The Korean Language.

• Author: Miller, Roy Andrew
• Position: Book Review

By IKSOP LEE and S. ROBERT RAMSEY. SUNY Series in Korean Studies. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 2000. Pp. 374, figs., tables. $23.95 (paper).

The title page of this important contribution to Korean linguistic studies is a trifle misleading; Ramsey's role was "to translate and edit" (p. ix) a manuscript jointly written by Lee in collaboration with two of his Seoul National University colleagues. But no matter how the volume came about, the result is impressive and will undoubtedly prove useful to anyone concerned with the Korean language.

This is particularly true of the substantial portions of the book that deal with sociolinguistic aspects of modern Korean. The author's (or, authors'?) accounts of levels of speech, the sociolinguistic aspects of style and related issues are detailed but clearly written, and might welt serve as models for treatments of other nearby languages. The same is true of the book's detailed account of the interrelations between the Korean script, the phonology of the modern language, and the several systems of romanization commonly used by foreign (and some Korean) scholars today (e,g., the account of the Yale romanization's -q, pp. 76-78, here explained more clearly than ever before, even though unfortunately, and unhistorically, conflating the use of this New Haven -q with an entirely different and unrelated quirk of the earliest hankul texts, i.e., their writing for the so-called prospective modifier ending, an orthographic feature that disappeared around 1468).

The linguistic aspects of the enormous ill will accumulated during the brief Japanese occupation of Korea are documented by concrete examples of the replacement of Japanese lexical loans either by Korean equivalents or by involved bilingual calques. But it is also worth noting that this linguistic Japan-bashing has not penetrated into Korean university circles, where the bulk of the grammatical terminology continues to be borrowed directly from the Japanese description of Japanese (which in turn was mostly calqued upon English, further to complicate the matter). That many of these terms do not seem to fit Korean very well is scarcely to be wondered at; they fit Japanese no better.

Another rampant Japanism that interestingly survives unchallenged in Korean linguistic scholarship is concealed in the statement that "the Korean word for 'loanword' is oylay-e" (p. 136). But this is merely Jpn. gairaigo borrowed into Korean, and Jpn. gairaigo does not mean "loanword" but instead calques Ger. Fremdworter. Japanese scholarship recognizes no "loanwords" in the Japanese language, only Fremdworter. When other ipso facto poverty-ridden foreign languages are forced to bargain for Lehnworter, that term is calqued as Sino-Japanese shakuyogo, but shakuyogo is never admitted as a phenomenon operative...