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From: deb5@ellis.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: A question on the Korean language
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Date: Tue, 21 May 1996 05:28:10 GMT
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In article <4nqt4k$f9m@tahoma.cwu.edu>, Tan <tan@tahoma.cwu.edu> wrote:
>Hi, 
>
>I am a native Chinese speaker, and don't speak any Korean.  Some time ago
>I read a newspaper article in Chinese saying that the social status of
>women in China was relatively higher than that of women in Korea, though
>Korea is more advanced than China in economy and social development. 
>This article said the reason might be in the difference of the two
>languages.  

Pernicious, fatuous nonsense.  That women and men use different forms
of respect language in Korean is a *reflection* of the gender inequality
in Korean society, not a cause of it.  (Similarly, the absence of terms 
for various kinds of machinery in pre-modern Chinese was a reflection of 
their state of technological development, not a cause of it.)

Greater gender inequality in Korea vis-a-vis China is a product of,
among other factors, the intense Confucian nature of Korean society and
the Communist commitment to equality of men and women.

>There are two styles of addressing people in Korean, plain
>style and honoric style.  With other factors, such as age, generation,
>social status, held constant, women conventionally address men in the
>honoric style, while men address women in the plain style. 

There are more than two; grammarians commonly distinguish five, though
some of these (such as the so-called authoritive style, the exclusive
province of men) are quickly becoming obsolete due to shifts in the
structure of Korean society.  (Similarly, hundreds of forms of address
and other indices of social status have dropped out of modern Chinese
since the abolition of the aristocracy.)

[snip]

>I've heard some stories about the inequality between men and women in 
>the Japanese society, but not of Korea.   

Not surprising.  Information about Japanese (which is generally considered
to have two basic registers or speech-levels, plain and honorific, though
the range is actually more complicated than that) tends to be much more 
widespread than information on Korean.


-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
