Day: March 1, 2018

My student Jiwon emailed her homework to me with the following subject line: 카롱마 [karongma].
This is evidently a play on the name of the hagwon (afterschool academy) where I work: 카르마 [kareuma], which is itself a Korean representation of the English word Karma, in turn borrowed from Sanskrit, I suppose. I have always assumed this name serves as a kind of oblique reference to the underlying Buddhist ideological stance of the business’s owner, just as another hagwon down the street goes by 시온 [sion = Zion] to indicate its being run by Christians.
As far as Jiwon’s alteration of the name, I’m not quite sure what all the semantic valances are, but off the top of my head I think there’s at least two things going on.
The first is the substitution of the syllable “rong”, which is a possible reference to the English word “wrong”, which has wider semantics in Konglish than in English (i.e. it can mean a mistake, or general badness – I suppose American slang takes the word in a similar directions, cf. an American teenager snarking “that’s so wrong”).
The second is that syllable final “-ng” on the substituted syllable. In Korean script, this sound is represented by the circles (“ㅇ”) at the bottoms of the glyphs: 롱 [rong], 잉 [ing], 강 [gang], etc. – which is the letter called “ieung”. This sound suffix is used on open syllables (those ending in a vowel) in informal talk, especially by women and girls, to sound “cute”, e.g. “안녕하세용” [annyeonghaseyong = “hello”, said cutely] versus standard “안녕하세요” [annyeonghaseyo = “hello”].
So you have the negative valance of “wrong” but the positive one of “cute”, mixed together.
[daily log: walking, 7km]