Our instructor then made the most remarkable claim, “This character was invented by the Koreans, and doesn’t exist in any other language.” That is an interesting thing to say about a character which is the most frequently used character in the Chinese language. In Japanese, it is also very often used, especially in the creation of adjectives.

The character 的 is the #1 most frequent character in Chinese, according to the two frequency lists found in James Dew’s 6000 Chinese Words: A Vocabulary Frequency Handbook and from an old 1980 sample it is again #1 with 83,0302 hits out of a total sample size of 21,629,376 (I found this in Yin Binyong’s Modern Chinese Characters).

Anyways, my instructor backed off when two of us mentioned that the Chinese and Japanese languages also use the character but he still claimed that, “The Koreans invented the character, and perhaps the Chinese imported it.” That is really interesting! There are certainly lots of Chinese characters that the Japanese invented (国字 or 和製漢字) See the large and small online dictionaries of such characters for some examples. So surely there are Chinese characters that the Koreans invented?

First thing I did was check my two classical Chinese dictionaries (古汉语常用字字典 and 古代汉语词典) neither of which have an entry for 的 with the most common modern pronunciation of “de” but do have entries for “di” which is used, among other things in the character’s other meaning of “target” (まと in Japanese). Both dictionaries list it, with a number of different meanings, including 明，鲜明, which is found in Confucian classics like the Doctrine of the Mean and the Book of Rites. There are also some half a dozen other definitions and their references in various classics. Similar list in the massive 辞海 dictionary. In the classical Japanese 古語辞典 I have there are two entries which include 的：的然 (found in 太平記) and 的伝 (found in in some book I can’t even write). Its meaning as target is also listed.

Also by searching for 的 in the 大辞林 dictionary at Asahi.com, all of the major definitions, including its primary use in Japanese for creating adjectives (「名詞およびそれに準ずる語に付いて、形容動詞の語幹をつくる」) are said to have come from sayings found in Song and Yuan (Mongols) period China, later to develop its use as the english “-tic” in the Meiji period. (「もと中国、宋・元の俗語で「の」の意味を表す助辞であったものを、明治以降、英語の -tic を有する形容詞の訳語に用いたことに始まる」） Now we are getting close to a claim that the Japanese took one use of it from Chinese (the use which corresponds to の which is now the most common use of it in Chinese) and then adopted this use of it to form the “-tic” of English in the Meiji period. If this is true, we are getting closer to a claim that the Japanese introduced it to Korea in or after the Meiji period…as they did hundreds of other nouns like phone, rights, and countless other compounds. Unless, of course, the Koreans did the same independently.

Well, I haven’t looked into any of the library’s professional dictionaries, since I just wanted a short 1 hour break from my history reading and made use of what I had on the shelf and online. But it seems likely that the character was not invented by the Koreans, and instead of being imported from Korea, its adjectival use may have been imported by Korea from Japan. Anyone know for sure what the story on this is?

Well, whatever the case is, I’m still interested in finding out about Chinese characters that the Koreans did invent. The Chinese wikipedia mentions the fact that the Koreans made some of their own characters in the entry for 韓文漢字. Then in the “notes” of the Japanese entry for the same, I found reference to a few of these characters and also a reference by someone to something called 吏読 (which doesn’t look like new Chinese characters when I found its definition in 大辞林:「ハングルがつくられる以前に朝鮮で行われた、漢字の音訓による朝鮮語の表記法の総称。狭義には、朝鮮語の構文に合わせて書き下ろした、漢文の漢字語に添える朝鮮語の部分の表記をいう。新羅の神文王の時に薛総(せつそう)の創案したものといわれ、公文書をはじめ金石文・歌謡の記述などにも用いられた。りとう。」)

Does anyone who can really read Korean know where we might find a list of the characters that Korea really did create? Apparently one of these characters is 돌(乭).

Update:There is a site where you can view all the characters which were created in Korea here. Thanks to Anton for emailing me this link.

So far this group blog is made up of a small group consisting of two professors of Japanese history and a collection of graduate students. I hope over time to slowly increase the number of participants, until we have a fairly consistent flow of postings on a variety of topics. I especially hope to increase participation from Japanese students and scholars, or at least those studying the field outside of the United States. A primary goal I have for this project, also mentioned in the site’s initial posting, is to increase interaction and discussion between students and scholars in places like Japan and the United States. While we have only one participant studying in Japan to start, I’m going to be aggressively looking for more members for our team amongst my contacts in the Japanese academic world.

