105: Discussion Post #10

[Ellie Yoon]

If I received a research grant to conduct a linguistic study of my target language and culture, I would like to investigate how to better teach the usage of Hanja/sino-Korean (한자어) in terms of morpheme categories since Hanja is purely phonemic or the effects of the integration of non-native Korean terminology in the younger generation of Koreans. These two linguistics-related topics are interesting and areas of personal confusion. When studying morphemes, specifically derivational and inflectional morphemes, I struggled to label a lot of possible morphemes as derivation because of the fact that it was a Korean compound based on Hanja. Historically, Hanja is the Korean name for Chinese characters, the Chinese characters the Korean language had borrowed and incorporated into the language with Korean pronunciations as a form of written communications. With the creation of Hangul, however, Hanja continues to be the basis of many Korean words and phrases (thus the flooding list of homonyms). For example, 수도(水道) and 수도(首都) are both pronounced “su-do”, yet one means (water "su" and way "do") aqueduct while the other means (head "su", capital "do-eup") capital city. On the other hand, I also find the linguistic aspect of the integration of English, for example, into modern-day Korean, aka Konglish/slang (ex. 셀프 for self-anything; 버스 meaning bus; TMI used as TMI, etc.) I think the cultural influence this has is something worthy of time and research, if not done already.