worry if it’s not coming together for you yet.

For that, I’m going to give you this link for basic vowels, and this one for dipthongs. Open it in a new tab or window, and mouse-over to listen to the vowel sounds as you look over what I’ve said about the vowels. If you repeat the sounds, think about the shape of your mouth as you make them, and how that relates to the bright/dark/neutral labels.

Coming Soon

If you want to skip ahead and listen to the consonants as well on those pages, they will be the focus of Part 2, where we’ll see how the design of the consonants (which are created in all languages by the modification and interruption of the flow of air by the physical parts of the mouth) are cleverly modelled on the physical movements needed to create them.

Part 3 will deal with how syllables and words are put together, the relatively simple rules for reading and writing them, and the few but consistent exceptions.

Part 4 will talk about the difficulties and challenges of the romanization of Korean, why it’s such a mess, why Koreans have so much trouble with English pronunciation (though they need not) and what you can do to make the situation better as a teacher (if you are one).

For now, one parting piece of essential advice to keep in mind: unlike English, the sounds of Korean vowels are (essentially) immutable. No matter where they are in a syllable, they make the same sound. This is one of the pure joys of learning to read Korean, and something that many (if not most) new learners of Korean miss, in part because of the confusion that reigns in romanization.

Have fun. You’re about a third of the way to being able to read Korean!

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Most people who come to Korea to teach, whether at a hakwon (the catch-all term for the private-study schools that can be found literally 10 to a city block, catering to the monomania not for quality but quantity of education here in Korea, many of which specialize in English and employ most of the short-termers in Korea), or a university or foreign school, or in-house at a company, or somewhere else entirely… most of them are provided with housing.

This is, few actually realize, mandated by the legislation controlling E-2 (English Teacher) visas. Which is not to say that this legislation is universally obeyed (’rule of law’ not being a concept that has achieved great penetration in Korea thus far), of course, but it goes some way to explaining why the feared-and-loathed, often dishonest and always money-struck hakwon owners actually do something that does not financially reward them in any tangible way. That is, provide housing for their English Monkeys.

There are some decent private schools around, and a fair number of goodish universities, at least in terms of working conditions, and they do occasionally provide their foreign employees with reasonable accommodation. Some very few go one better, and provide housing that is very comfortable indeed. This is the exception, rather than the rule, naturally.

Back when I was a bachelor in the mighty metropolis of Busan†, I lived for nearly two years — although I was working for one of the better schools — in a 3 metre by 4 metre closet in which there was room for a bed, desk and fridge, located right beside a textile factory. By right beside, I mean that my one window looked directly into a window on the factory floor, about 18 inches away. Right beside.

† I liked it better pre-2001 when Busan was romanized as Pusan, and pronounced Poosan by foreigners (’san’ being the Chinese character for ‘mountain’) so I could refer to the city as ‘Poo Mountain’ and actually be able to explain why without being quite as longwinded as I am right now.

The chatter of hundreds of sewing machines didn’t actually bother me much, as I tended at that point in my life to enjoy the tipple too much to care, and rarely at ‘home’ other than to sleep, anyway. Life was good, in a dissipated and aimless sort of way. It was the last gasp of a bachelorhood that was becoming less amusing, rapidly.

The last couple of years, though, have seen my wife (who I met as I was leaving behind that rocket-fueled lifestyle) in the lap of relative luxury, in Australia, and after our return to Korea, in the two large, brand-new apartments which were provided by the university where I worked until recently.

The other reason for schools to offer accommodation when you take a job with them — the one that people usually assume to be the primary one — is that it is effectively impossible to find your own, as a non-Korean. This is in part a manifestation of the blithely exclusionary attitude that has traditionally informed much of mercantile Korea’s dealings with the hairy barbarians. To be fair, it has been in part a reasonable response to the infamous behaviour exhibited by most GIs and many young, inebriate, wacked-out English teachers (of which I was once one, I admit). Stereotypes exist for a reason, after all. Not what you’d call the most-favoured tenant demographic, most non-executive expats in Korea. If you’re married to a Korean, yes, but alone : nuh-uh, unless you want to rent a room in one of the ubiquitous yogwan ‘love hotels’ on a monthly basis, which many single guys do.

