Notes from my time in Korea

I’ve just got back from one of the most fun holidays of my life. I think a trip’s enjoyability is massively influenced by the life that you’re coming back to at the end. In the case of this trip, Air France’s entire team of stewards had to restrain, drug and haul my weeping and uncooperative corpse onto the plane once I realised that the only thing keeping me from returning to work was a 12 hour flight.

This trip has been the first time in around a year and a half that I’ve been so completely immersed in and surrounded by the Korean language, so I took some notes on my experiences and the things that surprised me, as well as those that were just as expected. One of the reasons for going on this trip was to prepare for the TOPIK (Test of Proficiency in Korean) that I plan to take this coming spring, and spending a couple of weeks eavesdropping on conversations on buses and watching the Korean news (which is more right wing than I knew before!) has been really helpful prep.

• Honorific, polite and respectful language not as useful/necessary/common as I previously thought

This one shouldn’t have shocked me. In my final year of university I was studying sociolinguistics and the ways in which language and power interact with one another. A Japanese-American academic who supervised me told me that whilst carrying out research in Japan, they had been constantly complimented by Japanese people born in the 30s and 40s for her proper and precise use of honorific grammar and vocabulary. It’s because being Japanese raised overseas, she had been educated and taught Japanese language outside of the sphere of social and linguistic norms of Japan; whereas during her lifetime formal language had fallen out of favour among Japanese teens and young people, in her house there was no such social change.

I am not a Korean raised overseas; I’m a total foreigner who has learnt Korean to some extent (limited, poor, interesting or excellent depending on which of my Korean friends you decide to ask). Having lived in China one three occasions totalling a fairly long time, I have become aware of how useful it is in forming relationships to use the proper forms of address, especially with older people. Even in a shop, addressing the proprietor as auntie before your request notably softens the tone and makes the 阿姨 ayi, or auntie in question much more at ease and amenable. So I took the same idea to Korea and on a few occasions it paid off. Below are a few examples:

Halmeonikkeseo myeot shi buteo beoseureul kidarigo kyeshimnikka?

Sillyehamnida, jega se bun hamkke sajineul chikkeo teurilkkayo?

Harapeoji, yogiseo chom anjeushipshio.

So few foreigners speak Korean that even if I had used regular language I doubt there would have been any negative reaction. It is however quite endearing to use both humble and respectful language- it demonstrates an appreciation of the culture in which a language has developed rather than simply an ability to learn words and grammar.

Necessary though? I would have to say absolutely not. Whilst the language I was using did not seem unusual to the audience, it would almost certainly surprise my Korean contemporaries (i.e. 20-somethings). In interactions that I observed between young and older Koreans, it was very rare for me to hear the respectful register being used. This isn’t news in the grand scheme of the Korean language; there were originally seven registers of varying formality and politeness, and now only four are commonly in use. Potentially in just a few generations we will see two or three of the remaining ones dwindle into disuse.

• Can’t rely on foreign imported vocabulary so much

This was a foolish error on my part. In most languages you do need to actually learn words in order to communicate. This year however I spent so much of my time both learning and speaking Hindi and Urdu with native speakers that I became quite lazy.

Wanna ask if it’s raining, but forgot the Urdu word for rain? Just say rain:

Need your phone charger, but not sure how to say it in Hindi? No worries:

Want to send a postcard from Korea to Canada? Well, you should probably know the word 엽서 yeobseo, because you can’t just walk into a post office and say 안녕하세요, 이 postcard 을 캐나다에 보내고싶습니다 because. It. Doesn’t. Mean. Shit.

• The semantic relationship with Chinese is more useful than anticipated

On my final day in Seoul the new channel that I was watching announced that large scale protests calling for the resignation of President Park Geunhye were taking place in Gwanghwamun Plaza, directly south of the Gyeongbok Palace, the historic and cultural centre of Seoul. My couchsurfing host was complaining about the high level political vocabulary that was being used by news outlets to discuss the calls for impeachments.

“It really irritates me, our whole lives we’re taught that 탄핵 danhaek means impeach, and now suddenly no one is using it and they’re saying 하야 haya instead. You have to learn a whole new language to watch politics in Korea, it’s bullshit.”

