Comment by yongjik
4 days ago
According to a popular quote, "Languages differ essentially in what they must convey, not in what they may convey."
You can convey relative social position in English, if you want to. You don't have to, if you don't want to.
Korean is different. You have to convey relative social position in basically every sentence because without that you can't finish your main verb.
In English, you can't offend a reasonable person by saying "I heard it's getting hotter today!" or "How big was the pizza?" In Korean, you can. Because there's no socially neutral version of "How big was the pizza" you can use to everyone.
* Well, you may think it's an absurdly cumbersome grammatical system, and in some situations it really is, but generally you get used to, just like English speakers are used to having to know and specify the gender of everyone around them, including cats and dogs, and it generally doesn't cause issues - but then sometimes it does!
> Korean is different. You have to convey relative social position in basically every sentence because without that you can't finish your main verb.
Sure, by the currently recorded official rules of the grammar.
If young Koreans just stop doing it then it will disappear within a decade or two - something only crusty old people bother with. Not that I have any say in such things.
I find the process fascinating though. I like to imagine what English was like when grammatical cases were being dropped from the language. Who decided to drop them and why? Kids being funny? People from different regions having difficulty understanding accents or vowel changes? What would someone at age 50, having used cases their entire life, think about everyone from London or everyone under 20 (or whatever cohort popularized it) when they just said all the words "wrong"? And when chided for speaking incorrectly just shrugged their shoulders and continued doing it?
On the other hand despite everyone agreeing that English spelling royally sucks... no one cares to make major changes to it. Even when writing informally in text messages or whatever. We all just keep going along with the system.
I also wonder how much computers are affecting us. Auto-correction may end up killing some forms of change to language over time. If GUIs and better input methods hadn't been invented so quickly would latin-based languages drop diacritics or consolidate some letter forms? Would languages like Japanese or Chinese have adopted Korean-like writing systems for convenience? Who knows. English dropped some letters because printing press letter sets came from Europe and didn't have those oddball letters. Who knows what technology might have triggered or prevented.
> just like English speakers are used to having to know and specify the gender of everyone around them, including cats and dogs
Welp, you have no idea. In German and in Slavic languages you'd have to know and specify the gender of every single noun. Is a coat the same gender as a beer, or different? Is orange the same gender as capitalism? Every. Single. Noun.
And they have three genders, obviously.