[KS] Hong Manjong and "Land of Morning Calm"

[Adam Bohnet]

Dear all:

I have no idea if this interests anybody, but, because I noticed that  
the characters in my e-mail were all destroyed, I have typed the  
characters up at my homepage and also posted two photographs of Hong  
Manjong's text.

The link is as follows:

https://sites.google.com/site/adambohnet/home/hongmanjongonchoson

I think I remember looking at this passage in 2004 and thinking it  
might be interesting to look into it with greater depth, and then  
again in 2007 during the discussion on this list. I finally post it,  
having made no progress on the subject since 2004!

Otherwise, I briefly had the silly thought that "Land of the Morning  
Brightness" could be interpreted as the source for the "Korea -  
Sparkling!" tourism campaign.


Sincerely,

Adam


Quoting Adam Bohnet <adam.bohnet at utoronto.ca>:

> 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
>
>
>
>
>
>