Baseball, Junk Food & why Koreans say "화이팅"

To all my (imaginary/non-existent) readers: I am sorry for not putting up any new posts recently. But to get into the habit of "bloggingI really hate this word, it sounds like what happens when you do too much poo in a toilet" I need to persevere. As Koreans would say "화이팅h-wa-eeting / what you say to encourage people or yourself!"So I thought I would do a cultural post...

Korean is full of English words, it's even more full of Chinese words, and there's a noteable absence of Japanese words, although many words in Japanese are similar to Korean because they have a common Chinese root. Furthermore, Korean has some words in common with Japanese because of their English roots too, but even more interestingly some English words have entered Korean through Japanese.

The standard Korean romanisation and pronunciation of "f" is "ㅍpronounced like the "p" in "people". "Fast food" becomes 페스트 푸드"pest pood" / hehehehe or "fry" becomes "프라이"p-er-r-a-ee / not as funny etc. etc. Sticking to the theme of unhealthy dietary habits "French fries" can be written "후렌치 후라이hoo-rench-ee hu-ra-ee"" Here the "f" is changed to a "ㅎpronounced like "h" in "happy"". And "화이팅h-wa-eeting / what you say to encourage people or yourself!" is exactly the same. Which, if you haven't guessed already, is actually a mangled "fighting".

The reason for this variation is pretty simple. When English words come to Korean from Japanese, they maintain their Japanese pronunciation. Just as Korean has no "f" sound, neither does Japanese, but Japanese renders "f" as an "h" sound. Every time you hear an "f" in an English word pronounced or written in this way in Korean, it means that the word has entered the language through Japanese.

The word "화이팅h-wa-eeting / what you say to encourage people or yourself!" in Korean is from baseball, and can be heard at any game. Although baseball is obviously an American export, popular in many of the USA's pseudo-colonies, baseball came to Korea much later than Japan. Because of the geographical closeness, cultural and political exchanges throughout history, baseball in Korea has been influenced, and even modelled on the Japanese version of the game. It is clear that "화이팅h-wa-eeting / what you say to encourage people or yourself!" orginated in Japanese.

The only place I've seen "후렌치 후라이hoo-rench-ee hu-ra-ee"" is on a sign in the cafeteria in the university. This not only dates the sign as this spelling is outdated, it shows that the Japanese brought French Fries to Korea before America, or at least before new transliteration rules. We can't just blame the Americans for exporting Junk food!

By looking simply at the pronounciation and transliteration of a word we can understand so much more than what it means. It can tell us about where the word came from or even a little about who is saying it.