Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors
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Re: Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors
#2This is called multiple language norms. English is "virtually" a lot of languages.
Re: Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors
#3The article title is misleading. From the actual content of the article, there's some differences in accent (and maybe sentence structure?), which can lead to social issues for defectors, but the real issue seems to be vocabulary.
So really it's no different from American English vs British English, except the North Koreans have been cut off from contact with the South.
Re: Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors
#4The article title is misleading. From the actual content of the article, there's some differences in accent (and maybe sentence structure?), which can lead to social issues for defectors, but the real issue seems to be vocabulary. So really it's no different from American English vs British English, except the North Koreans have been cut off from contact with the South.
Right. Linguistic unification in the peninsula happened long before the war. Though there are still regional dialects and accents, the North-South split was far less divisive in language terms than this article assumes and has only had a couple generations to occur.
Some interesting things that have happened since the war:
- Korean national identity movements have been strong in both countries. In the North, an effort towards language "purity" has changed some of the vocabulary and eliminated Chinese characters from written communication. In terms of vocabulary, loan-words from other languages were replaced with "pure" Korean words. For example, South Koreans use "computer" (컴퓨터), while North Koreans have used (걔산기) (Gyaesongi) which means something else (though they've started to use 콤퓨터, an almost homophone for the the South Korean word and loaned from English). The article gives another great example with "donut". In the South, a preference to eliminate Chinese writing as a practical matter of preference has happened as well (these days it's pretty uncommon to see outside of maybe newspapers, people just can't be bothered to remember all of the characters), but knowledge of Chinese characters is still highly prized as a matter of scholarship and education. But the South also has more quickly incorporated loan words from various countries and you'll find loads of English and English-like loan words (sometimes filtered through neighboring Japan or China) ending up in the language and written in Hangul all over the place. French is also common, but usually written in Latin characters for commerce reasons.
A recent cooking show on South Korean TV involves teams of two cooks preparing traditional foods, and one of the teams is from the North. There's no trouble communicating with the Northerners, though my wife lets out chuckles on occasion as they let slip stereotypical sounding communist slogans from time to time as they face difficult cooking challenges - "the North has nothing but strength!" as they work a noodle press by hand.
Re: Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors
#5I cannot say I am surprised. I could talk about Arabic almost every time I comment here. That get's boring. Let's move to Vietnamese.
So one of the coolest co-workers my father had was a recon pilot during the Viewnam War. Not doing the high altitude picture stuff, but SIGINT and comm monitoring over the radio stuff.
He volunteered and went to Nam for the Navy. He was sent to schools stateside to study Vietnamese first, since he did well on the ASVAB, or whatever the hell it was then. While studying with Vietnamese, in DC I think, they would play cards and learn to talk. His first mis-step was crossing his legs, putting one leg on a knee, and showing his instructor the sole of his foot. Super offensive apparently, and off to a more boring instructor he went.
Then, once he was in country on intel flights, almost all of the people in the bases were South Vietnamese, but he is trained to speak Northern, for less than obvious reasons. So this got him into trouble routinely, and made him an issue with on-base stuff. One woman, a cook, on his first day was in the room and he asked "How are you, sister?" In Nothern, this is fine. In Southern, he called her a slut or a whore (someone can back me up on this). She ran out crying, and they needed a new cook.
He said he caused a lot of problems like that. That was the first time.
Re: Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors
#6The article title is misleading. From the actual content of the article, there's some differences in accent (and maybe sentence structure?), which can lead to social issues for defectors, but the real issue seems to be vocabulary. So really it's no different from American English vs British English, except the North Koreans have been cut off from contact with the South.
Right. Linguistic unification in the peninsula happened long before the war. Though there are still regional dialects and accents, the North-South split was far less divisive in language terms than this article assumes and has only had a couple generations to occur. Some interesting things that have happened since the war: - Korean national identity movements have been strong in both countries. In the North, an effor…
>North Koreans have used (걔산기) (Gyaesongi)
Which sounds exactly like Japanese 計算機 (Keisanki) meaning calculator, so why bother eliminating the Chinese writing if you are going to leave the Chinese loaned vocabulary in? Now you're just left with a huge swath of the vocabulary where the roots have become indistinct and impermeable since you eliminated the orthographic clues from the writing. Replacing it with English loanwords seems doubly hare-brained since there's no context for association to learn them with!
All this angst among the Eastern Asian nations over language-historical events that happened a thousand years ago. I bet the Chinese feel real dumb now that they obliterated their own orthographic heritage just in time for computers to come in and make mastery of the written character redundant.
You don't see us fretting over whether we should eliminate the Greek roots or Phoenician lettering from English.
Re: Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors
#7This is called multiple language norms. English is "virtually" a lot of languages.
Or dialects and vocabularies.
And at least to me (non-native speaker), the most difficult dialects are English. I mean, accents from England. I can usually understand very well people who come from the Indian subcontinent, or China, or Africa... but Manchester? Liverpool?
Northern English dialects perhaps sound funny but for me they are not that hard, despite some describing the Newcastle accent as most difficult.
Re: Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors
#8This is called multiple language norms. English is "virtually" a lot of languages.
Or dialects and vocabularies. And at least to me (non-native speaker), the most difficult dialects are English. I mean, accents from England. I can usually understand very well people who come from the Indian subcontinent, or China, or Africa... but Manchester? Liverpool? Northern English dialects perhaps sound funny but for me they are not that hard, despite some describing the Newcastle accent as most difficult.
I'm a Scot and as a child was brought up, until around ten years old, in rural north east Scotland. The local tongue around those parts was heavily influenced by Doric [0] (this was the 1970's - we didn't see many "incomers" :) ).
When our family moved to the central belt (Perthshire) no-one in primary school could fully understand half the things I said. I had to learn how to "speak properly" as one fairly unpleasant head teacher put it. My north east accent and pronunciation is but a long lost memory, though I do still have an interest in the "Scots Language" [1][2], or "Mither Tongue" [3] as it's affectionately known.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doric_dialect_(Scotland)
[1]: http://www.lallans.co.uk/
Re: Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors
#9The article title is misleading. From the actual content of the article, there's some differences in accent (and maybe sentence structure?), which can lead to social issues for defectors, but the real issue seems to be vocabulary. So really it's no different from American English vs British English, except the North Koreans have been cut off from contact with the South.
Maybe it's more specific... like a person from the "southern" USA meeting someone from Wales? They'd have quite a hard time understanding each other.
Re: Korean is virtually two languages, which is a problem for North Korean defectors
#10I hope to live long enough to see North and South Korea unified like East/West Germany.
But somehow I suspect it is going to be a lot harder for that to happen given the nuclear weapons involved and then learning how southern look down on northern folks.