I started with this quote, condemning terror polices, taken from a speech of his in parliament, as Secretary of State for War in the aftermath of the Amritsar Massacre in British colonial India:

“There is surely one general prohibition which we can make. I mean a prohibition against what is called ‘frightfulness.’ What I mean by frightfulness is the inflicting of great slaughter or massacre upon a particular crowd of people, with the intention of terrorising not merely the rest of the crowd, but the whole district or the whole country.” (1920)

I skipped his 1940 “and now set Europe ablaze” directive when establishing the British wartime SOE since it is a more complex case and made note of his often quoted 1942 statement:

“All the same, it would be a mistake to cast aside our original thought which, it may be mentioned, is also strong in American minds, namely, that the severe, ruthless bombing of Germany on an ever-increasing scale will not only cripple her war effort, including U-boat and aircraft production, but will create conditions intolerable to the mass of the German population.” (1942)

I then moved on to his famous post-Dresden 1945 statement in a draft letter he wrote:

“It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. … The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.” (1945)

Now, almost every version of this quote I have seen online or in books, places an ellipsis before “The destruction of Dresden” and thus leaves us with the impression that Churchill was shocked at the scale of terror and that this is what lies at the heart of the justification for the “serious query” against terror bombing.

Now, let us fill in that quote with what has been removed:

“It seems to me that the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land. We shall not, for instance, be able to get housing materials out of Germany for our own needs because of some temporary provisions would have to be made for the Germans themselves. The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing.” (1945)

I would argue that this radically changes our interpretation of this quote. Churchill here points to the practical difficulties of running an occupation in a “ruined land” and the need to devote much needed provisions for the Germans – not an ounce of sympathy is shown in this full quote for the suffering of civilians or doubt shown for the moral underpinnings of terror bombing.

On a side note: am I missing other important quotes by Churchill for this little collection (related, for example, to 1920s Iraq, India, or during WWII with respect to bombing etc.?).

I now have a Russian aunt. Together with her son, from a previous marriage, she has added a wonderful new multi-cultural dimension to my trips back to my hometown in Stavanger, Norway, where I stay in my mother’s apartment just under my uncle’s house. I have enjoyed my many chances to talk to them both and learn more about Russia and Russian. This was made simple given the fact my aunt speaks fluent English and her son increasingly fluent Norwegian, even though the two of them have lived in Norway less than a year.

This summer, my aunt Lena’s parents, both doctors, visited from Russia. I met them first in my uncle’s garden, which they immediately – and spontaneously – assumed supervision of, and I took a liking to both of them immediately. They were both incredibly active, healthy, full of childish vigor, and curious about the country they were visiting.

Granpa Alex on the ropes, with my aunt Lena and cousin Max outside my uncle’s house in Stavanger, Norway.

Communication was always difficult, however, since I don’t speak Russian yet and neither of them speak any English. When my uncle and my aunt left for a week of vacation, my daily interaction with them mostly consisted of some dozen greeting related phrases of Russian I had learned, quick single word lookups in a Russian-English dictionary I had on my iPod Touch, and a few random German words we hoped the other would be able to understand.

We started with greater ambitions. I spent my first evening with the couple mostly with Alex, the father, and we tried to teach eachother some English and Russian, respectively, with the use of a well-worn phrase book he had brought with him from Russia:

Русско-английский разговорник

(Russian-English phrasebook)

Guessing from the first pages, it looks like it was published originally in 1957 and reprinted as late as 1991.

Most of the phrases were very basic and still good choices for a phrase book of this kind. “How are you,” and “I have a cold,” for example. However, in this small pocket booklet of perhaps 150 pages things quickly got more technical, with some fascinating entries which really have a classic Soviet appeal.

You can view a collection of my favorite pages from the book here, but here are a just few phrases that were included in this beginner’s phrase book:

-We want to see the new types of reinforced concrete (metal) structures)

-Show us the agricultural machinery.

-What is the capacity of the lathe?

-We should like to see designs of apartment houses (industrial buildings).

-What special combine harvesters have you?

-Are you a member of the National Farmer’s Union?

-We should like to meet some members of Parliament.

-What is the membership of the National Union of Railwaymen (the Amalgamated Union of Foundry Workers, the Amalgamated Engineering Union)?

I’ve got ideas. I’ve got outlines. I’ve got hundreds of pages of notes.

I have years of training in the destruction and dismissal of other people’s arguments. They call it grad school.

Now the time has come when I too must write – and not one of those research papers churned out in the day or two before the deadline arrives. I must write the dissertation. I am to write chapters that connect to each other in some logical fashion. Chapters. Even the word itself sounds like so many heavy links of metal to be hung around the necks of PhD students back from those green pastures they call “the field.”