I’ve known some of them, guys who were capable of ignoring the nasty omnipresent fug of stale sex and cut-rate detergent, the dim green and pink lighting (creating that ambience of a festive abbatoir that just screams romance) and the weekend puddles of pinkish kimchi vomit in the hallway, the drunken screams and shouts from 11 pm to perhaps 3 or 4 am each and every night from the short-timers. Better than they deserve, though, I’m sure.

So when my contract at the university ended with a whimper rather than a bang last month, it was a fairly stressful time, as I was forced not only to look for other work, which would then allow me to get a visa, but to do so before the beginning of September, in order for us to actually have somewhere to live (and put our worryingly large collection of furniture).

The right job didn’t materialize, and in between our (well, my) chicken-little panic-stricken thoughts of bailing to Canada, or Mexico, or Thailand, or anywhere, really, we decided the cheapest and wisest option was just for me to do a visa run to Japan (Canadians get 6 month tourist visas here, on entry) and come back, and to rent our own house. That sounds blindingly obvious to the good people out there in Normal, Illinois, I know, but being locked into the mindset of job=visa=house, it really hadn’t occurred to us. Plus, I was kind of keen on hitting the beach somewhere, somewhere other than Korea. She Who Must Be Obeyed had predictable thoughts on that idea, unfortunately, and the plan was dismissed out of hand.

So we wandered hither and thither and even over yon a bit, looking for places to live, even as I was going to first and second interviews with likely employers and finding them all wanting, in one aspect or another. Seoul, for those of you who might wonder, is not small. Hither is about 3 hours from yon, and thither is another couple of hours beyond that.

Anyone who’s been reading my stuff for any length of time knows how much I loathed the industrial nightmare of an area where we used to live, nuts deep in garbage and banana-peel-slipping-around on the constellations of comedy throat oysters horked up by the denizens of Gunpo City, south of Seoul, near Suwon. It was true that most of the other places around the city and its skirts that we looked were somewhat nicer, but mostly only in degree. Unpleasant, of course, but less so. Not precisely enticing, particularly when I had been thinking along the lines of Koh Samui or Whistler or Zihuatanejo.

Until we found the area we decided to plant our flag for a few months. I’m telling you, angels descended and blew their tinny trumpets in my ears when we started looking around there. It was the first place — anywhere in Korea — that I’d seen that shows evidence of actual urban planning, where things are built on an almost-human scale, neither crowded together like brobdingnagian barnacles nor consisting of streaked domino concrete slabs looming over echoing concrete courtyards, brutalist Pyongyang retro-soviet style. No, this area was clearly designed for cyclists and walkers as well as cars, and wasn’t outright antagonistic to its residents, unlike most other places in Seoul I’ve been.

Seoul is a city (like most other urban environments in Korea) that hates its residents.

I could tell this suburb was different, though, as soon as we’d walked around a bit. About as far to the west of downtown as we were to the south in Gunpo, I saw the full bike-racks beside the subway station (something I’d never seen before in Korea, as there are few cyclists in most places, it being simply too dangerous and heavily trafficked to bother) and tree-lined paths winding through each block, expressly for pedestrians. Trees everywhere, in fact, not just on top of the fortunate stubs of mountains that hadn’t yet been leveled to feed into grinders and rise again as the vast human beehives where 70% of the population of the country live. Wide, straight roads. And, astonishingly, people who didn’t perform the ‘oh-my-god-he’s-not-Korean‘ doubletake that had left me so unwilling to dare set foot outside our apartment for the last couple of years.

Even my wife, who’s spent almost her entire life in Korea, said she didn’t know there were places like this here.

