31–40 of 61 posts
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And the small fact that the North is a totalitarian shithole.
East Germany was also not a great place – the largest domestic intelligence agency ever, everyone spying on each other, a totalitarian regime, a wall so that no one could flee, food was there, but you had no bananas, no chocolate, or any other expensive food. All in all, if one sees it objectively, east germany wasn’t /that/ different from North Korea.
I 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.
And the small fact that the North is a totalitarian shithole.
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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 unpleasan…
Scots is an amazing language. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0EwquC6wBU Though it seems like Scots is so overwhelmed by British Standard English to exist more on a creole continuum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-creole_continuum
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South Korea is much better. Not.
South Korea is much better.
The 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…
Oh my god... that's hilarious to me somehow, and I don't have any connection to Korea.
Is there a website somewhere that I could learn a few of these? I'd like to incorporate them into my repetoire.
I find it interesting the kinds of things one can learn from two countries that are nearly identical, but one is in isolation and the other is not. That being said, the North Koreans who defect should not feel so embarrassed about their style of speaking. It is unique and appreciable. Hell with the comedians. Just be a good sport and a laugh along. People laugh at others when they find themselves are weak.
How was it for East Berliners and West Berliners right after the Wall fell? Didn't they have to deal with vocabulary differences as well? I'd assume that those vocabulary differences have basically disappeared in the decades since, but I've never been there nor studied German. Thoughts?
I 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 fir…
I'm Czech and I can attest to something similar in my country with its measly 10 million people. There's a Bohemian and a Moravian/Silesian dialect. Bohemia is part of the country where Prague is and with that dialect, you can fare very well all over the country. You'll stick out, and sound downright silly in the depths of Moravia, but you'll be fine. I can't ever remember not being able to understand a Bohemian simp…
I 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 fir…
I've been living in Vietnam for the last four years and there's a huge difference in dialects from southern, central and northern Vietnam. People from the center in particular are often unintelligible even to other Vietnamese. It's a treacherous enough language already since getting a tone wrong can mean you're unintentionally saying something quite vulgar. Luckily the Vietnamese will almost always give foreigners a…
This is correct. It is always expected that foreigners will speak broken Vietnamese, and given that it is already rare in the first place to hear a foreigner speak Vietnamese, most will be delighted to see you do it, no matter how broken it is.
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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…
> 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. Oh my god... that's hilarious to me somehow, and I don't have any connection to Korea. Is there a website somewhere that I…
But I'd love to hear things that people actually say.