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Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

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Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#31

Post by famouswaffles »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #26
yongjik wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Korean has a crapload of complex speech patterns (degree of politeness - that's sheer madness) but the nice(?) thing about it is that it all comes at the end. So you can start your sentence without even deciding if it's a statement or a question. E.g., 오늘 그 식당 열어요 Today that restaurant is open. 오늘 그 식당 열어요? Is that restaurant open today? 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같아요. I guess that restaurant is open today. 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같다고 들었어요. I…

Is there the Korean equivalent of very formal language, such as: "Dear honoured sir, may I humbly beg for your indulgence in a meagre glass of beer?"

Formality and politeness is baked into Korean and you are basically always speaking at the right formality unless you ignore the rules.

Your relationship to who you're speaking to (and who you are referring to if you speak about anyone else) changes the grammar of the sentence.

The grammar changes mostly manifest in different suffix endings.

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#32

Post by gibolt »

aeternum wrote: post #18
schwartzworld wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these can be said as succinctly in English though. "one beer please" is enough to place an order, and the rest is just decorative. Does Korean not have more complex / ceremonial speech patterns?

It does, many words have different age-based / status-based suffixes which adds a lot of unnecessary complexity. Numbers are also annoying as the counting numbers vs. quantity. From an information theory POV, we should really look at not just the complexity but the information density of a language. English has a lot of foolish rules, but the large vocabulary provides a much higher bandwidth than other languages. htt…

Compared to many European languages, sure, but English still has plenty of filler. Chinese, for example, can be extremely information dense.

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#33

Post by vineyardmike »

neom wrote: post #22
lalopalota wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How would would you say "where is the toilet?" more succinctly with the context up front in English? "Restroom?"

We're talking(the article) about forming sentences, not just saying words at people.

While I agree “restroom?” Is perfectly valid, you could also say “the restroom is where?” Which puts the important noun first and makes it a question later. It’s not particularly formal, which in America at least is completely unnecessary for day to day life.

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#34

Post by KMnO4 »

schwartzworld wrote: post #12
neom wrote: post #4

Having spent the last 5 years learning Korean, I've grown to find it an incredibly efficient language. 맥주 한 잔 주세요 Beer one please 화장실은 어디에요? Toilet where? 와이파이 있어요? wifi is here? You can process and even start answering someone before they've finished their sentence. By contrast in English, I'd say "Could I have another beer please?" - tell me what you need up front!

All these can be said as succinctly in English though. "one beer please" is enough to place an order, and the rest is just decorative. Does Korean not have more complex / ceremonial speech patterns?

주세요 doesn’t actually mean “please”. It’s just the conjugated version of “to give”.

So it’s more like saying “beer, one, give me” in a polite way. And it’s cool, not because of the English translation (which yes, is just as simple), but as a showcasing of the composability of Korean.

Replace 주세요 (joo-se-yo) with any other verb and the sentence works.

For example, 마시다 (ma-si-da) is the verb[0] for “to drink”, so when you drop the “da” and conjugate it with the polite present tense “yo”, the sentence now becomes 맥주 한잔 마시요, or “I’m drinking a beer”.

And then as another show of Korean’s flexibility, don’t change anything about that sentence, but add a question mark and “맥주 한잔 마시?” For it to mean “would you like a beer?”.

Very cool and succinct.

[0]- you can identify Korean verbs because they all end in 다 (da). You can easily conjugate them to present tense by dropping the “da” and replacing it with “yo”. You’ll also notice that each block of characters in Korean maps to exactly one syllable, with no exceptions — pretty cool!

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#35

Post by famouswaffles »

okdood64 wrote: post #30
neom wrote: post #4

Having spent the last 5 years learning Korean, I've grown to find it an incredibly efficient language. 맥주 한 잔 주세요 Beer one please 화장실은 어디에요? Toilet where? 와이파이 있어요? wifi is here? You can process and even start answering someone before they've finished their sentence. By contrast in English, I'd say "Could I have another beer please?" - tell me what you need up front!

English can be pretty much as efficient... It's up to the social context on how much you want to dress it up.

No it really can't. It's somewhat hard to explain without going hard into grammar but if someone tried complex communication in English, how you would in Korean, communication would break down very quickly.

In Korean, Plural markers basically don't exist, Articles don't exist and possessive determiners are very few and only typically inserted when determining the meaning would be difficult otherwise.

Strictly speaking 친구 있어요 ? means Friend Have ?

