[KS] Se Habla Korean

kimrenau kimrenau at gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
Mon Jan 31 16:08:02 EST 2000


Dear Professor Duggan, Ross, and others who may still be interested in the 
topic,

I have refrained from sending a follow-up on this topic, but I am encouraged 
to do so by your (John Duggan's) most recent posting.  What the Yonsei 
Dictionary says is of course right on the mark, and I thank you for citing it.

To my astonishment, Last Thursday I noticed that I had labeled a computer file 
for Korean-language films as "Hangul-Movies."  This computer file name was 
strictly for myself, and therefore could not have been chosen to make a 
condescending gesture to "foreigners" or to somehow to express my 
"nationalistic" pride in the Korean writing system.  If I made the file name 
consciously, I probably would have called it rather "KL-movies."  This is 
another example confirming that what people believe they do is not necessarily 
what they actually do.

Also last Friday, by serendipity, I was invited to a panel discussion on 
"mal(language)," in a program called "kyop'o nondan (Overseas Koreans' 
Debates)," jointly organized by a Korean-language radio station and a 
Korean-language newspaper in the DC/Baltimore area."  Naturally I paid a great 
deal of attention to how people used the term "han'gUl."  Remarkably during 
the close-to-four-hour discussion, few referred to "the Korean language."  And 
yet, when they were introducing the panelists, the presider said I was "a 
professor teaching 'Han'gUl' at GW," while fully knowing that I teach the 
Korean language, the Korean component in the Asian Humanities, and Korean 
Literature in Translation.  When I mentioned after the recording session what 
he had said, he looked rather incredulous.

In spite of everything, I am of course not saying that the term <han'gUl> 
equals the expression, "the Korean language."  I am sure Ross knows that I use 
the word "variation" as it is used in modern socio-linguistics, and not as 
something like "free variation," an expression commonly used by earlier (e.g., 
Structuralist) linguists.  Variation does not refer to "any variants," 
including slips of tongue, either, but only refers to a list of systematic 
variants, for which some linguistic and/or pragmatic explanations are 
possible.  It is far from saying, "each of these expressions is equally good," 
or "anything goes..." in some kind of laxity or false open-mindedness.

It may be desirable that linguists/pedagogues stick to what Bob Ramsey calls 
"pedalanguage," at least at the beginning level.  The problem is that we 
should not be just teaching our students to speak and write, but also to read 
and hear, i.e., understand what others say and write.  Variation, when 
properly covered, is just as essential as teaching/learning "Standard" 
language.  It is particularly crucial when so many of our students come with 
quite a bit of informal and dialectal Korean-language experiences.

Young-Key Kim-Renaud

>------John Duggan wrote:

>...  Regarding a previous topic on these pages, a furtive check of the Yonsei
>Dictionary indicates "han'gUl" may refer to Korean language as in "han'gUl
>irUm" - a "pure Korean" name rather than one derived from hanja or a foreign
>language name.  I think this may be common usage.  I believe the examples in
>the Yonsei Dictionary are from the Yonsei CLID corpus...

>-------Ross King said:

>...I also think that occasionally we linguists (many of whom,
in our field, anyway, are also pedagogs trying to teach a semblance of
'standard Korean', whatever that is) should saddle up and take a quixotic
tilt at silly or wrongheaded usages like hankul = Korean language. In other
words, I don't think we should immediately reify or sanctify every odd
usage or mistake that comes out of the mouth of native speakers and
promptly put it in our database of examples of 'change in progress' or the
like...




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