[KS] Hanja, purification of Korean, and studying "bugs".

[N eo]

Dear All,

I live directly behind the compound of scholar- statesman Yi-Yul-Gok and his 
mother, Shim Saim-Dang: "Oh-Juk-Hon". It is a place of rare beauty and 
peace--once the throngs of visitors stop yakking to each other and have gone 
home.

I stood, yesterday, frowning at the Chinese characters that I couldn't 
decipher (most of them) and recalled a recent post on this forum.

I have carried Lee joobai's initial, thoughtful and provocative remarks on 
the Hanja debate around with me for weeks, now, and I hope I haven't waited 
too long to respond.

Although Mr. Lee asked for the perspective of an expert, I hope that some 
empirical observation might be of some help in lieu of an expert opinion.

Mr. Lee wrote:
"<DIV>...I sincerely look forward to the day when the process of 
purification is completed.... Can you imagine what delight it would be to 
never have to learn a new word, where the compounding or word formation 
makes the meaning self-evident, where the lexis is not encumbered with terms 
from unrelated languages whose meaning can only be partially gleaned from a 
dictionary, and where maybe the mastery of a few hundred words and rules of 
word formation will make it possible for any thoughtful eight year old to 
understand everything that is uttered and everything utterable can be 
contained in them.</DIV>"

Elsewhere, mention is made that the use of Chinese characters is being 
"targeted" despite its popularity in Korea in a trend toward purification of 
the Korean language.

Presumptive though it may be to comment as a non-Korean, the call for a 
purification of Korean and notions regarding purging of Hanja from school 
curricula really frightens me.

George Orwell's philologist in "1984" speaks of a project not entirely 
dissimilar:
----------
"I've read some of those pieces that you
wrote in The Times occasionally. They're good
enough, but they're translations. In your heart you'd prefer to stick to 
Oldspeak, with  all  its  vagueness  and  its  useless shades   of   
meaning.  You  don't  grasp  the  beauty  of  the destruction of words. Do 
you know that  Newspeak  is  the  only language  in  the  world  whose  
vocabulary  gets smaller every year?...Every year fewer and fewer words,  
and  the
range  of  consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course,  
there's   no   reason   or   excuse   for committing thoughtcrime. It's  
merely  a  question  of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end 
there won't be  any  need  even for  that. The Revolution will be complete 
when the language is perfect....Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that 
by the year 2050, at the very latest, not  a single  human  being  will be 
alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?"
http://www.inquiria.com/orwell/1984.html
(Chapter 6)

--------

I cannot know the depths of the ill-effects of Hanja on the worlds of Korean 
jurisprudence, economics, government or medicine. Any effort to renovate 
bureaucracies in the interest of efficiency seems a healthy thing.

I don't wish to conflate Mr. Lee's statement with to the longings of 
Orwell's philologist. Wholesale repression may not be the inexorable 
conclusion to a process of language purification. The sentiment, though, 
struck me as oddly familiar. I do wonder whether the Philologist's last 
question was ever tossed around among the statesman in Yi Yul-Gok's time.

My Western "mental furniture" will always prevent me from viewing values of 
purity or homogeneity (linguistic or ethnic) without a kimchi 'dok' full of 
skepticism.

I am a student of Korean (intermediate--at best) and a student/user of that 
mongrel of mongrels, American English. Words in my tongue, with meanings 
that are putatively "self-evident" are used all the time: 'Loyalty, 'Love', 
'Beauty', 'Sex'--as if these words were transparent to all--so, too, words 
like 'Patriotism', 'United Nations', 'peace-keeping', "Liberal", 
"Conservative", and so on.

Even if purification of one language of words with self-evident lexical 
entries were possible, there will always be barriers to confound and to 
frustrate us...rendering communication a very imperfect affair.

The notion itself of "perfection" or "purity" is interpreted variously.

I often think of, "man-ja~Man", the character that unnerves so many western 
visitors when they visit a temple or pass a Buddhist place of worship in 
Korea.