I have seen them. They wander the campus with a pale look; the clank and rattle of their invisible burden almost audible as they walk. Nearby a third year history grad student might be seen skipping away, “I’m off to the archives!”

I forge my first link this fall. Getting a summer head start on my procrastination, this week I sat down to read a few books on the craft of writing, including a simple but handy book of “writing tools” aimed mostly at journalists and fiction writers. Reading through the short examples of good writing, I realized that I didn’t really know what good writing looked like in history.

Don’t get me wrong. In historiography classes, I have read plenty of “classic” works, from a full range of “schools” of historical inquiry and their most radical theoretical rivals. A year spent mostly reading in preparation for oral examinations brought me in close contact – “reading” wasn’t always the best description of what that contact consisted of – with hundreds of history books, but in all cases my eyes were trained on the content, not the form. The only times I really paid much attention to form was when some theoretically ambitious works were so frustratingly obtuse that one wondered how these historians who claim sensitivity to the subtleties of discourse could have nurtured such talent for linguistic slaughter.

I can think of plenty of works of history that took an approach I liked, had an argument that persuaded me, or simply benefited me in my own research. However, I am embarrassed to admit, I can’t name any history books that I thought were well written. That is to say, I have apparently paid so little attention to the writing of history at the level of phrase, sentence, and paragraph, and so much to the arguments and their support instead, that I now feel particularly naked as I go forward in my own writing.

Of course, I suspect good writing in history resembles good writing everywhere else. Surely many of the lessons of good writing taught in a journalism class, at a college writing center, or in Mrs. Gould’s seventh grade English class back in Aberdeen, Scotland are applicable to the writing of one’s history dissertation. I am also doubtlessly influenced by the rhetorical strategies and sentence structures of at least some of the hundreds of works that I have read in the past few years. Hopefully that influence is partly born of an intuitive recognition of quality. Even if that assumption is flawed, it is too late for me to revisit those blissful days of wide secondary source reading now. But if I get a chance to speak to incoming grad students in my last two years in the program, perhaps in the form of a wailing spirit in the night, I think I will advise them to pay closer attention to the language of historical works; to occasionally wield the eyeglass, and not merely the sword when they confront the works both in their own fields and the broader historiography.

Today I was delighted to come across a passage in which he talks about this aspect of his work:

…the only essay I have ever written on the semiotics of the theater begins with the story of Averroes. What is so extraordinary about that story? It is that Borges‘s Averroes is stupid not in personal terms but culturally, because he has reality before his eyes (the children playing) and yet he cannot make that relate to what the book is describing to him…Averroes’s situation is that of the poetics of “defamiliarization,” which the Russian formalists describe as representing something in such a way that one feels as if one were seeing it for the first time, thus making the perception of the object difficult for the reader. I would say that in my novels I reverse the “Averroes model”: the (culturally ignorant) character often describes with astonishment something he sees and about which he does not understand very much, whereby the reader is led to understand it. That is to say, I work to produce an intelligent Averroes.

As someone said, it may be that this is one of the reasons for the popularity of my fiction: mine is the opposite of the “defamiliarization” technique; I make the reader familiar with something he did not know until then. I take a reader from Texas, who has never seen Europe, into a medieval abbey (or into a Templar commandery, or a museum full of complicated objects, or into a Baroque room) and make them feel at ease. I show him the medieval character who takes out a pair of glasses as if it were completely natural, and I depict his contemporaries, who are astonished at this sight; at first the reader does not understand why they are amazed, but in the end he realizes that spectacles were invented in the Middle Ages, this is not a Borgesian technique; mine is an “anti-Averroes model,” but without Borges’s model before me I would never have been able to conceive of it.”¹

1. Eco, Umberto “Borges and My Anxiety of Influence” On Literature, 127-8

Finally, use of these quotation marks excuses us from having to spend time analyzing the terms themselves, putting them aside as if to say, “Yes, yes, this is a very inappropriate term that needs careful and sensitive discussion, but since I’ve a lot to do in this essay, I just can’t be bothered at the moment to deal with it.”

Some people seem to feel that the aesthetic impact on one’s work is such that the frequent use of quotations is just not worth it, or perhaps feel that we simply aren’t accomplishing anything useful by using them for direct translations or referrals to terms as they were used decades or centuries ago. However, not using quotations or confronting problematic terms can earn the ire of book reviewers, as I discussed in a response to a review of the book Collaboration by Timothy Brooks. Brooks was criticized for used the term “pacification teams” to refer to the units the Japanese called “pacification teams” in occupied China during the war even if he is anything but sympathetic to the Japanese in his book.