I chewed over this for a moment. Quite often in Korean there exist two words for the same thing- it’s the same phenomenon that appears in Japanese. One of these words is pure Korean in origin, and the other is Chinese. Once you’re familiar enough with both languages it’s easy to identify. Almost every verb in Korean is pure Korean, unless it ends in 하다 hada, in which case it is probably Chinese. For example 내리다 naerida means to get off a bus, and so does 하차하다 hachahada. As a Chinese speaker and user I find hachahada (which comes from the phrase 下车 haa che/xia che in Chinese) more convenient and pleasant to use, but most Koreans unsurprisingly feel the opposite. My first thought was that one of danhaek and haya would be Korean and one Chinese. However looking at them, it’s very clear that they’re in fact both Chinese. Danhaek (impeach) is the characters 弹劾, which are pronounced in Cantonese as tanhaat. Haya was less obvious, but the Chinese character 下 xia/ha (to put down or descend) is always pronounced as ha in Korean (like in hachahada above). I was able to explain just from knowing this that the reason different words are being used is because they have different meanings, danhaek meaning to impeach (a transitive verb) and haya meaning to give up power, or abdicate (which I later confirmed is derived from the archaic and truly out of date 下野 haaye/xiaye).

Being surrounded by a language all day isn’t just the best way to learn it, as clichéd language teachers have been insisting all our lives. It’s also the most enjoyable way to further explore and understand the social and psychological environment that both shapes and is shaped by language. I hope following this trip I’ll be able to write more deeply about the linguistics of Korean and of learning this language, as well as the ways in which it interacts with other languages, both Indo-European and within the context of East Asia.

Borrowing languages: aka class identity and outdoing your peers

A meme popped up the other that shared among lots of linguists I know. I lolled because a lot of what it says is true: by and large the more knowledge you have of languages and how they work, the less prescriptive you become about things like spelling and grammar. It also critiques the classism and tendency towards belittlement of those who are grammatically prescriptive, which is criticism I can always get on board with.

However it goes and makes a claim that made me wander round thinking about language for a couple of days afterwards: “Do you realise how crazy that is – a language borrowing *inflectional morphology* from another language?”

It’s pretty odd I suppose. When children learn new English words they tend to pluralise them by adding an s, because in their way of thinking that’s how you do it. And gradually these rules become compounded, and when seeing for the first time a word ending in y, they may automatically think to remove the y and replace it with ies. However it’s really unlikely that when learning the word madrasa, the term used to describe an Islamic school (among many English speaking Muslims) they would know that the plural is madaaris. In fact even among those using this word who are Arabic speakers you’re equally likely to hear them pluralise it as madrasas. From this example, and a number of others we can see that for a large part, words imported into English from other sources do get treated as English words.

Japanese doesn’t pluralise words for the most part. Inu may be rendered in English as dog or dogs, depending on its context (i.e. whether or not it is preceded by a number or you know how many dogs are being described by other means). If you read Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha, you’ll notice that throughout the word Geisha 芸者 is used, whether describing the beautiful Geisha Mameha (singular) or the crowd of Geisha who try to mask their surprise when Sayuri embarrasses Hatsumomo at the O-zashiki (plural).

Golden did, however, carry out a lot of research before writing this novel, and most people who write about Japan will likely have enough background in Japanese to know not to pluralise nouns. Those who don’t on the other hand will often be heard talking about seeing “loads of pagodas” on holiday or eating “five gyozas”. As stated above, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this, but in the case of Japanese there seems to be an established pattern- if you know about Japanese nouns, you leave them as they are, if you don’t you tend to add an s to them.

Arabic has some really interesting ways of forming plurals (click on the link to read my rant/article about them). They are plurals that no English speaker would come up with. Around 10% of nouns in Arabic are regular, meaning that these 10% of nouns add a simple ending in order to make them plural- they are normally human nouns (e.g. musaafir– ambassador, plural- musaafiruun; taaliba– student, plural- taalibaat). The other 90% require the vowels inside the word to be rearranged, like in the madrasa–madaaris example above.

Most Arabic speakers in the English-speaking world are Muslim and a significant proportion incorporate their Arabic into English, for example when addressing friends/acquaintances as akhi/ukhti (brother/sister). The i at the end of these two words means “my”, and so instead of addressing someone as “my akh” or “my ukht”, it is overwhelmingly more common to hear the Arabic inflection of these nouns used. They are however fixed expressions that would sound quite absurd otherwise.

