[KS] Alternate site for Korean homophones ( Acronyms in M.)

Lee JooBai jblee6952 at hotmail.com
Wed May 12 16:21:49 EDT 2004


Hi,

Apparently the site for the Korean homophones at
http://www.koreanyes.com is being blocked by some
ISP(internet service providers).  It appears to be suffering
from a problem akin to one experienced by the Korean site
earlier.

In the meantime, there is an alternate entry-way into the site
which seems to resolve the problem.  It simply has "1.net"
in the place of ".com" part of the name.

http://www.KoreanYes1.net

This is only a temporary measure, and all those linking or bookmarking
should not be surprised to find the link at http://www.koreanyes.com
in the future to be the only one alive, once the issue is resolved.

Cheers,

JooBai Lee

jblee6952 at hotmail.com

5/12/2004

P.S.

Thanks to all of you who have kindly commented on the site.
As of now, it is 2 to 3 that I hold back on unnecessary polemics.


Dear List,

Earlier there was a query on Korean homophones, about
which there is little available in the way of information
on the web.

In the way of a reply to Professor Unger's reply regarding
"Pro and Con of Restoring Hanja from Koreanists..,"  I
thought it might be interesting to hit two birds with
one stone.

Admittedly, I am in agreement with Professor Unger
as to restoring Hanja, but not on account of the failings
of Hanja as a writing system, but more on account of
Hangul-only in Korea being a fait accompli, with prospect
of Hanja returning in the writings being seemingly very
far in the future, if ever.

There is now a website which addresses both issues.

http://www.KoreanYes.com

I hope the site will allow the Korean language students,
whom I have been calling "Koreanists-in-training,"  to get
a better understanding of the place of Chinese words in
Korean and in their language study, even if the students
themselves are not proficient in Chinese characters.

I have provided a nearly complete list of Common-Chinese
homophones in Korean, as well as a similarly complete list
of homophones in English.

I hope the students will be able to grasp the parallels
between Chinese words in Hangul and the acronyms(or initialisms)
in some unknown language.

The Hangulized Chinese words seem to offer many
conundrums for the students of Korean language:

1) Notions of Partial Homophony, which occurs when
you focus on any one syllable of a compound word of
Chinese.  Partial Homophony is somewhat of a misnomer
as we are really dealing with complete/total homophony
with every compound word of Chinese.

2) Degree of Homophony, such as 39th degree of
homophony,  and multiplicative degrees of homophony
resulting in compound words of Chinese actually having
100+ degree of homophony.

3) Why native-Koreans untrained in Chinese syllables
are seemingly unaware of the massive internal homophony.

4) The place of Common-Chinese in the vocabulary that
defines Modernity for Korea, indeed all of East-Asia.

5) How it is that the students of Japanese and Chinese
seem to make great progress in learning the respective
languages despite being "handicapped" by being forced
to learn Chinese characters, whereas students of Korean
language seem to lag:  The data shows that the learning
curve for Common-Chinese is 10 times faster than the
learning curve for Hangul-only study of Common-Chinese
words, even disregarding the characters.

6) Graphically details how a student who do not know
characters can locate Common-Chinese words, and also
illustrate the omnipresence of Chinese words in Korean
to beginning students.

I hope the site will be able to afford useful information
to Koreanists-in-training.  To this end I have refrained
as much as possible from rhetoric, aiming for hard-nosed
data analysis.

Any comment from the list would be much appreciated.

Thank You,

JooBai Lee

jblee6952 at hotmail.com






More information about the Koreanstudies mailing list