Briefly: Thoughts on the Korean language

As I'm sure I've written  before, Korean was probably the first language I learned growing up.  I was born and raised here in the States, in Massachusetts, and watched a lot of PBS as a baby, but I also watched some Korean children's shows and my parents spoke to me in a pretty even combination of Korean and English.  When someone asked what my name was I'd reply that I was 지원 (G1), which is actually my legal middle name; I didn't consistently identify myself with my first name until I started going to school.  My mastery of Korean has stayed at about that level, so I sound like an Americanized five-year-old when I speak it.

The Korean language is mostly foreign to me, but at the same time it's comforting to hear it, to listen to it.  It's music to my ears.  I don't always know what is being said when it is spoken but I can identify the tone.  To me its the prettiest sounding Asian language, but of course I'm completely biased.  Then again, it can also be the scariest, because it's the language that's used on me and my siblings when we get in trouble...and Ken Jeong seems to agree at the intensity of the Korean language:


Still, I can't get out of my head this memory from childhood, of waking up on Sunday morning and just lying in bed, listening to my parents talk to each other in Korean, speaking very lovingly toward each other, undisturbed (for the time being) by us kids.  I hope to have that kind of facility with the Korean language, but I'm closer to being fluent in Spanish; it'd be awesome to be able to say that I'm trilingual but for now I'm aiming to be bilingual in English and Spanish.

Textspeak?

I just saw this Facebook status and wanted to record it:

‎35T3 P3QU3Ñ0 T3XT0 5IRV3 4P3N45 P4R4 D3M05TR4R C0M0 NU35TR4 C4B3Z4 PU3D3 H4C3R C05A5 1MPR3510N4NT35! P0N 4T3NC10N! 4L PR1NC1P10 35T4B4 M3D10 C0MPL1C4D0, P3R0 3N 35T4 L1N34 5U M3NT3 V4 D3C1FR4ND0 3L C0D1G0 C451 4UT0M4T1C4M3NT3, S1M P3N54R MUCH0, C13RT0? PU3D3 QU3D4R B13N 0RGULL050 D3 35T0! 5U C4P4C1D4D M3R3C3 uN45 F3L1C1T4C10N35

It's in Spanish and in text-speak.  The zeroes are O's, the ones are I's, threes are E's, the fours are A's and the fives are S's.  In regular Spanish it reads as such:

Este pequeño texto sirve apenas para demonstrar como nuestra cabeza puede hacer cosas impresionantes! Pon atencion! Al principio estaba medio complicado, pero en esta linea su mente va decifrando el codigo casi automaticamente, sim pensar mucho, cierto? Puede quedar bien orgulloso de esto! Su capacidad merece unas felicitaciones

Translated into English without the use of any dictionary because I'm lazy (although translating it kind of negates the message):

This little text serves to demonstrate how our brain can do amazing things! Pay attencion! At the beginning it was kind of hard, but in this line your mind is decoding almost automatically, without thinking much, right? You should be really proud of this! Congratulations for having such mental capacity.

Amusing, to consider the layers of language, the way communication has changed so much.  The message actually rings true for me in that as I continued reading the passage it became easier to read despite the fact that it was in Spanish and had five letters substituted for numbers.  It reminds me of this "brain teaser":

Say the color of the word:

green       yellow       pink        blue       red        orange        black
purple     white         black      green      pink       yellow       blue 

Stream of consciousness: embarazada

A cognate is a word that sounds the same and has the same meaning in different languages.  Examples: in Spanish the words medicina, dormitorio, chocolate mean medicine, dormitory/room, and chocolate in English, respectively.  But, I think I've mentioned before, there are false cognates, or words that sound or seem the same but don't directly translate.  One case that's brought up often and used to comic effect is the Spanish word embarazada.  You would think that it means "embarassed", right? Wrong: it means 'pregnant'.  Can you imagine the hilarious accidental situations in which a novice Spanish speaker might misuse this false cognate?

But why is it so?  Why does the Spanish word for "pregnant" sound like the English word for "deeply ashamed"?  For generations, eons, woman's purpose in life was to procreate (after having been legally married, of course); it would only make sense that showing signs of pregnancy would be cause for happy emotions and celebrations, and not shame...unless it were an "illigitimate"/"bastard"/"unexpected" birth.  That's the explanation I can think of right now.  Today we see female celebrities dressed very stylishly throughout pregnancy, showing off the progress of their baby bump.  There's even a show called "Pregnant in Heels" that, to my knowledge, features a pregnancy concierge to help an expecting mother look fabulous throughout her term.  But it's only been recently that the pregnant woman was seen as beautiful or remotely sexy.  There's a lot of negativity directed at female bodies in general.

Take the word "hysteria" too.  Another word with the same suffix: hysterectomy, which is the surgical removal of the uterus.  Coincidence? No; I think it was in Victorian times that it was thought that the womb/uterus floated around a woman's body, and that this movement made a woman so disturbed that she was hysterical, experiencing hysteria.  Recently the trailer for a movie of the same name came up, and I have high hopes for it.  Not a serious-face period drama, but that's what makes it enticing, to me: it's a comedy-- a sex comedy at that-- which is set in a traditionally stuffy time period, and it focuses on an...interesting subject matter.

