A Day At School

Date: 3/9/11

I'm going to start this post out with a picture:

This is one of the teacher's at my school, during a free period of his...snoring away.  He is completely passed out and is starting to make some not so delicate snorts.  The other Korean teachers are starting to laugh.  But only because he is snoring--not because he is snoring.  Well, it was pretty funny snoring, but the fact that he is sleeping is not a problem over here in the wonderful land that is Korea.

If teachers have free time (which is not often--rarely) they can fall asleep.  Some school even have a "sleeping room" where teachers can sneak to if they are sick or just exhausted.  I just find it mind blowing that it is better/more accepted that teacher need to come to school if they are feverish and contagious--they just spend their off hours in the sleeping room.

I also learned something else on Thursday.  Korean language is going through a few renovations.  The phonetic pronunciation of some of the consonants from Korean to English is not exact and have been going through some changes in the past 60 years.  For example: the Korean character ㅂ  is pronounced somewhere in between a "b" and a "p" sound.  The city of Busan--it was originally romanized into Pusan.  But I have learned it with a B.  Another example: ㄱ is in between a "g" and "k".  My little port city is Gunsan.  But it is not pronounced like "goon-san"...it is sort of an explosive g/k blend.  It is hard to describe in writing.

Well, it seems that the Korean language may be going through some another round of romanization.  I was looking through through the text book yesterday and noticed some funny things.  I went to Ms Kim and asked her about them.  This is what I found out:

Funny thing No. 1:

One of the most popular names in Korea is Kim.  There is a joke that four categories of last names: Kim, Lee, Park, and all the others.  That just shows you how many people in Korea have the name Kim, Lee, or Park.  But, apparently there seems to be some disagreement between how one spells "Kim" and "Lee."

Okay, so the character ㄱ is a mix of both G and K, correct?  Well, for as long as I've know about Korea is has always been "Kim."  But, in our textbooks this year, it is clearly not "Kim" but "Gim."  (Who? Gim Sujin).

Personally I think Kim sounds like a closer approximation to what the Koreans say when they speak "Kim-김- so and so" but I am just one in a voice of many.

Funny thing No. 2:

Dr. Yi?  "Who is Dr. Yi?" I asked Ms Kim.  And she explained, after some initial confusion and shock and disbelief, that Yi is a new way to write the common Korean name "Lee."  Lee is one of the most popular last names in Korea.  It is written: 이.   But, in romanized Korean, that equals I (pronounced: long E.  ee.).  So, whoever was the first English speaker to put Roman letters to Korean sounds, made the last name 이 (E) into Lee.  Which sounds fairly close.

Ms Kim explained that there is a debate though, about how to make the romanization more authentic to the Korean sounds.  Some people propose 리.  But the character ㄹ is another one of those blended sounds of R and L so it would theoritically work.  But South Korean are against this suggestions because it is, interestingly enough, North Korean in origin.

You see, people with the last name of "Lee" in North Korea write it 리.  So, by adopting this suggested change of 이 to 리 South Koreans would be giving North Koreans power over an integral part of the Korea Identity.  I find this extremely interesting that something as seemingly taken-for-granted as the way a word is spelled becomes a key concept of national identity.

Thus, text books in South Korea have changed "Lee" into "Yi."  Yi is probably closer to the original Korean spelling of 이 but (if it sticks) it's going to take a while for me to remember that "Lee" is not "Yi."

Funny Thing No. 3:

A finally funny when dealing with sound.  It is proposed that if you change "Kim" to "Gim" you might want to look into changing the name Park.  But, unfortunately, if you change the "p" in Park into the other sound, you come up with "Bark."  For some reason, I don't think the Koreans are going to want to go around being called after with doggy-sounds.

On another side note: I went to my country school and found this waiting for me: