Korea Times: Let's Take Pride in Korean Language

Here's a column in yesterday's Korea Times encouraging Koreans to take pride in their language and culture, even/especially while learning English or going abroad.

Ordinarily you'd use "let's" to suggest doing something you're not currently doing now. I have yet to meet a Korean who does not gush over their scientific alphabet, and the thought of a Korean woman going overseas and teaching her foreign friends her great language and culture doesn't strike me as uncommon at all.

I've met plenty, though, who confuse language with alphabet. King Sejong did not invent Korean, as many say, he invented Hangeul. I doubt there are many who confuse 한글 with 한국어, but it happens in English.

I also wonder where they get "scientific." I'm not being (too) skeptical, I'm just curious. Is it because the letters were designed to resemble speech organs? Is it because some think the language was designed by committee? Because it was simply an attempt at writing Korean without Chinese characters? When my former students were writing essays about their favorite person in history, those who didn't choose Yi Sun-shin and his Japanese-killing ways chose King Sejong, and they all mentioned how scientific Korean is. In fact, many of their opening paragraphs were nearly identical, so they clearly memorized the tract from somewhere else, and I suspect that nowadays it's a hollow phrase Koreans repeat, like "we have four distinct seasons" or "Korean food is so spicy." I'll have to ask about that, though I wonder if they think "scientific" is a synonym for "easy" or "efficient."

The author of the article, Ms. An, could very well be a nice young lady, and her alphabet could very well be a nice young alphabet. I've met plenty several a few nice, well-adjusted Koreans back home who didn't seem to have visions of language imperialism dancing through their heads. Hell, Ms. An's article looks more fantasy than fact . . . most Koreans I've associated with back home were too shy or too stuck-up to hang out with any barbarians, and this article's message strikes me as a way of kiling two birds with one stone: practicing English and spreading Korea's glory (not a euphamism). Or perhaps the stress of using English is dulled when used to talk about Korea, so mightn't that be admirable?

But I'll bet a lot of folks groaned when seeing the article's theme, something we come across just about all the time in a country plagued by both superiority and inferiority complexes. Every culture has its own ethnocentric beliefs, and I'm sure there are Koreans or Canadians who get pissed off with our Thanksgiving, WW2, or 9/11 myths. A big difference, though, is that one of our primary aims of learning foreign languages isn't to spread these cultural facts to others. Forget about the Jesuits, I mean that you don't have little kids studying Korean and, right off the bat, learning how to say "America is an industrial might," "The atomic bomb is a great deterrent," and "English is the global language."

Maybe hangeul lessons for Ms. An might be nothing more sinister than an ice-breaker, but the episode does reveal a bizarre attitude toward outsiders and outside things that are already pretty well exoticized. Notice how she even used "foreign friends" while refering to people she met overseas? Taken a little bit further you'll have books for learning Korean that operate on the following premise:

Language is the first precious intangible cultural properties in this world.
Writing is the first valuable tangible cultural propertie in this world.
Amog the rest, The Korean Language and Korean Writing are the greatest cultural inheritance of everything in the world.
Of course, there are only their language and writing in other country, too.
But their language and writing cannot express perfectly each and every.
The Korean Language and Korean Writing can express perfectly everything, everysound, all of thinking, and all of feeling of this world.
Like this, The Korean superior culture be Known to the general public, the foreigners are learning The Korean Language and writing, is getting more and more many.
This book is wrote for the sake of them.

You can see the scan and the rest of the post on Occidentalism.

So, yeah, maybe Ms. An just figured she'd teach the world a little about her little country. And maybe her intentions were just to convey something about South Korea beyond the War and the Olympics. But it's bizarre to be met so consistently with dual feelings of inferiority and superiority, and anymore I can't tell if people want to teach us about Korea or pity us for not knowing.