And you would say exactly that for any of these English equivalents

"Do they have friends ?"

"Do you have a friend ?"

"Do you have friends ?"

"Does he have a friend ?"

And so on.

If you wanted to say,

"I have a friend"

"He has friends"

"They have a friend" etc, you'd simply remove the question mark and change the tone of the last syllable (when speaking).

친구 있어요.

The exact meaning would have to be divided from surrounding context.

Lots of composability that simply doesn't exist in English.

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#36

Post by hydrok9 »

yongjik wrote: post #28
schwartzworld wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these can be said as succinctly in English though. "one beer please" is enough to place an order, and the rest is just decorative. Does Korean not have more complex / ceremonial speech patterns?

Oh, and there's one really succinct way of expression that's not found in English: One can say something like 난 라면 - literally "I am ramen" (or something like that - it's a bit fuzzy because the "be" verb is omitted). It would be a ridiculous sentence by itself, but if your friend just asked "I'll have noodles, how about you?" then it's a perfectly fine response. Similarly you could even say 난 프랑스 ("I am France") if…

In English you could say I am FOR salmon though!

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#37

Post by MichaelZuo »

famouswaffles wrote: post #31
MichaelZuo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there the Korean equivalent of very formal language, such as: "Dear honoured sir, may I humbly beg for your indulgence in a meagre glass of beer?"

Formality and politeness is baked into Korean and you are basically always speaking at the right formality unless you ignore the rules. Your relationship to who you're speaking to (and who you are referring to if you speak about anyone else) changes the grammar of the sentence. The grammar changes mostly manifest in different suffix endings.

How do noble or formal titles work then?

It seems very unlikely to just be a suffix ending.

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#38

Post by devonkim »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #26
yongjik wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Korean has a crapload of complex speech patterns (degree of politeness - that's sheer madness) but the nice(?) thing about it is that it all comes at the end. So you can start your sentence without even deciding if it's a statement or a question. E.g., 오늘 그 식당 열어요 Today that restaurant is open. 오늘 그 식당 열어요? Is that restaurant open today? 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같아요. I guess that restaurant is open today. 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같다고 들었어요. I…

Is there the Korean equivalent of very formal language, such as: "Dear honoured sir, may I humbly beg for your indulgence in a meagre glass of beer?"

Using the wrong register is a form of humor as well just like in English and other languages but with different impact due to the politeness level being so important to the syntactic structure just like in Japanese. Being overly polite or using too low of a register works much better than sarcasm for comedic purposes for reasons I can’t quite explain. In English sarcasm is commonly how I joke around and involves an intonation cue but it doesn’t really work in Korean even with intonation (possibly because intonation and vowel lengthening is used for a lot of word distinction perhaps although homonyms exist in basically all languages) and if you try it native speakers will oftentimes have trouble telling if you’re serious or not. Although these days due to Western influences IMO most Koreans understand sarcasm as a style of humor and can apply it for all languages although for older generations it’s going to be less natural. The country’s had massive, massive social and economic changes in the past 100 years, it’s kind of wild

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#39

Post by KMnO4 »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #26
yongjik wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Korean has a crapload of complex speech patterns (degree of politeness - that's sheer madness) but the nice(?) thing about it is that it all comes at the end. So you can start your sentence without even deciding if it's a statement or a question. E.g., 오늘 그 식당 열어요 Today that restaurant is open. 오늘 그 식당 열어요? Is that restaurant open today? 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같아요. I guess that restaurant is open today. 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같다고 들었어요. I…

Is there the Korean equivalent of very formal language, such as: "Dear honoured sir, may I humbly beg for your indulgence in a meagre glass of beer?"

There are many levels of honorifics, from very low form to very polite form. Most aren’t used on a daily basis though, just like how most people don’t speak like they’re a lawyer addressing a courtroom.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_honorifics#Addressee_...

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#40

Post by MichaelZuo »

KMnO4 wrote: post #39
MichaelZuo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there the Korean equivalent of very formal language, such as: "Dear honoured sir, may I humbly beg for your indulgence in a meagre glass of beer?"

There are many levels of honorifics, from very low form to very polite form. Most aren’t used on a daily basis though, just like how most people don’t speak like they’re a lawyer addressing a courtroom. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_honorifics#Addressee_...

I tried translating it with a tool:

"존경하는 각하, 맥주 한 잔만 드시게 해달라고 겸손히 부탁드려도 될까요?"

Does that sound about right?

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