This post is an exploration into a bit of Sino-Korean etymology and usage of certain vocabulary.

On the 22nd I wrote about the use of F in place of 4 on elevator keypads, even when it comes to Braille. Zrv made a good point about the pronunciation of 四 and 死, both 사 (sa) in Korean. From his comment:

I think it’s really not accurate to say that the homophones in this case are in a “foreign language”. Sino-Korean words are as much Korean as Latin-English words (like “very”) or Franco-English words (like “enter”) are English.

That’s absolutely true. While a Cantonese speaker would likely understand much of what was said around them while in Seoul, it’s all still Korean.

However, aware of the 죽다 verb form that’s most commonly used for “to die”, I wanted to look into the homophones. The question I left in the comments is this: By modern standards, can we consider ‘death’ and ‘four’ homophonous in Korean if 죽다 is the preferred word?

Continue reading →

Koreans, like many Chinese, have a superstition about the number 4. In Chinese it’s because 四(4) and 死(death) are both pronounced “si”. In Korean, it’s because in Chinese they’re pronounced the same. The Sino-Korean pronunciation of both is 사. In native Korean, 4 is 넷 and “to die” is 죽다, though a Sinitic-root verb also exists, 사망하다. At any rate, anyone I ever asked about this gave the answer that it’s considered unlucky because of how it’s pronounced in Chinese, not in Korean.

As a result of this, and like in China, many Korean elevators lack a 4th floor. Most often it’s replaced with ‘F’ on the button. I don’t think I ever saw a lift that simply skipped 4 as they often* do in China.

Digging through some photos of the past year, I came across one of an elevator panel that I found a little curious. Here’s the photo, scaled down a bit.

For floors 3-5, the buttons read as follows:
3 ⠼⠉
F ⠴⠋
5 ⠼⠑

Note the difference in the first letter in F as compared to 3 and 5. In Korean Braille, ⠼ is the marker to show that the following glyphs are numbers. Also, consistent with many other languages written in Braille, ⠉ is 3 and ⠑ is 5. 4 is actually ⠙ and if it were a number, ⠋ would be 6. But in the second line, ⠋ is preceded by ⠴. That glyph, ⠴, is actually called 영어표. That is, it’s the thing that marks the following letters as English. ⠋ then corresponds to the English letter F.

It baffles me a bit that a superstitious homophone in a foreign language requires a remedy in another foreign language, when they could just write 4 and call it 넷.

- – -
* I once lived in an apartment building that numbered the floors 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 … 11, 12, 15, 16 …, probably to accommodate the triskaidekaphobic foreigners who lived there.

relevant links:
- Site in Korean w/ the full alphabet
- More limited Wikipedia site, but in Engish

I’m cooking a lot these days. A lot. Like 小笼包 from scratch including gelatinising homemade broth and rolling out dumpling skins. Leaving no stone unturned in the world that is Chinese cuisine, I went ahead and picked up a moon cake (月饼 yuèbǐng) mould. It’s only just now 春节 so I figure I have 7 or 8 months to get really good at this.

Continue reading →

While in Taiwan last August, I stocked up on some Mandarin reading material. In Seoul, you can buy books in Chinese, but a 3元 ($0.47) paperback will have been marked up to ₩20,000 ($17.42) by the time it hits the shelves at the local Kyobo. I just can’t bring myself to spend $18 on a book that screams 50¢ on the cover.

Continue reading →