Читать книгу Survival Korean - Boye Lafayette De Mente - Страница 4

PREFACE

The Korean Language

Linguists say that the Korean language, Hankuk Mal [Hahn-kuuk mahl], originated in the Ural-Altaic region of what is now Russia, and that it appears to be related to Turkish, Mongolian and Tungusic.

Be that as it may, some 60 percent of the spoken language of Korea is Chinese in origin. This massive importation of Chinese words into Korea began over 2,000 years ago when China sent an expeditionary military force onto the Korean peninsula, and for the next 400 years exercised virtual suzerainty over the small Korean kingdoms that had formed by that time, fundamentally influencing their cultural and social development.

The Koreans not only incorporated thousands of Chinese words into their vocabulary; they also adopted the Chinese ideographic writing system (called Hantcha / Hahn-chah in Korean), which contributed enormously to the use and spread of Chinese words among the kingdoms’ educated classes. However, much to the credit of the Koreans, they did not attempt to import the Chinese tonal pronunciation of these thousands of words. They simply pronounced them as if they were Korean.

It was not until the 1440s that one of the early Choson dynasty kings [Sejong] ordered the creation of a native Korean script for writing that is now regarded as the most scientific of all writing systems. But for generation after generation, Korea’s ruling class continued to use the Chinese ideograms as the official system of writing.

Still today, most writing in South Korea consists of a combination of Chinese characters and Hangul (Hahn-guhl) , the unique Korean script. [In North Korea, on the other hand, the government has virtually banned all use of Chinese characters.]

But the use of thousands of Chinese words did not change the fundamental nature of the Korean language. It retained its own unique properties. However, in Korean, as in Chinese, there is generally no distinction between the singular and the plural, and the subject is often left out in the conversational mode when it is understood.

Another thing Chinese, Korean (and Japanese) have traditionally had in common is the existence of different “levels” of politeness and formality, based on social class, rank, and age as espoused by China’s famed political and social philosopher Confucius.

Korea is often described as the most Confucian of all countries in the Confucian sphere of Asia, and appears to have gone further than either the Chinese or Japanese in developing different levels of language. In fact, Korean language experts say that Hankuk Mal was designed to reveal and maintain the social status of the speakers rather than to communicate clearly.

The etiquette levels of Korean are based on the use of different words and on the choice of word endings. There is also a category of Korean, known as chondae mal (chohn-die mahl) , which means “polite speech,” or “honorific speech,” that refers to vocabulary traditionally used to elders and seniors.

There are other “rules” applying to the use of the Korean language that are tied up in the traditional culture and often make it more of an “expression of culture” than a means of factual communication. It is therefore necessary to have an in-depth knowledge of the culture, and be adept at expressing it in the correct terms, to speak the language fluently.

This said, it is possible to communicate a wide range of needs and thoughts in Korean without getting hung up, or tripped up, by the cultural element, especially where foreigners are concerned. Koreans are acutely sensitive to the cultural imperatives of the language and social etiquette, and are very tolerant of foreigners who make an effort to learn and use the language.

I have endeavored in this book to select vocabulary and example sentences that can be used to communicate a broad range of ideas with a minimum number of words, and to further simplify the process by providing English phonetics for every word and expression in the book. To “speak Korean,” all one has to do is to pronounce the phonetics as English. And don’t worry if the accent is a little bit off. We’re not dealing with a tonal language here!

Additionally, since the mid-1950s thousands of English words have been absorbed into the Korean vocabulary. Generally—as with the importation of Chinese vocabulary in ancient times—these are terms for which there were no native Korean words and/or did not lend themselves to the creation of simple, clear, Korean equivalents.

While these imported English words are written in the Korean writing system as if they were Korean, the pronunciations remain as close as possible to the original English. Tennis, for example, is spelled with Hangul characters that read as te-ni-su, and is pronounced as tay-nee-suu, which is still recognizable as English.

Boyé Lafayette De Mente