Here’s a marvelous essay from the LA Times about pronouns, actually, about a pronoun – ‘you’. It’s written by a Korean American who explains how Korean is actually more complex, when it comes to honorifics, than even Japanese is. Korean is not an easy language to learn. John Pasden has his work cut out for him.
The Confucian societies display tremendous level of deference and this finds expression in their languages. (Chinese is, ironically, slightly less intense in this regard.) Do we have qany Korean friends who wish to comment? How about other Confucian societies?
I’d also be be interested to hear from some Scandanavian friends to see how that contrasts with their those cultures. I have the impression that the Swedes, for example, are the very opposite of the Koreans. I’ve seen young Swedes show an almost shocking level of informality when talking to college professors. (Or am I extrapolating too far here?) Do any of our Scandanavian friends (or indeed any other friends) wish to comment on this?
Ken Carroll
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{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
A similar language is Javanese, which also distinguishes 5 levels of formality. Or at least it used to. Japanese might be the one that’s quoted all the time, but Javanese and Korean blow it out of the water.
Thai also has a formality distinction – if you are being more formal the word is longer. Usually because you use a Pali or Prakrit word to replace the native Thai word (not recent borrowings though, they’ve been around for centuries).
Errr, I speak both languages and I dont find that Korean has more honorifics than Japanese at all. In fact, I can think of many forms of honorifics in Japanese that do not exist in Korean.
Ken,
my background: Swedish, who now lives in Texas and studies Mandarin and China for 2 years.
Sweden has gone through a couple of phases over the past 50 years. From very rigid titulations (similar to Germany) around 1950 along the lines of Doctor instead of you, Engineer, and other titles, and the all common “Ni” (which corresponds to the German Sie) to address “You”, we had a period around 1970, when everybody was “Du” with each other, even the Prime Minister and the King was called Du. It was called the “Du Reform”, and almost considered a Law. It backfired a bit, and the 90-s saw a resurge of titles and “Ni”. I believe the last couple of years the pendulum has swung back a little towards “Du” again.
My theory would be that 75 years of Social Democratic control of the country has pushed the notion of equality very hard, not only in wages, gender, and other things, but also in the area of speach. Sweden also have a long-standing tradition of “Don’t think for a second you are better than any one else” (This is called the “Law of Jante” (long story), which many think is rooted in Lutheranism, which is the dominant religion in Sweden (or was I should say, since the country has secularized completely at this point). So if everybody is equally important, no titles should be used.
So your theory is probably true, Scandinavia (with Sweden as the most extreme) might be on the very opposite side of Korea.
Matt,
I have no knowledge of Korean, so I’ll take your word for that. Is the rest of the article accurate?
Ken Carroll
I suppose it is accurate enough, but the whole content of the article is a kind of 韩国万岁 by writer K. Connie Kang, expressing a kind of Korean 民族主义 that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Examples, ‘Korean is more expressive than English’, ‘Korean has more honorifics than Japanese’. This is standard fare in Korea, but it is based on the line of thought that puts Korea at the center of everything.
Matt,
Is there more of this ethnocentrism (or is it just jingoism?) amongst Koreans than other Asians?
I’ve visited Korea but I don’t know much about the palce. It does have a reputation, however, as being one of the tougher assignments, from a cultural perspective, for language teachers.
Ken
Mikael,
Clearly politics can affect culture. Your description is fascinating.
Let me ask you a question. I have the impression that where ever a society pushes hard for egalitarianism, that basic liberties can suffer. Sweden has very high taxes (which some would call an infringement of economic liberty), strict labor laws, etc. Is there a downside to all the reform?
Ken
Response back to Ken,
When talking liberties, I believe Sweden is ranked very high. Newspapers, Bloggers, any media can pretty much say what they want. Same is valid for business. I have yet to find another country where employees can express their opinion about what’s wrong and how to fix it. In USA, the boss is always right, and the brutal work environment, makes people avoid stating deviating views, especially if they are inconvenient. Not so in Sweden.
The downside with the equality in Sweden is in Drive, Ambition and Moving up the ladder. Since salaries are reasonably equal, social network for unemployed, parents year off (yes you can take a year off for each child and not loose your job and get paid too), the reward of hard work is small. Taking on more responsibility, working longer hours and so on without any monetary reward, is just not appealing to many. And if you make more money, then it’s usually evened out by the progressive tax structure, which goes up to 60%. Highly educated Swedes have discovered after EU that they can perform the same job in Denmark, Germany or UK, and make twice as much money net as they would in Sweden. And the cost of living there is about the same or lower. I don’t have the numbers (they’re available on the web) but the emmigration of highly educated swedes are in the tens of thousands a year (could be as high as 50,000). The population is kept on the same level only by allowing immigration from East Europe and Middle East. This is causing an integration problem as big as many other countries in Europe if not bigger. There is no doubt that Braindrain due to lack of reward is a major issue in Sweden today. As you can tell I am one of the swedes who did exactly that (typing this in Texas).
