2004, Vol.12, No.2

The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.57

pISSN : 1226-4822
https://journal.kci.go.kr/socioling

This paper examines the sentences relevant to Korea which were found in a search of an English-English dictionary to see how they portray Korea. One hundred nineteen sentences were obtained from the CD-ROM version of Collins-Cobuild English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (2001) and they were judged as to whether they present positive, neutral, or negative images. The majority of the sentences (73/119) have neutral portrayals. Among the remaining sentences, 12 are positive and 34 are negative. When the data are sub-categorized into three groups, it becomes obvious what the positive and negative sentences in the data reflect in general. Nine positive sentences out of the total 12 positive ones are relevant to the activities/people of the Republic of Korea. Twenty-four of the negative sentences include the generic expressions of Korea referring to both South and North Korea (e.g., Korean peninsula or Koreans) or phrases referring to North Korea more explicitly. When we look more closely at the negative sentences, it is found that they are mostly related to the political tension or military conflicts between South and North, which happened quite a while ago and which we have fully recovered from. In order to prevent those sentences from leaving a potentially bad imprint on the users of the dictionary, we need to give feedback to the publisher about the results of this line of research and ask them to replace the sentences with positive/neutral sentences when they update the dictionary.

This paper suggests a new direction of making Hangeul names in view of the Hangeul(Korean Alphabet) cultural community. We newly organize the concept and category of Hangeul names which include names of a Chinese character written in Hangeul as much as the names of the original Korean vocabulary. This type of combination produces, for example, from “슬기(seul-gi)” and “지혜(chi-hye)”, “슬지(seul-chi), 슬혜(seul-hye), 기지(ki-chi), 기혜(ki-hye), 지슬(chi-seul), 지기(chi-gi), 혜슬(hye-seul), 혜기(hye-gi)”. Through this method, we will be able to gain the following results: (1) We can make more human names with Hangeul, (2) We will be able to overcome the dichotomy between Chinese characters and Hangeul, (3) We will be able to truly accomplish a cultural community using Hangeul writing system.

This study explores the social, cultural connotations of French personal pronouns. The second person pronoun divides into TU and VOUS. In the past, TU was used when the speaker of high standing calls a person of low birth. VOUS was used by the latter calling the former. Between persons of high rank, VOUS was used reciprocally and between persons of lower classes TU was in the reciprocal usage. At the time of the French Revolution, TU was considered as the real pronoun for the citizens whereas VOUS was rejected as flattering, causing inequality. But a few years later, VOUS began to be used again. The change was made by the way that the use of TU presents familiarity between speaker and hearer, and no more equality. So nowadays, the choice of TU/VOUS depends principally on the horizontal relationship, not on the vertical relationship. Other terms of address like 'Monsieur', 'Madame', 'Mademoiselle', the first name and the last name come join TU/VOUS and make the most appropriate mode to call or indicate persons.