I think I will be keeping a heavy academic focus for this site that may unfortunately limit our readership. My reason for this is that I want to appeal to an audience of students and scholars who have little patience or appreciation for the world of blogs. There are no other group blogs related to the history of Japan, that I know of, and I hope this will help some people working in this field gain an appreciation for this medium of communication and writing.

The Japan history group blog is only the first of the “Frog In A Well” projects. I’m in the process of building a team of scholars and students for a China history blog (井底之蛙), a Korea history blog (우물 안 개구리), and one closest to my own heart: a fourth blog dedicated to transnational historical study of East Asia and/or its place in a broader global context. This last blog will also include duplicate postings from the other three which didn’t fit neatly within national boundaries.

The claims of legitimacy by linking oneself to Korea’s independence movement (Kim Hee-sun apparently claimed to be the “daughter of the independence movement”) and the taint of treason that comes with being connected in any way to those who cooperated or worked for the Japanese colonial administration are powerful currency in the politics of the ROK. Only in the last few years, however, has this really bubbled to the surface in mainstream political discourse. Again, I can’t wait to get my Korean up to a level where I can plunge into looking more closely at the history of treason in the aftermath of the colonial period.

Koreans, especially women, are very sensitive to fashion. With seasonal changes, Koreans change their clothes (and shoes, in the case of women), conforming to the most fashionable trends. In the workplace too, men and women like to dress in a more or less uniform way. The quest for fashion and the wearing of similar formal attire are ubiquitous in Korean cities, perhaps because of Korean’ culture of uniformity and formalism.

Although diluted to a certain extent by the American culture of diversity and pragmatism, Koreans still place a considerable value on traditional uniformity and formalism in social interactions. In general, a Korean’s mind is tied to his/her immediate family, organization, and community. Koreans are very much concerned about how others are behaving and what others think about their behavior.¹

Am I the only one who finds this description, designed to introduce foreigners to Korean culture deeply problematic? These kinds of generalizations, which I was only happy to make when I first started studying Japanese and Chinese years ago now totally disgust me and I find them totally unhelpful. As evidence, the picture shows a bunch of Koreans walking down the street in business suits. Exactly how is this different than any business sector in Asia, New York, London, or anywhere else? And can anyone tell me a culture where we can not find people “conforming to the most fashionable trends”? I’m also amused by the use of the term diluted by American culture.

1. Cho, Young-mee et al Integrated Korean: Intermediate One (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001) p. 49.

The most recent news is that the Uri Party have completed their final draft of the law. While I’m getting plenty of information on this through Korea’s English language media, I can’t wait until I can read more about this in Korean…unfortunately my language studies progress only slowly…

UPDATE: In a comment to this posting, my mom added a great link to a page listing various special roman characters and how to input them. I guess I could also add a plug for my own Pinyin to Unicode Convertor website which you can use to create unicode pinyin with tone marks.

UPDATE: Adamu pointed out that this list doesn’t have the ヱ from Yebisu beer! The list below is all hiragana. If, while typing Japanese you type “wye” you get ゑ but if you type “wye” with the “shift” key down, you can get the desired ヱ that is familiar to beer fans in Japan.

I like how the BBC article quotes him in a documentary made about him:

At one point, wandering through Derrida’s library, one of the filmmakers asks him: “Have you read all the books in here?”
“No,” he replies impishly, “only four of them. But I read those very, very carefully”.

All of these articles refer to him founding a “school” of “deconstructionists”? Is this true? I know his work, which include the idea of deconstruction, has been amazingly influential, but are there people out there who call themselves “deconstructionists” and does anyone in literature or theory think there is a school which thinks it is “doing what Derrida does”?

Anyways, it was strange to hear this news today since I just started Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida which is the first time these two very different philosophers have agreed to be published together. I don’t know that much about Derrida’s work. I never made it through Spivak’s introduction to his On Grammatology. However, I really liked the book Derrida by Christopher Norris, all of whose work I really respect, and also Jonathan Culler’s On Deconstruction, which I think does a decent job of explaining the idea.

UPDATE: There is a longer obituary in the NYT I didn’t see earlier. I like one quote especially:

“Many otherwise unmalicious people have in fact been guilty of wishing for deconstruction’s demise – if only to relieve themselves of the burden of trying to understand it,” Mitchell Stephens, a journalism professor at New York University, wrote in a 1994 article in The New York Times Magazine.

