"The Rise of Phono-centricism and Its Implications for the Korean Language"
Young-mee Yu Cho, Associate Professor of Korean Language and Culture, Rutgers University
Many progressive intellectuals in the 1890s advocated the idea of ŏnmun ilchi in the sense of “write as you speak” as an integral part of modernization. This movement began by encouraging the use of the phonetic script, han’gŭl, in place of Classical Chinese, and promoted experimentation on various colloquial written styles, finally resulting in the modern narrative prose style. With the spread of han’gŭl through the vernacular press, the private and public initiatives to educate the masses and to raise the national consciousness in the wake of the Japanese annexation led to the birth of the modern literature. This “phonocentricism” (Derrida 1982), which recognizes the primacy of speech over writing, continues on to present-day Korea although emerging language contact involving English is quite different. In the Chinese diglossia model, literary Chinese was studied as a noble means in the search for truth, not for its utilitarian or communicative value. English is ubiquitous both as writing and as speech, which causes xenophobic responses among language purists, who function as watchdogs against massive flows of foreign words and syntactic expressions. However, it might be impossible (or not even desirable) to weed out millennia-old Chinese translation styles, century-old Japanese borrowings and English loans flooding the country at an unstoppable speed. Rather, we notice the adaptive power a live language has in absorbing, rejecting, and assimilating foreign elements; there is an increasing vitality in native morphological power of word-formation, word plays such as puns and rhymes, and other creative innovations in cyberspace.
