I've talked before about how, at the deepest levels of its structure, Korean is like mirror English, built in a way that seems backward to an English speaker. Today I want to mention some trivial—but still interesting—examples of "backwardness."
Look at the English words onion and green onion. The way the English lexicon works, big round onions are basic. Those things are called by one simple word: onion. The long-stemmed type of onion that isn't round and bulbous is treated as a special variety of that larger category: a green onion. It won't surprise you to learn that Korean does it the other way around.
In Korean, the long-stemmed green thing is called 파 (p'a), and the big, round thing is 양파 (yangp'a). It's backwards! The Korean lexicon treats the long-stemmed thing as the default, the basic exemplar of the category, and it's the big, round thing that's a different version of that. (It would be like English saying "chive" and "big, round chive." In other words: chaos.)
It's the same thing with the words for "expensive" and "inexpensive." (There might very well be hundreds—thousands!—of examples like this. These are the only two I can think of at the moment. With a bigger vocabulary I'm sure I could come up with more.) In English the basic state is expensiveness, and we modify it to negate it: in + expensive. Korean is the other way around: the more basic form is 싼 (ssan "inexpensive"), and the marked form is 비싼 (pissan "expensive"). So it's like having the basic form in English be cheap, with the standard way of referring to something that isn't cheap as uncheap.
I'm not pretending that this means anything, other than that different languages encode these things differently. I don't know whether this different encoding actually leads to different attitudes or perceptions—I assume it doesn't—but I still think it's interesting.
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