UPDATE: Enowing has a nice entry on this, which points to an article at the Chronicle which doesn’t refer to the “deconstructionism” that I puzzled over above. Also enowing has a great quote which cracked me up:

Avital Ronell recalls being with Derrida when a new edition of a French dictionary is released, and it includes the word differance with an a. Avital wants to organize a celebration of this historic occasion. Derrida’s mom, who’s been sitting at the dinner table listening to this conversation, turns to Derrida aghast and asks, “Jacky, you spelt differance with an a?”

Korean on a Macintosh – Adding Korean input support, tips on input, and how to add hanja.

Today the New York Times has an extremely detailed article on the tragedy of the tubes and how the US time and time again claimed they were for centrifuges when there was plentiful evidence that they were for regular conventional rockets. In fact it shows time and time again that the only evidence that it might be used for centrifuges rather than rockets is countered in several ways throughout the article by America’s own Energy department and defense department. This is a very important read because it shows how intelligence information and disagreements between intelligence can be ignored by our leaders. Once pride, or national credibility is on the line, sometimes the path of least resistance is onward to war.

UPDATE: The article will eventually require payment for access. Kerim has some passages from it in his summary of the article.

I think Kerry babbled too much sometimes, but was much better at imitating the 5 word, 5 syllable sentences that for some reason seem to resonate so well with public opinion. I think everyone wants to believe that the word is full of binaries, that there isn’t real complexity, and that, to use a metaphor by Jessi Klein, freedom can be “spread” like peanut butter.

UPDATE: I remember one more line I liked, Bush’s constant pleading to Kerry that he acknowledge poor Poland in the coalition of the bribed and coerced. Here is what Aleksander Kwasniewski, the Polish president has to say about his country’s participation: “They deceived us about the weapons of mass destruction, that’s true. We were taken for a ride.” (Via Hit and Run)

UPDATE: FactCheck.org has an article detailing the factual errors of each candidate in the recent debate.

According to the introduction by another professor, Tilly’s work has recently tried to create a general theory of “boundary formation” and his talk introduced an argument which seems to be a part of it. His talk yesterday began with a story about the formation of the concept of citizenship in the Pyrenees Catalan speaking communities between Spain and France in the 17th century and then went to more general observations about the rise of citizenship within the context of national boundary formation. He based much of his historical discussion on two books by Peter Sahlins called Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees and another called Unnaturally French. His emphasis, which I think ties into his broader theory, was on the idea that the modern concept of citizenship formed as a byproduct, or the indirect result of an exclusionary move. In other words, it was not so much thanks to the definition of who was “French” but out of the gradual determination of who was “not French.” This is not, in and of itself, a very creative point. Many scholars of national identity and nationalism emphasize the role of “the Other” in the creation of a national Self. In using Sahlins’ example of the Pyrenees, however Tilly was good at tracing specifically how this worked in the legal domain of citizenship, long before, as he says, “The idea of ‘nation’ was hijacked by the French Revolution.”

While I don’t have time to trace (and have no confidence I can reproduce accurately) his 8 point argument during the talk, there was one prerequisite condition which I found of particular interest. He argued that one of the triggers which allowed this kind of definition of citizenship by exclusion was the modern transition from a “jurisdictional” regime of state control to one which was “territorial.” When he described this, I was immediately reminded of the argument in Thongchai Winichakul’s book Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Thongchai’s examination of the birth of Siam’s (Thailand) “geo-body” comes out of the clash between a traditional “jurisdictional” interpretation of state control—one in which each community is involved in complex, and potentially contradictory or overlapping social relations with political agents, and the modern British and French conception of “territorial” control based on clear geographic territorial markers which designate the physical boundaries of (and therefore the material body) of a nation.

I had imagined, up to this point, that Thongchai’s argument might only pack a punch in the case of pre-modern states outside of the “West” but Tilly was very clear in his claim that this same transition happened much later than I had imagined in the case of Europe as well. He cites, for example, the fact that the “territorial” boundaries which depended on clear and geographic markers weren’t completely fixed in the case of France and Spain until an 1868 treaty finally marked the territorial boundary with a row of stones. In early modern Europe, he argues, many areas were only beginning to make the shift from a jurisdictional conception of state control. Does anyone have any recommendations for books which specifically trace this kind of shift in the European case, either from Tilly’s own work or others who he might have been referring to? I want to get a better grip on the theories behind this as I go on with my own studies of East Asia.

Finally, I just want to mention that I was impressed at how completely his work was taken as having broad interdisciplinary value. Evidence of this can be found in the fact that they did not choose sociologists to comment on his paper. Instead, they brought one discussant in from Harvard’s Law School, and the other from the Kennedy school of Government, neither of whom had done anything directly related to this in their own work.