Korean Job Discussion Forums

[ChimpumCallao]

this has been bothering me forever and ive been waiting, also forever, for someone else to bring it up. but its either been talked about or no one cares.

nonetheless.

do koreans know that a often used....erm...staple of their vocabulary is a huge derogatory word for asians (vietnamese and koreans especially, methinks).

im talking about the word 'gook'.

i remember the first time i learned to say i was an american...

Mi.....hee hee....WHAT....saram !?

or ordered soup...

Ill have the Kal--hee hee--kook--su.



so...do the koreans know? what do they think? what do you think? admit it...even you apologists. its funny.

i honestly find it hilarious. it's like me saying that im from the united states of cracker ass honky.

and then the soccer chanting....LOL....

[Satori]

Of course there is no linguistic connection at all. The two phonemes are not even pronounced the same way. The derogatory "Gook" is with a full "long u" sound, rhyming with "spook", and the Korean suffix for "country" is with a shorter "u" sound, rhyming with "cook", more accurately anglecised as "Guk".

[Corporal]

They don't really care. It's certainly not one of the things they lose sleep over. (Any more than when you try to explain why Suk Mi and Yoo Suk are such funny names to English speakers. "but...hahhahaha...that means something weird in my language!")

So. Yeah. They don't care.

Do YOU care that your name means something stupid or derogatory in another language?

[ChimpumCallao]

[Return Jones]

[ChimpumCallao]

[Satori]

[Return Jones]

[Satori]

[mithridates]

They're probably about as embarrassed about it as Italians are of saying cin cin (Japanese for pen!s) to toast drinks or we are whenever we say the word puts (Estonian for c*nt). Or Koreans when they say 우와, 반지도 많고 못걸이도 많고... (two bad Japanese words in there, and I had a bit of trouble forcing myself to say that when I first started learning Korean to be honest)
Then there's also the capital of the Central African Republic, Bangui.

No, I don't think people need to spend any time worrying about how their language sounds to others.

[denverdeath]

[Woland]

The awareness can be there and avoidance does apparently happen sometimes. I remember reading an article by the anthropologist Mary Haas (in a collection of papers edited by Dell Hymes) in an undergrad linguistics class that looked at the phenomenon of language avoidance. I can't remember all of it in detail but one example stuck in my head: Thai students in the United States avoiding the use of the Thai word prik (which is a kind of hot pepper, if I recall all details correctly) when speaking Thai in places where English speakers might overhear them.

The interesting thing is that given the role of tone in Thai the word didn't really sound like the English word, but the Thai students perceived them as being close enough to prompt avoidance. In this sense, the exact match between English gook and Korean guk wouldn't be important; it's the perception of closeness/equivalence on the part of the language users that would count.

[mithridates]

Yeah, there's also the Chinese nage (那个) which is used ALL the time but usually pronounced like nige which sounds just like n*gga. It's also used just as often as the English 'like' or 'you know'...

[Qinella]

[Satori]