Korean Job Discussion Forums

rawiri · Joined: 01 Jun 2003 Location: Lovely day for a fire drill.

They have various names for eggs, an egg is not neccesarily just an egg apparently.

According to my coteacher who speaks sfa english, then again my korean isn't that chit hot so maybe he's onto something. I doubt it though.

dogbert · Joined: 29 Jan 2003 Location: Killbox 90210

Main Entry: egg
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: seed
Synonyms: bud, cackle*, cackleberry*, cell, embryo, germ, hen apple, hen fruit, nucleus, oospore, ovum, roe, rudiment, spawn, yellow eye*
Source: Roget's New Millennium� Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.3.1)
Copyright � 2006 by Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
* = informal or slang

gang ah jee · Joined: 14 Jan 2003 Location: city of paper

...English doesn't have a word for 구멍동서.

dogbert · Joined: 29 Jan 2003 Location: Killbox 90210

Zoidberg · Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 1:53 am Post subject:

I love these X language is superior to / more developed than / more expressive than / more beautiful than / etc than Y language arguments.

Reminds me of RTeacher and Sanskrit. It's all bunkum.

jaganath69 · Joined: 17 Jul 2003

RACETRAITOR · Joined: 24 Oct 2005 Location: Seoul, South Korea

Ya-ta Boy · Joined: 16 Jan 2003 Location: Established in 1994

gang ah jee · Joined: 14 Jan 2003 Location: city of paper

Son Deureo! · Joined: 30 Apr 2003

billybrobby · Joined: 09 Dec 2004

I'm under the impression that it means something akin to a "sloppy seconds" relationship between two dudes based on what RT said. for women, wouldn't it be 고추동서? hehe.

who is right?

Maybe it's deliberate deception! I hate it how sometimes Koreans will try to censor their culture for us and clean it up a bit. When I first came to Korea I was told that those cards with naked girls on them are for phone sex. Little did I know they are for phone, then sex.

flotsam · Joined: 28 Mar 2006

Junior · Joined: 18 Nov 2005 Location: the eye

Korean words need to be shortened, far too much of a mouthful.

It takes 3 times longer to say something in Korean than it does in English.
This is because English has been forced to evolve by many outside influences. It has been trimmed and made more efficient. it is also a lot more recognisable to most people in the world, because it has borrowed so many words from other languages. Korean on the other hand, may as well have come from mars, because it relates so poorly to other languages.

English is a beautiful language.

The only way I can possibly think of Korean being superior is because they have a bigger variety of more precise descriptive words. But how many ways do you really need to say "its raining".? Its more obstructive than useful.

gang ah jee · Joined: 14 Jan 2003 Location: city of paper

SPINOZA · Joined: 10 Jun 2005 Location: $eoul

'More developed' is too odd to be worthy of discussion, but it's certainly more simple in structure - at least at the basic level.

English: how do I go to Myongdong?
Korean: Myeongdong to, how go?

I could think of a huge amount of examples if I wanted to, but basically English contains too many pronouns and too many auxiliary verbs. English is unnecessarily complicated. In the above eaxmple, "I" and "do" are superfluous. English is a difficult language to teach Koreans, but Korean is very easy to pick up if you're an English speaker, I re-emphasize at a basic-to-intermediate level. It goes without saying that it's difficult to become fluent. It's difficult for me to become fluent in German, even though 50% of English is Germanic.

However, the difficulty with Korean, as with all languages, lies in trying to understand what the fook two adjummas are talking about.....the same way my Korean buddy, whose English is very good, hasn't got a clue what me and my American friend are talking about when English guy and American guy are talking to each other, yet if we talk to him (the Korean) he understands.

But, whilst English is unnecessarily complicated its strength is that it has a huge bunch of synonyms at its disposal (Norman French added essentially the same concepts to Anglo-Saxon, yet a different word - so we have buy/purchase, freedom/liberty etc) with slightly different shades of meaning between.

It's very interesting that English = 지구어. It's partly coincidence, since England and America have been the most powerful countries in recent centuries. But maybe it's not a coincidence.

Korean certainly isn't more developed than English because English is a mixture of several languages and thus has a massive conceptual apparatus. It also is egalitarian - one must employ manners in accordance with common sense as opposed to the age or status of the person you're speaking to (or about). Assuming egalitarianism is the most wonderful thing ever, that's more of an advance on Korean, where one must use manners to an old, shiballing, sojuing w@nker who hasn;t got a clue about anything, yet not have to use the same politeness to a young law student who might well be the future UN Secretary. However, Korean has many advantages over English (the above, plus spelling, plus ridiculous rules about prepositions, plus unnecessary use of articles). There are many aspects to English it wouldn't be bad logic to get rid of.