Korean-English, not Konglish (Part 1)

By Lyman McLallen

Many Korean people say they reach a point in their English studies when they no longer have to translate every single English word into Korean. They begin to think in English. Koreans who are good with English ― and there are many ― say they still translate English into Korean, then translate the Korean back to English again, because they just can't ignore their Korean sensibilities – even when they're thinking in English.

Living in the same land, on the same ground, where all the generations of their ancestors lived, influences them so deeply that when they use English, they do it in Korean ways with Korean idioms and phrases that come straight from their Korean hearts ― translated into English, of course. I don't see that they can help doing this and see no reason why they should stop. This is what makes the English that the Koreans use Korean-English.

I hadn't been in Korea even a week before a young man asked me if I'd had lunch. Nobody had ever asked me that back home, at least not as casually as he did, and it was unsettling, if only just a little. Yet I knew he wasn't being rude.

"Have you had lunch yet?" he said, and I didn't know what to say. It was the first time anybody I'd just met ever asked me that (many Koreans since then have asked me the same thing, and still do).

"Have you had lunch yet?"

Soon after I got to Korea, I became friends with a man who was 30 years older than I ― Mr. Cho ― who during his working life was a high school music teacher in Masan on Korea's southern coast not far from Busan, now part of Changwon. Mr. Cho was a child at the beginning of the Japanese military occupation and a grown man by the time the Japanese left. Without the benefit of formal classes in English or even a tutor, Mr. Cho taught himself English by listening to tapes and talking with American servicemen whenever he could. Mr. Cho taught me a lot about Korea and one of his history lessons was about the greeting, "Have you had lunch yet?"

Mr. Cho explained that "Have you had lunch yet?" is a standard greeting in Korea that today Koreans say to each other in Korean, much like Americans say, "How do you do?"

When Koreans first asked each other if they'd had lunch yet, though, it was during a time when many were starving, so it wasn't just a greeting in those years, but often meant the difference between eating and not eating, between life and death.

To keep their neighbors from starving to death, women came together in communities all over Korea and cooked enough food so they could feed those who had none. They knew these people wouldn't beg, even if they were hungry. But if they were to ask them if they had eaten, they would confess that they hadn't. So the women asked them, "Have you had lunch yet?" And this is how these great women kept many of their fellow Koreans alive.

"So you see," Mr. Cho explained, "many Koreans are alive today because in that terrible time, those heroic women who cooked all that food surely asked some of our ancestors the question, ‘Have you had lunch yet?' And when those starving people told the women that they hadn't had lunch yet, the women fed them so they could live another day, and in Korea, that's why this greeting lives on."

So, if you're new to Korea, how would you respond to somebody asking you, "Have you had lunch yet?"

You won't be here long before somebody will.

More than three-quarters of all people who speak English today aren't native speakers, yet it's these English speakers who bring fresh perspectives to the language, changing it as they make it their own, and enhancing it for everybody.

There's no one right way to speak and write English and no single authority who can dictate what's good English and what's not, for even in countries where English is the native tongue, its use isn't uniform. Of the countless variations of the language, though, none is so different from the others that it is unintelligible to the rest of us. The Oxonian easily understands the Australian. Americans understand Africans and Indians who speak many languages in their local communities but who all use English publicly. Even watching BBC World broadcast from Hong Kong, it strikes the viewer that the Hong Kongers are as eloquent in their English voices as the best-spoken Londoners. What's important today is not that a person is a native speaker but that she or he can read, speak, think in and write English well.

People from different nations speak English with their unique phrases and idioms, bringing variation and richness to the language it wouldn't otherwise have. You hear English spoken everywhere, and many speakers ― native or not ― are erudite with the language, for they are well-read, speak with intelligence and wit, write beautiful English that is often a sheer delight to read, and this is true of the Koreans.

Lyman McLallen works for The Korea Times. As a child, he attended The Orchard School in Indianapolis, Indiana.

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