Google honors "Hangul Day"

Everyone is familiar with the Google doodles, the clever and sometimes elaborate ways that Google changes their standard and simple logo to honor some event or the anniversary of this or that person's birth. (They're tough to make. My one, possibly slightly NSFW attempt is here.)

Well today is October 9, Han•gŭl Day, where in Korea the invention of the Korean "alphabet" is honored on the anniversary of its promulgation in 1443. Koreans are immensely proud of this achievement, which was part of a forward-thinking plan by King Sejong the Great to dramatically expand literacy (Chinese characters were essentially the only means of reading and writing prior to this) and thus allow the spread of knowledge among the masses on all sorts of matters from farming to statecraft to government regulations. If I remember correctly, this day used to be a national holiday, but I might be mixing it up with Arbor Day. (Wikipedia has a nice write-up on Hangul.)

Anyway, this year Google again paid homage to King Sejong the Great with a Hangul-themed Google doodle:

This one is all in Korean. It says 구글, which is the Hangulization of Google, roughly ku•gŭl. It's kind of nice how the last syllable ends up corresponding with the exact same final element in Han•gŭl, which refers to letters and writing systems. (The han part refers to the Korean people, 한/韓.)

You can see how the Google doodle has evolved over time. In 2005, the second o in Google was replaced by the ㅎ character, not for sound (ㅎ symbolizes h) but only for the similarity in appearance. They could have used the i•ŭng character (ㅇ, which represents -ng or serves as a soundless placeholder), but it wouldn't have been very obvious what they're doing.

In the 2008 Google doodle, the lowercase g is replaced by 글, which applies meaning while neatly replacing the gl with nearly the same pronunciation.

In the 2009 Google doodle, they took to stripping away any actual meaning and just used a mishmash of Hangul characters that roughly mimicked the appearance of the original Google letters. Were you to pronounce this, it would be t-j-m-p-yong-n-t, probably a swear word in some country.

In the 2010 Google doodle, the lowercase g is replaced by han (한), both for meaning and for its kinda sorta squiggly similarity. The lowercase g sees a lot of action this way.

Anyway, all this is kinda cool, but it's mostly just seen by people in Korea or those who use the google.co.kr search engine. Everyone else gets a regular Google, I believe.

...

"English" names cause Korean speakers to shut themselves off from the outside world

Shut-ins, they're called. People who can't take being bombarded with all the "English" surrounding them on the streets of Seoul so they just stay home. The Chosun Ilbo has an article on them, complaining about how Korean names for food shoppes (innovatively named Chongno this and Chongno that) have been supplanted by Tous les Jours, Cold Stone Creamery, A Twosome Place, Red Mango, and other names that make little sense to those who haven't studied English since the twelfth grade (assuming they were even paying attention then).

Roh Moohyun was a man of the people who recognized that the very old and the very young couldn't figure this out, and so he ordered that no official government information be available only in a form other than Han•gŭl (the Korean alphabet). This included the giant B, G, Y, and R on the sides of Seoul's new buses, standing for blue, green, yellow, and red. For the elderly who also happen to be colorblind, this apparently would throw them into a panic or cause them to get on the wrong bus.

Anyway, the CSI feels your pain:

Coffee has become an essential part of the daily lives of Koreans. Each Korean drank 288 cups of coffee in 2008, based on the amount of coffee beans that were imported that year. But elderly Koreans, who cannot speak English, as well as some younger Koreans who are not yet au fait with the coffee jargon, say ordering the beverage is strange and difficult.

"Coffee is imported, so we cannot do anything about the names," says one man in his 60s. "But why are the sizes classified as 'short' or 'tall' in English?" he said. "I'm a university graduate and have lived without any problems until now. I never imagined I'd end up getting nervous ordering coffee."

Hmm... the collapse of the Hawaii state economy has emptied the coffers at the university where I study, and thus the third year of the graduate assistantship I was promised when I came here has dried up, forcing me to officially take a leave of absence from school because I can't afford tuition and leaving me, except for some at-home projects from Korea, essentially jobless and living off my savings. If not being able to figure out small, medium, large, and extra large at Starbucks is your biggest worry, then STFU (sorry, Matt, I'll try to stop saying that).