One strategy is to use quotations once, and then announce that you won’t be using them anymore. I came across this tactic today when reading a Chinese translation of an essay by Matsuda Toshihiko, called 日本帝國在殖民地的憲兵警察制度：從朝鮮，關東州致滿洲國的統治樣式遷移 (English title was listed as “The ‘Gendarme-oriented’ Police System in the Japanese Colonial Empire: The Transfer of Models of Rule Used in Colonial Korea to Kwantung Province and Manchukuo”) After putting Japan’s 內地 (the interior of Japan = Japan proper excluding its colonies) and terms like 滿洲 (Manchuria, 滿洲國 Manchukuo, the largely Japanese controlled Manchurian state from 1932-1945, often called 僞滿州 or the “puppet Manchukuo”) in quotations, he follows each with “一下省略括號” (“Brackets left out below”).

Another strategy that can sometimes be used, which is one I follow for some words like “traitors,” is to embrace a word and use it quite shamelessly in order to deliberately provoke the reader. In English, the word traitor has lost much of its punch of late – a good thing in my opinion – but still holds great power in many other places and languages. The discomfort generated by the word and the way it forces readers to think about what it really means is part of what I aim to achieve when I use the term. Far from wanting to contribute to the term’s legitimacy, my deliberate use of it is partly out of a kind of mockery, but more importantly out of a desire to help set the scene of the politically charged context in which it was used.

Though I can’t speak for them, I suspect something similar is being done in some other famous cases of this. Some scholars of Korean history have been strongly criticized for using words like “terrorist” to describe Korea’s national tragic hero Kim Koo. I suspect these same critics would have much less opposition to him be referred to by his popular nickname, “the assassin.” I really don’t have strong feelings on this issue and I don’t think it is as straightforward as my own case, but it raises some interesting questions. What if these scholars are also engaging in a dual process of linguistic mockery and deliberate attempt at reviving a historical scene? Should the word be off limits entirely, should it necessarily be accompanied with quotations, or are there alternatives? What I think escapes some critics of such scholars is that I believe at least some of them are using the word terrorist not as a way to conjure images of Kim Koo as a suicide bomber in a crowded market but, on the contrary, to show how the word terrorist has itself a history and potentially embraces a wide range of figures we might be less willing to unconditionally condemn. In doing so, they potentially open a space in which to critique the way the word has come to be used and what it now narrowly represents, as well as the wide range of activities and contexts it covered both in the past and now. Can we only engage in such a rhetorical technique through the use of quotations?

I’d be interested in hearing from other students and scholars about this. What strategies do others take when they are faced with the need or potential need to establish quotational quarantines? What conventions do you follow?

Today I faced this kind of problem. There are lots of “annotator” websites online that make use of the free CEDICT Chinese dictionary but I have yet to find one which outputs a simple, and nicely formated (with all […], and /…/ stuff removed) tab delimited vocab lists.

I have recently been frustrated by the fact that I often come across Chinese characters that I haven’t learn, or, more often, characters that I only know how to pronounce in Japanese or Korean. I also am frustrated at the fact that I have forgotten the tones for a lot of characters I knew well many years ago when I studied Chinese formally.

Over the summer I want to review or learn the 3500 most frequently used Chinese characters, particularly their pronunciation, so that I can improve my tones and more quickly lookup compounds I don’t know.¹

I found a few frequency lists online (see here and here for example) and I stripped out the data I didn’t need to create a list with nothing but one character on each line.² Although it is an older list based on a huge set of Usenet postings from ’93-’94 you can download an already converted list of 3500 characters here.³

Since I’m not in the mood to look up 3500 characters one by one, I spent a few hours this evening using this problem as an excuse to write my second script in the Ruby programming language.

In the remote possibility that others find it useful who are using Mac OS X, you can download the result of my tinkering here:

Cedict Vocabulary List Generator 1.1

This download includes the 2007.8 version of CEDICT, the latest I could find here.⁴

How this script works:

1. After unzipping the download, boot up the “Convert.app” applescript application. It will ask you to identify the file you want to annotate. It is looking for a text file (not a word or rich text file) in Unicode (UTF-8) format with either simplified or traditional Chinese characters or word compounds, one on each line.

2. This application will then send this information to the convert.rb ruby script which will search for the words in the CEDICT dictionary in the same folder, format the information it finds (the hanzi, pinyin, and English definition), including the putting of multiple hits for the same character/word within the same entry with the definitions numbered. It does not currently add the alternate form of the hanzi (it won’t add simplified version to traditional or vice versa).

3. It will then produce a new file with the word “converted” added to its name. It will create tab-delimited files by default but you can change this by changing this option at the top of the convert.rb file in a text editor.