Mikael,
This is really insightful stuff. So, I think there is a price to be paid for trying to make people equal – it kills ambition! (Clearly it hasn’t killed yours, though.)
Ken Carroll
Hi Ken,
I dont know if its more or not, but I dont know of any other country in Asia where people will openly describe themselves as a ‘superior race’ (I am not sure if they mean ‘a’ or ‘the’ superior race, because Korean does not work that way – so much for it being more expressive than English). Its just a kind of naive ethnocentrism cause by knowing virtually nothing about what the rest of the world is really like.
Mikael quoted (not his quote):
“Don’t think for a second you are better than any one else”
I caught my breath when I read this– it sounded exactly like an article a friend had given me to read called “The Jante Spirit” and sure enough, Mikael mentions “the Jante law”
Probably it’s not a commonly used expression in Sweden.
So it really is a recognized “social law” in Scandinavia?? The context (of my reading) was recognizing errors in Christian thinking that creep in from the surrounding social environment and are not part of the teachings of Jesus. But I thought maybe the “Jante” idea was just some subtle or abstract slant of thought that the author had identified by his own insight, not something really obvious and pervasive!!
In high school I had a Swedish exchange student friend… I can still recite 1 to 10 in Swedish and say “I saw a shark today!” (learned during a beach trip) Something like “jag sorg en hag idag” (spelling??) Every Swedish person I meet (not many) gets to hear me say that (or write it)
Response to Kaiselin:
Lol on the Shark thing. Correct spelling is “Jag såg en haj idag” (notice the a with a circle above it, very important). Not something you would say in Sweden very often. When I moved to Texas, we used to teach the locals “Tjena pappskalle” and told them it was a polite swedish greeting. It means hello paperhead, and is fairly commonly used in Sweden if you think someone is rather stupid.
So being swedish I would say “Don’t think you are better than anyone else just because you know a couple of swedish expressions”.
Just kidding.
Mikael (and CPodders): I thought Sweden was really beautiful. I visited the Stockholm School of Economics but the real treat was a trip to Tallberg which, as I understand, really has a lot of the original Swedish culture (?) We traveled in an old Volvo, ate a very thin crispy bread (that never goes stale, and its name sounds like the noise it makes when you break it) and, of course, sauna culture! If anyone goes to Tallberg, I highly recommend the Klockargarden Hotel. Being from the States I was really impressed by the carpentry – everything was made out of such high quality white-colored wood. I guess the red paint on so many homes and barns is made with a by-product of the copper mines. And they have big mooseburgers there…wow! And lots of big bottles of milk and other creams and stuff in the cooler at the convenience stores. The best thing of all was seeing real maypoles. Oh yeah, and I learned all about Tomte and the tomtenistas (the original Santa and the elves)!
That Sweden trip was the first time I realized zhongwen hen you yong. wo xu yao shuo zhongwen yinwai meiyou ren hui shuo yingyu. Danshi wo kan zhonguoren he women you liao tian. Sweden hen hao! Sorry for the pinyin practice. I know it’s incorrect. So now I’ll listen to a CPod podcast!
BTW, if there are any Cpodders who get together in Beijing, please send me a note. I’ll be there for several weeks starting after national holiday (or Hong Kong – I go to HK for three weeks after BJ.) Cheers all!
“I have yet to find another country where employees can express their opinion about what’s wrong and how to fix it. In USA, the boss is always right, and the brutal work environment, makes people avoid stating deviating views, especially if they are inconvenient.”
INteresting – I don’t know if the ‘boss is always right in the states.’ I think they’re mostly wrong, and then we make an art out of criticizing our superiors publicly! I think the difference between what you describe in Sweden and, say, the US, is greater affordance to subvert system-level inadequacies because of intranational interstate variety. One e.g., is that we move to other states where the rules are slightly different and suit what we want (gay marriage, etc.). E.g., many people used to start businesses in Delaware because the tax structure there favored startups. They moved there from the midwest. Etc. etc.