Okay, okay. As one who has written that signs in Koreatown and Little Saigon should be accessible to people who only speak the dominant language (which is English if you're in Orange County, for the time being at least), I can sympathize with this up to a point:

An office worker in his 30s said, "When I order coffee, I wonder whether I'm in Korea or America, hearing all the words that are used mixing English and Korean." One Internet portal even posted advice on how to avoid humiliation in coffee shops. "Just ask for 'original' coffee if the shop worker keeps using strange words," one advice reads. At Starbucks in Korea, milk is the only item written in Korean on a menu listing around 50 different drinks.

Oh, boo hoo! If this is what you're complaining about then... Oh, right. I promised to be more sympathetic. Sorry.

The truth is, even native English speakers in America have trouble figuring everything out once they step into your typical coffee house. I know that sometimes I set foot in a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and try to order my regular and can't always find it, even though I know it's there, somewhere, on the ever-shifting menu. And really, Korean governments from decades ago have decided that the road to South Korea's future runs right through Englishtown, so come on, what are you complaining about? It's not like you're unprepared. Enjoy the thrill of international travel while staying close to home and your precious kimchi.

Some people do take this seriously, though:

Stress levels began rising in the mid-1990s when so-called "family" restaurant chains began to pop up in Korea. T.G.I. Friday's, Bennigans, Outback Steakhouse and other restaurants featured menus in English, or words created by mixing Korean and English.

Um... I was living in Seoul at that time, and I'm pretty sure that stress levels began to rise when the economy collapsed. I think that's when people took a look around and noticed all the foreign-sounding family restaurants and said, "Holy sh¡t! I've got to blame someone for this mess, and you guys are easy targets."

So they all started going to Lotteria again, and they bought tickets to Shiri instead of that movie about the boat... the one with the girl... where all those people died. You know the one I'm talking about. It has the annoying Celine Dion song. Oh, right. They're all annoying.

And as usual, the conservative CSI takes the Mrs Lovejoy approach, screaming, "Won't somebody please think of the children?!":

The problem gets worse when it comes to children's snacks. According to a study by a newspaper last year, 54.6 percent of 449 different snacks in production had names that included foreign words. Only 31.2 percent of the snacks had purely Korean names.

Pardon me for making lemonade out of lemons, but wouldn't the preponderance of Roman characters on their fish puffs cause little kids to become accustomed to seeing those strange letters and thus make them less intimidated by them when they encounter them in school? Or it that familiarity breeds contempt?

Anyway, what do kids know?

But children and teens who are loyal customers of the snacks do not look favorably upon the foreign names. Eight students at Doseong Elementary School in Pyeongchang, Gangwon Province sent a letter in 2007 to the heads of confectioners asking them to use Korean names. The petition drew support from around 1,000 people after it was posted on an Internet portal.

Guess whose sŏnsaengnim is part of the chinboista teachers union. Can you guess? Can you guess?

At about the same time, a survey of third- and fourth-graders in elementary school showed that 79 percent favored Korean names for snacks, saying they sounded more familiar and made it easier to determine what kind of snack it is.

Unless they're writing "fattening," "rots your teeth," "excessive consumption now will cause heart problems later in life," "would be considered animal abuse if fed to your pet," etc., in Korean, then I am skeptical that such labeling does actually make it easier to determine what kind of snack it is.

[above: From the Korean writing on the package, I know that this product contains 짱 and 구. And probably several chemicals that will give you toxic poop.]

And it's not a save-our-language story unless the nationalist angle is brought into the picture:

Korean language experts say we may end up thinking that it is only natural for products to have foreign names. This perception becomes ingrained as we become adults and create stereotypes that favor foreign words and developing disdain for our own words.

Forcing people to use "our own words" while simultaneously feeding them a narrative that causes them to feel that their own language and culture is under relentless assault because 0.5% of the national lexicon is not originally "our own words" is a sure-fire way to get them to feel disdain.

Look, Korean culture is dynamic (a gross understatement, seriously), and the constant injection of foreign words into localspeak is part of that. And this preference for freshness and novelty is also reflected in the often clever and innovative way in which new Korean words are also developed, not just in the proliferation of borrowed (and then often mutilated) words. It's just the way "dynamic" Korea works, and it's time to go with the flow, unnamed Korean language experts and anonymous thirty-something office worker.