[KS] historical revisionism & western attribution of "Land of Morning Calm"

[Adam Bohnet]

Dear Jim:

The subject of "Land of the Morning Calm" has been discussed in great
detail on this list, notably in June, 2007. I include a link to one of
the more extensive responses by Gari Ledyard. To sum up, it is simply
not true that "Morning calm is the English rendering of  ChosOn;" if
it were, the Chinese pronunciation of "ChosOn" would be Zhaoxian, and in
any case "xian" does not mean calm.

http://koreaweb.ws/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreaweb.ws/2007-June/006287.html


That being said, although this may have been mentioned earlier, I note
briefly that the misreading of "Cho" as morning is older than Western
missionaries to Korea. My copy of Hong Manjong (1643-1725)'s Sunoji,
for instance, includes a discussion of why men of old created the name
ChosOn.

"Because the land was close to the origin of the sunrise [would
'sunrise valley' be an over-literal translation?], they called it
'Cho.' Because when the sun rises ChosOn is the first to become
bright, they called it 'sOn.' "

[I don't know if the characters will go through, but here goes:

"????????, ???????."

As you can see, even Hong did not gloss sOn ? as calm, but as 'bright'
[myOng ?] which is one of the meanings of 'sOn' along with I
think a bit of a word game with another 'sOn ?,' ['first, earlier,
before' - my e-mail seems to destroy Chinese characters so follow the  
meanings if you get garbage letters], which rhymes with sOn even  
according to Tang poetry rules. From the  point of  view of modern  
linguistics, all this is silly word games, of  course.

I think this particular folk etymology may be older than Hong Manjong,  
but I refer to Hong because I have a copy on my desk. The original  
page numbers are not included in my facsimile edition, but it would be  
1:7a, I think. The passage is on page 16 of volume 1 of the Hong  
Manjong chOnjip (T'aehaksa, 1980).

Finally, as a general comment not directed exclusively to Jim Thomas,  
I simply do not understand what people think they mean by "historical  
revisionism." When people go through archives, they often discover  
aspects which were not properly considered - for instance, consider  
the recent discovery of proof of widespread destruction of archives  
concerning British brutalities in Kenya, or for that matter  
post-Soviet discoveries in archives. When people go through sources  
that have been discussed before, they often discover misreadings or  
aspects that were missed. All of this is wonderful. Otherwise, we  
would still be following Hong Manjong's inaccurate gloss for Choson,  
Lenin would still be the glorious father of the revolution later  
betrayed by Stalin, and so forth.

Yours,

Adam

Yours

Adam