So we found an apartment, in one of the newer style buildings that have started springing up all over Korea, geared to singles and young couples, called ‘Officetels’ in Konglish. Basically — and completely unlike the standard, cookie-cutter ‘apart’ concrete beehive family apartment buildings that rise everywhere out the earth like buboes on a plague victim — they’re like western-style apartment buildings, down to the gardens on the roof, the hot-water-on-demand, and the emphasis on sky-light, and air, and brightly lit cleanliness.

We found a small loft, with west-facing 4 metre windows taking up one entire wall, and rather than sucking car-exhaust from the perpetually-roaring highway that was behind our first apartment, or looking straight into the baby-factory slum windows over which our second apartment had a glorious low-rise, low-rent panorama, I can watch the sun go down out over towards the West Sea. I honestly never thought we’d live in such a lovely place, here in Korea. I hadn’t thought they existed, except for the rich in downtown Seoul, and on TV. We gave our huge fridge and washing machine to the wife’s bachelor brother, and left some furniture in the apartment for the new (cheaper and more malleable, more bible-thumping) university hire to use (rather than just chuck it all), and moved on up. To the top. To a deluxe apartment. In the sky-eye-eye.

It’s no Sydney, or Vancouver — hell it’s not even Toronto – but it’s pretty nice.

One of the only good points of our previous university-supplied place, other than the fact that we had been the first to live there and thus didn’t need to deal with accreted filth, was the proximity of a small mountain ridge, up and along which we (and thousands of others, it seemed) could walk, escaping the apocalyptic vision, if not the all-pervasive noise, of the concrete wasteland that is Gunpo. That had been pleasant, and walking there in unaccustomed green along the trail that wound its way a few kilometres along the ridge had been enough to recharge my batteries, at least when there weren’t too many shrieking, pudgy children up there too, dragged away from their computers and compelled to exercise by their parents.

The new area, Songnae, had a few wooded mini-mountains within walking distance as well, and I resolved one day, after failing to find my way through a military base to a likely trail at another nearby mountain to the west, the week before, to attempt to find my way up the closer megahillock to the south. The wife begged off, and I headed out, with my usual lack of preparation. I crossed the subway tracks – on the surface, that far from downtown – and wandered around for a good hour before I found a trail that led upwards.

The weather had been flawless for a good week after a miserable summer — unsmoggy blue skies, dotted with fluffy cumuli, hot sun cool shade. It was gorgeous; the sun spattered through the leaves as the wide trail wound its way up to higher heights, at a much steeper grade than our old daily walk in Gunpo. I got past the thundering-heart first ten minutes, and fell into the euphoric groove that exercise almost always brings, when I’m out in nature, senses heightened, brain clear. There were only a couple of people around, trudging down as I headed up. Past small plots of vegetables the trail rose, and soon became almost alpine, studded with those massive, rounded rocks protruding from that tightly-packed, cafe latte-coloured dirt that always make me think of Korea and Japan. The perfume of pines baking in sunlight. I was happier than I had been in a while, and it was good.

I reached the first summit, and there were a number of smaller trails heading off from the glade atop the ridge, wandering off to various points of the compass. Thinking one might lead to a vantage point unscreened by greenery, where I could get a good look at the geography of our new home, I struck out along one of the paths, towards the sinking sun. I realize now that that military base I’d been unable to find my way around last week was to the west, too. You know, the direction I was walking.

After about 5 minutes of blissed-out traipsing along the trail, all Homer-in-Chocolate-Land, and before I quite knew what was happening, there were shouts in Korean, and as I abruptly came back to earth, I noticed in quick succession that: the clearing ahead of me had a tall chicken- and barbed-wire fence along it, that there various dishes and antennae and stuff behind that, and that the half dozen camo-clad Korean men approaching at a trot were all carrying weapons that I could only presume were automatic.

