Korean Mnemonics 4: alphabetical order

Almost as though it's a whole different language or something, Korean insists on having its own alphabetical order. Sure, it doesn't have many of the sounds represented by letters in the Roman alphabet, but did they have to make their alphabetical order so hard to memorize? (To be fair, English requires you to learn an entire song to remember its alphabetical order.)

ㄱ ㄲ ㄴ ㄷ ㄸ ㄹ ㅁ ㅂ ㅃ ㅅ ㅆ ㅇ ㅈ ㅉ ㅊ ㅋ ㅌ ㅍ ㅎ

In the transliteration scheme I use, this is basically k (or g), kk, n, d (or t), tt, r, m, b (or p), pp, s, ss, Ø, j, jj, ch, k', t', p', h.

(This is just for initial consonants, not vowels or final consonants. And I don't even understand what it means that there's an alphabetical order for final consonants. And North Korea has its own alphabetical orders! Well, sure. They would. And everything is further complicated by the fact that those letters don't map cleanly onto letters in the English alphabet. It's all kind of... approximate.)

I've seen mnemonics for remembering Korean alphabetical order before, but they don't work for me. My textbook offers this: "Canada lamps are Jackie Churchill and Katie Thomas's parents' hobby." To me, that's about as hard as remembering the string of consonants. (Canada lamps? Jackie Churchill? Katie Thomas?)

Here are the ones I came up with:

Condor mobs just chase kittens to pink heaven.
Canada rumbles—jerks choose kids to put here.
Gandalf rumbas with joy. Champions come to pinch him.

With these, and my textbook's "Canada lamps," the "doubled" consonants are understood to follow the single forms. So, where the order starts with ㄱ ㄲ ㄴ ㄷ ㄸ, the mnemonic starts with one k sound, an n sound, then one d sound. You also have to remember that the aspirated stops—ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ (k', t', p')—come at the end. Oh. And these don't account for the ㅇ/ Ø.  I told you: it's hard.

Real People with Star Wars Names

If you know me, which you do (or don't), you know that I'm into names of made-up people, places, and things. (Read this whole post about my love of made-up words.) Also, if you've ever had the (mis)fortune of sharing an office with me, you know that I don't think very highly of many of the names of characters from the Star Wars universe. It's one of my "charming" things.

As a nomophile, I'm offended by the lack of care with which (it appears) many Star Wars names were crafted. To illustrate the lackluster hodgepodge that is Star Wars naming, take a look at the following list. Half of these are names of actual Star Wars characters, and half are names I made up in three seconds. Can you tell which is which?

1. Sio Bibble
2. Frik Tingo
3. Gobb Goon
4. Lok Durd
5. Glu Tranta
6. Poggle the Lesser
7. Joclad Danva
8. Sy Snootles
9. Sprut Wykoochis
10. Dwar-kar Yambri

(The real ones: 1, 4, 6, 7, 8. If you identified the right ones, you should probably find other movies to watch.)

With all that in mind, please enjoy this list of real people who could (or should!) be Star Wars characters.

• Sepp Blatter (scandal-tarnished FIFA president; second-string podracer pilot)
• Fee Waybill (frontman of the Tubes; shaggy Mos Eisley Cantina patron)
• Trent Lott (thankfully former US senator; crummy bounty hunter)
• Reince Priebus (chairman of the Republican National Committee; Death Star janitor droid)
• Bob Balaban (beloved character actor; minor Jedi from an obscure planet)

Do you know more Star Wars people stranded in the real world? Let me know.

Flap Songs

I never realized how interested in flaps and flapping I am. I've been collecting things like this for a while, it turns out. Everyone needs a hobby, I guess. There's just something about this one little speech sound that seems to open a window into what we're doing when we talk. Or in this case, when we sing. Right now I want to talk about songs with inconsistent flapping. (You all know what I'm talking about by now, don't you? See this post about Flaps and NPR for some background.)

On the Rolling Stones 1978 single "Shattered" we get a whole lecture on the sociological essence of flapping. Or... something. Throughout the song, Mick flaps his t's. Shattered, tattered, battered, chitter chatter, party, dirty, I can't give it away, what a mess, does it matter?: he flaps in all of these, like the New Yorker he's personifying. (In the whole piece, I counted one place where Mick doesn't flap: listen at :58 and you'll hear the repeated Yiddish shmatte shmatte shmatte! with aspirated t's.) But the backing vocals (by Ronnie Wood and... whoever?) are a different story. These guys stubbornly refuse to flap. It can first be heard clearly around :22 and really stands out around 2:40. It's as though they're holding on to their Englishness, aspirating t's all over the place, while Mick goes native, belting out his ambivalent ode to the Big Apple right over them. The result is so discordant, almost like they're singing two different songs at once.

