Experience with Korean academia

By Akli Hadid

I was studying the history of the Joseon Kingdom in Korea, when our professor told an anecdote about wives often murdering their husbands and families with blowfish eggs in the late Joseon Kingdom period. Why such murders were common was a great mystery in Korean academia, he insisted.

I said I would put my money on the fact that the blowfish had become a popular culinary item during that period and was not readily available before then as it is a rare and expensive fish, and tends to rot very quickly and only advanced fishing and preservation techniques such as ice conservation made the fish readily available. I pursued the idea that wives who were tired of their oppressive status might have slipped a few eggs in the broth. They often got caught, though, because blowfish eggs were one of the rare popular ways to poison someone back then, and that they were caught because death by poisoning led the corpse to turn blue rather than pale. The professor stared at me like I had tried to murder him, and did not let me talk for the rest of the semester.

A Korean musicology professor was discussing the Joseon dynasty musical notation system with us. He explained the notation system, and explained that the black boxes separating notes were a mystery to modern musicologists. I said perhaps they intended to mark pauses. He said that possibility was ruled out. I then said perhaps back then there was a lot of mysticism and superstition over notes and music, as in many countries, and that perhaps boxes had to precede or follow certain notes for superstitious reasons. "It's a very big mystery! You cannot solve it!" he yelled, not even examining my suggestion.

Another mystery is the king Gwanggaeto Stele and the authors of the writings on the stele. I suggested to the history professor that they use a technique that most detectives use when trying to trace the author of an anonymous text: word-frequency statistical analysis and type-token statistical analysis. That is, you identify the main authors of that period, or "suspects" and statistically analyze their word frequencies and type-tokens (how frequently they use certain words and how frequently they tend to dwell on the same idea or repeat themselves). The author or authors whose word frequency or type-tokens are the most similar to the stele's inscriptions is the most likely author. "We never use statistical analysis in history!" the professor yelled at me.

Yet another mystery is the linguistic origin and classification of the Korean language. I explained that in the Samguk-sagi and other historical texts, during the Three Kingdom Period it was said that in Goguryeo they spoke a language similar to Manchurian, and that Silla and Baekche spoke two dialects of a similar language, and that under unified Silla many Koreans intermarried, sometimes by force, and intermixed. In historical linguistics, such cases of frequent intermarriage and linguistic diversity often lead to the creolization of a language among children and that modern Korean has all the features of a creolized Silla language and Manchurian language: invariant verb forms derived from the infinitive or the least marked finite verb form; loss of determiners or use as determiners of demonstrative pronouns, adjectives or adverbs; placement of a negative particle in preverbal position; use of adverbs to express modality; fixed single word order with no inversion in questions; reduced or absent nominal plural marking.

"You don't know anything about the Korean language!" the professor told me.

Academia is specifically about solving mysteries and moving on to the next. However, I feel that Korean academia wants to dwell on mysteries rather than solve them. I hope Korean professors can learn to have civil debates in the future and accept new ideas and suggestions.

Akli Hadid works for the British Council. He can be reached at hadid.akli@gmail.com.

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