Between The Lines

Death of an English teacher

What really happened to this man will no doubt remain a mystery. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d venture (judging by what’s said in that report) that it sounds like he was deep in amphetamine psychosis – “… the officer gave Mr. Sellers a piece of paper so that he could write his name, which Mr. Sellers did in a quivering hand, and in fact, ended up writing an entire personal history” – but hell, who knows? He was disturbed, it’s clear, which is odd in someone who is claimed by everyone involved to have been level-headed. Regardless, how did he get to that point? It might be a story worth telling, if one could unravel it. One assumes that whatever else may have happened, though, he died as a result of bungling. And so it goes.
Of this I’m sure : every expat living here in Seoul who reads this sad and unsurprising story comes away with an entirely different picture of the realities of what happened to this guy than someone who has never lived here. Little tidbits like “Mr. Shin, who speaks English, at first glance took Mr. Sellers for a homeless man” ring so false as to be laughable. There aren’t any non-Korean ‘homeless men’ in Korea, as any policeman would know. Stories fly off from offhand sentences in the linked article like fleas from an electrocuted dog. Chasing them down would be more trouble than it’s worth, for me at least, but every second or third line in there rings a J Arthur Rank gong in my brain, and sets me to imagining in technicolor.
But it also makes me think about how difficult, how doomed from the outset is any attempt to tell anything like a true story, ever. How locked into the bone cages of our own skulls we are in the end, and how far from reality even the most carefully worded tale-telling leaves us.
And it makes me think about how many of us will probably die : anonymous, shoeless, babbling, gripped by rage and despair, surrounded by people who can’t understand what we are saying to them.
Which is as it should be, perhaps, and the sooner we come to terms with it, the sooner we can start having some goddamned fun.
Hopefully Matthew had a little fun before he died.
Edit : This thread at the ESLCafe Korea Forums, with posts from some of Sellers’ friends and family and a whole lot of speculation from everyone else, is worth reading, if you are interested.

Cesspool

Yeah, this isn’t much of a surprise, but it does steel my reserve to get the hell out of this cesspool of a city as soon as possible. Seoul was recently found to have the worst air quality of any OECD city. I shudder to think of the crap that must be circling around my bag of blood.

[via Mefi]

OhMyNews? Bah.

So Tom asked me about OhMyNews.com, which has been popping up recently around blogistan and generating some buzz.
(Just as a trivia-question aside : the ejaculation ‘Oh my god!’ is one that you hear almost constantly here in Korea. It was the tagline of a popular comedian a while back, and even young Koreans who don’t speak any English other than the always-useful ‘OK!’ and perennial favorite ‘Do you like kimchi?’ know it and use it with grating regularity. I assume the URL is a reference to that, although I might well be wrong. It happens.)
Well, OhMyNews is pretty neat, sure, and apparently did have some influence in the election of Noh Moo Hyun recently (which is a whole other story), but I don’t think it’s either quite as democratic or as elegant as it’s being chalked up to be. The basic gist of the Korean boilerplate at the site (according to my wife) states that you can send them an article anywhere up to ten ‘pages’, for which you are held personally (and legally) responsible in terms of veracity. If it’s acceptable, they edit it and pay you for it. Discussions are hung off the individual pieces that make it to the site. It doesn’t seem as if there is any reputation system or moderation beyond once-off editorial filtering and smoothing of language.
So not quite as groundbreaking as has been suggested, perhaps. More like a less-sophisticated kuro5hin.org for the Korean non-geeknoscenti, in my humble. Interesting, but more as a concept than a reality. And the concept is a pretty cool one.
We – the few, the involuted, the snarky! – at Metafilter got all hot and bothered about the idea few months back, and spent a good while trying to figure out how to build our own and entirely too much time talking about what to call the thing. Even so, prototypes were made, discussions were held (since disappeared from the server where they were hosted, sadly), thoughts were thunk, a corner of the MeFi Wiki was reserved, and then the two (much beloved, but nonetheless daunting) 800-pound gorillas in our metamidst, Rusty from kuro5hin.org and Matt from Mefi itself revealed that they were planning to build their own version of a collaborative journalism site, and in spite of their exhortations to us to carry on without their direct involvement and just keep bashing away at our plans, the enthusiasm of our little ad-hocracy kinda dissipated. After all, if there are two people out there who have the experience and know-how in the granular details of building and finely balancing the vagaries and conflicting tidal pulls of large online communities, it’s them.
[/brownnose]
Matt recently mentioned in an unrelated thread in Metatalk that they were hoping to have something to show the world by July 1st. I hope this is not a premature outing, and that I’m not pissing him off too much by talking about it now, but I really want to see this thing, and the comments he and rusty have made about it are a matter of public record, so you heard it here first, folks.
Unless you read Metatalk, of course. Then you heard it here second.
Ohmynews? Bah. I’m waiting to see the real thing.