Matt, I enjoyed looking at your blog and reading several of your articles. Good job! I have been married to a Korean man for three years, worked with Koreans for three years prior to that in the US, and I’ve been living in Korea for just over two years. I do know there are a number of Koreans who would describe themselves as “superior race” but I think they are in the minority. A vocal minority to be sure and influential, but still a minority. The majority of Koreans are certainly extremely proud of their own culture, but generally I find them open minded and eager to learn about other cultures. There is no doubt that the Hermit Kingdom mentality still has a strong influence here, but on average, I think that young (say under age 35) Koreans have much cross-cultural exposure than their ancestors and are very willing to consider alternate opinions.
Ken and the others, Korean is quite complex in terms of honorifics, but I can’t compare it to Japanese since I don’t speak Japanese. I rather commonly encounter six different levels of politeness/formality: 해라체, 하게체, 하오체, 합쇼체, 해체, and 해요체. Any of these six may be used with or without the honorific particle 시. There is a seventh extremely honorific level which is now archaic, but still used by Christians to address God in prayer and thus I hear it in church. The pronoun system mentioned in the article is correct, but in practice, I almost never use any of the four words for “you.” I avoid it altogether by either using the third person or simply omiting the subject/object and letting the honorific verbal conjugation do the work for me. If one uses an honorific, the “you” is often just assumed.
As far as Korean being more “expressive”, it all depends upon what one wants to express. Korean is more lexically rich in certain areas than English, and visa-versa. Obviously, Korean is far better at expressing Korean cultural tendancies than English is, and thus is will be more “expressive” to Korean people. For example, Korean is much richer in onomatopoetic words and much more precise in describing familial relations in particular and social relationships in general. I believe Korean also many subtle nuances in its adjectives, such in describing colors.
My belief is that, taken as a whole, no language is any more complex than any other. Humans of equal intelligence learn to use each one. But, when learning a language for the first time, some languages are easier to enter than others. I think Korean is particularly hard to begin learning as an adult because of the complexity of the levels of formality and the use of honorifics–not to mention the morphophonemic changes in the verb conjugations. Korean children learn Korean by starting with non-honorific, non-formal language, but for an adult to speak that way is highly frowned upon. Anyway, enough rambling. Thanks for the interesting article,Ken.
There have also been lots of changes in the use of honorific syntax/word choices. It may be that a number of the forms I mentioned have gone out of practice in the last hundred years. I know some of them have in Japanese and Javanese, such as those reserved for royalty. Sweden sounds great. I’ll move there and take my brain (if they want something of dubious worth…). Every time my government gets reelected I threaten to move to Sweden, where social theories are actually somewhat practical and actually make sense! That or New Zealand. But then it seems like too much work. I think that’s the main reason nothing changes. It sounds so good, but then it just seems like too much work and we give up. It’s interesting the different types of honorific use. It can be simply the choice of pronoun, or it could be the choice of word (Like Thai. English does this to an extent, but not noticably or officially) or it could be the morphophonemic alternation (what bits you add to a word – like Korean and Javanese), or adding bits to a word (Japanese does this a bit, but I can’t remember the keigo forms). More often, of course, it’s a combination.
Patrick,
Maybe your work experience in the US is different than mine. I have worked here in large corporations of more than 10,000 people the last 15 years. In all 4 of them, we have made major down-sizing and restructuring. In the company I work currently, we are about a third of the people we were 5 years ago, and we do 2-3 times more business. We have very few support functions, and do most administrative work ourselves. Many of the employees work very long hours. People are squeezed into very small work areas to save money. Every year the company applies the 10% rule, i.e. gets rid of the lowest ranking 10% of the staff (Jack Welsh theory). You can see fear in the eyes of many people every day they go to work. Nobody would dare to challenge a managers opinion.
The upside, (if anything can outway that) if you rank among the top 20% is very high monetary reward.
I realize that Texas, and some industries in particular have been hit very hard the last 5 years (dot-com bubble and telecom-bubble) and been forced to do a lot of down-sizing, so there’s probably many other locations and industries in the US where the situation is not as tough. But in general Big Business has been pushed into a Cost-Savings mode the last 10 years, with fierce competition, commmoditized products and supply exceeding demand. Not to mention loosing jobs to low-cost competition from China.
Good morning, Mikael! You make a good point. I am in academia now but I did have a fulltime corporate job for over two years in a large French multinational firm. Big companies like yours, over the last 10 years or so (and esp. since the dot-com bubble burst in April 2000), have endured major retrenchment and eliminated millions of jobs. So they try to use models to eliminate jobs (since they’re going to have to eliminate them anyway) like the 10% rule that retain the best (and yes I know that’s not how it always works out). I even know of a big company rght here in my city that explicitly uses that approach.