My meagre command of Korean being what it was, I had no idea what they were saying, but from their tone I could infer that they weren’t asking me in for a cup of tea. They were young, of course — just the age of many of my university students, and no doubt doing their two years of compulsory military service and quite happy to have pulled light duty sitting on top of a mountain somewhere. Nonetheless, their excitement coupled with their tendency to gesticulate with their guns was making me a wee bit nervous, I have to admit. In response to what I thought was an inquiry as to precisely what the f**k I was doing, I shrugged, and made the two-fingers-walking gesture, which in conjunction with a goofy grin and vacant swinging of the head, as if communing with butterflies, was what I hope was the universal sign-language for ‘just, you know, wandering around, being a nature-boy doofus’.

They peppered me with more questions in Korean, none of which I understood sufficiently to make any attempt at answering, in sign-language or otherwise, and eventually the eldest, who couldn’t have been more than 25 or so, said “OK” quite clearly, waved the back of his hand in the general direction of the trail along which I’d been walking, and said something in Korean which, near as I could tell translated roughly to “Get the hell outta here, and you’re lucky we don’t arrest your ass. Sir.”

I got the hell out, and continued my walk, no worse for wear, up into the almost-alpine and the green, blue and white, being extra-careful to stick to the main trail.

And so, my lesson for the day, one that all Koreans seem to learn at some point: stray from the well-trodden path at your own peril, smart boy. A lesson that came complete with a moderately-sized brown spot in my boxers, for punctuation.

[originally published September 2003, revised and updated June 2006]

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The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which is variously referred to as the ‘Whorfian Hypothesis,’ ‘linguistic relativism,’ and ‘linguistic determinism’ (a description of the strong formulation meant by implication to be a bad thing, I think) concerns the relationship between language and thought, and suggests in its strongest form that the structure of a language determines the way in which speakers of that language perceive and understand the external world. This formulation is generally understood by many to be untenable, but the hypothesis also exists in a weaker form : that language structure and content does not determine a view of the world, but that it shapes thought to some degree, and is therefore a powerful impetus in influencing speakers of a given language to adopt a certain world-view.

A possible opposite claim, from a sociolinguistic viewpoint, is that the thought (and thus culture) of a linguistic group is mirrored in the structure and content of their language, that because they behave and understand things in a certain way, their language reflects those behaviours and understandings — the idea that language is molded, if not determined, by culture.

Two quotes from the linguists whose names are most closely associated with this idea, the first from Edward Sapir (Language, 1929b, p. 207) :

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language that has become the medium of excpression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsiously built up on the language habits of the group…We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.(Sapir, E. Language, 1929b, p. 207)

Benjamin Lee Whorf, who was a student of Sapir, went further than the ‘predisposition’ suggested by his teacher, and proposed that the relationship was a more deterministic one :

the background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental stock in trade. Formulation of ideas is not an independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but is part of a particular grammar, and differs, from slightly to greatly, between different grammars. We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions that has to be organized by our minds — and this means largely by the linguistic system in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way, an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees.
(Whorf, Benjamin, (1956). In J, Carroll (Ed.), Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf.

Whorf does not go so far as to say that language structure totally determines the world-view of a speaker here. He does add, though :

This fact is very significant for modern science, for it means that no individual is free to describe nature with absolute impartiality but is constrained to certain modes of interpretation even while he thinks himself most free. The person most nearly free in such respects would be a lingusit familiar with very many widely different linguistic systems. As yet no linguist is any such position. We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all obcervers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are simialr, or can in some way be calibrated.

This last is where the argument runs off the rails for me, at least the argument in which I have any interest. It is also the portion of the idea upon which most critics focus, and which was fueled by the Great Eskimo Snow Silliness set off in great part by this :

We have the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven flying snow – whatever the situation may be. To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on, are sensuously and operationally different, different things to contend with; he uses different words for them and for other kinds of snow.
(Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1940. Science and linguistics, Technology Review (MIT) 42, 6 (April))

and which has been discussed at length in many places, including, cogently here, for example.

To most people, particularly those with little knowledge of Hardcore Linguistics, including myself, the weaker form of Sapir-Whorf seems self-evident. Of course the words we use, the words we know, have some influence on the way we think! The very fabric of our cognition is language, it might well be claimed (but of course that would be a claim that would meet great opposition as well). There is, predictably, great argument about what constitutes ‘mentalese,’ the native language of our minds, as it were). Do words determine the shape of our thoughts? Well, it seems equally clear that that’s nonsense, and though it may and can be argued, it must be said most people don’t bother to try.

Steven Pinker, who was the entry point to the brief exchange between Kevin and I a few weeks ago, calls the idea ‘linguistic determinism,’ and argues as most do that the strong version is nonsense. A student of Noam Chomsky, he works from Chomsky’s idea of ‘Cartesian linguistics,’ that the brain has a ‘hard-wired’ built-in language acquisition device with an understanding of ‘universal grammar’, and suggests that language acquisition is an instinct. If we accept that language is an instinct, as Pinker and his mentor Unca Noam argue, it seems as if we must reject the proposition that language shapes thought. Some consequences of this :

Thinking of language as an instinct inverts the popular wisdom, especially as it has been passed down in the canon of the humanities and social sciences. Language is no more a cultural invention than is upright posture. It is not a manifestation of a general capacity to use symbols: a three-year-old … is a grammatical genius, but is quite incompetent at the visual arts, religious iconography, traffic signs and the other staples of the semiotics curriculum[...]

[...] Once you begin to look at language not as the ineffable essence of human uniqueness but as a biological adaptation to communicate information, it is no longer tempting to see language as an insidious shaper of thought, and, we shall see, it is not.
(Pinker, S (1994). The Language Instinct New York: William Morrow and Company Inc.)

In this, Pinker seems to be arguing not only against the idea that culture shapes language, but also the against idea that language shapes culture (by shaping thought). The use of the pejorative ‘insidious’ is a little unnecessary, but I’m not one who should poke people with sticks for using flowery language.

In his discussion of the idea, Pinker suggests three possibilities for interpretation:

(a) identicality: that language determines thought precisely, word-for-word;
(b) concept determinism: language determines (to an unspecified degree) what we
can think (doubleplus ungood!);
(c) linguistic relativity: that the form of our language (merely) influences what we tend to believe.

In Chapter 12 of The Language Instinct (quoted to me by Kevin), it seems that Pinker does concede the weak form :

Language surely does affect our thoughts, rather than just labelling them for the sake of labelling them. Most obviously, language is the conduit through which people share their thoughts and intentions and thereby acquire the knowledge customs and values of those around them.

Some commentators apparently do not take this as evidence that Pinker is admitting the weak formulation (c, above) of Sapir-Whorf. As I do not have access to a copy of The Language Instinct (no English language libraries and no damn money!), I’ll have to take their word for it.

The amount of time and energy that’s been expended on arguing about how vocabulary effects cognition surprises me, frankly. I think there’s a much more interesting discussion about grammar and deeper structures here that often seems ignored, at least in what reading I’ve managed to do.

The effect of such things on language users seems to me to be more pervasive and more subtle than simple differences in richness or breadth of vocabulary, on which most work and thought has seemed to focus.

One reason I believe this to be so is as a result of some of the fundamental differences in language structure between Korean and English (and to a great extent, the other European languages with which I have some familiarity). Please note that I neither claim to be a expert in Korean language (more of a lazy amateur), nor have I conducted any experiments or formal observations. First, some background. There are three ideas with some circulation about the earliest genetic relationship of Korean with other language families : 1) the traditional view that Korean is an Altaic language, sharing its origins with Manchu, Mongolian, and Turkish, amongst others; 2) the proposition that Korean has its origin in two language families, Altaic and Polynesian; and 3) the view that because of insufficient evidence to support a definitive relationship with other languages, Korean is a language isolate.

Regardless of its origins, Korean does share a number of features common to Altaic languages : words are built by agglutinating affixes, vowels within words follow certain rules of harmony, and articles, relative pronouns, explicit gender markers, and auxiliaries are not found.