Everything is ordinary, flap-wise, in Heart's blistering 1977 classic rock standard, "Barracuda." Until the 1:30 mark, that is, when Ann Wilson doesn't flap the d in barracuda! That is a full-on d! (Compare this with the flapped barracudas at :40 and 2:48.) I know! That d always strikes me as a jolt of childlike innocence in the center of a scathing takedown. It's... Well, it's pretty remarkable.

















Now, I don't know what to say about "The Authority Song," John C. Mellencamp's 1983 anthem to underdogism. In the chorus Mellencamp tells us, "I fight authority; authority always wins" 13 times. And, strangely, in seven of those instances, he aspirates the t in the first authority, but flaps the t as expected in the second. (In other words, using the same simplified transcription I used in the NPR post linked to above, a little more than half the time, he says, "I fight authoriTy; authoriDy always wins.") It's like he's fighting himself. Fascinating. Listen to all the pairs and see for yourself. :42 (one aspirated t, one flap), :48 (again, one of each), 1:00 (both authorities are flapped), 1:37 (one of each), 1:43 (one of each), 1:56 (both flapped), 2:35 (one of each), 2:42 (both flapped), 2:54 (both flapped), 3:00 (one of each), 3:06 (both flapped), 3:18 (both flapped), and 3:25 (one of each).

I don't know how everyone doesn't hear this stuff. I can't not hear it. It jumps out at me and says, "Listen up!"

Addendum: Here's a fun article about analyzing the Southern Californian "punk rock" accent. Tip of the tongue to Torque for the link.

What Does Korean Sound Like?

This is, of course, only my impression. I assume different people—depending on their level of familiarity with Korean (or on their own aesthetics)—see it differently. And I acknowledge that all kinds of cultural beliefs can color how we perceive other languages. We English speakers are told practically from the cradle that German sounds harsh and aggressive and that French sounds beautiful. If we'd never been exposed to those stereotypes, would we come up with them on our own? I don't know. But I doubt those language attitudes would be as nearly universal (among Americans, as least) as they are.

Anyway!

To me, Korean can be described by the following words:

• Whitewater (flowing, but turbulent)
• Masculine
• Chunky (?)
• Woody (??)
• Forthright (???)

Korean is beautiful, but not pretty. It is not airy and light on its feet, but weighty and deliberate. It doesn't chase butterflies, but describes them from a stony perch.

I admit this sounds a lot like the "joke" about overly impressionistic descriptions of wine—it's a reckless little red with a hint of cedar and a butterscotch finish—but I think it's the best I can do.

Word Watch: calm and palm

Am I hearing things? For the past few years, I could swear I've been hearing more and more people pronounce the L in the words calm and palm. Have you heard this, too? The words coming out as "callm" and "pallm" and not "com" and "pom"? I'm not positive, but I think I've also heard the L creep into the pronunciation of folk, as well, yielding "follk" and not the familiar "foke." (I think I can confidently say I've never heard yolk as anything other than "yoke.")

At first I thought this was the result of the same kind of... I guess we can call it litterization (a word I think I just coined, which means "pronouncing things they way they're spelled") that leads to the pronunciation of volatile as vo-luh-tile, which I've heard plenty of times. But where volatile is a fairly uncommon word in speech—we can easily imagine someone who hasn't encountered it in the wild—the same can't be said for calm, palm, or folk. These are everyday kinds of words, so I'm not sure what has rendered their pronunciation so unstable, if, in fact, it is.

Clearly I need a grant to study this further.

Ripped from the Headlines: Americans are lazy jerks

On p. 23 of today's (May 10, 2015) New York Times Magazine, we see the perfect expression of the kind of linguistic insecurity/chauvinism discussed in this blog post. In "How to Fake a British Accent" we are reminded that Americans are lazy (they "have particularly lazy tongue tips"), that Americans need to "clearly enunciate consonants," and that Americans "run words together." We also learn such bizarrities as the fact that "Americans speak with wide, almost grinlike mouths." (Could the dialect coach quoted in the piece simply be unfamiliar with the sight of people... smiling?)