At the same time, the entrepreneurial sector has generated millions of jobs. In this context (which includes outsourcing staff functions to India, e.g., and/or moving parts of supply chains to China, e.g.) there are lots of insitutions and people who want to make an attempt to try to change things to make it better for all. It’s a big system that evolves, not a static one. So there’s hope. Think entrepreneurial Options are never apparent right away but if one takes on an innovative, proactive, and risk-taking orientation one will eventually recognize an opportunity (might take a year or two). Even when top managers in large companies think entrepreneurially those companies find ways to hinge on effectiveness rather than efficiency (e.g., cost). That’s called corporate entrepreneurship (3M comes to mind). But if the top managers won’t do that, and they aren’t going anywhere, then ??.
You make a good point about challenging the manager – if a company is undergoing retrenchment as a corporate level strategy and looking for a reasons to get rid of people across its functions/divisions, the climate in that organization changes sharply. People become paranoid, will not make a fuss, get cagey, etc. I saw it firsthand when I worked a corporate job. It’s not limited to the US; in countries like Singapore one sees aspects of the logic where ranking, not unlike Welch’s 10% rule, is used in primary schools.
In some sectors there is a clear shift away from commodotized products (“hits” that everyone loves). Music industry sales statistics reflect it (so does the film industry). The economic system is increasingly affording ways for ventures in niche markets to be viable (eBay, Amazon, CPod
) based on products/services that are not mainstream. Those business models are able to harness demand for obscure offerings (which, if aggregated, are as numerous as the hits – again think of the number of items on eBay or Amazon compared to the most popular items in a big deparment store or bookstore). And no, it does not just apply to internet companies. Even though it started in that space, the overall system as a result is becoming heterogeneous enough and its logic is becoming amenable to those who develop and offer “micro hits” (e.g., a small simple low-tech innovation) to make a living.
Patrick
patrick,
Good comments. And I agree that US with it’s entrepreneurial approach has many areas where employees are allowed to participate in the dialogue. Thanks for an interesting exchange.
I’m not Scandinavian, but in Germany, where I was born and dwelled until deep into the frosty winter of 1996, everyone used “du”, as in some stranger coming up to me in the Frankfurter Hauptbahnhof, noticing my “Germania” brand beer and saying, “Ach! Du trinkst geiles Bier!” (Which it was,true enough; it really was far-out and “wild” beer!) As he was not from “my generation”, that was not an issue. All traditional formality among Germans in the urban scenario is utterly gone. Only the Polizei (Police) or some very formal person would come up to you and say “Wie geht’s Ihnen?”
With some Asian languages, especially among the Mon-Khmer group, pronouns are “tricky business” for the uninitiated, and have been the source of great trouble and embarassment for the dilettants.
Actually, oftentimes in Korean, pronouns are NON-EXISTENT, (in context, they are implied, especially in intimate conversation) and sentence structure (at least in conversational Korean) is really consistently NOT what most grammarians would call “complete sentences”. However, with regard to “you”, the word “너희” or just “너” is good enough, I think, regardless as to with whom one is talking… The pronouns actually are often “sexless”; e.g. “그 녀는 ” (she) and “그 부은” are usually just rendered into the “genderless” form for both as “그 는” (that person, that guy)and “her” or “him” is just “그를” (나는 여러해 동안 그를 알고 지내왔다.= “For many years, I have known him[or her]“). In the nominative, the subject he is just usually “그분은” (or 그분이)as in “He”, for example, did something or other, or he is there, with “He” being the subject. Actually, Korean (“한국말”) is very easy–much easier than Japanese, and if one has any familiarity with Chinese, then the ample Sino-Korean “words” (Chinese compound characters of 2, 3 and 4 characters written into the phonetic Hanggul (“한국말”)alphabetic system makes learning the same term in a different form much easier–my friend and I were talking in the wonderful summer of 2002, and she said “Chinese is pretty, but for us Koreans, Korean is neater.” Well, when the unexperienced eye for the first time gazes upon Chinese calligraphy, and sees what appears to be ink brushed chaotically on paper or silk, then Korean is “neater” to Koreans, albeit less of a medium for the varied and certainly undefined type and level of artistic expression the Chinese have since time-immemorable treasured!
I hope I haven’t been to boring, to odious, or too “pedantic”.
Kim-Ha Albert (陳金夏).