Hangul Part One

This is the action-packed Part One of my long-promised review of Hangul, the Korean writing system. Even with the liberal lashings of foul language and obscene anecdotes, it may bore the tits off you – if so, feel free to either skip it entirely or send me the bill for the mammary reattachment procedure. (It will help to have Asian fonts installed, as explained here, but is not essential. My next post in the series will require them, though…)
Chinese writing in its various historical manifestations has been known and used in Korea for more than 2 millennia, dating back to the time of the Chinese occupation of northern Korea from 108 BC to 313 AD. By the 5th century CE, the Koreans were starting to write in Classical Chinese – the earliest known example of this dates from 414 CE, and by the 7th century, educated Koreans were speaking Korean and writing in Chinese. Later, three different systems for writing Korean with Chinese characters were created and adopted to various degrees : Hyangchal, Gugyeol and Idu.
The Hyangchal (향찰) system used Chinese characters to represent the sounds of Korean, and was used mainly to write poetry. (A similar system in use in Japan at about the same time, known as man’yogana, eventually evolved into hiragana, one of the syllabaries used to write modern Japanese. Man’yogana was developed under the supervision of Koreans in the Japanese court.) The Idu(이두) system, created in the 8th century by scholars of the Shilla Dynasty, used a combination of Chinese characters and special symbols to indicate Korean verb endings and other grammatical markers, and was used in official and private documents for centuries thereafter. Gugyeol (구결) was introduced in the 13th century, and was basically a simplification of some Chinese characters in an attempt to remove some ambiguity arising from the use of some Chinese characters for their sounds and others for their meanings.
China has always been the great civilization next door in Asia, a very big brother sometimes benevolent and more often not, the source of cultural borrowings for all of its smaller neighbours, including the Koreans, and for much of Korean history the language used for learned, official purposes in Korea was Chinese, in somewhat the same way as medieval Europeans used Latin.
By the 15th century, though, it was time for Korea to find a way of writing their own language that was more appropriate to its own sounds and grammar. It could be argued that Koreans had limited need to write their language down up to this time and for a some time afterwards, and when they did, it was sufficient to use Chinese writing to spell it out, but Chinese and Korean were and are very different languages. Korean is a subject-object-verb language, for example, and has a rich system of postpositional case markers. Chinese, a subject-verb-object language, does not. Korean has a complicated system of honorifics, part of which is expressed as verb endings. Chinese does not, and doesn’t have any characters to represent these verb-ending morphemes.
The Korean writing system 한굴 (hangul) was finally created in 1440s, through the patronage of King Sejong, the fourth king of the Choson Dynasty, who ruled from 1418-1450. The new script was easy to learn – a matter of hours in many cases. (Hell, I even developed basic reading skills years ago after a couple of beer-fueled sessions at my favorite bar!) It was elegant, scientific, rooted in philosophy and study of the phonemes of spoken Korean, and is truly a thing of beauty. At the time, it was called 훈민ì •ê¸ˆ(hunmin jeongeum, or ‘proper sounds to instruct the people’). According to King Sejong’s preface to the book in which it first appeared in 1446, the invention of the script was nationalistic in intent, devised to enable the Korean people to write their own language without the use of Chinese characters. He states, in immodest Kingly (but surprisingly egalitarian) fashion :

