An essay dated June 9, 2019.
Through a discussion of the poverty of the Korean language, dependence on Chinese characters and Sino-derived vocabulary, the creation of Hangul, and Japan’s role in spreading it, this piece argues that abandoning one’s own words had a profound effect on culture.
By examining names, vocabulary, education, and cultural formation, it sharply probes the historical characteristics of the Korean Peninsula.

2019-06-09
The names of present-day Koreans are “Shina-style names,” and about a thousand years ago they had already long since undergone “sōshi-kaimei.”
This harmful effect of “having abandoned their language” can be explained through an example like this.

What follows is the continuation of the previous chapter.
The unnaturalness of crying “aigō.”
What is important in speaking about Korea is the “poverty of its language.”
This too is greatly different from Japan.
The only culture Korea had within the “Chinese-barbarian order” was “an imitation of China.”
They brought in Chinese characters, brought in Sino-derived words, and because they valued them too much, they lost almost all of Korea’s original words.
This can be called a rare case even in the world.
For example, even though the Philippines was occupied by Spain and taught Spanish, and then occupied by America and taught English, it did not abandon its own language, Tagalog.
The Korean people, as soon as they were culturally encroached upon by the neighboring country called Shina, voluntarily threw away all of their own culture.
As a result, almost none of their original language remains today.
It is not even known at all what sort of names people in the past used to give.
The names of present-day Koreans are “Shina-style names,” and about a thousand years ago they had already long since undergone “sōshi-kaimei.”
This harmful effect of “having abandoned their language” can be explained through an example like this.
For example, when sad, a Japanese person does not merely express it by saying “sad,” but has many different ways of expression, such as “waaaan waaaan,” or “eeen eeen,” or “meso meso.”
But these Koreans even cry in Chinese characters.
How do they cry?
They cry, “aigō, aigō.”
This is strange.
Because “aigō” means “to wail in grief, or that crying voice.”
In other words, they cry by saying “crying voice, crying voice.”
They cannot express even one of the Japanese forms such as “meso meso,” “shiku shiku,” or “waa waa.”
Having even lost the original words that once existed, they suffer from an absolute shortage of vocabulary.
Even “thank you” is substituted with the Sino-derived expression “gansha.”
Professor Hiroshi Furuta of the University of Tsukuba has been diligently digging up ancient Korean words, but only 180 words have been found.
Koreans are extremely constrained in language.
Culture cannot be cultivated without language.
That is why one can even say that Korea has no culture at all.
Then in the 15th century, King Sejong, the fourth king of the Yi Dynasty of Korea, created ŏnmun, or Hangul.
Because education would not spread if there were only Chinese characters, he devised it by imitating Japanese kana.
However, it did not spread very much.
That was because the yangban, the ruling class who used Chinese characters and Sino-derived words as authority, resisted it.
Because writing was linked to social rank, the literacy rate was low.
So Yukichi Fukuzawa sent his disciple Kakugorō Inoue to Korea and had him devote himself to spreading the Hangul language.
After the annexation of Korea, the Government-General of Korea built elementary schools and at the same time spread Hangul through an orthographic standard called “The Ŏnmun Spelling Method for Ordinary Schools” (1912).
It was the Japanese who established Hangul.
But even so, vocabulary was lacking.
To begin with, because the Shina language on which Hangul is based also lacked vocabulary, Shina could not respond to the concepts of modern society and imported from Japan such words as “democracy,” “republicanism,” “society,” and “joint-stock company.”
All the more so in Korean culture, which is a culture based on the Chinese characters of Shina, vocabulary is even more insufficient.
Koreans are often said to be short-tempered and quick to flare up, but there are linguists who say that at the root of that lies the frustration of “not being able to get one’s meaning across” caused by a shortage of vocabulary.
To be continued.