4. Though this version of the script doesn’t do this yet, you may want to run the resulting text through the Pinyin Tone dashboard widget or a similar online tool such as the one here or here. That will get rid of the syllable final tone numbers and add the appropriate tone marks. I am having a bit of trouble converting the JavaScript that my widget and this site uses into Ruby so if anyone is interested in working on this let me know!

If the script doesn’t work: make sure you are saving your text file as UTF-8 before you convert. I am also having trouble when my script is placed somewhere on a hard disk where the path has lots of spaces. Try putting the script folder on your Desktop.

Note: If you don’t have Mac OS X but can run Ruby scripts on your operating system, you may be able to run my script convert.rb from the command line. It takes this format:

convert.rb /path/to/file.txt /path/to/cedict.u8

UPDATE 1.1: The script now replaces “u:” with “ü” (CEDICT uses u:).

1. The top 3000 make up some 98-99% when their cumulative frequency is considered.
2. A few of the frequency lists I have seen have Cedict dictionary data included but not in a very clean format
3. I notice that there is a high frequency of phonetic hanzi for expression emotion in the postings and some other characters one doesn’t come across as often in more formal texts, I actually don’t mind
4. If you find a newer version (in UTF-8) put it in the same directory as my script and name it cedict.u8

“Let Obama teach you charming English”

Above is an advertisement at some kind of English academy near Chinese Culture University in Taipei. Somehow I don’t think this concept would have worked with our sitting president as a model.

Many years ago, before Unicode became dominant, I used a Microsoft Word macro written by a Chinese language scholar, James Dew, as the basis for making an old Mac OS 9 application that translated texts between various pinyin fonts that were floating around online. Later, I made an online script that could convert tone numbers into unicode tone marks. I was surprised to hear from various Chinese language instructors at a conference I presented at a few years later (2003) that many of them used the script regularly when preparing texts for their Chinese language classes.

The online script still works but there is a much more elegantly written online script which does the same thing written by a more skilled programmer in Taiwan named Mark Wilbur hosted on his site Doubting to Shuō. You can find his tool here: Pinyin Tone Tool.

My old PHP script is ugly by comparison to Mark’s compact javascript so I have essentially installed his script to work in an OS X dashboard widget. You can download the widget here:

Pinyin Tone Widget v. 1.02

To use it, just enter the pinyin into the large text field and press the “Add Tone Marks” button. It will add the tones and select the resulting text so you can copy it for use elsewhere with Command-C.

If you like the widget and find it useful, send your thanks to Mark at doubtingtoshuo at gmail.com.

This was my second Dashboard widget. The first was the 檀紀 Conversion Widget that students of Korean history may find useful when reading newspapers and documents from the days when Korea used that calendar more frequently. I really love the free Apple development environment for creating these widgets called Dashcode, which comes with the developer tools for OS X. You just need to know a little javascript and you can be up and running with your own widget.

Next time I need a distraction I hope to create another widget which changes romanized Korean text using “eo” or “eu” into ŏ and ŭ. I won’t be writing a full tool for conversion between McCune-Reischauer and the new government romanization system, which is a pain, but some of us when writing romanized Korean words prefer to keep using the McCune-Reischauer system but have trouble creating the ŏ and ŭ easily directly from the keyboard.

Another calendar widget is in the works too, one for Chinese dates that will convert Qing (I am too lazy to go back further) and republican period calendar years into the Western years, and another for Japanese years that will convert Meiji, Taisho, Showa, and Heisei years via a widget. Anyone who wants to add older imperial reigns can modify the resulting widget when it comes out.

UPDATE: I have updated the widget and changed two things: 1) I saved it to be backward compatible with 10.4.0 instead of 10.4.3 and 2) I changed it so that if you press enter, it will trigger the button for conversion.

UPDATE: None of the widgets I make seem to be compatible with OS X 10.4.11. I’m not sure why but there were some things changed in 10.4.3 regarding dashboard widgets. If you want to upgrade your OS to 10.4.3 then you first need to upgrade to 10.4.2 and then 10.4.3, both of which are free upgrades.

UPDATE: 10.4.11 is a newer version than 10.4.3 – the newest Tiger has to offer (it was 11 as in after 10, not as in after 1 but before 2, my bad). So I guess my widgets are doomed to only work on Leopard. That is lame! Still have no idea why this is…also happened with the calendar widget I just made with far less and different code.

Google 사투리 번역을 소개합니다
Introducing the New Google Dialect Translation Service

If you read Korean, check out the hilarious webpage showing examples of translations between various Korean dialects, how to attach dialect “modes” for translation of dialects in Google Talk and an explanation of how Gmail will provide one click translations of those dialect filled emails into standard Korean.