Although Korean is not related to Chinese, as a result of history and geography more than 50 percent of the words in the Korean dictionary are of Chinese origin. Most legal, political, scientific, religious and academic vocabularies, as well as Korean surnames, and increasingly at present given names, are based on Chinese borrowings and can be written with Chinese characters, although meanings and pronunciations have often shifted as they have been adopted.
Although some basic words for body parts, clothing and agriculture are shared between Korean and Japanese, and other similarities exist, including grammatical structures similar enough that word-for-word translations between the languages is relatively easy, it is still uncertain whether the similarities are genetic or come as a result of historical borrowing between the two. Many features of Korean separate it from English and other Indo-European languages. Some of the most important of these (for my discussion here, at least) are the use of honorifics, relationship words, and different levels of speech (others include articles, plural markers, pronouns, adjectives, verb forms, demonstratives and so on).

Honorifics are markings for nouns and verbs that express the speaker’s attitude toward the addressee and the person who is being spoken of. Relationship words are blanket nouns denoting relationships between people that are commonly used in informal conversation between people, rather than given names – older brother, younger sister, uncle, auntie, grandmother and so on. (In the slummy, thin-walled building I used to live in in Busan, it was de rigeur on Saturday nights to hear sounds of passion and female cries of ‘Opa! Oh, opa! (older brother)’ from the playboy-next-door’s apartment.) These extend to the common practice of referring to a woman as ’so-and-so’s mother,’ rather than using her given name.

There are four main levels of speech – polite-formal, polite-informal, plain, and intimate style – from which a speaker chooses, generally unconsciously, in everyday speech. The rules which determine the appropriate choice in conversation derive from the arcane art of knowing the ins and outs of the complex sociocultural fabric of Korean. It is equally inappropriate (in general) to address an older non-relative informally as it is to address a child with the polite-formal style, and mistakes like this may constitute a social breach (although it is generally understood that non-native speakers might make such mistakes). Depending on the relative status of the speaker, the person spoken to, and the person or thing that may be spoken about, the speaker can choose different words and forms to express intended meaning. For many basic verbs like eat, sleep, or give, at least two Korean words are available, each reflecting a different status of the subject or object of the verb. Each verb in Korean is further altered by a choice of grammatical affixes, adding not only grammatical information (such as tense), but carrying different levels of respect, deference, or politeness. Many nouns that refer to kinship or the household alsohave plain and honorific versions, the latter of which are used speak of another’s house or relatives, and the former of one’s own.

How does all of this relate to my earlier discussion of Sapir-Whorf, and considerations of how much and in what manner language may shape thought, and whether culture (loosely) determines language stucture, or vice versa? Don’t worry, I’m getting to that.

Korea is widely acknowledged to be the most Confucian nation in the world technically neo-Confucian, but there’s no need to split that particular hair here). Confucius focused on the need to maintain social order though willing or unwilling submission to the five primary relationships :

1. Ruler and subject
2. Parent and child (teacher and student)
3. Husband and wife
4. Older and younger person
5. Friend and friend

All of these relationships are explicity hierarchical, excepting, significantly perhaps, the last, although friendship of a Confucian bent is a considerably more meaningful proposition, it may be argued, than ‘buddies’ in North America might be.

Appropriate behaviour is expected for participants in each of these relationships, and the language used must be similarly hierarchical :

…a son should be reverential; a younger person respectful; a wife submissive;a subject loyal. And reciprocally, a father should be strict and loving; an older person wise and gentle; a husband good and understanding; a ruler righteous and benevolent; and friends trusting and trustworthy. In other words, one is never alone when one acts, since every action affects someone else.

Although as in many nations, the strength of these traditional beliefs is fading, Confucian tenets still underly a great deal of the conscious and unconscious expectations of social behaviour, and deeply influence the relationships Is it possible that Koreans really do think differently about these things, and that this difference may spring (entirely, partially, as much or less so?) from their language? between the sexes and the generations.

