Languaging

A video about learning Russian (or any language) with Mary Hobson, a 91-year-old translator and writer who started learning Russian at 56 and now translates Pushkin and Tolstoy.

A ted talk video that shows how anyone can learn a language.

A ted talk video on how to learn a language in 6 months even if you are desperate.

A video with adorable British students who absolutely love learning foreign languages.

A video by National Geographic that illustrates endangered languages and explains how some languages are dying because none speaks them anymore.

A video about the benefits of being bilingual.

A video of a 4 years old girl who speaks 7 languages

Happy Hangul Day! 

Language on the Move has a post about the invention of hangul, quoting Chapter 11 “King Sejong’s One-Man Renaissance” of Gnanadesikan (2009), where the above images are also from:  

King Sejong concluded that, in order to achieve broad dissemination of knowledge, Korean needed a writing system of its own; not one based on Chinese but one that was based on Korean and easy to learn.

He started to look around for ways to develop a script for Korean. In addition to Chinese, he was able to study Japanese, Jurchen and Mongolian scripts. While these syllabary-based scripts provided some inspiration, it must be considered a stroke of genius that he figured out the difference between consonants and vowels – characteristic of alphabetic writing – by himself. In a next step, he divided the consonants into groups according to their place of articulation – another impressive feat in the absence of any phonetic models.

Having identified the phonetic characteristics of the sounds of Korean, he devised signs that represent pronunciations. This is in contrast to all other writing systems where signs initially started out as ideograms representing objects. At the danger of overusing the expression “stroke of genius” – that’s precisely what it was!

The new script was published in early October 1446 and the preface, written in Chinese, states:

The speech sounds of our country’s language are different from those of the Middle Kingdom and are not communicable with the Chinese characters. Therefore, when my beloved simple people want to say something, many of them are unable to express their feelings. Feeling compassion for this I have newly designed twenty-eight letters, only wishing to have everyone easily learn and use them conveniently every day. (Quoted from Gnanadesikan 2009, p. 204)

My stupid ass: 

Such a wild thing to observe: SKorea has developed so rapidly that our language has become riddled with foreign loanwords that our Northern counterpart can no longer understand - even if we speak the same language.

Narrator: “27,000 North Korean defectors living in South Korea.”

[Students introduce themselves in Korean]

Narrator: “What is it called?”

[Students name objects in Korean]

Narrator: “Through 70 years of separation, languages of the two Koreas have grown apart. Would you mark any unfamiliar words? North Korean defector students could understand less than 50% of the terms in the textbooks. This led to them being neglected from regular education, and that led to disparity in employment and income. Even Google Translator could not solve the discrepancies in the language. So then we came to create our own translator. South Korean-North Korean translator. We designed it so that a simple scan of an unfamiliar South Korean word with a smartphone would translate it into North Korean. Translating several words all at once is also possible. It was hoped that with this app, the North Korean defectors would be able to get proper education. We of course plan to continue to help them adjust well to life in South Korea. Koreans were shocked, saddened, but motivated after seeing the translator for what had been the same language.”

[Dr. Huttman speaking German]

So while the video paints a picture of North Korean dialect as ass-backwards compared to modern, loan-word loving South Korean, I think that’s an unfair depiction.  For a nation built around narratives of cultural and ethnic purity, it’s actually kind of necessary, if not downright brilliant.

Also, it’s my understanding that if you said “South Korea” in the north you’d get in big trouble.  You’d be acknowledging that there are two separate countries, carved up by US fiat way back when, in fact, they are and always have been one – according to the North Korean narrative, natch.

france, for example, has tried to impose neologized french words for a number of english ones as well as anglicisms, sometimes successfully (e.g. ‘ordinateur’ for computer), sometimes less so (’courriel’ for email, or mél).

in fact, there’s hardly a country in the world that hasn’t been impacted by a large number of english loan words in the last few decades. several, such as france and north korea, have taken political measures to limit them.

these are certainly artificially imposed, but it would be a mistake to assume that the proliferation of english loan words is a ‘free’ and ‘natural’ state of affairs. english words are imposed by cultural and linguistic hegemony. no one in south korea ‘elects’ to study english. 

the limitations on the use of chinese characters isn’t just a north korean thing. in 1970 park chung-hee also banned the teaching of chinese characters in schools and though the ban was eventually lifted, the use of chinese characters in south korea has never really recovered. look at any korean newspaper before the 1970s and you’ll see a lot more chinese there. a lot of south koreans in their 50s, even well educated ones, sometimes struggle to read chinese characters.

i would hope that a reunified korea would adopt some of the north korean words. i think 어름과자, for example, is preferable to 아이스크림. most european languages simply use their own word for ‘ice’ to designate ice cream, and i don’t see why korean should be an exception. 

1. our words are much shorter. e.g. 지내 instead of 지나차게, -히 instead of -하게, -함 instead of any other ending with 하다, -까소 instead of anything formal with 겠 in it

2. our spelling is a lot easier. e.g. 녀자 instead of 여자 is much more logical because of the use of 녀, 저가락 instead of 젓가락, 낭 instead of 나무, 짱냐 instead of 짜증나다 3. less spaces between words. e.g. 할수잇는것 instead of 할 수 있는 것, 많잇소 instead of 많이 있어, 죽고싶어 instead of 죽고 싶어.

4. we cut sentences shorter. e.g. “ 내가 열정을 가지고 있으면서도, 창조적인 뭔가를 하면서 살아야 한다는 건 알고 있다” would be “내가 차조적인 열정을 하면서 살아야하는지 알아” (34 vs. 20) 5. instead of having many different English words to mean similar things; we ‘build up’ like: 양복치마 instead of 스커트, 나리옷 instead of 드레스, 달리옷 instead of 원피스, 동강옷 instead of 투피스 = with the literal ‘옷’ (clothes) and ‘치마’ (skirt) in it.

Refugee Loneliness: The deaf Syrian father learning British Sign Language to combat isolation

After a career teaching Arabic sign language to children in Aleppo, Ahmad is having to learn to sign in a different language from scratch.

Ahmad uses Arabic sign language and Mountaha can’t speak English, meaning they are struggling to learn how to communicate and get by in their new home country.

While Ahmad has recently started classes in British Sign Language (BSL), Mountaha is still waiting to start English classes five months after arriving in Birmingham.