Haley Zhao's Posts (13)
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If I have received a research grant to conduct a linguistic study of Korean and its culture, I would like to study the difference in Korean usage between North and South Korea. North and South Korea has been divided since 1945 after World War II. During this period of separation, linguists and historians from both sides decided to create a dictionary of the Korean national language together. But the two regions still developed distinctive dialects and words usage overtime. For example, South Korean has more borrowed words from English compared to the North. South Korean call their language Hangul while in North Korean call it Joseon-gul. And there are many more differences in pronunciations. I would like to start from researching the existing differences and what would be the possible causes behind. It would also be useful to look into how linguists from both sides tried to keep the language and means consistent over the years. In class we discussed how geography and culture would shape a language, so North and South Korea offered perfect example on how a same language would develop differently under regional and cultural influences.
Languages go extinct as the global communication being taken over by the major languages such as Spanish, Mandarin and English. Lots of tribal languages go extinct because of the loss of native population or standardized education in other languages. Linguists estimate that half of the 7000 languages could go extinct this century. Linguist David Harrison said that people don’t know what they are losing when a language dies. There are invisible property embedded in a language. When a language dies, we also lose their way of looking at the world. There are many plants and animals have not been scientifically defined or discovered, but we could find names for them in many different tribal languages.
Linguists can help preserve a language by documenting the language and keep a record of it through talking to the last speakers. They would record audio entries and create a dictionary for that language. Sometimes linguists could face challenges as most of the native speakers are elderly, and recording them need the speaker’s consent and focus. A “dead” language can be brought to life. Linguists would work on existing records and language associated with the “dead” language to learn about it. They would also try to generate a population of active speakers again for the “dead” language.
The Korean alphabet -- Hangul, consists of 14 simple consonants and 6 simple vowels. The letters are combined together into syllable blocks. For example, Hangul is written: 한 (han) = ᄒ (h) + ᅡ (a) + ᄂ (n) and 글 (geul) = ᄀ (g) + ᅳ (eu) + ᄅ (l). When compared with American English, several English consonant sounds do not exist in Korean. The most significant of these are the /θ/ and /ð/ sounds in words such as “then”, “thirteen” and “clothes.” Additionally, there’s the /v/ sound, which is produced as a /b/ in Korean, and the /f/ sound, which leads to “phone” being pronounced “pone.”
Interestingly, you could also find trace of Chinese and English in modern Korean phrases. Because the Korean language borrowed some elements from both languages and adapted. I think it’s important to first learn the structure of Korean syllable blocks, as the sounds of some consonants change depending on whether they appear at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a syllable. It would be helpful to repeatedly listen to a native speaker reading a sentence, in order to gain a better idea of how to follow the sound structure.
Through my research about the Korean language structure, I found that Korean sentences consist of either a “subject + verb” or a “subject + object + verb.” And because the verb comes at the end of the sentence, there is a saying of “you need to listen until the end of the sentence” to understanding its meaning, which is very different from English. Korean sentence cannot be translated word from word to English, therefore, in order to comprehend the Hangul translations of the sentences, I should break down the sentences and familiarize with the words first. I would keep this language structure in mind when trying to understand and translate a sentence in Korean.
In “How to Investigate Language Structure” by David Crystal, the author mentioned one language might only use small part of sound we could produce. And the study of phonology, which is the pronunciation system of a language, is important in understanding the language. Korean has 19 consonant phonemes and it has eight vowel phonemes at varies length. I also found the North Korean dialect use the vowels differently from the South Korean dialect. I consider speaking to be the most aspect in learning a new language, therefore, understanding phonetics and phonology of the language would be helpful in providing a guideline in learning Korean.
Although I’m not currently enrolled in SDLC 110 Korean, I believe I can start to develop a basic understanding of the Korean culture and start to learn conversational phrases during this semester. Specifically, my learning plan starts from learning Hangul and know how to count in Korean. Some of the learning resources I identified includes textbooks, apps and online classes. “Korean Friends” is an app that connects native Korean speakers with foreigners who wanted to learn Korean. I believe when my speaking skill progresses, I should try to actually talk with natives to improve my accent. It would also be helpful to go to Korean-themed activities and festivals to learn more about the culture. I first became interested in Korean from watching Korean variety shows and listening to k-pop. Therefore, as I said in my presentation, I got to know some of the pop-culture in Korea. But I still lack the knowledge about the history and culture. When sharing our learning plan, Lanqin recommended to me the language learning platform Memerise. I believe it would also be helpful to use that as a complement of my language learning. Through discussing within our group, we talked about learning through watching cartoons and reading children's books, which could be also a good starting point for beginners.
In the article “Figuring Foreigners Out,” the author discussed the differences between cultures. I have been hearing the idea of individualist-collectivist many times. It's also a common belief that Asians tend to have a collectivist culture, while Americans are more individualistic. For the discussion about monochronic and polychronic times. I think it could vary from person to person or one household to another. But at the same time there is an overarching perception of time in one culture, as the author states -- cultures do tend to be more one way than the other.
In Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimension, six dimensions were presented and the countries each fit somewhere on each scale. Although it could be a bit of generalization, I agree that his study offered interesting insight about the difference in each country’s culture. I found the dimension “uncertainty avoidance” to be interesting. It was defined as “the extent to which the members of a culture feel threatened by ambiguous or unknown situations and have created beliefs and institutions that try to avoid these.” I was kind of surprised to find China was rated at a low score while France got a score of 86. The explanations kind of helped, Hofstede actually took more elements into consideration than what each dimension appeared to be.