The question that interests me, then, is this : do structures and forms like these in the Korea language shape the way in which Koreans think, particularly in terms of their relationships not so much to the world but to the people in it, to such a degree that we can say that language has given them a world-view substantially different than, for example, my own, as an English native speaker? It certainly seems so, to me.

Language is a tool for communication, a social construct, and it seems somewhat pointless to argue about what nouns one uses, and whether the presence or absence of a given bit of vocabulary in one language or another either permits and limits one’s ability to think about it. This may be so, but I don’t think it’s very interesting, except in the abstract.

More interesting to me is the idea that the structures of a language – in this case Korean – may expand or limit the way in which one thinks about something much more important than snow (for example) : how one fits into society, and how one interacts with other humans. Is it possible that Koreans really do think differently about these things, and that this difference may spring (entirely, partially, as much or less so?) from their language?

Is this a valid argument for a weak form of lingustic relativism? Is it even something that comes under the Sapir-Whorf rubric? I’m not sure. An opposite, equally important question is this : is it the case that the language has come to have the form it does as result of culture and belief, rather than the opposite? Confucius was Chinese, after all, and from an entirely different language group!

Again, I’m not sure. The correct answer is usually ‘a little from column A, a little from column B’, no doubt.

[originally published April 2003, revised June 2006]

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It might be described as the part of you that goes beyond your physical presence, that not only permeates your being but surrounds you, invisibly, like a cloud. But it can be damaged, by unhappiness or disrespect, by losing face, by thoughtlessness or humiliation, by anything that’s disruptive to the harmony you feel with other people. Damage to your kibun is damage to your essence, and can have negative effects both mentally and physically.

It is this consciousness of an inner life, one that is molded by the degree of harmony one achieves in one’s relationships with other people to whom one feels any degree of responsibility, that gives Koreans their almost preternatural ability to sense peoples’ mood, and their character, and modify their own behaviour to lubricate the social gears. That’s the nice part. The infuriating flip side of that, though, for many foreigners, is the tendency to dance elegantly away from any potential confrontation. An angry waeguk-in, until they understand what’s happening, is likely to become angrier when the Korean with whom they have a bone to pick says ‘Maybe’ when they mean ‘No’, or ‘tomorrow’ when they mean ‘never’, in order to try and re-establish harmonious dealings. The accompanying, ever-present potential too, is that when someone is pushed too far, and they lose face, in which case ’social harmony’ can take a flying leap, and the only way to regain face and salvage personal kibun is to blow up and stomp and yell. This happens a lot, too.

In this consciousness of the relationships between people and its effect on your own wellbeing, rather than the ‘correctness’, ‘objective truth’, or self-interest of an individual or his arguments, there is a minefield of potential misunderstanding. Most foreigners to Korea trip through it over and over again, myself included, before they realize that putting the kibun of the people around you first, even in a situation of confrontation, will bring results.

(As an aside, this is what the Americans do not seem to understand, or care to, when they deal with North Korea. The patterns of seemingly-irrational behaviour on the part of the DPRK negotiators isn’t (always) irrational at all, from their own perspective.)

The importance of kibun for Korean people should never be underestimated. It’s not merely convention, it’s baked-in. Koreans can make crucial, important decisions based on kibun. Business decisions, choice of a mate, career and employment choices, all may be taken on the basis of what feels right, or what will result in the most socially harmonious outcome for all concerned. Koreans will discuss kibun, but rarely attempt to analyze it in this way. To do so would perhaps damage their kibun.

This is not to say that decisions, important or otherwise, are made strictly on a non-rational, intuitive basis. Things like love and marriage, about which westerners can be decidedly irrational, are approached with a combination of cold, rational analysis and intuitive leaps here, for example. It is another of the contradictions that make up so much of what it means to be Korean.

In future, look for more on this from me. Kibun is only one of the six controlling concepts of the Korean psyche : chemyeon, neunchi, kibun, bunuiki, jeong and han, and the interplay between these guiding forces is what makes Koreans so unique, and, at times, so difficult for the non-Korean to understand.

[originally published January 2002, revised and updated 2006]

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