The Korean language

잡수시지않으셨더라면

 Well, I've just had the fairly unusual experience for me of staying in a country where all the language is 'as Greek to me', but it would be Greek to the Greeks too, as the country is Korea and the language is Korean. 

My experience of the language before this visit was to be able to recognise the print form of it, the weirdly attractive 'Hangul' shown above (which looks like something that an English comic-strip writer would put in the speech bubbles of robots) and the brief exposure that I have had to it listening to some K-pop (forgive me, Lord).

However those who know my past will know that I have worked in bilingual dictionary publishing, so I take a nerdy interest in the mechanics and culture of other languages and can remember some of the linguistics that I learned from Professor Scraggs at Manchester in the 1970s.

So of course I boosted all my knowledge with a trip to Google, as well as with a trip to Seoul and Icheon. Here is Wikipedia, if you have more time:

The Korean Language

I knew two things about Korean already, and these are the kind of things that stick. For one, I know that the alphabet (for it is essentially that, rather than a character system as in Chinese) was invented by a 15th-century King! Beat that, Charlie! King Sejong the Great wanted to get away from the difficult-to-learn borrowed system of Chinese characters, which had kept the huge majority of the population illiterate. In this he was successful, and his 'Hangul' system is beautifully phonetic despite its appearance. So you can make some sense of the Hangul/Romanised names on the Seoul underground. 

The other thing I knew, and this was mainly from reading Malcolm Gladwell's book 'Outliers', is that Korean society, and its language very fully, is hugely based on levels of politeness and respect (to elders, superiors, visitors etc). If you have time to read the Wikipedia article the whole complexity is at least introduced.

It is impossible to speak good Korean without knowing all of this, and the helpful online translator I tried has an 'honorific' button you can select. Gladwell's interest in the respect system was because of problems it caused for Air Korea cockpit crews in moments of crisis.

The other thing I learned is that Korean is SOV rather than SVO (one for you spods), but also that it is - as it certainly sounds to be - agglutinative. If you listen to or read Turkish or Finnish ( and why not?) you may have wondered why the words look or sound rather long. Its because they too are agglutinative and speakers can add quite long strings of affixes with different functions so that a single word can sometimes function like a whole sentence. For example, AI tells me that söisinköhän in Finnish means 'I wonder if I should eat something'. And Korean of course can add in the affixes to show speaker relationship too. 

And today is my penultimate day in the country, and tomorrow I shall get a ferry to China where at least I can make myself understood (and yes, I do know what a humblebrag is..). But our brains are made for learning, and every day is a day in school, as they say. And I may only be able to say 'thank you' in Korean after five days here, but you have to start somewhere.