When Jews borrow Hebrew words, whether it be into Yiddish, German, Spanish or English, there is an almost 50/50 chance of Hebrew inflection being used, or of the native language’s being used. Yom tov יום טוב is a holy day, and when describing the glut of them that take place around the start of autumn I just as often hear them called yom tovs as I do yamim tovim ימים טובים (although the Ashekenazic/Yiddish pronunciation of yomim tevim is far more typical).

Interestingly whilst attending a Jewish school I noted that one of the ways in which students would really hammer home their piety and their family’s religiosity would be to use the proper Hebrew grammar, rather than adding an s. Being the cool atheist cat that I am, at the end of class I would give back my siddurs and khumashes back to the teacher, whereas my holier classmates would have been returning their siddurim סידורים and khumashim חומשים.

A similar but also fascinating distinction came from words that end with an aspirated tav (ת). In Yiddish and Ashkenazic vocalised Hebrew this will always be pronounced s whereas in Sephardic and Modern Hebrew it is universally pronounced t (historically this letter would have been pronounced as θ or ث). It became a marker of education and erudition in Hebrew language, and by extension a form of class distinction: if you only knew the Hebrew/Yiddish that your shtetl grandparents spoke to you in childhood, you would pronounce the Feast of Tabernacles are Sukkois, whereas if you had learnt the modern language and were familiar with its grammar and phonology you would say Sukkot (סוכות). It wasn’t a universal rule, but those who wanted to appear knowledgeable and of high cultural capital (in terms of Jewish religion and tradition) almost all pronounced it as t.

The lingua franca of around 200 million East Africans, although the native language of relatively few, (Ki)Swahili is spoken by the mainly Muslim Swahili people who now reside largely in Tanzania. They account for a fairly small percentage of (Ki)Swahili speakers these days, numbering only around half a million, but the importance of Islam in their daily life is reflected in the extensive borrowing present in the language from Arabic.

(Ki)Swahili is a Bantu language and like all its siblings has a system of nouns classes which distinguish themselves form one another by using prefixes. One of these prefixes is Ki (as you can see above- Kiswahili is the language of the Waswahili, or Swahili people). Words that begin with the prefix ki are pluralised by changing this prefix to vi, and Swahili is rather specific about this happening. Unlike words entering English that can occasionally be inflected according to the origin language’s rules, Arabic words entering Swahili need to abide by these rules, which dictate that one can identify nouns by looking at these prefixes. When the word kitaab entered Swahili as the word for book it became kitabu (altered slightly to conform to the language’s phonological rules) and its plural not kutub as in Arabic or kitaabs as in English, but vitabu.

So going back to our original issue, why the hell would people be so interested in how you pluralise Latin and Greek words? I think, as we saw in the examples form the Hebrew language, there’s a need to prove oneself as educated/cool/well travelled/pious/well read behind this kind of talk. We can see that as well from the inconsistency with which these rules are applied; among Jews there may well be a cultural capital to understanding and being able to use Hebrew proficiently, and among educated English speakers, those who can, or appear to be able to use Latin and Greek are perceived as especially learned. The same prestige doesn’t really exist with Japanese or Hindi- there is no history of educated English speakers devouring the Japanese classics or dissecting the grammar of turn of the century Hindi- as a result you would not likely be told off for saying “that’s one of my favourite sashimis!” or “I’d like a chaai tea pls” as you may for sending two “memorandums” to your manager.

Cheating on Chinese

A year and a bit ago, knowing that I was a Spanish speaker, and thinking that I’m something of a big deal, I decided to try and learn Portuguese in a month. It took three weeks, so I got to spend a week re-watching Orange is the New Black. It was just a case of identifying which vocabulary was not from the same source, or had not followed the same formation process as its equivalent in Castillian Spanish, altering the order of some accusative pronouns (total NIGHTMARE in Portuguese, will write a blog post later on what I mean and why it constitutes such a challenge to me, graphic showing the hellfire below…) and adding a future subjunctive to the horrendous list of romance language tenses I’ve learnt over the years (don’t knock the future subjunctive ‘til you’ve tried it, I often find myself wishing there was one in English now).

