Don’t look up your favourite 漢字 dictionary, it ain’t in there… tasha means Tiger in… Jürchen! Okay, in Manchu, too, since it’s basically the same language. But that script is disturbing for a sinogram-litterate person… Still, very nice.

At least for mobile phones. Look at that:

成三問 would be proud. The vowel part is especially good. Love it.

This is my sister-in-law’s phone, which I commandeer when in Seoul. But the whole family seems to have the same phone

This reeks of machine translation. Like, very. But the part that held my eye is this:

1. 酒后, which is simplified characters for [飮]酒後, ie after drinking. The thing is, 后, as in 皇后, means queen. But since there’s no such thing anymore at ChinkaRed Central [hello 溥儀], and it is pronounced as 後, “after”, and mucho simpler to write, the Commies in charge of destroying the culture and the language decided that it would mean after from now on. Ah Goody!

If it wasn’t so fucking sad, I’d laugh…

Once in a while we need some erudition, just to make sure the ole chatterbox doesn’t go to waste… The Missus and I just came back from a visit to me ma’s, where most of my academic stuff is stashed quasi-permanently. I was browsing some of my old loves, when I stumbled upon a copy of the 蒙語老乞大 [copies of the 老乞大 usually are published back to back with copies of the 朴通事, but this one came instead with a copy of the 飜譯老乞大 [”translated 老乞大”, ie from the original Chinese into Korean], which made binding this book an interesting task: while old crap in the Chinese world was written top to bottom, and right to left, Mongol was written top to bottom, and left to right. So while the copy of the 飜譯老乞大 starts from the [as a Westerner] “last” page, the 蒙語老乞大 starts from “our” first page. You read this book from both ends, which is quite entertaining…

Anyway, that thing, 蒙語老乞大, was published in the mid 18th Century [around 1741] by the 司譯院, the government branch that trained interpretors in the four predominant foreign languages: Chinese, Japanese, Mongol and Manchu. Needless to say, the corpus and methods didn’t exactly vary, which is great for research purposes, since you can pretty much rely on most documents to be identical, save for the foreign language. Here’s a page [the first one, as a good student I have learnt that you always start with page 1] from the 蒙語老乞大:

click on the image to see a mucho larger version

The first column on the left is the title, in Chinese, duh, then small sentences in the uighur mongol script and the transliteration side by side, and the translation in Korean below. This is extremely interesting material, since it gives us not only a glimpse in 18th Century written Korean, but also a hint on the pronounciation of 한글 syllables back then. Consider this as a late Rosetta stone.

Example:

This is the first sentence. The second word, abaɣai, is transcribed as 아바개, which implies that 애 was pronounced as a diphtong back then [ie 아이].

Another interesting bit in the use of 한글 as a transliteration tool is the appearance of non-regular forms, at least things deemed “impossible” while writing proper Korean. Like
쵸
ㅗ
for a long [cho:]. I’ve seen actually more [in numbers and diversity] in Japanese texts, but there are a few odd ones still. The 飜譯老乞大, on the other hand, is full of strange combinations, trying to stick as much as possible to the Chinese original, and would make the recent mania of transcribing 北京 as 베이징 and the like laughable. Try ㅊㅠㅕㄴ in one syllable, and you’ll see what I mean. Ah, plus two dots on the left to indicate the tone…

As a bonus, lemme translate this first page, so you get an idea what they were teaching:

1. Big brother, where are you from? [where did you come from?]
2. I came from Chosŏn’s capital.
3. And where are you going now?
4. I am going to Beijing.
5. When did you leave the capital?
6. I left the first day of this month.

That dude sounds like a Seoul cab driver, with all them nosy questions…