First, this kind of generalization is (always) silly: Americans hold their mouths this way; Southerners speak slowly; Spanish-speakers always talk so fast! No. They don't. More important, I think, is the need to dispel the idea that American speech is the result of laziness. This has been common knowledge (that is, commonly believed but false) for a long time now.

(Remember the business about flaps in that NPR post linked to above? Most varieties of American English are more particular than the classic British "Received Pronunciation" English the thing in the Times Magazine is talking about. The phonological rules about all those t's, d's, and flaps depend on niceties that RP doesn't even notice. (USA! USA!) And you know what else? Those sounds in the middle of the word butter when spoken American-style aren't d's, you people who wrote the piece!)

Can we move past the idea that the British are the ones who naturally, innately, inevitably do language right? According to this piece, Brits even place an "infinitesimal space" around each word, as though each one were a precious bead on a chain. (How much do you want to bet a sound spectrograph would put the lie to that claim? Do people still use sound spectrographs?) Sorry, British people. You're just like the rest of us ugly clods—you run your words together, and you're stuck with the same imperfect equipment the riffraff use.

Favorite Words 3: Korean

우울하다 (uulhada "be glum") seems almost perfect to me. Actually, oo-ool-hada is probably a clearer way of transliterating it. (The verb 하다 [hada "to make or do"] is a common suffix that turns nouns into verbs.) It can't just be me who sees in this word a gloomy owl drooping on a branch, hooting into the lonely night. You see it, too, don't you? I think it might be impossible to forget this word. To my ears, it doesn't have an especially Korean feel, so I guess I have to take off a few points, but it still scores very highly.

The Danger of Dictionaries

This isn't a post about the illusion of linguistic authority, although that sounds like a good theme. Probably a better theme than what I'm going for here: the shortcomings of dictionaries and automatic translation. Everyone knows not to trust Google Translate too far. But we probably shouldn't trust the dictionaries and translator apps on our phones too much, either. (I'm guessing the dictionaries, with their fewer moving parts, are more trustworthy.) I rely on my apps, turning to them when I work on my Korean homework, or try to pick apart a phrase I've finally begun to understand in a K-pop song, or can't remember some Korean verb. And here are some examples of what my dictionary app has given me:

Fig. 1: Slocum?

Fig. 2: Yes. Of course.

Fig. 3: I... see.

뵙다 doesn't actually mean Slocum. I'm not sure anything in Korean means Slocum. (To be fair, very little in English means Slocum, either.) 뵙다 (poepta) means "to see or meet an honored person" and is part of Korea's intricate system of respectful and humbling words and grammar. Which brings us to figure 2 and 높임말 (nop'immal "elevated speech"). I wasn't sure how to spell it, but I was almost positive it didn't mean "raising horses." (Yes, it has something to do with being elevated, and 말 does mean "horse"—along with "speech"—but come on!)

And then there's figure 3. No wonder learning Korean is so difficult! Apparently I don't even know English! Slantindicular? Like... slanted?

I'm sure I'll dig up more hi-larious examples of this stuff. And when I do, don't you worry—I'll share them here.





Addendum (5/25/15): And here's another one.

Fig. 4

겁. You know. "Cowardice." Okay. Or "fear." Oh, you mean, like, recreancy? Sure, or recreancy. Good, good. Okay. Got it.



















Addemdum (6/13/15): This one's from a different dictionary app.

Fig. 5

I don't think 사랑한, from 사랑하다 (to love), means "The Ballerina Who Loves," although I'm sure that's a great movie.




















Addendum (7/15/15): Some more.

Fig. 6

While I wasn't sure what 경이 meant (see figure 6), I was almost positive it didn't mean "The next timeSer Meryn speaks,."

Fig. 7

Another example of these dictionaries teaching me as much English as Korean. I just thought I was checking to see whether this word is spelled 체육관 or 채육관—I'm probably going to have to check it every time—and I stumbled on to the lovely palaestra.

















Addendum (9/28/15): Two bizarrities for the price of one.

Fig. 8

Fig. 9

I couldn't quite remember the word 움지기다 (to move), and when I entered what would have been the adjectival version of the word (if the word had been 음지기다 instead), I got these two different examples of gibberish: Sadness and gladness succeed each other even greater increases in per capita and Tone-deaf. Standardized tests. Two glorious gems of timeless wisdom. They belong in a fortune cookie. It makes you wonder what other horizon-exploding insights are hidden inside the mind of this dictionary, when entering a nonword yields stuff like this.