Korean language

“ All the narratives of events, except those of the most recent date, which have been written by foreigners, have, of necessity, been lacking in that intimate acquaintance with the Korean language, institutions, customs, and the temperament and spirit of the people, which is the indispensable equipment of the historian. ”

“ Very recently, however, the difficulties of map making have been considerably lessened through the efforts of students of the Korean language, who have developed exact systems of transliteration, by the application of which the sounds of Korean proper names may be correctly expressed in our own letters. At the present day it would seem possible, therefore, to fix, by common consent, upon a general, systematic orthography for Korean proper names, to be used upon the charts prepared by all those nations employing Roman letters ”

“ Korean is an agglutinative, polysyllabic language whose development is marvellously complete and symmetrical. We find no such long lists of exceptions as those which entangle the student of the Indo-European languages. In Korean as in most of the Turanian languages the idea of gender is very imperfectly developed, which argues perhaps a lack of imagination. The ideas of person and number are largely left to the context for determination, but in the matter of logical sequence the Korean verb is carried to the extreme of development. ”

“ One of the most interesting things in connection with this modern movement of Korean Buddhism, and one which seems to show that it has real vitality, is the fact that Buddhist books for common reading are being printed. Most Korean books are printed in Chinese characters and are thus sealed to the common people; they can be read only by scholars or people of considerable education. Yet Korea is said to have invented one of the most perfect systems of writing that the world has seen. It is known as the on-mun and is competent to write the language perfectly and easily. ”

“ However that may be, he solved the difficulty by leaping over the mud wall that separated them and gained her promise to become his wife, which promise she fulfilled after he had led an army against the usurper and driven him from the throne. Korean poetry is all of a lyric nature. There is nothing in the nature of an epic. The language does not lend itself to that form of expression. It is all nature music, pure and simple. It is all passion, sensibility, emotion. ”

“ It has been well said that the test of a man's knowledge of a foreign language is his ability to understand the jokes in that language. So I should say that to know a people's life we must understand their folk-lore. The back attic of Korean folk-lore is filled with a very miscellaneous collection, for the same family has occupied the house for forty centuries and there never has been an auction. ”

“ They never talk politics, it is too dangerous, but retail the latest gossip of the court or city and the witticisms attributed to great men, and tell, hear, and invent news. The front rooms of houses in which the men live are open freely to all comers. In some circles, though it is said to a far less extent than formerly, men meet and talk over what we should call “questions of literary criticism,” compare poetic compositions, the ability to compose a page of poetry being the grand result of Korean education, and discuss the meaning of celebrated works—all literature being in Chinese. ”

“ In the first place, it is the experience of those who have had to do with the various peoples of the Far East that it is easier to understand the Korean and get close to him than it is to understand either the Japanese or the Chinese. He is much more like ourselves. You lose the sense of difference very readily, and forget that he is a Korean and not a member of your own race. ”

“ Abstract qualities embodied in human form are unknown to the Korean, but his refined taste enjoys whatever thought and labour have made charming to the eye by its suggestion of pleasing images to the imagination. His art is decorative, not creative or ideal. His choice pieces of bric-a-brac may be rougher and coarser than those of Japan, but their individuality is as strongly marked as that of the Chinese, while the taste displayed is severer than that of the later Japanese. ”

“ They have a number of peculiar, picturesque customs in connection with “Crossing the Bridges,” but I fancy that with both men and women it is more an excuse for a night out than anything else.
The Koreans are even more impersonal than the Chinese. The Japanese are intensely personal. The Korean is impersonal in business, and impersonal in pleasure. He feasts with other men, and mingles with other men in all his amusements, but his interest is absorbed by his surroundings, and not by his companions. ”

“ Korean has no dialects. There are different brogues, and a Seoul man can generally detect by a man's speech from what province he comes; but it would be wide of the truth to assert that Koreans from any part of the country could not readily understand each other. ”

“ It is not strange that the Korean populace is Korean still, when it suddenly takes to some new kind of reform, or adopts some new kind of religion. Such strong and contradictory, and even convulsive, reactions characterize the native in his politics, his morals, his religion, and his behavior generally. ”

“ It cannot be said that the Korean is lacking in the aesthetic instinct, but its development has been narrow. There has been no scientific development in their art, no formulation of aesthetic laws, no intermixture of a rational or regulative method. The statement that there is a pronounced arithmetical element in music, that geometry is essential to successful landscape gardening or that a knowledge of conic sections is essential to bridgebuilding, would arouse only mirth in the Korean. ”

“ As for Korean gentlewomen, they are skilled in Korean music, in Chinese and Korean literature. They are unsurpassed mistresses of the needle, more than able with the brush, and thoroughly acquainted with every detail of the complicated Korean etiquette. They are deft in the nice ceremonies of the toilet. They know the histories of Korea, of China, and perhaps of Japan. They are familiar with their own folk-lore, and can repeat it glibly and picturesquely. They are nurses and mothers and wives by nature, and wives, mothers, nurses, and accoucheuses by training. ”

“ They touch the Korean at every point in life, making his well-being depend on a continual series of acts of propitiation, and they avenge every omission with merciless severity, keeping him under this yoke of bondage from birth to death. ”

“ But, even in its infancy, through the long years of its magnificent splendour, and in these days of its decay or of trance, Korean art always has had, and has, a marked individuality, and bears the indubitable hall-mark of genuine originality. ”

