On language

Moon Jin-hyun

Besides being informed of world events by reading The Korea Times, I also improve my understanding of idioms, jargon and colloquialisms of current journalism. This is why I am as interested in the syntax of the articles I read as I am in the information. So when my English teacher assigned our class an essay on a significant word in our lives I chose “language,” the origin of communication, creation and what distinguishes and separates humankind from the rest of the animals.

When I analyze sentences in a newspaper article, I focus as much on the micro, the grammatical features, as I do on the macro, how those sentences develop the article to its conclusion. My micro method makes it easier for me to comprehend the way a verb is used in a social context, as well as getting me higher scores on English exams due to my meticulous analysis of readings.

I will analyze the following sentence as an example of my micro method: “One of his famous works is still heralded as a breakthrough in the discipline.” In this sentence I combine grammatical features with how the verb “herald” is used: “heralded” is a past participle followed by a subjective complement and maximizes the meaning of his success. That’s how I came to understand the sociolinguistic application of “herald.”

Analyzing the spoken word intrigues me, as well. For example, my curiosity about silent syllables was excited after hearing a native speaker say “I help freshmen.” but thinking he said, ‘I hope freshmen.” I then realized the meaning of “help” could be misunderstood because the letter “l” was processed as a silent syllable, called “cluster reduction,” due to the speaker’s quick pronunciation. Therefore, “help [help]” was phonetically changed to “hope [houp].” This is one example of why I am fascinated by linguistics and why I chose “language,” with all its infinite alterations and creations, as my significant word.

My enthusiasm for linguistics was also piqued by a TED talk on lexicography, the process of writing dictionaries, given by Professor Erin McKean. She spoke of language as a creative act that everyone from around the world participates in, by contributing ideas and communicating with each other while adding more words to dictionary word stocks through their interactions. Although she did emphasize that word stocks are not limited to words in dictionaries.

McKean’s premise is especially true of today’s internet-based society, enabling people to express their thoughts freely through their own culturally-based language and often including dialect and vulgarisms, “inadequate vocabularies,” rather than standard language, “adequate vocabularies.”

Thus, semantic meanings could be understood differently from culture to culture, especially with idiomatic expressions. For instance, the idiom “kick the bucket” is not about someone literally kicking a bucket. Americans use it to mean someone has died. While “kick the can down the road” is a metaphor for continuing a futile course of action without any foreseeable conclusion or positive results, it has been used recently to describe the failure of “strategic patience,” the Obama administration’s futile policy towards North Korea’s nuclear program.

As the title of Professor McKean’s TED talk is The Joy of Lexicography, I agree with her premise that lexicography is not the process of taxonomy, the scientific classification of words, but the joyful communication among people to express their own thoughts. There are reasons why their interactions are composed of the articulation of various words, which fascinates me. I am certain that through the activity of communication people create linguistic culture along with developing their own descriptive and distinct, rhetorical ability, expanding their own knowledge of how to use words in diverse social contexts.

The great debate among linguists _ akin to which came first, the chicken or the egg _ centers on language vs. consciousness (thinking); that is, which gave rise to the other? From McKean’s premise I conclude that the development of lexicography gave rise to that of linguistics. This is manifest in the invention of computers, leading to a global connection among people who live in separate and distinct, cultural zones and creating a new form of language: texting.

It is now much easier for people to put their own cultural distinctiveness into words on the worldwide web. As we can see in the case of “social network service”, internet neologisms are spread rapidly online. For example, the acronym LOL [lol], created by American netizens and meaning “laughing out loud,” manifests the overwhelming influence of millennials, although computer gamers think LOL means League of Legends, while those ignorant of computerese think it means “lots of love.” This singular linguistic development on the web is prominent in online dictionaries, especially in the application of example sentences in them.

I may be just a beginner at linguistics, but my passion for it is permanent. That’s why I will focus on linguistics at university, where I intend to acquire a better understanding of, and critical insight into, language and how people interact through it.

The writer is a senior at Hwanil High School.