Monday, June 25, 2007
Linguistics question
I have a question for any Korean speakers.... do the charaters that mean "America" or "American" have any instrinsic negative connotation? I know sometimes there are words in languages that connote a negative image just by being those words. I also assume there are some pretty degrading titles for Americans in Korean? ...not trying to say that this is only in Korean, of course.... I know Americans are made fun of everywhere....
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Korean word for America is pronounced as "Mee-Guk". Mi/Mee is actually a Chinese character meaning "beautiful" and Guk is "country-Guk". So when you actually write America or American (Mee-Guk-In, beautiful-country-person) has absolutely no instrinsic negative connotation, perhaps the very opposite. However it is true that there are growing anti-Americanism that overshadows the very 'beautiful' name.
FYI, while Chinese and Korean word for America is 美(Mee)國(Guk), "beautiful country," Japanese word for America is 米國, "rice country." Yet both words have exactly the same pronunciation.
I heard that Japanese too used 美國 for word America, but they changed the first character during World War II, thought that it wasn't appropriate to call their enemy beautiful.
America is called the beautiful country so there are no negative connotations. However, I do know that North Koreans and South Koreans call Americans by a different name. I can't really write the translation into English, but while watching a documentary my dad pointed out how North Koreans prounounce American differently. I do not know if there is a different meaning behind it or if its just a different way of saying it due to the different dialect.
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