Since my final research topic concerns the evolution of the Korean language over time, me and my language partner decided that it would also be good if I learned some Korean history as well. So over the last month or so, I would watch brief videos on the history of Korea and the important events that happened within. But since watching pure historical videos could be boring or even just hard to understand with the Korean I know, I was shown historical videos that had a bit of a comedic aspect to them. These include, once again, episodes from 무한도전 (Infinite Challenge in English) and brief history lessons on Youtube.
Despite being history lessons though, learning through these were very fun and interesting since they didn’t feel like actual lectures. Rather, as mentioned before, they had a bit or even a lot of comedy incorporated into them. But the most helpful thing was that they used casual language to teach these historical events. That made understanding the videos much easier, even though there were, of course, specific words that I didn’t really know. We chose to focus on events that would change the entire nation and its future. This includes the creation of Hangul, Japanese occupation, World War II, Korea’s independence from Japan, and finally the Cold and Korean War. Some of the words I learned are; 독립 (independence), 6.25 전쟁 (Korean War), 친일파 (pro-Japan faction), 일제강점기 (Japanese occupation), etc. Although a lot of these words aren’t useful in everyday conversation, it helps me understand the history of Korea better. But by learning all these historical events throughout Korean history, I was able to make connections on how the language itself changed greatly across.
For example, before the creation of Hangul the main written language was Hanja; a language strongly based on Chinese. And because of this, many of the words in the spoken language are also based on Hanja rather than Hangul even to this day. But of course after the creation of Hangul, there are many pure Korean words that are used instead. During 일제강점, one of the main goals of Japan was to eliminate all Korean culture and replace it with their own This led to many words from Japanese being incorporated into the Korean language to erase the usage of Korean. Even in the modern world, a lot of Japanese equivalent words are used instead of the actual Korean words, showing the lasting impact of the terrible event.
Lastly, is the huge impact of the independence of Korea and the Cold & Korean War. To keep things simple, the division of Korea was due to the conflicting views between the Soviet Union and USA. This led to North Korea being freed by the USSR under communist views and South Korea being freed under democratic views. This led to a strong influence of the US essentially covering South Korea. The US had military, police, and government officials taking charge in South Korea during the Cold War and post-Korean War. A lot of this influence caused the US to be an influential figure for South Korea, leading to many English words being directly incorporated into the Korean language. The lasting effects of this can be seen in the modern world where nearly more than 50% of the words used in the Korean language are just direct translations of the English equivalents.
Comments
무한도전 was one of my favorite shows back when it aired, I remember the episodes when the cast would explore history with that one professor guy. Its cool that you've researched the history of not only the Korean language, but accessories that've attributed to the direction of the language. I learned a lot here that I didn't know before!