This article constitutes part 2 of the Korean language series. In part 1 we provided some insights in relation to why the inner logic of Korean is mathematical at its core. Now we will get more practical and observe some of the gifts it has to offer to the world when it comes to our perception and our appreciation of its beauty .
1 Deferred meaning – Korean teaches Patience
The first thing worth noting about Korean language is that it is associated with deferred meaning. In Korean, verbs appear in the end and so do politeness markers, ethical stance and the relationship between people involved in the speech. This trait is very much associated with a term envisioned by poet Keats named negative capability.
Negative capability
Negative capability is the capacity to rest with mysteries, doubts, ambiguity without rushing after facts and reason. This is not indecision , it is disciplined suspension, allowing meaning to arrive without being coerced .
Negative capability has a lot of gifts to offer to the world, a major one being that it is associated with genius in the sense that it allows images to find their own logic , structures to emerge organically . After all Beauty , as well as the Muse cannot be forced, they reveal themselves at their own time, their own way.
From another stand point , fostering a mode of perception which is anticipatory trains people to have tolerance for pauses, reformulations and nuance. This has ethical consequences in the sense that it allows people to suspend judgement, grant others time to unfold their argument and find their way in life. This fosters greater understanding and patience which is a hallmark of a successful relationship. This gives rise to the following point which is no other than relational seeing.
2 Relational Seeing
In Korean what matters is not what something is but how it stands in relation to the speaker, the listener, the social context. The word is perceived as a field of vectors rather than static points.
Relational seeing trains attention towards perspective which in turn is associated with what astronauts call Overview effect.
In particular, when astronauts see Earth from space they report a profound cognitive shift. They report :
- the disappearance of borders
- the fragility of the planet
- a sudden awareness of interconnectedness
Most importantly they describe a change not in what they see but in how they see
They no longer see isolated nations , events. Instead they see systems, flows and mutual dependence
This gives rise to a cognitive arc from perception> ethics> responsibility which very much relates to peaceful co existence and appreciating the underlying the inherent order underneath apparent chaos.
Relational seeing is what happens when perspective shifts from objects to systems, from things to relations exactly what astronauts describe when they look back at Earth.
Pausing here to reflect on the surface Korean politeness markers and the overview effect seem to contradict each other, but as a matter of fact they reconcile perfectly when u realise they operate at different scales of perception.
The key to reconciliation : scale not contradiction
The overview effect is cosmic and systemic
Politeness markets are local and relational
Both are expressions of relational seeing applied at different distances,
When astronauts talk about the overview effect they do not say that differences disappear,
what disappears is arbitrary abstractions such as national borders, or ideological separations
What emerges instead is interdependence and responsibility
.
Though in some cases Korean politeness markers are not power hierarchies, in several they do not encode domination but relational positioning
In this sense the overview effect operates at a macro level while politeness markets at a macro one , both being ultimately concerned with ethical responsibility towards the world.
This gives rise naturally to the next point namely spatial thinking .
3 Spatial thinking
In Korean language words are arranged into blocks , syllables are seen as a whole. This teaches pattern recognition and simultaneity instead of sequence. The gift here Korean has to offer to the world is spatial thinking. What this means is that people perceive relationships in space rather than sequences in time.
It involves seeing how parts relate to a whole, how elements are positioned relative to other , how structure emerges from arrangement People are trained to understand meaning through distance, proximity, orientation and hierarchy
Aesthetic intelligence of a sentence
If we were to exemplify the latter in terms of the aesthetic intelligence of a sentence, let’s examine 2, one with high aesthetic intelligence and one with low.
Low aesthetic intelligence:
Love changes people because relationships are complex and require patience
Why this is weak:
- Everything is equally weighed
- There is no hierarchy
- There is no tension
The sentence tells but it doesn’t configure!
High aesthetic intelligence:
What love teaches is not patience , but the distance required for patience to exist
Here:
The sentence itself enacts distance , in this sense the syntax performs its insight
- Hierarchy is clear, patience depends on distance
- Its meaning emerges , it asks the reader to wait for the insight to emerge
- There is a pivot, introduced by the word but . Structurally, everything before this is provisional, while everything after it reorganises its meaning This creates orientation , the key component of spatial thinking
- Patience and distance are not adjacent , they are separated by grammatical scaffolding once more the sentence creating the distance it speaks about
The word teaches pattern in that its form mirrors the meaning it wishes to convey.
Korean language revisited
To encounter Korean as a perception lens is not to acquire a new vocabulary but to inhabit a different attentiveness . It does have several gifts to offer to the world , yet like everything we shouldn’t oversimplify and romanticize it. Deferred meaning can be misunderstood in direct cultures while its complexity makes it cognitive demanding for novel learners not to mention the fact that some times politeness markers fosters discrimination.