Acabo de pensar de esto la semana pasada

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Estaba hablando con una amiga quien me dijó de cómo pidió su novio una hamburgesa: queso extra, sin lechuga, sin tomate, con salsa de tomate.  A él le gusta el tomate pero no lo comerá si lo mezcla con otra comida, pero le gusta el sabor de la salsa de tomate.  Este me confunde; me gusta ambos tipos de tomate.  Algo que me encanta sobre el verano es la variedad de tomates que puedo comprar, en varias tamaños, colores y sabores.  Ahorita mi especie favorito es el tomate bistec: es enorme y sabroso.

Estaba leyendo este artículo sobre el tomate, y cómo se cultivan y cosechan tomates hoy en dia para mantener su color, su aparencia de sabor y ya no tiene ningun sabor.  Es una lástima, es este problema.  En otras estaciones encuentro este problema, de comprar la "manzana de amor" y comerlo y me aburre la lengua.  Pues, es probable que la rebanada de tomate que casi era comido del novio de mi amiga tuviera ningún sabor, y si lo tuviera, ahogara del sabor del salsa de tomate.  Quizás este explique por qúe tanta gente come el tomate en este forma, en la forma líquida: porque es más interesante que la tomate fresca...y es más barato.

Hugh Jackman in the morning

Me pregunta porqúe? Vale, explicaciones:
1) El sol brilló cuando me levanté este mañana, y esto es lo que sentaba
2) Tocaré este obra de teatro musical en unos semanas y he escuchándo la musica
3) ­Porque no? Busco cualquier razon para ver y escuchar este actor cantando y bailando.

Es lo que es

Nota: No escribí todo primero en inglés y luego lo traduce inmediatamente por lenguajes en Google.  Escribí totalmente en español y usé el diccionario para buscar las palabras que no pudiera recordar.  No es perfecto, no escribo como es mi lengua nativa; pues, es lo que es.

No me sentaba bien cuando me levanté este mañana.  Me sentaba un poco enferma: tuve un calentura pequeña, poco tos y tuve sinusitis un poco.  Nada seria pero me enojaba mucho.

Hasta que usé mi Neti Pot! Ay, hace mucho tiempo que lo usé.  De vez en cuando lo utilizo para irrigar las pasajes de la nariz-- cuando las alergias me afectan.  Lo compré el Neti Pot dos años pasados; aquel verano era casi insoportable, y la nariz siempre era rosado porque siempre tenía que sonarla. Una amiga sugiera que probar usando esta cosa.  Aunque lo he usado muchas veces, cada vez me hace un poco nerviosa.

Lo que pasa es que mezcle un poco sal y sodioclorido en agua templado en el Neti Pott y echarlo en una ventana de la nariz.  El líquido sale por la otra ventana de la nariz, y es importante respirar por la boca cuando hacer esto.  Me siente un poco extraño, porque es como ahogando.  Tipicamente nadie quiere que agua viene la nariz, pero los polvos en el agua sirven para limpiar todo interior sin hacer daño a los tejidos.  Cuando termine y no hay mas agua, hago lo igual en el otro lado.  Parece curioso y siente curioso pero sirve bien.  No mas me duele los senos y respiro mejor.  Despues hay un poco olor de algo quemado, pero este sensación sale hasta unos minutos.  No me gusta decir que "me encanta ___" si es una cosa material, porque me siente que se usan este frase con frecuencia y no tiene tanta importancia; pero sin dudo me encanta el Neti Pot y no quiero vivir sin esto.  Puedo sobrevivir, pero no querio y no es un hábito precio-- me ayuda, y no hace daño como otros polvos blancos...

An Observation

In Spanish--and I’m guesing this goes for French and other European languages in which nouns are gendered--the sun is el sol (masculine article) and the moon is la luna (with the feminine article).  Son, the word for a male child, and sun are homophones.  There’s a song called “Mr. Sun”.  In Western cultures the calender is marked by the movements of the earth around the sun.

There’s a Korean folktale that I learned as a child.  It says that a brother and sister stole away into the night and were chased by a tiger; they ended up escaping it by going into the moon with the brother becoming the sun and the sister turning into the moon.  But the girl was scared of the dark, so the siblings switched places and the brother became the moon.  The moon is male. Many Eastern cultures follow the lunar calender, marked by the cycles of the moon around the earth.


I wonder if there's a culture out there which believes that feminine>masculine and reflects this in its calender.

I love...words

My seven favorite words, as of this writing:
acquiesce
aplomb
commence
calavera (Spanish for skull)
diaphanous
luxuriate
tangential

I'm more fond of the way these words sound--the way they roll around in my mouth--than I am of their meaning.  I don't necessarily use these words very often or seek opportunities to say them; rather I squirrelled them away in my memory to use sparingly and for just the right situation.  A week from now my seven favorite words would be slightly different, with maybe two or three remaining. Hmm, maybe I'll do that for next Saturday's post...

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