If I were to shave my head, paint this character on my door, sit in my 
apartment and seek the 'perfect Bodhi-enlightenment' I might not raise so 
much as a brow in Korea. I would, however, advise my friend in Brooklyn 
against this if he didn't wish to be pummeled by his neighbors.

We have dictionaries for reference and for distinguishing the denotation 
between, "suastika" and it's reverse "swastika" (one meaning "well-being" or 
"a benediction"...the other meaning something different entirely). I doubt 
that any refined lexicon entry for those seperate terms would be of any 
assistance to my friend in Brooklyn in his efforts to persuade an angry 
throng that he was a seeker of "perfection" of an entirely different flavor 
than they had assumed.

If languages truly are living things, as Professor Ledyard has mentioned, 
then lexicons and grammars are tombs. A student/user of any language is 
charged, then, with raising Lazarus. This may seem fanciful to some, but 
this helps to motivate, to stave off discouragement and feed enthusiasm. I 
mention this only to say that, while I recognize Mr. Lee's frustration as my 
own, I do not look forward to the day where I "never have to learn a new 
word".

The worlds of bureaucracy, of commercial and law documents, etc. are not so 
dissimilar to the worlds of lived language--written and spoken between 
persons. I see no reason why they should be immune to ineluctable 
ambiguities--no matter how many archaic terms are quashed, no matter how 
many cryptic Hanja are disallowed by committee. Any such committee, it seems 
to me, assumes the burden of deciding whether "less is more".

Hanja can be a fresh breeze into those stifling, overcrowded classrooms 
where Korean is taught. In a practical way students gain a more certain 
command over the language they use. If Korean, with its calques, it's 
Chinese roots and derivations, is a dappled thing I don't think this is 
cause for lament therefore.

In the English language classroom one glimpse at the etymologies of words 
like "education", "religion", "barbaric", or "enthusiasm" would yield a far 
more satisfying experience--even to an eight year old--than simply to be 
taught their proper function in a sentence.

I would no sooner teach my students Korean while depriving them of Hanja 
lessons than I would teach them to taste a watermelon by instructing them to 
lick the skin.

Mr. Ledyard has mentioned reluctance many may have to "teach Hanja" and I 
don't doubt that this dread exists. Alas, this difficulty ascribed to Hanja 
education further fuels the trend to purge Hanja from school curricula. I'm 
reminded of the erstwhile "dead" languages of Greece and Rome whose 
textbooks we once regarded as just so much ballast in our book-bags before 
we were lead to discover their contents by an able teacher. Curricula even 
in the best U.S. schools have been eviscerated of their Latin and Greek in a 
similar spirit of reluctance to teach what is "difficult".

I'm not certain, but I thought it was the whole point of schooling was to 
attend to the voracious intellectual appetites of the young. Our purpose 
cannot be to remove items from the menu--no matter how inaccessible or 
obscure they may seem at first blush.

Moreover, the putative difficulty (or ease, for that matter) of a given 
language is, to me, a red herring. In my opinion, languages are largely 
neutral with respect to accessibility. If Hanja students come to class with 
notions of "difficult" or "easy", then they are already encumbered before 
they open their books or dip their brushes.

In Korea, at a university (and in it's annex) on the East coast of Korea, I 
teach close to 400-500 students per week. They are from all walks of life, 
of all ages (from elementary school age to adults).

Although my university students seem to have less interest in Hanja, those 
with the greatest enthusiasm for Hanja are pre-teens. Roughly 80% of them 
know at least 500 characters, a large portion of whom are well on their way 
to passing their 1,800 character tests by the time they graduate middle 
school. It's a safe wager that almost half of my youngest students can read, 
identify the roots of, and write accurately at least as much Hanja as most 
professors at the university where I teach. In order to improve their Hanja, 
more than half of my youngest students attend Hakwons which are found all 
over this city.