Castillian Spanish (above), Continental Portuguese (below)

And now I’ve found myself in a similar situation, attempting to learn Cantonese with a firm grasp of Mandarin. I should probably explain what these mean first; Cantonese and Mandarin are registers of the Chinese language. Cantonese is an ancient variant of Chinese and is largely spoken in southern parts of the People’s Republic and HK, as well as Malaysia, Singapore and other areas with a large resident southern Chinese diaspora. Mandarin is a fairly regulated language, as it is the register than is used by the PRC’s government and state media, and is also a medium of instruction in schools. As is the case in other diglossic populations, the writing system is (depending on whom you ask) the same for both Mandarin and Cantonese, the variance is in spoken language. There is however a variation in writing in that many Cantonese speaking populations continue to use traditional Chinese characters, whereas the simplified versions have become standard in the PRC.

Simplified (left), traditional (right)

This idea that the writing system is identical is problematic, because it assumes that time stands still, and with language this is very much not the case. People will say that the phrase “our friend”, though pronounced ‘women de pengyou’ and ‘ngawdei ge paangyau’ in Mandarin and Cantonese respectively, they are both the same in writing. This is purely because of these two only Mandarin is a standardised language and as such the characters 我们的朋友 reflect exactly the Mandarin pronunciation. However, and there is no uncertainty in this, there are characters that represent the sounds dei and ge in Cantonese. They’re not especially familiar to PRC citizens, but their existence is not in question. 我哋嘅朋友 reflects the Cantonese pronunciation, and although not standard Chinese, there is no unique utterance in Cantonese that cannot be represented with a character. There’s nothing magical or innate about certain languages that mean they become standardised and written, that’s just the result of people wanting it. In order to make sure that I’m not grossly exaggerating I just checked the Wikipedia article about China, which has a Cantonese page:

係，同，同埋，嘅 and 睇 are characters used in Cantonese differently from Mandarin.

Highlighted are occurrences of characters that are not used in Mandarin in the same way.

One of my favourite things about learning a new language is that occasionally I stumble upon x something and realise that it’s exactly the same way as expressing x in another language. It goes without saying that Cantonese is full of these occurrences. I’ll discover that the standard way of saying that one likes something in Cantonese is zungji, which is made up of the characters that in Mandarin mean ‘bell’ and ‘meaning’, but when I run zungji through my dictionary app it turns out that this is an archaic way of saying ‘to like’ throughout the Chinese language, which just happens to be current in Cantonese.

Tonality is a feature of Chinese that never seems to die. Depending on whom you ask (this is common with all varieties of Chinese) Cantonese has between 6 and 9 tones, whereas Mandarin is largely accepted to have 4. Given that I’ve been speaking Mandarin for quite a few years, but only recently started consciously using the 4 tones, I have come to an inevitable conclusion that they’re not super important. This flies in the face of what most Chinese teachers would say, but I’ve truly found that in the vast majority of cases either the context or the phonemes of what you are saying make you understood. The phrase chidao means either to arrive late, to hold a knife, or the equator- on very few occasions could these be mixed up. It becomes problematic with phrases like maifang, that dependant on tone can mean either buyer or vendor, but by and large these kinds of confusion are rare. Incidentally if you want to hear how similar maifang and maifang sound, type 买方 and 卖方 into Google translate and play recording, it’s effed up. In fact even the characters for mai and mai are way too familiar for my liking:

In an earlier post I drew out the tone contours for Mandarin, which with a few years of experience behind me I can appreciate are quite simple; one flat and high, one going up, one going down and one dipping. The ease of Mandarin tones comes from the fact that you never have to quantify your own voice. The tone that is rising simply has to rise, with no prescription as to where it must end up. However the Cantonese tones, whose contours I’ve drawn below, very explicitly deal with high, mid and low tones, meaning that you really have to have a firm understanding of how your own voice works before being able to perfect them.

However there is a slight difference here, which is that the Cantonese language is in such a state of change that on several occasions I have heard Cantonese speakers argue with each other about the correct tone for a certain character’s pronunciation. It seems that the more tones there are (I have even heard Cantonese speaker arguing about how many tones exist in their language!) the less stringently enforced the rules become. This is problematic, not least because where Mandarin has favoured two syllable words in recent times, Cantonese has shown no such tendency, and as a result context is far less obvious in Cantonese. That being said, as long as I can continue to be understood and sometimes even complimented on the tones that I neglect and don’t even understand, I shan’t complain.

