[KS] the Korean language

[J.Scott Burgeson]

--- ??? <gary at korealore.com> wrote:

> As for the problem of homophones, I agree with
> Michael
> Robinson. I've been living in Korea, among Koreans,
> for
> 36 years and have found homophones to be no more of
> a
> problem than they are in English. Far from lugging
> around
> dictionaries of sino-Korean words, most Koreans
> aren't
> even quite sure of how to look up a Chinese
> character in
> the okpyeon.
> 


Yes, that is my point--most people don't do that
because it's a pain in the ass... Ask 100 Korean
adults what the famous "P'imatgol" means, for example,
and I bet 99 of them would have no idea... I do a lot
of translation work with Koreans and even when
researching academic texts, the problem of homophones
and which sound means which Chinese character always
arises... And then if there is no Chinese character
and it is a purely Korean word, then often the meaning
of the original word root is lost in the mists of the
ancient past... Anyway, maybe the meaning of most
words in Korean are intuitively understood by most
Koreans, but when it comes to isolating the exact
meaning and translating them into another language,
that is when all sorts of slippery problems occur...
Again, I would argue that science is based on more
than mere "intuition"...
   --Scott Bug

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