Caveat: Mysterious Squiggle Jamo

When I went to the museum last weekend, I saw a strange jamo.

<digression>
Most of you will say, what's a jamo? A jamo is a single letter of the Korean alphabet, which is called hangeul (or hangul, if you don't like to follow official romanization rules and want to just wing it, transliteration-wise, or hangle, if you're a 5th grader with a seussian penchant). So, for example, ㅅ is a jamo. Or ㅎ is a jamo – my favorite, because it looks like a little man with a hat. The jamo are gathered together to make blocks (모아쓰기 = gather [and] writing), so ㅎ + ㅏ + ㄴ becomes 한.
</digression>

The jamo I saw was the one on the left in this image:

Squiggle

Which is extracted from this monument of names of deceased soldiers from the Korean war (squiggle jamo found in center):

City 002

The mysterious squiggle jamo is not one that is taught when learning Korean, so I wondered what it was. It's very hard to research. When I tried to take the image above and do a 'google image search' I just got pictures of naked people in strange positions – so much for google.

And good luck trying to search a term like "mysterious squiggle jamo" – perhaps now that I'm blogging this, future mystified foreigners will be less stumped.

OK, so, conclusions? The squiggle jamo is an alternate 's' (i.e. ㅅ). My friend Curt assured me it was. And I finally found something where the squiggle jamo is clearly transcribed as ㅅ- it's the cover of an 1880s New Testament (note that in 1880s using hangeul, as opposed to Chinese script, was pretty radical).

Yesu_html_m67d0107f
The large characters are clearly transcribed below as 예수셩교, with the squiggle jamo in the 셩 (an old spelling of 성 = 'saint, holy'). So now that I have seen the internet says so, it must be true.

Caveat: Oldschool KRap

KRap is what I call Korean rap. I just like that it comes out that way, I'm not making a value judgment.

What I'm listening to right now.

서태지, "컴백홈" [Come Back Home]. This is from 1995, which in Korean pop musical terms is about 200 years. Note how the Cypress Hill-y cadences have carried over into Korean quite well.

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