“ Introspection, and the study of other men, are seldom or never methods of Korean self-entertainment. Nature is after all the greatest entertainer of the Koreans; and to study Nature, to watch her, and to fall more and more deeply in love with her, is a Korean’s greatest amusement. ”

“ In thou- sands they waylay the traveller as he leaves his home, beside him, behind him, dancing in front of him, whirring over his head, crying out upon him from earth, air, and water. They are numbered by thousands of billions, and it has been well said that their ubiquity is an unholy travesty of the Divine Omnipresence.4 This belief, and it seems to be the only one he has, keeps the Korean in a perpetual state of nervous appre- hension, it surrounds him with indefinite terrors, and it may truly be said of him that he "passes the time of his sojourning here in fear." ”

“ Intrinsically and potentially the Korean is a man of high intellectual possibilities, but he is, superficially, what he is by virtue of his training and education. Take him out of this environment, and give him a chance to develop independently and naturally, and you would have as good a brain as the Far East has to offer.
Korea is a good illustration of the great influence which environment exerts upon a people's mental and moral characteristics. I am not sure that the conservatism of either the Korean or the Chinese is a natural characteristic. ”

“ When called upon to work—manfully, faithfully, persistently, doing with his might what his hand [339] finds to do—the Korean, like the Indian babu, is likely to show that his modern education has the more unfitted, rather than the better fitted, him for the effectual service of his country. If this should be the result of modern education, it would be scarcely more to be commended, under existing conditions in Korea, than was the education of the old-time Confucian schools. ”

“ It may be said with considerable truth that the whole literature of Korea, as of China, is history and belles lettres. The practical side of life is hardly touched upon. To be sure, there are countless aphorisms, and moral essays of an academic character are most common, but these in their practical bearing on the Chinese or Korean mind are no more than mere polite literature, and are always perused as such. ”

“ There are no exceptions. Any typical Korean verb can be conjugated through its thousand different forms without finding the least change in the stem of the word. A comparison of Korean with Manchu discloses at once a family likeness, and at the same time a comparison of Korean with the Dravidian dialects discloses a still closer kinship. It is an interesting fact that none of the Chinese dialects possess any of the distinctive features of this Turanian family. There is more similarity between Chinese and English than between Chinese and any of the Turanian languages. ”

“ The air of the men has under- gone a subtle but real change, and the women, though they nominally keep up their habit of seclusion, have lost the hang- dog air which distinguishes them at home. The suspicious- ness and indolent conceit, and the servility to his betters, which characterize the home-bred Korean have very generally given place to an independence and manliness of manner rather British than Asiatic. ”

“ Even if one were blind, he would learn from the Korean's delighted exclamations while on the road, from his heart that speaks in his face, from his poetry and folklore, from the habits of travellers and even from the common burden bearers who are cultured to enjoy, how fair is nature and how lovely is the landscape to the native. ”

“ The Korean is your true lover of springtime. The harshness of his winter is mitigated by no glowing hearth or cosey chimney-corner. Winter means to him a dungeon, twelve by eight, dark, dirty, poisonous. Spring means to him emancipation, breathing space, pure pleasure,—animal pleasure, if you will,—but the touch of spring affects him to the finger-tips and makes his senses " stir with poetry as leaves with summer wind." He is simply irrepressible. He must have song.
One branch of Korean classical music deals with convivial songs. ”

“ The Koreans, who had borne on the whole quietly the ascendency of a hated power, the murder of their Queen, and the practical imprisonment of their King, found the at- tack on their hair more than they could stand. The topknot is more to a Korean than the queue is to a Chinese. ”

“ The same is true in China. There is no conservatism that will stand out against self-interest.
And here we touch a second characteristic of the Korean. It cannot be truthfully said that the Korean is niggardly. It has been the opinion of most who have had intimate dealings with him that he is comparatively generous. He is generally lavish with his money when he has any, and when he has none he is quite willing to be lavish with some one else's money. ”

“ There may be a rare man in foreign dress, but even the native pastors almost all wisely cling to the flowing native garb of snow-white grass-cloth, so much more comfortable and becoming to Koreans. The men squat on one side, the women on the other, with the children in front between them, and seldom do they rise at all during the service, but merely bow their heads to the floor to pray. Now and again they sing one of our old familiar hymn tunes, with Korean words, in loud, metallic voices. ”

“ The so-called mixed script in which the daily papers are printed can be read by very many ladies, for it requires no knowledge of the Chinese idiom, but only the meaning of some eighteen hundred characters. The native Korean writing, of which we speak at length elsewhere, is often called the "ladies' writing." ”

“ MUSIC AND POETRY
IN spite of the evidence to the contrary borne to our ears on every summer breeze, Korean music is not a myth. The sounds seem peculiar and far from pleasing, because we do not bring to them the Korean temperament and training, but the more artificial Western ear. We complain because they do not " keep time " ”

“ On approaching his village he was met with flags and music, the headman and villagers, even the women in gay apparel, going out to welcome him. After this success he was entitled to erect a tall pole, with a painted dragon upon it, in front of his house. Success was, however, very costly, and often hung the millstone of debt round a man’s neck for the remainder of his life. After “passing” the student became eligible for official position, the sole object of ambition to an “educated” Korean. ”

“ Seated on the rocks along the shore were white objects resembling pelicans or penguins, but as white objects with the gait of men moved in endless procession to and fro between old and new Fusan, I assumed that the seated objects were of the same species. The Korean makes upon one the impression of novelty, and while resembling neither the Chinese nor the Japanese, he is much better-looking than either, and his physique is far finer than that of the latter. ”