Language quirks I

Learning a new language often, or always, feels like an uphill struggle. I’m seasoned now, quite fast, and have a reinforced tolerance that means that even the most obscure grammatical features don’t faze me anymore. But even now, I love encountering little fun nuggets of joy in a language I’m learning that remind me that, actually, learning can be fun and eye-opening. In fact it should be both of those things.

I’ve been studying Urdu and Hindi for around two months now, and very early on I was fascinated by the fact that kal is both the word for tomorrow, and yesterday. These are both languages with tenses, so the meaning of kal can easily be deciphered by listening to the verb that follows it. Essentially, kal means neither tomorrow nor yesterday. It in fact means, a day other than today that is near. A bit further down the line (yesterday in fact, or kal) I discovered that parson is the word meaning either the day after tomorrow, or the day before yesterday, with a similar principle behind it. I sat in my coffee shop chuckling to myself, making bystanders nervous and awkward as I contemplated how random the world is, inspired by these two funny little words.

So in tribute to this unintentional gift of self-awareness and that languages give us, I’ve put together a list of the things that have really tickled me whilst learning. They’re not necessarily funny, but they’re certainly out of your comfort zone and might make you wonder what’s out there in the languages you’re currently learning.

1) The contemporary use of the character 囧

Occasionally when you’ve been learning Chinese too long, you come across a character that reminds you of a bunny rabbit or your great-aunt. Normally it’s a sign that you need to improve your social life. But that’s not the case with 囧. This character is originally the name of a plant so specific that I’m not even going to look it up in my dictionary to give you the correct name. But in recent years, due to the fact that it looks like a disappointed/heartbroken/panic-stricken face, it has undergone a transition in meaning, and now the character, pronounced jiong (third tone) means OMG I’m so embarrassed/awkward/frustrated.

2) The characters of the Korean writing system look like the parts of the mouth that form them

I spent a long time looking for the answer to this when I first began learning Korean. In 1446 King Sejong, spurred on by a sense of early nationalism and the knowledge that literacy in highly complex Chinese characters was beyond the capabilities of most of his citizens developed the Hangeul, a simple script for writing the Korean language. In contrast to thousands of Chinese characters that had been used until that point, the newly developed Hangeul consisted of just 27 consonant letters and 16 vowels. Six hundred years later, of these only 14 consonants and 15 vowels are still in use.

But as this writing system was purposefully designed for the adoption of literacy in the Korean populace, and is not the result of generations of evolutionary processes, I wondered how the early Hangeul pioneers decided on the designs of the letters.

The amazing thing is that in 1940 an antique collector, Jeon Hyeongpil, publically revealed an item in his collection called the 훈민정음해례 (Hunmin Cheongeum Haerye), or Explanations and Examples of the Proper Pronunciation for the Instruction of the People. In this ancient document, the origins of Hangeul characters are discussed and explained as diagrammatic representations of the parts of the mouth that move and alter in order to form consonants.

Below is a photo of the Hunmin Cheongeum Haerye. The explanation is written in Korean Chinese characters. For some perspective, one selection of the document reads: 舌音ㄴ象舌附上腭之形。脣音ㅁ象口形。齒音ㅅ象齒形。

This excerpt means: “The lingual consonant ㄴ (n) is intended to resemble the tongue rising to the palate; the labial consonant ㅁ (m) is intended to resemble the shape of the mouth; the dental consonant ㅅ (s) is intended to resemble the shape of a tooth.”

3) The fluidity of Arabic nouns, verbs and adjectives

Arabic, like most Semitic languages, is based on a system of roots with (normally) three letters. To demonstrate what I mean, I’m going to use the root s-k-n, which when assembled together creates words that mean something to do with living. Askunu means I live, saakin means resident (noun usage), sukoon means living (noun usage), sakan means residence, tusaakinu means she shares a house. There’s an amazing amount of flexibility here, especially as in many varieties of Arabic there are two ways of saying I live in London. One is to say Anaa askunu fee Landan, in which the verb askunu is used, and the other is to say anaa saakin fee Landan, in which the noun is used. This special form of the noun, called the active participle, is actually used as a verb to denote the present tense, as technically Arabic doesn’t have a present tense (in fact Arabic doesn’t have a tense system at all, verbs are conjugated by aspect and there are only two aspects: actions that have been completed, and actions that have not).