I think the idea would be just as hilarious if Google Norway (as well as countless other localized Google sites in countries where there is a high degree of dialect variation) were to try it.

I thought to myself, you know, it is kind of depressing to see how little is actually available in Korean sources, as far as I have been able to find out so far, and especially when compared to the wealth of materials of widely varying quality coming out on the various violent uprisings in South Korea in 1948 (Yŏsu, Cheju-do, and so on). Though American military materials abound, in general, I been somewhat underwhelmed by the relative lack of accounts of the 1945-50 period on the Korean side. The explanation I hear everywhere is that the devastation of the Korean War of 1950-3 is much to blame.

Just as I was pondering this problem, two elderly men sat down next to me and carried on a conversation. Although the loud espresso machine in the background made it difficult, I overheard some of their conversation and could recognize my favorite linguistic phenomenon:

わざわざ…followed by some Korean
しがつはつか（四月二十日）완전히…more Korean
근대おれは…more Japanese
すまないな, 지난번…more Korean
あれはね、…followed by Korean sentence.

Some excellent code-switching going on. Sentences seemed to only switch completely into Korean when discussion got fast or emotional, but would switch back to Japanese at the beginning of a new topic with Korean words sprinkled in here and there in the middle of sentences, and the middle of Korean sentences throughout the conversation would get a Japanese word here and there, as if for emphasis.

This is something I have written about here at Muninn on several occasions (A code switching family in Seoul, code-switching in Taiwan, Japanese-Chinese code-switching couple in Taiwan, Chinese-English code switching in a Harvard campus coffee shop). It was something I saw on a number of occasions in Taiwan amongst older Taiwanese though, with the exception of older Koreans speaking to me in Japanese (such the Korean war stories I heard from this gentleman and this retired policeman) I have been looking forward to finding the same thing in Korea, where I know it happens.

After listening for a few minutes, I took advantage of a moment of silence between the two elderly friends and jumped in, using Japanese. A delightful conversation ensued, which eventually ended up in exactly the kind of code-switching between Korean and Japanese that was going on before I joined in, but now with some English thrown in (one of the two had worked 4 years in the US) here and there as well.

Both learnt their Japanese as children, having completed primary school during the colonial period. They were 13 and 14 when the colonial period ended, and were both a small minority in a good quality school made up of mostly Japanese students. “One day, our Japanese friends suddenly told us they had to go to Japan because they lost the war,” said one, “to which I replied, ‘Why do you have to go to Japan? Weren’t you born here?'” One was born and raised in Taegu, but was now living and still working in Japan, while the other grew up in Seoul. I asked the man from Taegu if he remembers anything about the violence in the autumn of 1946, he said someone told him about seeing the corpses of policemen being dragged by ropes through the streets, but he didn’t see anything himself.

I asked them about their Korean war experience. The man from Seoul says that he and his family were kidnapped by North Korean militia and taken to a town north of P’yŏngyang and put into a labor team, and that he was held for 100 days. He said every day was a nightmare there, his mother praying for their survival every day. He says he has almost blocked every memory of the experience out, “When I close my eyes all I can see is an image of the 태극기 flag.” He said that he escaped with his family when the US troops reached the area in the autumn of 1950. He then walked back to South Korea. His friend sitting across the table said, “I have never heard this story! Why do you tell this stranger but you’ve never told me this story?” He replied that this was a really painful (つらい) memory for him and he doesn’t want to recall it (思い出したくない).

I told them the biggest obstacle for people like me studying the period 1945-50 is the lack of materials. Even if the memories are painful, I encouraged them both to write down their stories, and like the boom of Japanese publishing their memoirs and diaries of wartime experiences in Japan in the last few decades has done, give historians and younger generations a chance to hear their stories. One of the guys answered, “いや、韓国は日本じゃない。ここでは、そういうような書く문화がない。” (Korea is not Japan. Here we don’t have that kind of culture of writing) Is that fair? Perhaps that generation just needs a bit more time and a bit more encouragement?

This sign can be found in the bathrooms of Jinan airport in China.¹ A loose translation of the Chinese might go something like this, “Support the protection of the environment, use only what [toilet] paper you need.” (or “be economical in your use of paper”) I had never heard the word bumf before so I thought it might be a misspelling but the closest word I could think of that made sense was “Bambi.”

Bumf is, in fact, a real word. I must have missed it during my GRE preparations. From the OED:

[Short for bum-fodder (see BUM n.1 4).]

Toilet-paper; hence, paper (esp. with contemptuous implication), documents collectively. Also attrib.

