Ruminations in Korea

Comment by Sumiyoshi Pilgrim

21 February 2006 @ 6:23 am

Cool. Now I know how that stupid store, “WIGPIA” near my old house got its name. As for lespia, hmmmm…thinking more along the lines of beautiful women, Greek island, no men allowed…

Comment by Plunge

23 February 2006 @ 3:42 am

Honestly, if you heard someone say the word “lespia”, would you immediately think “leisure sports utopia?”

Heh…no, more like a lesbian paradise. Where’s Howard Stern when you need him?

Comment by Bubba

23 February 2006 @ 9:52 am

Language and its rules are in constant evolution because of the changing needs of its users. Languages that don’t evolve are dead languages. In this case, the users are Korean, and the need being fulfilled is that of the merchants who want to convey a certain image in order to grab the attention of potential customers.

Comment by starbucks

23 February 2006 @ 11:24 am

koreans do the same thing with korean words. they combine words and make it into one word. it’s also no different in the states as the younger generation shorten words or combine them to fit whatever they can when iming or text messaging.

Comment by SKFK

25 February 2006 @ 8:40 am

I think the point is that when people mash up words to come up with a new one in their native languages, at least they usually try to avoid coming up with a word that sounds like it has some unintended meaning. Like those tasty fruit drinks in Korea which has the unfortunate brand name of “Coolpis.” (On the other hand, I’ve seen those National Lampoon photographs of grocery stores in America advertising “homo milk.”)

I’m reminded of a well-known story about the North Korean government trying to come up with a Korean word for lightbulbs. Since NK’s Juche ideology dictated that they should avoid using Chinese-derived words as much as possible, using 전구 was not the best option. So they decided to literally translate “light” and “bulb,” then combine them into one word. The result? 불알.

Comment by Kevin Kim

25 February 2006 @ 10:00 pm

Starbucks, above, makes a good point. S/he’s talking about “polysynthesis,” a fancy-pants term for the phenomenon where people reduce something like 숙명여자대학교 to the much shorter 숙대. Polysynthesis is like a linguistic in-joke– comprehensible only to the people who tend to talk/think the same way.

If it serves Korean purposes, then a new polysynthesized word will indeed mean something– to Koreans. There’s no rule saying a locution must be meaningful to people outside a given speech community.

But SKFK’s point is also well taken: many neologisms create unfortunate and often hilarious resonances for people in the out-group. “Coolpis” and the NK “불알” are evidence of this.

“Dude, my 불알 burst last night. Maybe it was too cold, or some moisture got into it.”

That’s an intercultural issue. I suppose one could argue that, in an era of globalization, people of various cultures need to be conscious of how others will perceive them. While that’s true, it’s also inevitable that some locutions are going to provoke a chuckle. A Turkish friend of mine told me that the word “bok” means “shit” (can someone confirm this?). Gives new meaning to 새해 “복” 많이 받으세요. Sean Connery’s surname sounds like the French vulgarism “connerie,” which used to get some Frogs giggling. And anglophones joke all the time about the prevalence of nasty phonemes in East Asian languages such as “dong” and “wang” and “Bum Suck” (범석). We anglophones are also amused by the German expression, “Gute Fahrt!”, or the French verb “assoler,” which simply means “to put into the soil,” or the French noun “la phoque,” which designates a seal (the mammal).

What’cha gonna do, eh? It might be a bit too PC to submit all neologisms to an intercultural ombudsman to make sure they are maximally meaningful and minimally offensive to other cultures and speech communities. Perhaps it’s best to take a cheerful attitude and see things like “Lespia” as an opportunity to have a hearty Western chuckle. When Koreans ask why you’re laughing, just say, “Nah, it’s nothing. Nothing.”

Kevin
frequent visitor of the Buddhapia site

PS: Confirmation! “Bok” does indeed appear to be one of many Turkish words for shit. See here: shit/bok

Comment by Max Watson

26 February 2006 @ 4:26 pm

Ahhh.. now I know what the heck “leports” is!

Comment by Cruz

28 February 2006 @ 2:12 am

“Koreans taking two or more english words and combining them to create a new, utterly meaningless word”
So do Germans. And Italians. And Russians. And Spaniards. And…
That’s what people do with foreign languages. What’s the problem about it? It’s not their (neither my) mother tongue. And then you tend to mess up things.

Comment by Ziggy Freud

28 February 2006 @ 4:18 pm

I do admit to getting an occasional chuckle from some of these newly created Konglish words, but I have to go with Cruz on this one.

This is just how living languages evolve, and come to think of it, English is probably the most adoptive and adaptive language of all over the past thousand years or so.

The way our Anglo-Saxon ancestors adopted and butchered loan words from Latin, Greek, and French probably made the Romans, Greeks, and Normans laugh out loud at us. Everyone wants to speak English nowadays, but back before English was the lingua franca of international trade, and before Billy Bob Shakespeare came on the scene to make us sound real purty, we were the backwater of European culture, and grew our vocabulary mostly by highly leveraged acquisitions and mergers.

Comment by Patrick

22 March 2006 @ 11:36 am

While I still get a chuckle out of strange English on signs or made-up words, I decided not criticize it anymore.
Native English speakers are obviously not the target demographic and the people who make up the words don’t (or should) care what we think.

Jeff, your site looks great!