Incidentally, the sweet thing about this system is that many Semitic languages share roots. While the verb used in Hebrew meaning to live is not s-k-n, the root s-k-n is used in many words, including shakhen (neighbour), shkhuna (neighbourhood) and shkina (the presence of god).

Another cool example is the root h-m-r, which relates the things that are red. From this root comes ahmar (red) and ihmarrat (she blushed).

Using Chinese as a base language Part 1

The world’s full of haters, and my two least favourite are 1) those who think that Beyonce is overrated and 2) those who think that learning Chinese is not good prep for learning Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese.

“They’re completely unrelated languages!” they cry, “The grammar’s totally different!”
Yes Basic Boo, the grammar’s different, you’ll just have to learn it. My heartfelt apologies at this difficult time.

But grammar is not the only thing that makes up a language, and its importance is often overstated, which creates a great barrier in the way of people who want to learn a new language but whose abilities with grammar are limited. There’s no need to make things harder than they are, and if you suck at grammar, that’s a shame, but there’s still plenty you can do. Just like rain in the summer and arthritis, grammar is something you get used to over time. In the meantime let’s look at vocabulary.

Around 60% of words in Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese come from Chinese. Because of the Chinese influence on all three literary cultures, a lot of the vocabulary that has entered from Chinese is high level language, used in diplomacy, literature, politics and philosophy. But a huge quantity of everyday words are also essentially Chinese words that, with a little knowledge of phonetics and how Chinese characters are absorbed into Japanese and Korean (it’s harder with Vietnamese), you can quite often guess how the word is rendered.

Having learnt Japanese for only two months I had a conversation with a Japanese friend about Japan’s occupation of the Korean Peninsula. I decided to be bold and enter this territory (pun genuinely not intended) without resorting to either English, or a dictionary. The Mandarin pronunciation of 殖民地 is zhímíndì, this word means colony. Having spent some time studying phonetics of Japanese and how they relate to their Chinese counterparts, I was able to surmise that the pronunciation of these three characters in Japanese would be shokuminji. Amazingly I was only very slightly wrong; it’s shokuminchi. The suffix 化 in Chinese means change, and it is suffixed to attributives to turn them into verbs of transition: “modern化” means modernise (现代化 xiàndàihuà) and “automatic化” means automate (自动化 zìdònghuà). The corresponding suffix in Japanese is used in the same way, and is pronounced ka, BUT as this is a Chinese import it is not a verb until the element する suru (to do) is added.

 

So, out of almost no Japanese knowledge (I know, it’s a slight exaggeration), we can guess that the verb to colonise is shokuminchikasuru 植民地化する. Whilst in Chinese, verbs are quite simple, and you can use the form 殖民 zhímín to mean colonise, and with no internal alteration this verb can also express the passive be colonised (香港被殖民了), Japanese verbs are more inflected, and this is where, if you’re so inclined, you could start to worry about grammar. But honestly it’s not that big a damn deal- suru is the active, and its passive form is sareru, perfective form: sareta. So, that’s it. The Korean Peninsula was colonised by the Japanese becomes 朝鮮半島は日本に植民地化された。Chousen hantou wa nihon ni shokuminchika sareta. (Note that while Chinese uses the character 殖 in the word for colony, Japanese uses 植, which carries identical sound value, and differs only in “spelling”.)

Having studied a bit more grammar you may decide you want to say something else, like: 19世紀の明治時代の日本が朝鮮半島を植民地化することにした (In the 19th century Meiji Japan made the decision to colonize the Korean Peninsula). It’s sentences like these that are harder, because they involve learning repetittive and tiresome grammatical structures, of which Japanese has thousands. But for now, the “simple” sentence should suffice, and serve as a stepping stone to learning a more polished and eloquent Japanese.

