The other day I saw this banner hanging from a pedestrian bridge (picture at right). It was linguistically interesting to me because it does something I have almost never seen in Korea – it combines “konglish” and “hanja” in a single phrase. Both “konglish” (English vocabulary adopted into Korean and written in the Korean alphabet) and “hanja” (Chinese vocabulary adopted into Korean but still written using Chinese characters) are quite common in Korean, which is a voracious borrower of words. It’s one of the things that fascinates me about the language.
Nevertheless, it’s very rare to see konglish and hanja in the same sentence – in this case, in a single compound noun. NASA, of course, is NASA. 휴먼어드벤처 [hu.meon.eo.deu.ben.cheo] is “human adventure.” And then the trailing hanja is 展 [전=jeon], and means “exhibition.” So the entire title is: NASA Human Adventure Exhibition. But it uses 3 different writing systems. It’s for a show at the local giant convention center, Kintex.
[daily log: walking, 6.5km]