아는것이 병
know-PRESPART-fact-SUBJ sickness
Knowing [is] sickness.
“Knowing is sickness.” It sounds like it could be the title of a Kierkegaard book.
There’s another proverb in Korean that is exactly opposite:
아는것이 힘
know-PRESPART-fact-SUBJ strength
Knowing [is] strength.
“Knowing is strength.” This sounds more like the title of something by Lenin.
It’s interesting to reflect on how these two opposite possibilites start quickly to take on ideological resonances in my mind.
The nominalizing ending -는것 is extraordinarily common. Not only is it used to construct a sort of periphrastic present tense with the copula (-이다), but it also seems to serve as a kind of periphrastic gerund (where the actual gerund is -기 and the more nominalizing -ㅁ). Both proverbs are missing an explicit copula after the second noun phrase, but I think it’s implied by the subject marker on the first. This strikes me as similar to the Russian present tense copula, which is normally absent in actual Russian, and merely implied by the case endings of the nouns.
Day: June 4, 2013
Caveat: Who’s That Reading My Blog?
I sometimes go and look at a website called feedjit, which allows me to “watch” people as they visit my blog’s web address (i.e. raggedsign.blogs.com [UPDATE: this address is no longer the valid address of my blog, effective late 2018]). It can be interesting to see what brings people to my blog – what sorts of google searches or links they’re following.
I’m honestly not sure why I’m interested in this – perhaps it’s merely a weird sort of vanity, like my students who keep checking to see if their friends have sent them messages on their phone. Certainly, it’s not that I’m interested in “optimizing” my blog or getting more visitors – that’s not at all what this blog is about. So I’m not actually doing anything with the information revealed. I don’t actually have a clue as to what this blog is about.
Well this morning, at just before noon, I saw something truly weird: a North Korean visited my blog. I did a screenshot, unable to believe it was true. Here it is.
I noticed the person probably typed into google something in English combined with the Korean proverb “망건 쓰자 파장된다,” which I wrote about in a blog entry from last year in February. That’s the specific blog entry that google sent them to.
I wonder what the North Korean is looking for? I doubt very much he or she found it on my blog. It’s possible it’s not even really North Korea – it could be a spoofed web address being produced by some proxy server with a strange sense of humor. I don’t know enough about how that stuff works to judge. But nevertheless I feel like this is some weird momentous milestone in the blogular history.
Let us celebrate.
