For two Koreas, a quest for a united language
North and South are divided over words' meanings
SEOUL -- If a South Korean asks a North Korean how he is doing, the response will probably be ``ilupsopneda," which literally means ``not much." It is the North Korean equivalent of ``I'm fine, thanks."
Many South Koreans attempting a casual chat have been taken aback by this response, and perhaps have formed a stereotypical view that North Koreans are rather blunt neighbors . In the South, the Korean expression means: ``Mind your own business!"
After six decades of living separated across a tightly sealed border, South and North Koreans find themselves divided by what used to be a common language, so much so that a person from one side often gets bewildered, amused, and even mistakenly angered by what a person from the other side says.
When a North Korean says squid, it means octopus in the South; when a South Korean says octopus, it means squid in the North. A word common on both sides, ``mije," means ``American imperialist" in the North and ``Made in the U S A " in the South.
It is enough of a problem that authorities in both Koreas are bypassing their political differences and are compiling a joint dictionary of the Korean language, their first attempt to prevent their languages from drifting further apart.
``Our dictionary is not meant to replace dictionaries or established grammar in the North and South. Nevertheless, it represents our efforts to rediscover our common linguistic roots in preparation for reunification," said Lee Jae Kyu, secretary general of a South Korean government panel of linguists involved in the seven-year compilation of the joint dictionary.
What used to be a single nation was divided into the Communist North and the capitalist South at the end of World War II, and so was the language. Two million military personnel, barbed wire fences, and minefields seal off the border. Both sides jam each other's radio signals. Watching television, reading literature, and communicating with people from the other side used to be a serious crime in the South and still is in the North.
After such a divide, the task of compiling a unified dictionary bristles with linguistic minefields sown in the days of Cold War confrontation.
What should be done with the word ``sooryong," for example? In the North, the word is honorific, only applied to the regime's leader, Kim Jong Il. In the South, it is slightly derogatory, meaning the head of any political faction, clique, or even gang of bandits.
What about ``pukgoe?" A term listed in every South Korean dictionary, it means ``North Korean puppet regime."
When North Korean defectors are asked to go ``shopping" after they arrive in the South, they don't know what that English word means. South Koreans puzzle over what North Koreans mean by a ``vehicle that goes straight up after takeoff," when the simple English word ``helicopter" will do.
``We negotiate and leave out words with too much of a political problem," Lee said. ``We will also leave out many of the foreign words South Koreans have indiscriminately adopted."
``We hope to compile a 300,000-word joint dictionary by 2012," he added.
People from the Koreas can understand each other to a large degree because sentence structures and basic vocabulary remain the same. Still, they have diverged, linguists say, in grammar and vocabulary over the decades.
