Caveat: 구슬이 서 말이라도 꿰야 보배라

구슬이 서 말이라도 꿰야 보배라
bead-SUBJ hold[?] word[?]-EVEN-IF string[Verb-meaning]-IN-ORDER-TO treasure-[?]
[Something about beads being held and treasure and stringing them together]

This was impossible for me to translate. Lately, I’ve been finding all these Korean proverbs that I really can’t figure out. I get the meaning of this one but individual vocabulary items, like “서” and “말” are what I think of as overloaded homonyms – there are so many possible meanings that I can’t make a decision that narrows it down, even within context. Each of those morphemes has several dozen dictionary entries. I can only guess how they fit together, even given the context of beads and string. I don’t get 보배라 either. Google translate is useless. 보배 is “treasure” but then what is 라? – that’s a verb ending meaning command, or else it can crop up in the rather irregular conjugation of the copula (BE verb), but in that case it’s preceded by morpheme 이 which is the main copula. I’m stumped.

“Beads cannot make a necklace without string.” This is a slight alteration of a translation found online, which is unenlightening vis-a-vis the nuts-and-bolts grammar of the sentence.

I think the point of the proverb is that you need string to string beads – not just beads. You need a certain minimum to get along to something. Not sure what the English equivalent proverb is.

The pictures below are my prayer beads I strung along with 108 bows (prostrations) while on the temple stay in 2010.

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Caveat: modernity causes suicide because it commodifies individuals

There's an excellent series over at the Ask a Korean website about South Korea's stunningly high suicide rate. The blogger there, known by the name "The Korean," generally starts in a humorous vein but his posts often pursue serious topics analytically.

His observation, that I wasn't really aware of, is that the Korean suicide problem is a recent development – very recent: post 1997 (which was a transformative date in Korean history because of the IMF Asian financial crisis of that year). Up until then, Korea's rate was lower than would be predicted based on other socio-economic factors. This is why, he eventually explains, culturalism is not a good explanation for the problem.

Considering that The Korean blogger is, in fact, a lawyer working in DC (according to his online bio), he makes a pretty trenchant observation:

"What
is it about modernization that causes suicide? Modernity comes with
capitalism and individualism, which travel hand in hand. Reduced to its
core (and thus risking gross over-generalization,) modernity causes
suicide because it commodifies individuals."

 

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