Origins of Konglish
By Charles Fullerton
The shipwrecked Dutchman Henrik Hamel was not the first Westerner to visit Korea, but he was the first to write about his experiences.
He was not a linguist. His observations on the language did not go much beyond saying, ``Korean is very hard to learn. It doesn't look like any other language (and) ... there are three scripts."
Besides Hamel, most early visitors to the Hermit Kingdom were missionaries or diplomats. They arrived in such small numbers and with jobs that required integration that no doubt most of them adapted to the local language and customs.
That early Westerners learned Korean is evidenced by Protestant missionary Horace Underwood's publishing of the first Korean/English dictionary in 1890, and by McCune and Reischauer coming up with their system for Romanizing Korean in 1937.
The word ``Konglish" itself must be less than 100 years old. Before the Japanese occupation of Korea in 1910, the country was known as Joseon. During the colonial period, any English which entered Korean came through Japanese. Examples include ``apat" for apartment, ``service," (dry) ``cleaning," (night) ``club" and ``stamp."
Historically, half of the Korean lexicon is of Chinese origin. Nowadays nearly all new loanwords come from English. Up to 10 percent of Korean vocabulary is now believed to have come from English. There are over 30,000 such words. This is remarkable in a country with a 5,000-year history. In just 60 years, since the first American GI's occupied the peninsula on Set. 8, 1945, English words have been adopted at an ever increasing rate.
The first pidgin adopted by Koreans and GIs was known as Bamboo English and was actually a mix of Japanese and English (most soldiers had been in Japan before Korea). The honorific suffix -san was often added to a person's name.
The ubiquitous ``fighting" is of Japanese origin where it is known as ``fight-o." Originally transliterated as ``파이팅 (paiting)," it first appeared in the Chosun Ilbo archives on Nov. 16, 1965, in an article about a company sports day. Many early references occur in stories about boxing so the original meaning was much more literal. Today the``화이팅 (hwaiting)" spelling is much more common (it was first seen in print on Feb. 28, 1992) and it is usually used as a battle cry.
Candidates for the first Konglish include bar, restaurant and tailor. ``No touch," another early Konglish, has two possible etymologies. It comes either from foreign mining companies or the U.S. army. In either case it is believed the Koreans were constantly told not to touch, either the minerals being mined or the army equipment. ``No touch" (nodaji) thus came to mean something valuable.
More recent additions to the lexicon include ``Hollywood action," (diving, an exaggerated action) a result of the 2002 Winter Olympics and Apolo Anton Ono's ``stealing" of the gold medal from a Korean speed skater by throwing up his arms after being cut off by him in the race. This year on the TV show "Misuda," Lee Do-Kyung used ``loser" to define any male under 180cm tall. Whether this is a lasting addition to the lexicon or not remains to be seen.
Other common Konglish expressions, including ``meeting," ``one plus one," ``grand open," ``handphone" and ``skinship," have etymologies which are more difficult to pin down.
The writer is a visiting English professor at Hongik University in Seoul. He finished his M/ Ed. (TESOL) degree from Framingham State College in August 2009, and can be reached at charfull@yahoo.com.