My student sent me this message as the subject line when emailing an essay last week.
용화꼰데 녜이보 쥬도 몰라소 미효니꼴로 보냬욤
This is profoundly badly-spelled Korean. It is so bad, that it’s systematically bad. It took me about 25 minutes of work to figure out what she meant. Thus I theorize that it represents a kind of Korean version of “eye dialect“.
One thing I realized is that it systematically moves vowels around. Where standard Korean spells “어” she spells “오”
Thus 네이버 -> 녜이보 and the verb ending -서 -> -소
This change applies to her name and her friends’ name too:
영화 -> 용화 and 미현-> 미효니
Note in the latter she also doesn’t obey the morphophonological rules for dividing stem from suffix, but sticks to a strictly phonological division.
I don’t quite know what the -꼬- suffix is about, semantically. Something “cute” I suspect.
There is also a certain degree of systematic palatalization:
네 -> 녜 and 내->냬 … I never pronounce these distinctions quite right anyway, they are quite fine, but Korean ears perceive differences in palatalization to a degree I can’t even hear with my English-trained ears.
My ultimate question is why did she do it? In a paranoid moment, I could just imagine it’s a kind of mocking of a “foreign accent” – several of the transformations, like the vowels and the palatalization, represent issues I have with my Korean pronunciation. But in fact I very much doubt it. Basically I think it must be a kind of “eye-spelling,” I’m almost certain, which emphasizes certain trends in Korean as spoken by teenagers – I have definitely heard 어->오 in slangy talk, especially girls. Kind of like the very common addition of the ending -ㅇ/ŋ/ to open syllables in clause final position, of which this text doesn’t have an example – but I frequently hear e.g. “안녕하세용” for “안녕하세요,” even by teachers.
That being the case, however, it’s puzzling that she would select me as a target for this strange spelling – the message was meaningful and specific to communicating the content of her email to me – it relied on me understanding it’s meaning, because what it says is: “Yeonghwa forgot her login password so Mihyeon is sending you her essay.” Thus the only way Yeonghwa gets credit for the attached essay is if I understand the subject line – otherwise Mihyeon gets credit for the essay, as except for the “sent by” field, it’s the only place any names occur.
Did she just “forget” that I wasn’t a native speaker? That’s probable. Or did she do it intentionally as a way to challenge me or be deliberately opaque? That’s possible too. Did she think I’d spend half an hour figuring it out, and then write a linguistic analysis about it on my blog? I doubt it. I tend to write about these things because there is very little on the internet, in English, about non-standard Korean – it’s extremely hard to find.
[daily log: walking, 6 km]