possibly starting as a side-effect the long and treasured tradition of Korean men taking credit for the hard work of their underlings.
Even after the invention of the Korean alphabet, though, most Koreans who could write continued to write either in Classical Chinese or in Korean using the Gukyeol or Idu systems – the new script was seen to be the province of people of low status : women, children, and peasants, those who did not receive the necessary years of education required to learn to write Chinese.
Reading and writing weren’t the only political issues with regard to the language at the time, of course – spoken Korean at the time was basically a vernacular, used mostly for more homely means. Chinese was still mainly the language of power, of art, of loftier pursuits. With the similar (and certainly more despised) position of Japanese as the language of power during the brutal occupation of Korea during the first half of the 20th century coming hard on the heels of the collapse of the Choseon Dynasty, the idea that Korean (both written and spoken) should be the common language of all levels of society is still a relatively new one. Ideas like universal literacy and egalitarianism weren’t exactly popular ones in the society of that time (nor were they for the 5 and a half centuries after King Sejong, for that matter).
When Korean was written in the newly devised hangul script, it did still make sense for Chinese loan words, of which there were and are a multitude, to be written in their original Chinese. During the 19th and 20th centuries a mixed writing system combining Chinese characters and Hangul became increasingly popular, and literacy rates rose precipitously (as much as a consequence of changes in society as anything else, of course), until today, when the literacy rate in Korea is amongst the world’s highest. Although it has been fading since 1945 (and was outlawed in North Korea in 1949) the use of Chinese characters still persists today – the front page of many South Korean newpapers today are littered with Chinese characters, although to a lesser degree than they were even 10 years ago.
Stay tuned for Part Two, coming as soon as I bloody well feel like it, which in addition to details about the writing system itself, will include naked pictures and senseless violence! Or not. I haven’t decided yet. Please feel free to point out any factual inaccuracies – I am well aware that there are many folks around with more knowledge of this subject than I could possibly lay claim to.

This Is A Test Of Korean

한국 말?

Edit : Woot! It worked for me, at least, on IE6. That was my very first MT-hack, and I’m pleased as hell that it seems to have worked. If you don’t see some Korean up there (or, come to think of it, even if you do), please let me know which browser/version you’re using.
Crap, now I have to worry about spelling in two languages, at least one of which I don’t speak worth a damn.
Edit again : If you can’t see the Korean characters above, can you also not see the Korean, Chinese and Japanese characters in this post at glome.org (from whence I have borrowed the UTF-8 encoding tricks to try and make this work)? Can you see them in one or the other, or both, or neither? Thanks for the help!
(Edit : I found this today, coincidentally – “an open community of bloggers who post in one or more languages about material discovered in one or more other languages.”)

Ignorance Bought And Paid For

Language Hat points to this strangely timely article in the New York Times, which not only mentions the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but mentions it in the context of East Asian languages. How interesting, thinks I to myself, as I follow the link, hoping it will be germane to all the fascinating and erudite discussion in the neighbourhood that’s sprung up around and taken off in a multitude of interesting directions from my brain dump last week.
In it are described the ideas of a certain William C. Hannas, “a linguist who speaks 12 languages and works as a senior officer at the Foreign Broadcast Information Service,” author of a newly released book which claims that Asian science has suffered because the main Asian languages are written in “character-based rather than alphabetic” systems.
Not to get off on a rant here, but : in and of itself, this seems to me to be the most vile form of egregiously wrongheaded bullsh-t, and I suspect Mr Hannas is precisely the sort of person that I’d take great pleasure in pummelling until he whimpered like a frightened infant (a reaction that may reveal to some extent why I left academia many years ago, having dipped no more than a toe in its calm waters). But that’s not the thing that bothered me.
The article states, presumably parrotting Mr Dipsh-t, that “Western specialists are better informed today [...and] now recognize that the writing systems of East Asia, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean, are “syllabaries,” in which each character corresponds to a syllable of sound.”
Now, I can’t speak for written Japanese (for which I think this may in part be true, depending on which way of writing the language one chooses – Jonathon may be the better person in the immediate neighbourhood to address that), and I’m only semi-certain it is true as far as my knowledge goes for Chinese, but this is completely and laughably wrong in the case of Korean.
I’ve been promising for over a year now to write a piece about the Korean language and alphabet, and this may have me riled enough to actually do it.
“Mr. Hannas’s logic goes like this: because East Asian writing systems lack the abstract features of alphabets, they hamper the kind of analytical and abstract thought necessary for scientific creativity,” says the New York Times.
Replies the wonderchicken : Mr Hannas should take his head out of his ass, because having one’s cranium so firmly lodged up one’s rectum can hamper the kind of analytical and abstract thought necessary for actually making some f–king sense.
A googlesearch takes literally about 5 seconds to find a multitude of sites that describe hangul, the Korean alphabet, and make Mr Hannas look like the idiot (or at the very most gracious, ‘mind-bogglingly poor researcher’) he would seem to be.
What is also distressing to me is that Sapir-Whorf (to the weak formulation of which, as I’ve mentioned, I have a degree of sympathy) is being talked about in connection with such worthless, badly thought-out crypto-racist twaddle.
Here’s a rude bit of English, sloppily and phonetically rendered into the Hangul alphabet in 5 letters and two syllables for Mr Hannas, sounding something like ‘puhk kyu!’. Wonder if he’d be able to read it…

[Gah! I thought I had all my ranting out of my system for the week. Ah well.]