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You may have heard your Korean students say "I went to a ‘meeting'" when they meant they went on a blind date. "Meeting" is an example of a word that means different things in English and Korean. It means a gathering of business people in English, but it means a blind date in Korean.
Many foreigners think loanwords is a violation of the purity and sanctity of English or other languages from which Korean has borrowed, and the violation is for both English and Korean.
Studies show that words move from one language to another as a result of code-switching after pervasive contact with another language or when new concepts or objects move from one culture to another. Studies have found that nouns are more likely to be borrowed than verbs, and that "core" vocabulary tends to resist change or borrowing.
Why then, would a noun change its meaning from the original language when loaned to a different language? The reason is simple. Have you ever played Chinese whispers? You know how the original message gets completely deformed as it passes through several people. The same thing happens to vocabulary. Several studies have found that loanwords change meaning as they are propagated through the rest of the speech community.
Loan coinages are common in most languages. In French, the term box was coined as a kit that includes a phone landline, Internet connection and cable television. It started off as a brand, but is now commonly used. In Korean, a "game room" is used to describe a place where people pay to play video games. A "golden ball" is a term used for sudden death in a sports game in most English-speaking countries.
Another form of loanwords is hybrid words, which are words that mix two languages. They often use a native word with a foreign prefix or suffix. Suffixes such as "-ting" or "-ism" are popular in Korean and often serve word coinages. "Sogaeting," or a blind date in Korean, is one example of a hybrid word.
Then there are false friends. To some, false friends are those annoying words that have a different meaning in English and Korean, despite being English loanwords. Among false friends, there are cases of synonymy, polysemy, homonymy, changes in register and diachrony.
Some false friends will be synonyms with the English word but will not have the same nuance. For example, a sombrero is any hat in Spanish, but it is the straw hat typically worn in Mexico. In Korea, a "mansion" is a luxurious building, when in English it denotes a luxurious house.
Some false friends will have several meanings in English, but will only have one meaning in Korean. Such are known as cases of polysemy. For example, the word "hit" has a lot of meanings in English, but only means something very successful in Korean.
Some words will have similar sounds in English and the target language, but will have completely different meanings. Such cases are known as cases of homonymy. "Health" is what it is in English; in Korean it means a health club.
Some words in English have the same meaning in the target language except that it is archaic English. For example "walkers" are a form of jump boots that were used during the Korean War but no longer exist. However in Korean, "walkers" still means jump boots worn during military service.
Finally some words have evolved at different paces in English and in Korean. Such cases are known as cases of diachrony. For example, in the 1950s, the word gypsum in English used to refer to a cast, plaster or fertilizers, among many things, when today it is simply used to denote a chemical component. In Korean, "gypsum" evolved to mean cast.
Despite Konglish being natural and having linguistic explanations, many still find Konglish very annoying or disturbing. I'm sure I will still come by angry foreign netizens who will argue about Konglish is spoiling the sanctity of the English language.
Akli Hadid is a Ph.D. candidate at the Academy of Korean Studies. His email address is hadid.akli@gmail.com.