1889 BARRÈRE & LELAND Dict. Slang, Bumf (schoolboys), paper… A bumf-hunt is a paper-chase. 1912 V. WOOLF Let. 16 Nov. in Woolf & Strachey Lett. (1956) 46 Is this letter written upon Bumf? It looks like it. 1930 WYNDHAM LEWIS Apes of God (1932) v. 161 Low-lid fodder or high-brow bumph! 1930 E. RAYMOND Jesting Army I. vi. 90 The Brigadier pushed back the mess accounts to me and said, ‘You’ll keep all that bumf till next time, won’t you, padre?’ 1938 E. WAUGH Scoop II. iv. 211, I shall get a daily pile of bumf from the Ministry of Mines. 1957 M. K. JOSEPH I’ll soldier no More (1958) 21 Matthews is bringing the bumf… He says be sure and type it on Army Form A2.

bum-fodder, L. anitergium, hence, worthless literature.

The more I think about it, this slogan has many possible uses that go beyond bathroom walls. You know that US law which is designed to reduce paperwork? You can find reference to it at the bottom of many government documents in the small print. They could rename the law, “Protect the environment, reduce bumf!”

You know the kind of academic scholarship with a gargantuan theoretical superstructure which ultimately has absolutely nothing interesting to say? We could start a movement under the slogan, “Protect the environment, reduce bumf!”

The possibilities are nearly inexhaustible. The word bumf clearly deserves a period of renewal.

1. Apparently, I am not the only one on the internet who has noticed this sign. Another Konrad has posted a picture of the sign on flickr. Other references can be found here and there.

The most interesting conversation I had that day, however, was not with journalists or city officials. As I was sitting in an underground shopping center, looking over a map of the city, an old man sat next to me and stared at me as I looked at the map. I have had this experience quite often in Korea and it usually leads to fascinating conversations with retired men who love to share their experiences during the Korean war, their interactions with Americans during the Korean war, their belief that Park Chung-hee was the best thing to come out of Korea since the hangul writing system, and that the coming of democracy has sent Korea off its rails.

When I noticed the guy was staring at me, I struck up a conversation. He originally answered in English but when we determined that my bad Korean was still better than his English, we settled upon Korean as our language of discussion. This doesn’t always turn out to be the case. Another fascinating random conversation I had with an old man outside the national library in 2005 was conducted almost entirely in Japanese.

The old man told me he had been a KATUSA (Korea Augmentation Troops to the United States Army) working with US soldiers in the Korean War, 1950-1953. That would explain the fact that he spoke some English. I told him I was spending the day trying to learn more about Kangwon provincial history and was told by city officials that very few materials are left from the early postwar period. I asked him if he had ever written anything down about his experiences since he was a “living historical archive.”

He said that he hadn’t but was willing to answer any questions I had. I asked him to talk about living in 춘천 from 1945-50. When he proceeded to tell me half a dozen stories I felt a deep frustration with myself that my Korean listening skills are so bad that I could understand less than half of what he was telling me.

My new friend was 12 years old when the colonial period ended in 1945 so he had attended elementary school under Japanese rule and learned some Japanese as a result. He says the next few years after liberation were horrible and he listed various trees and plants that his family tried to eat in order to live through a time of severe food shortages. He had some story about smuggling from North Korea that I would have loved to have understood. He also launched into a long and complicated story involving a cow which he seemed to love telling but which I just couldn’t make heads or tails out of.

I asked him if he had family in areas of Kangwon province which were under North Korean control in the early postwar, some of which later came under South Korean control as a result of changes in the lines of control. He said no, but this triggered a story about his life as a soldier during the war.

He told me, “I would not be here alive today if it wasn’t for the help of a Chinese officer.”

I could tell I was going to be interested in this story so as he told it, I repeatedly asked him to clarify and explain things I didn’t understand which helped raise the percentage of the story I came away with.

As far as I could gather my friend and a few other soldiers were in complete disarray in the second retreat in the winter of 1950-1 and found themselves way behind enemy lines. They were soon captured by a unit of Chinese troops who were quickly making their way south after China’s entry into the war. I have no idea to what degree he exaggerates the desperate situation at the time but the man told me that he believed the Chinese troops were going to summarily shoot the group of captured soldiers he was a part of before they continued south, rather than keep them as POWs.

