[GreenDolphinSys]

> Unlike North Korea, South Korean society extensively uses loanwords in technology, finance, and culture. English-derived words like “computer,” “café,” and “internet” are ubiquitous in the South but virtually unknown in the North, creating challenges for defectors encountering them for the first time.

This is tangential to the topic at hand, but as a Korean learner of ~9 years, it's maddening just how many English loanwords there are. In addition to pure Korean words, there's a surfeit of Sino-Korean (Chinese-derived), or Hanja words. Both of these are beautiful, and then the English loanwords stick out like a sore thumb.

It's trendy to do so, but I think displacing Korean/Sino-Korean vocabulary at this pace is reckless. I think of it as 사대주의 (toadyism) to some degree as well.

---

Some years ago, I went to some cafe and ordered a coffee, like I've done thousands of times here. The employee asked me if I wanted a '디씨' (di-ssi). I had no idea what that was, so I had to ask, and lo and behold: it was shorthand for discount. Discount would be 5 syllables in Korean (디스카운트), an unbelievably long word in a language where most words are 2 syllables.

I was, and am, baffled because Korean already has a serviceable and widely used word that means discount: 할인 (hal-een), which is Sino-Korean (Hanja: 割引). I figure this is some marketing thing, but the same point applies. There are many cases where there's a perfectly capable word that, for seemingly no reason, gets switched out for an English loanword.

Maybe it's to give headaches to anyone trying to learn the language.

[shlewis]

This is an extreme level of pedantry(forgive me), but there is a subtle difference between "DC" and "할인" (and also "세일").

"할인" refers to a wide variety of discounts: it may have a few conditions (minimum quantity, membership, etc.), be available only for a certain period of time, or be a fixed amount or percentage.

"세일" is pretty much the same, although it puts a tiny bit more focus on being a limited-time offer and being percentage-based.

"DC" almost always refers only to a simple, percentage-based discount or rounding down the price. It also sounds much more spontaneous and less formal.

[GreenDolphinSys]

No need for forgiveness, I appreciate the pedantry and explanations. Personal grips aside, I'm forever a student of the language.

[yorwba]

FWIW, North Koreans also use lots of English-derived loanwords for computer topics, but they may be different from those in the south. Some time ago I made a search interface for a North Korean English dictionary if you want to poke around: https://yorwba.github.io/dic.html/ For example, "file" is 화일 (hwail) instead of 파일 (pail).

[GreenDolphinSys]

This is really interesting, thanks for putting it together. I figure for specific topics like computing it's pretty much unavoidable.

[yorwba]

You might also be interested in the writeup by the person who reverse-engineered the original dictionary file format: https://digitalnk.com/blog/2020/05/08/porting-north-korean-d...

[exidy]

I completely understand the sentiment you're expressing here, however if it helps the language you see as a monolithic invader underwent exactly the same process, more than once. If you could go back in time, no doubt a 12th-century Anglo-Saxon would bemoan the influx of Norman French replacing perfectly capable English (Germanic) words.

[cenamus]

To be pedantic, not German, rather words of Germanic origin (or just native Old English words)

[GreenDolphinSys]

It's ironic no doubt to be complaining about this topic, in English. I can empathize with that 12th-century Anglo-Saxon.

[thaumasiotes]

> In addition to pure Korean words, there's a surfeit of Sino-Korean (Chinese-derived), or Hanja words. Both of these are beautiful, and then the English loanwords stick out like a sore thumb.

Any chance the English loanwords stick out to you and the Chinese ones don't because you can recognize English words but not Chinese words?

I can recognize many Sino-Korean words and zero Korean words, so I tend to think of the Sino-Korean words as sticking out.

[GreenDolphinSys]

The Sino-Korean words stand out, but in a beautiful sense to my ears/eyes. It helps that they're generally short at 2 syllables and are represented nicely with the Hangeul script. Given that they make up about 57% of the Korean language [0], they're unavoidable.

English/German loanwords just stick out due to there being fewer of them, and they look atrocious in Hangeul, like little dirt islands in a sea of pure Korean and Sino-Korean words.

Since I study Hanja I imagine Sino-Korean words stick out a bit more for me, but I think anyone who's studied Korean for a while can get a sense of the two major groups. They just sound very different.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Korean_vocabulary

[daemin]

This is the same sort of thing as is happening in other languages such as Polish. Many English loan-words are being used when there exist equivalent Polish words, even on the news broadcast on TV.

[pndy]

I'm baffled that "cel podróży" was replaced with a bizarre "destynacja" from English 'destination'. And it seems it's also being used outside tourism context.

Not mention the infamous "hejter" but so far I don't think there's any good Polish equivalent and people are fine with that loanword - especially politicians.

[t-3]

It happens all the time in English too, not always super broadly though now that English is the lingua franca (and that is a foreign phrase that's aged poorly but has no proper translation!). It's very common to prefer romanized genre names (eg danmei, isekai, xianxia, wuxia) rather than the English equivalents/translations/reverse borrowings.