Category: Language & Linguistics

When I went to the museum last weekend, I saw a strange jamo.

<digression>
Most of you will say, what's a jamo? A jamo is a single letter of the Korean alphabet, which is called hangeul (or hangul, if you don't like to follow official romanization rules and want to just wing it, transliteration-wise, or hangle, if you're a 5th grader with a seussian penchant). So, for example, ㅅ is a jamo. Or ㅎ is a jamo – my favorite, because it looks like a little man with a hat. The jamo are gathered together to make blocks (모아쓰기 = gather [and] writing), so ㅎ + ㅏ + ㄴ becomes 한.
</digression>

The jamo I saw was the one on the left in this image:

Which is extracted from this monument of names of deceased soldiers from the Korean war (squiggle jamo found in center):

The mysterious squiggle jamo is not one that is taught when learning Korean, so I wondered what it was. It's very hard to research. When I tried to take the image above and do a 'google image search' I just got pictures of naked people in strange positions – so much for google.

And good luck trying to search a term like "mysterious squiggle jamo" – perhaps now that I'm blogging this, future mystified foreigners will be less stumped.

OK, so, conclusions? The squiggle jamo is an alternate 's' (i.e. ㅅ). My friend Curt assured me it was. And I finally found something where the squiggle jamo is clearly transcribed as ㅅ- it's the cover of an 1880s New Testament (note that in 1880s using hangeul, as opposed to Chinese script, was pretty radical).

The large characters are clearly transcribed below as 예수셩교, with the squiggle jamo in the 셩 (an old spelling of 성 = 'saint, holy'). So now that I have seen the internet says so, it must be true.

I have a student who says this one phrase all the time. It seemed to indicate a kind of fatalistic and pained attitude with respect to assignments, tasks, homework, etc., as today when she took a look at a page of “paraphrasing” exercises we were working on and exclaimed “망했다” [mang-haet-da]. Finally, I broke down and asked, what does this mean. She said without pause, “ruin.” This was funny, but I suspected it wasn’t a very good translation.
Some research shows that the underlying verb, 망하다, does include a meaning of “ruin,” as well as “perish, die out, destroy, go bankrupt, crash.” as well as “to be ugly, to be unbecoming.” But the googletranslate also gave me a hint when I found one fixed expression where the verb, with a slightly different ending, was translated as “damn.” In an online dictionary, I had found the example phrase “망할지 오랫동안 살아남을지 누가 알겠는가?” which is given with the translation “Who knows if it may sink or swim in the long run?” But the same Korean phrase in googletranslate gives “Long damn that would survive, who knows?” – which is undeniably utter nonsense, like most of googletranslate’s output – but it nevertheless provided that “damn” as a clue.
As a result of this research, combined with the evident usage by my student, I’ve decided that the pragmatics of the phrase are essentially, “Damn!” or perhaps “Crash and burn!” as it was used in certain programming circles I worked in, when some task was essentially impossible.
In any event, I like the phrase. Perhaps I’ll try to be brave and use it at the appropriate moment, sometime.
I finally used another phrase today that I’ve been hearing for ages and understood the pragmatics of, but which intimidated me because of how disconnected its literal meaning was from its pragmatics: 들어가겠습니다. The pragmatics seem to be, “take care,” in the way we use that phrase to say “good bye” in a familiar way. But the literal meaning of the underlying phrasal verb, 들어가다 is “to enter.” How does saying, “[I] will enter” end up meaning “good bye”?
Enter what? I’d like to know. One coworker explained, somewhat brokenly, that there’s an elided, never-stated, “my home” home in the phrase: “I will enter my home now.” I suspect it’s a little bit like Mexicans saying “andale” which literally means “walk on it,” but has the pragmatics of “that’s right,” or even “take care.”
But I used it and everyone just said other similar good-bye noises in an utterly unremarkable way. It works. Language is weird.