Jeff, your site looks great!

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.

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

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.

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