[KS] Hangul to hanja conversion online and the fate of cherry trees Nipponica

Kye C Kim kc.kim2 at gmail.com
Fri Jun 1 07:23:00 EDT 2012


Dear Professor Sasse,

I would be happy to trade your sketchy( and impressive) memory any day for
my regrettable slip-of-the-finger which created  the non-existent Prof.
Harbmeir and left the real Prof.C. Harbsmeier and his famous
Coca-colanization presentation before the *Union Académique Internationale
in a limbo,** *(Link here : GLOBALISATION AND CONCEPTUAL
*BIODIVERSITY*<http://www.hf.uio.no/ikos/english/research/projects/tls/publications/Globalisation.pdf>
.)

Thank you for your interesting post.  Your 木曰南記 citation seemed to be a
case of "*the exception proving the rule,*"  with the proposition ,
regardless of Heavenly bidding, that  "ANY Korean word would be writable
with Chinese characters."

Interestingly, *"the exception proves the rule"* stands in the exactly the
same relationship to the Latin *"exceptio probat regulam in casibus non
exceptis"* as Prof Harbsmeier's modern EA languages' relationship to modern
English.  Placed against the German *"Ausnahmen bestätigen die Regel"* or
the French* "L'exception confirme la règle,"* the English version seems
oddly less immediately sensible.*

*In light of your post, I guess 최남선(崔南善)'s statement that "'나막신'은 '나무신'이
와전된 것"(Namaksin is NamooSin distorted) may have to be inverted/upturned to
"나무신은 나막신이 와전/진화된 것'(NamooSin is NamakSin distorted/evolved)?

Just as an aside, I don't recall ever seeing 나막신(NamakSin) or Koreans
portrayed as wearing wooden clogs in any modern portrayal of pre-modern
Korea, across movies, illustrations, or historical dramas(straw and leather
shoes yes, but no clogs).  I wonder if Namaksin did not suffer the same
fate as the post-WWII cherry trees which  were hacked, chopped, and burned
down to ashes immediately following liberation from Japan because of their
association with Japan(Cherry tree=Japanese), despite having been very much
a Korean favorite by tradition all through its history.  This account is
provided in Prof Ramsey's *The Korean Language(2000)*.  I guess I am
thinking of the way Japanese are always portrayed as wearing Geta(Clog
Nipponica), whether in thongs or kimonos.

One wonders if same fate did not fell the Kanji in Korea, by association
with the first introduced general public education under Imperial Japan.


Regards,

Joobai Lee

6/1/2012

On Fri, Jun 1, 2012 at 2:14 PM, Werner Sasse <werner_sasse at hotmail.com>wrote:

>  Response to the following (sorry to be so late, I was travelling...),
> and sorry to be a little sketchy, but I am writing from memory...
>
>
> >Prof. Harbmeier recently noted that most recently modernized languages
> despite sounding "native," are actually mirroring English concepts and
> >rhetoric, under the guise of native sound. "나막신" appears to be just such
> an instance, only Chinese replacing English. It is puzzling that 나막 is
> >used instead of 나무 to calque "tree" 신 as "wear"?  "
>
> ==> 나막 is a fossilized form of an old Korean word. The development was 나막
> > 남ㄱ (남기, 남ㄱaㄹ, 남ㄱaㅣ [a = arae-a]) . 나모 is the Middle Korean form without
> suffix and before -와. ModKor 나무 comes from the latter...
> 鷄林類事 has 木曰南記
> dial. also 남구, 남게, 낭게, 낭기, 냉기...
>
> ==> 신 is Middle and Mod Korean for "shoe"
>
> No Chinese involved here
>
> Best wishes
> Werner Sasse
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
> Date: Mon, 28 May 2012 19:02:55 +0900
> From: kc.kim2 at gmail.com
>
> To: koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
> Subject: Re: [KS] hangul to hanja conversion online
>
> Yes indeed! Heaven forbid, that "ANY Korean word would be writable with
> Chinese characters."
>
> There was a news item last year describing a wondrous program capable of
> making this automatic conversion from hangul to hanja.  Not surprisingly,
> Korean media's and the public's response can best be described as "so
> what," and "means nothing to me" and "does nothing for me."  All quite
> true!  While 92% may sound good, if you imagine that 8% of your text is
> gobbledy-gook, you really can not avoid ending up with gobbledy-gook.  Not
> surprising and quite necessary.  But looked at from another perspective,
> that is from the view of Chinese or Japanese students, wives, husbands,
> children, etc (the only two hanzi countries remaining), who must wrestle
> with Korean text, it could be a heaven-sent.  While the hanja to hangul is
> easy as cake, hangul to hanja is not a trivial problem and still looking
> for a solution.  It is also not so unimportant a problem as every
> translation software's accuracy is just as equally determined by the
> performance of hangul to hanja conversion.  Every time you look at the
> translate.google or any translator and wonder why the output is
> gobbledy-gook, this is always a large part of it.
>
> Prof. Harbmeier recently noted that most recently modernized languages
> despite sounding "native," are actually mirroring English concepts and
> rhetoric, under the guise of native sound.  "나막신" appears to be just such
> an instance, only Chinese replacing English. It is puzzling that 나막 is used
> instead of 나무 to calque "tree" 신 as "wear"?  Yoo Kwang-on shows prescience
> with his recent post about 지렁이 which he glossed as 地龍'이.
>
> Altaic question?  Just how many words are we talking about here?  What
> percentage of modern Korean?
>
> On Sun, May 27, 2012 at 12:02 PM, <gkl1 at columbia.edu> wrote:
>
> Hi List,
>
> Admittedly a huge number of Chinese words and compounds have become part
> of Korean's vocabulary, just as a huge number of Greek and and Latin words
> have become a part of the vocabulary of English (and the other European
> languages too). But it's distressing to learn that people might think ANY
> Korean word would be writable with Chinese characters. If that were so,
> then Korean would be a language in the Sino-Tibetan family. It's hard
> enough to get scholarly agreement on what language family CAN claim
> Korean's ancestry, but any linguistic reference work would make it clear
> that it's not a Chinese-type language.
>
> Gari Ledyard
>
>
> Quoting Clark W Sorensen <sangok at u.washington.edu>:
>
>  Caren,
>
> Namaksin is a native Korean word, so it doesn't have corresponding
> Chinese characters. However, any of the on-line dictionaries will give
> the characters for Korean words such as at naver.com. The problem is
> you have to input the Korean in hangul.
>
> Clark Sorensen
>
> On Fri, 25 May 2012, Freeman, Caren (cwf8q) wrote:
>
>
> I’m asking this question on behalf of a colleague who is a sinologist.  He
> asks:
>
>
>
> “i want to see what chinese characters correspond to korean "Namaksin"
>  wooden clogs.  Namaksin (나막신)
>
>
>
> Is there an online dictionary that gives the classic readings for korean
> words entered in pinyin type western alphabet?”
>
>
>
> Many thanks for your recommendations,
>
> Caren Freeman
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/attachments/20120601/036918b2/attachment.html>


More information about the Koreanstudies mailing list