I recently came to the realization there must be a Buddhist temple in my building. Sometimes I hear chanting-like noises, and at first I thought it was a neighbor’s television – but it really didn’t sound like a normal television program. And then I saw a sign near the back entrance to my building, and that sort of confirmed it – the swastika is the standard Korean symbol for “Buddhist establishment” used on signages and maps. Here is a picture of the back entrance to my building.
Day: June 8, 2008
Caveat: Humilific Fun
“Humilific” is a real word – it describes a class of Korean words (mostly verb infixes and pronouns) that are used to show deference on the part of a speaker with respect to a listener. They are somewhat the inversion of an honorific, which are linguistically more common, and which exalt the listener’s position with respect to the speaker. A good example of a beginner’s level humilific is the use of 저(jeo) instead of 나(na) to mean “I” (first person singular). When I call a student’s house, and I get a parent who I can’t expect to speak English, I have a phrase of badly pronounced Korean where I say “I am the English teacher” and I use this humilific form for the “I” in this sentence: “저는…” (jeo-neun …).
Here is a picture of a building I saw in Suwon, on top of the hill I climbed there last month when I went there, just for kicks and to provide something interesting to look at.
And for those who feel that the price of gas in the U.S. is out of control, consider this:
That’s 1913 Korean won per liter, which comes out to about $7.25 a gallon at recent exchange rates. The fact is, American gasoline is highly subsidized, if only indirectly – not least by that astronomical Iraq war cost, but also by military aid to e.g. Saudi Arabia.