[KS] Greek and Latin studies in Korea

[Eugene Y. Park]

Dear all,

Let me begin with a huge disclaimer: what follows is an educated guess 
at most, informed also by a personal experience.

I suppose one may consider [Eastern] Orthodox Christian presence in 
Korea of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a possible 
conduit for spread of Greek learning in Korea, but my take is that it 
did not work out that way for at least two reasons.

One has to do with the fact that unlike the Roman Catholic Church which 
privileged the Latin language for centuries, even for the ordinary 
masses, until the Second Vatican Council, the Orthodox Church had 
decided early on to propagate the faith using local languages and 
scripts (e.g. the Cyrillic Alphabet) as much as possible. Not just in 
terms of church organization, even in the Middle Ages, decentralization 
and local autonomy shaped the Orthodox Church's attitudes toward local 
languages, cultures, and customs. Thus there was relatively little 
compelling reason for the Orthodox Church to stress learning Greek among 
non-native-Greek speakers--whether we are talking Classical Greek (the 
knowledge of which remained limited to a tiny percentage of the educated 
and intellectuals after post-Justinian centuries), Koine Greek (the 
spoken Greek especially in the eastern Mediterranean region where Greek 
as a spoken and daily administrative language was more or less dead by 
the seventh century), Medieval Greek (the spoken language of the 
Byzantine empire's population as well as the Greek Orthodox liturgy), 
and Modern Greek (the language of the population of modern Greece and 
the Greek diaspora).

The second reason concerns the ruptured history of Orthodox missionary 
activities in Korea. During the period of Russian influence in the late 
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Russian Orthodox missionaries 
won converts in Korea, especially in Hamgyeong region. Not only did the 
outcome of the Russo-Japanese War (i.e. the Japanese victory) curtail 
Russian Orthodox missionary activities in Korea, the Bolshevik 
Revolution effectively cut off the small number of Korea's Orthodox 
population from support, in any sense, from the Russian Orthodox Church. 
In fact, the Greek soldiers during the Korean War virtually reintroduced 
Orthodox Christianity to Korea, as they were accompanied by Greek 
Orthodox priests, and a smattering of Korean Orthodox Korean population 
participated in services (not "masses" but "divine liturgies" in 
Orthodox Christianity) conducted by Greek priests.

As a formerly practicing Orthodox and someone familiar with the Korean 
Orthodox scene in the 1990s (centered around Church of St. Nicholas, 
located in Ahyeon-dong, Mapo-gu, Seoul) and Bishop Sotirios, I can 
attest that at least among Orthodox missionaries and Korean Orthodox 
Christians, the Greek language has never played a role anywhere near 
that of Latin among Catholics in Korea. If I were to investigate further 
into the history of Greek language study in Korea, I would look more 
into those Koreans who were strongly influenced by and enamored with 
what they considered classical education in the early twentieth-century 
U.S. and Britain where youngsters supposedly had to study both Latin and 
Classical Greek. In fact, in the early '90s when I told my graduate 
school mentor and advisor, late Ed Wagner (born in 1924), that I'm 
taking Modern Greek, he told me that he once had to study Classical Greek.

Yours,
Gene

Eugene Y. Park
Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History
Director, James Joo-Jin Kim Program in Korean Studies
University of Pennsylvania
http://www.history.upenn.edu/faculty/park.shtml

On 3/9/2013 9:45 PM, Frank Hoffmann wrote:
> Dear All:
>
> Very interesting facts that Professor Sung-Deuk Oak just posted …
> Greek in 1916, there are always surprises.
> A small detail: "Wuthemberg" in Germany is the "Kingdom of Württemberg
> [Wuerttemberg]" in southern Germany. The village he was born in was
> Rottenacker .. well known to historians of German and local history of
> Ohio (U.S.) as a main center for the so-called Seperatists, a radical
> pietist, political-religious group splitting from the church.
> Indirectly, the movement was quite important influence for the early
> socialist movement in Germany. In any case, most of the Separatists
> from Rottenacker emigrated around 1800 to the U.S. and continued to be
> active there. The mentioned Dr. Gelson Engel (he died a year later, by
> the way, in 1939), the founder of the Presbyterian Church in Korea, was
> from one of these Separatist's families in Rottenacker, just that his
> family had emigrated to Australia instead of the U.S. to flee from the
> pressure against their movement home in Württemberg.
>
> Since Ed Baker or Stephen Epstein haven't yet posted anything, just
> this bibliographic note in between:
>
> "한국에서 외국어 교육의 역사" (History of Foreign Language Education in
> Korea) by Dr. Yi Kwang-suk (Kwang-Sook Lie, in her own rendering).
> http://blog.daum.net/gangseo/17954583
> or in HWP format:
> http://du.german.or.kr/zs/21/06%EC%9D%B4%EA%B4%91%EC%88%99.hwp
>
> It is a very nice summary on the wider topic of foreign language
> education in Korea, with an emphasis on German (the author, now at SNU,
> got her PhD in Germany, and also translates Korean literature into
> German). The near-absense of LATIN is interesting. But I think that the
> author (and Franklin Rausch in the earlier posting) are likely right
> on: Latin seems to have been a Catholic Church language 'only.' Some
> studies (e.g. from France) show a--for me at least--surprising number
> of very early 20th century translations from French and Russian into
> Korean, naming a couple of major Korean intellectuals who had at the
> time learned those languages. As professor Kwang-Sook Lie also
> indicates, Latin or Greek were never the languages for the educational
> elite, as was the case in Europe with its merger of state and religion,
> but these other languages very well where, because of the "opening"
> process and Western influenced reforms the country went through.
>
> The first Latin-Korean Dictionary seems to have been published in Korea
> in 1936:
> _Dictionarium Latino-Coreanum_
> comp. by Laurentio Youn (alias Laurent Eulsu Youn, alias Yun Ŭl-su)
> But I believe to have seen a shorter, handwritten one by the
> Benedictine monks from the late 1920s.
>
>
> Best,
> Frank
>
>
> --------------------------------------
> Frank Hoffmann
> http://koreaweb.ws
>