As for the name of the Korean Peninsula, that was easy too, in fact even easier than most Chinese to Japanese hack translations. In both languages the characters are the same (朝鲜半岛) and the pronunciation too is almost the same. Cháoxiǎn becomes chousen (the name of Korea, specifically North Korea) and bàndǎo changes to hantou (peninsula, which like in most languages, literally means half island. You’ll know this half or 半, from when you learnt tell the time).

This post in mainly focused on Japanese, but the equivalent sentence in Korean uses the phrases식민지sikminji (the Koreanisation of colony 殖民地 zhímíndì) and 만들다 mandeulda, the verb that means to make or form.

That’s all for this post folks, I’ll write a follow-up hopefully soon explaining some of the “rules” for transforming Chinese characters into their Japanese pronunciation, including an explanation of how I was able to figure out that zhi became shoku (as it’s probably not the most obvious thing to most people).

나쁜 기집애, 女汉子 and Bad Bitches

When I first heard the term 女汉子 (nǚhànzi) I cringed a little. I’m not a fan of unnecessary gendering (…all gendering basically), and something about this phrase was especially bad. 汉子 on its own refers to a “good/real/proper man”, for example in Mao Zedong’s famous “不到长城非好汉[子]” (“If one has not been to the Great Wall, one is not a real/proper/good man”). It’s a phrase used with shockingly little irony of awareness to encourage visitors, both foreign and domestic, to visit the Great Wall. The prefix 女 means “woman”: on the one hand it makes this once exclusively masculinist term of praise and admiration applicable to women too, but worryingly the affixation of 女 suggests that whatever skills, abilities and qualities a 女汉子 have, generally are the domain of men, basically reinforcing the misogyny present in the origin term, 汉子. Even worse, the translations offered by dictionaries vary from “masculine woman” to “ladyman” and “manwoman”.

However, these days its most common usage is amongst young women exalting themselves for excelling in life, or congratulating friends or women they admire for achieving highly. It’s not unusual to open the 朋友圈 (blogging page of the hugely popular 微信 WeChat messaging app) and see a selfie of a young woman holding an English language certificate and a passport with a caption along the lines of “雅思：得到6.5了，签证：办好了。女汉子到纽约读书!” (“IELTS exam: got 6.5, visa: all sorted, this 女汉子 is going to study in NYC!”)

Similarly, after posting a status or photo showing herself completing a task or managing a seemingly impossible errand, friends may comment supportively “女汉子！“ often accompanied by emoticons of a thumbs up or a bulging arm symbolising strength. Do we understand it to mean “Go girl!”, or is it something more significant?

Historically, languages lack words that are both 1) specifically gendered to refer to women and 2) have positive connotations. Looking at us, an extraterrestrial being would assume that on our planet lives a race of brave, strong and balanced humanoids, and alongside them another almost physically identical but irrational, lazy and stupid race that is constantly having sex (because they’re filthy!), but at the same time don’t put out enough (because they’re frigid bitches!).

The existence of a term that can be used by women to refer to themselves favourably is a big change in the way society and language interact with one another. In Mainland China this has been done by regendering a term for men, whereas in English it often takes the form of slur reclamation.

In spite of the normalisation in recent years of the term, hearing a woman called a bitch still makes a lot of women uncomfortable. It aligns all women with the sexual submissiveness of female dogs and, especially among women who react strongly to the term, it is largely considered still to be a slur that at its core shames and degrades women from the aspect of their sexuality.

Discussion over the term bad bitch tends to go one of two ways: those who are indifferent, and those who are not comfortable with the characterisation (active and dedicated supporters are few and far between). This comes from a longstanding objection to the term bitch OR interestingly from a racial aspect. Bad bitch is essentially a coinage of AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) and its appropriation by white women and white gay men has angered some who cite this as an occurrence of cultural appropriation. Even east of the Atlantic where AAVE is not a big talking point (though its lexicon is largely understood), there is something ugly and noticeably racist about the way in which bad bitch is used.

Strangely, though the two terms come from very different, though still offensive, origins the usage of them is not massively disparate. Nicki Minaj popularised the use of bad bitch by using it to refer to her own success in music and her achievements in business. In Orange is the New Black, Red refers to Frieda, Irma and Taslitz as “the baddest bitches around” after they managed to steal prison kitchen supplies for her.