Then, he says, a Chinese officer approached the group of captured Korean troops and asked if any of them spoke Japanese. My friend then began to have a conversation with this Chinese officer in Japanese. At this point in the story, my friend looked away from me, staring off into space, and recited the entire conversation he had with this officer in Japanese. Perhaps he has told this story a hundred times but I was interested in the fact that he recited the whole conversation to me in a language that he could not know that I did, in fact, understand. Essentially the conversation consisted of my new friend begging the officer not to kill him, the officer offering him a cigarette and assuring him that he was not going to let him and his friends get killed. He told my friend that he had gone to junior high school in Manchuria when it was the puppet state of 満州国, and had there learnt the Japanese language. The officer told him that they had both therefore, “suffered under the same Japanese rule.” Finally, my friend claims that the officer said that he really hated Mao Zedong. This, in my opinion, is the most implausible part of the story, for a number of reasons.

At any rate, after finishing his retelling, in Japanese, of the conversation he claims to have had with the officer, my friend switched back into Korean and told me the officer told the troops that were holding him and his friends (I don’t know how many there were of them) to release them, and continue moving south.

Hearing his perfect Japanese during the retelling of the conversation, I thought I could continue our conversation in Japanese, which I speak much better than Korean, but he didn’t seem understand anything I said in Japanese. It was as if the words in that conversation he had with the officer was the only Japanese he knew or still remembered. I asked him if he ever used Japanese after that encounter and he said, no, it was the last time he had spoken Japanese.

I was running out of time and had to get moving to find the Kangwon ilbo newspaper building so I couldn’t stay to ask him more about this story or other experiences but it was really wonderful to spend the hour or so with him on that bench outside the bookstore. Hearing this kind of story fills a student of history like me with excitement but it is so hard to know what to make of this kind of retelling. What can a historian do with this kind of material, if anything?

Transitions – When going to and from East Asia, I love passing through airports like San Francisco and LA (one gets a similar experience passing through London when I visit Norway). On the way back to the US I transferred in San Francisco. After spending 6 months in Korea, the most immediately striking thing was the amazing diversity. From the time I disembarked to the time I got on to the second leg of my journey I counted 6 languages. “So what?” you might ask, it is an international airport, after all. Yes, but I counted 6 language among the airport staff, not among the traveling passengers.

On the way back to Seoul, I passed through LA. The process is reversed. Going from a place like Oklahoma, with only slightly more diversity than Korea, the transfer in LA has the effect of easing me back into Asia. Announcements at the airport are given in Japanese, Chinese, Korean, as if to reacquaint me with the languages of the region.

Asian food can be found everywhere, except strangely, passed security in the international terminal. All they have is a hot dog stand which also offers sandwiches and chicken noodle soup. A Chinese couple in front of me with the strong southern “s”es in their accent had the following exchange: Woman:”Chicken noodle是什麽樣的noodle?” Man:”是一種soup.” They decided to order six small Chicken noodle soups and three sandwiches for the family. I hope they weren’t disappointed.

TSA Language Skills – On my way back to Seoul, I had to change to the international terminal at the airport in LA, going through security again. The lines were hectic and full of people, a scene which, in my experience, is often made worse by stressed out and yelling TSA officials. As if to confirm my stereotypes of TSA, I heard one TSA official get frustrated with a passenger and then yell from somewhere closer to the X-ray machines, “Make sure you have all signed your passport!”

Another young blonde TSA official, hair shaved in short military fashion checked boarding passes and passports nearby. A family of Malaysians were ahead of me. As the woman in the family, who seemed to be the one responsible, handed the young man her passport I heard him speak to her in what sounded like Arabic (it didn’t sound like Malaysian). The woman seemed to understand and replied in the same language. They continued with a short exchange, including something found humorous by both of them, and the young man, who looked barely old enough be out of college, let her and her family through the barrier strap and into a line which had just become shorter than our own.

This was the most pleasant encounter I have ever had with TSA. I had never seen any TSA official speak to anyone in anything but English and the occasional Spanish and was impressed not only at his language skills (which I can hardly judge, since I’m not even sure what language he was speaking – but he seemed to be communicating successfully) but even more the young man’s friendly approach to the woman and her impatient children.

Asiana English – I went through lots of horrible cancellations and rescheduling on my way back to Seoul because of weather problems in Denver, putting me back in Korea 2 days later than I had originally planned. I got put on an Asiana flight to Seoul which is my first time with the airline. I had heard good things and overall the service and food was indeed good. However, I couldn’t help noticing how incredibly bad their English was. Everyone, including the pilot and all the airline stewards and stewardesses who I heard interacting with passengers spoke phenomenally bad English. This was not limited to the Korean employees, because this was also the case with their two Japanese and Chinese staff members.