In mid-2013, the lead singer of Korean pop group 2NE1, CL, released her debut single “나쁜 기집애” (Nappeun Kijibae). Naturally, two years later I heard it for the first time and loved it.

“But wtf does 기집애 (kijibae) mean?” I struggled to understand even the title (my enrolment to the advanced Korean exam may be postponed another few months), as the official name used to promote the track to the enormous non-Korean speaking Korean pop fan market was The Baddest Female. (Initially I thought it sounded weird too, but you’ll get used to it.) I relented and did what is normally a mistake; I asked the online cesspool of Korea-obsessed North-American drama-watching shut-ins if they had heard it before. I finally got a decent response, from an actual Korean speaker, explaining in length the history of the term (derived and morphed from 계집 (kyejib), a term used in the Joseon Dynasty of Korea to refer to women in a disrespectful way). Then the story began to sound familiar: “But these days it’s used a lot by women talking to each other in a friendly way, or even used to say someone did good.” Okay, so it’s the Korean bad bitch. The nappeun 나쁜 that occurs before it is actually the prenominal form of the verb nappeuda 나쁘다 (be bad).

It doesn’t seem like a big deal for women- old words that formed part of the societal structure of an age that hated women are being revived and reused by women. It doesn’t sound like a good idea, or like something that could be good for shaking up the androcentricity and gender-normativity of language, but there are some glimmers of what may look like hope when we get closer, or I may just be being too optimistic:

Firstly, throughout the whole song of 나쁜 기집애, CL doesn’t once mention men. Easy to skip over if you’re not gender critical 24/7, but this is the first time I’ve heard a song about bad bitches/strong women etc., in which the singer didn’t make at least one reference to how sexy and appealing to men such women are.

Secondly, affixing bad to the word bitch can be seen as a form of rebellion against standard stylistics. Bitch is an anti-woman slur, why does bad precede it? The addition of the word bad somewhat removes the sting from the word bitch, and as a result destigmatises the word of the societal hate thrown at women’s sex lives.

Lastly, there’s this cartoon, showing a 女汉子 (nǚhànzi) enjoying herself with hairy legs and not giving a shit about her uncovered flesh. I’m not explaining it, just enjoy it.

Daniel Hernandez Halpern

Why I’m LOVING Farsi right now

Instead of watching Modern Family, eating the beautiful fresh quesillo in my fridge or catching up with my family, I’m learning Farsi, and I just love it.

It’s the combination of two things I love- Arabic script and long sexy compound nouns- that really get me hot for Farsi. Whereas Arabic words are generally very short, being based on a three-letter root, Farsi words have no such morphological limitation. Similarly, whereas Arabic declines nouns with a genitive and separates them, Farsi just piles them all up together, which means that you get beautiful long words like هم‌دانشگاهی (hamdāneshgāhi, hæmdɒːneʃgɒːhiː) and the months have names like Ordibehesht (اردیبهشت) and Farvadin (فروردین) that just feel like taking a long luxuriant bath in consonants.

It’s also quite cool for me to see an Indo-European language in Arabic script. If you already speak Arabic you’ll be able to understand the main points of a text, due to considerable noun borrowing. However, the verbs are all native, so whilst you may understand, as an Arabic speaker, that a news article is about Iranian Muslims being discouraged from attending pilgrimages in Saudi Arabia, you won’t know why it’s happening, who instigated it or how long it’s gone on for without any knowledge of Farsi.

Speaking of polemics, it’s also nice to be able to read articles about Iran written in the language of the country. Our cultural depictions of Iran misunderstand and misrepresent the country to the point of distortion, and though reading texts in Farsi may not necessarily change one’s mind, it’s useful to have access to what and how Iranians are  actually thinking, rather than accepting the prevalent view that is put forward by American Christian conservatives.

For speakers of Indo-European languages too, Farsi is full of lovely little treats to amuse and delight. Take a look at the post-nominal suffixes indicating possession:

And for you Latin lovers, the verb “to be”:

It’s like the Arabic Fairy and the Proto-Indo-European Fairy got together to collaborate on the most banging album ever, and that album is the national language of Iran. If Farsi were a rap artist, she would be Nicki Minaj; thanking other languages for their contributions to her overall aesthetic and vibe, whilst absolutely insistent on her own superiority and unfathomable elegance.

Daniel Hernandez Halpern