I sympathize with the fact that the incredible range of nationalities among their passengers (I sat next to passengers from the Philippines, and was otherwise surrounded by Chinese voices) but was amazed that even the standard announcements that get read out in English were sometimes unintelligible due to horrendous pronunciation and their utterances sometimes barely constituted sentences, let alone grammatically correct ones. While I can pick up what I need from announcements in other languages, many of those on the plane will not understand the Korean. Aren’t they reading from a pre-translated card or something? If so, they need to go back and work on it. Whatever the reason is, and I really shouldn’t generalize from a single flight, this trip gave me the distinct impression that Asiana’s hiring practices put far more weight on the physical appearance of their staff than on language skills.

I suppose that some of the smaller things about Leopard will either grow on me or annoy me with time. The only thing I have gotten really excited about so far, however, is the improved “Dictionary” application. It now has four Japanese dictionaries: 大辞泉, プログレッシブ英和・和英中辞典, and 類語例解辞典. They are not shown by default (in the English version of the OS, I assume they are default on Japanese language installations) and you need to activate them in the Dictionary application’s preferences.

I usually use my portable electronic dictionary for J-J, J-E, and E-J (plus C-J, J-C, and Kanji dictionary) and can always look words up various places online. Asahi.com’s dictionary site has 大辞林（国語辞典）, エクシード英和, and エクシード和英. Yahoo Japan’s Dictionary site has both 大辞泉 and 大辞林 as well as the same プログレッシブ dictionaries Apple has licensed. However, it is wonderful to have all this accessible offline write on my mac.

Some snapshots, click image for larger version:

大辞泉:

プログレッシブ英和・和英中辞典:

類語例解辞典:

I wish they had included the front and back matter for these dictionaries, as they did for the English language dictionary in the new version of the application, with all its interesting reference information.

I also really hope some day that the China and Korea markets will become important enough to Apple that they will consider licensing dictionaries in those languages.

To be honest though, the prospects for a fully bilingual child are not that great. Living in the United States as they do, with a huge majority of those around him speaking English, he may develop decent listening skills and some limited speaking skills in Norwegian, but since my sister is most comfortable speaking in English, this will probably mean that in the long term Loki won’t be growing up in a two language household.

For now, however, he not saying anything at all. I don’t know if he is supposed to be saying anything at 16 months, but even if he is, this is to be expected in a mixed language environment. I apparently didn’t start speaking muddled Norwegian and English until I was two or so.

Loki is, however, communicating. Since two spoken languages were apparently not enough, the parents have been teaching the child simple signs from American Sign Language. I understand that this is the newest trend in the “teach your kids to do tricks” genre, but I have discovered that it has a real practical value with a 16 month old child that does not yet emit anything more than extremely entertaining gurgles.

Here is my brother-in-law Mike’s posting about this. Here is what he says:

I’ve been teaching Liam sign language for the past few months now, and I wanted to keep a record of the signs he’s learned. Here’s what he knows so far:

Light

Fan

More

Water

Eat

Shoe

Dog

Bath

I think that’s all. I proud of him, and myself as well, this is the sort of thing that I would start and then just give up on, and I almost did, but then he just exploded with all these new signs that, after months and months of practice, finally just started popping out of him.

I was rather skeptical when I read this but since I have come to visit them in the United States, I am pleasantly surprised to see that this child, who otherwise expresses his likes and dislikes by pushing things away, pointing, and screaming is able to give these signs and convey his desires very nicely.

Of course, the child speaks a unique dialect of this small set of ASL, having changed many of the signs somewhat.

I have had a bit of catching up to do to learn his dialect. This morning we were teaching him the word for ‘berry’ so at least I will be able to recognize the newest addition to his gestural vocabulary. Here are some examples of his communication so far:

Situation #1: Loki is crawling up and down the stairs. He looks pooped. He turns around to me, stands still, and begins slapping his cheek and mouth with his hand in very regular motion. I yell to my sister in the kitchen, “Carleen! What does it mean when he…” -“He is telling you he is thirsty.” We get the boy some water.

Situation #2: Loki discovers one of his favorite mechanical devices: a small light plugged into the wall which lights up when things are dark (or when you cover it with your hand). The light is not on, but he recognizes the object for what it is. He stands up, turns around and starts flicking his hand behind his right ear. “Carleen! What does it mean when he…” -“He is giving the signal for ‘light.'” UPDATE: Loki also did this whenever he noticed the lights on the Christmas tree.

Situation #3: Loki is bouncing on the couch next to me while I eat cereal. He stops, walks carefully over to me, looks like he is going to grab my spoon and I give him a stern look to indicate that I don’t want him to grab my spoon. He seems to acknowledge this and then begins to repeatedly and slowly put his clenched fists together. “Carleen! What does it mean when he…” -“He is saying that he is hungry.” We take the boy into the kitchen and feed him. UPDATE: Loki mixes this sign up with the sign for shoe, and thus later in the evening, when he saw one of my shoes, I thought he was hungry.