# 니가 망봐 / 네가 망봐



## vientito

Hello

I have presented this clip already to a korean and he could not make it out much and he claimed the clip was not clear enough.  I hope some of you may be able to help me.  The scene is about a group of students hiding in the school toilet trying to smoke and one of the students yelps to another who happens to pass by.

http://www3.zippyshare.com/v/98136923/file.html

Your help is greatly appreciated if you could jot down in hangul of the foreground conversation between the two

Thanks in advance

PS  Post  "Approved by Rallino" - please do not delete


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## Superhero1

A : 야, 백희, 네가 망봐.
C : 일단 불 붙이고..
A : 야, 백희, 씹냐? 망보라니까.
B : 아 뭐..
A : 너 어차피 담배도 안피(우)잖아.


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## vientito

Thank you very much for your help.  The last sentence is a tough cookie  -  I listen to it while reading so far still cannot really match up all the sounds.


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## 조금만

Wow, Superhero1 should be called Super Hearing! But then, anyone from outside the region who lives in Newcastle-upon-Tyne has to develop the ability to decipher the local unintelligible dialect as an essential survival skill, so I guess that transfers to snatches of barely audible Korean soundtrack too.

There's a rather interesting point about this transcription which may puzzle some people who've listened to the clip and then read Superhero's transcript.

People listening to the first line, where "Baekhui" is being told to act as lookout (but insists in the next line on being given a light for his cigarette first, despite his friend's belief expressed in the last line that he doesn't actually smoke himself) may notice that the words sound like *니*가 망봐 (where the 가 is scrunched into the next syllable, as befits "cool" adolescent-speak) but Superhero1's transcription reads *네*가 망봐.  

Superhero1 is, of course, absolutely right.  Writing that word as it actually sounds counts as a crass spelling mistake. Schoolkids are penalized for it and adults who spell it as it sounds are regarded as uncouth subliterates. 

So what about the much-vaunted perfect correspondence between Hangeul spelling and actual pronunciation?  How come a very plain "ㅣ" sound has to be written as if it were an "ㅔ"? Well, that's down to the same Ministry of Culture and Education which, in its material aimed at foreigners. is so boastful about that supposed perfect correspondence.

Like the Académie Française, whose stance it resembles in a striking number of ways, the Korean cultural beaurocracy thinks language change is a BAD THING, to be resisted at all costs and shoved under an orthographical carpet if it can't be stamped out. But like every other living language, Korean is changing all the time. 

Sometime around the mid 1950's, for reasons no-one can explain, younger people in the Seoul region stopped making a distinction between the vowel sounds "ㅐ" and "ㅔ". Though that distinction had been very useful to Koreans for a millennium or more (and the wise King Sejong thought it was important, otherwise that supremely pragmatic genius would never have distinguished between "ㅐ" and "ㅔ" in a writing system that shuns every sort of redundancy) the habit of doing without it spread throughout South Korea and, as the generation that had introduced it grew older, it became the norm. Ask any Korean older than, say, 65 about the difference between the way "ㅐ" and "ㅔ" are pronounced and they'll wonder why you need to ask about what to their ear is a perfectly obvious thing. Put the same question to a Korean in their 20s and they're more likely to wonder what on earth you are talking about. 

But the loss of the "ㅐ" and "ㅔ" distinction introduced several potentially troublesome ambiguities into the spoken language. True, Koreans are adept at resolving acoustic ambiguities by reference to context alone. So they have no difficulty with the way that the word for "dog" (개) has come to sound the same as the word for "crab" (게). Only foreigners, especially when they're subtitling Korean dramas, fall foul of that one. Hence the rather disconcerting moment in a recent drama where a furious lady was said in the English subtitles to have a "face as red as a freshly-boiled dog". 

But other cases are more troublesome. Above all the second-person pronoun used in _banmal _to intimate equals, close-knit colleagues, former school classmates, younger family members, or distinct inferiors. In its base form, 너, that pronoun remained very clearly distinguishable from the base form of the "non-humble" first person pronoun "나". But add the subject marker to those pronouns (which causes an irregular change in both of them) and the loss of the "ㅐ" and "ㅔ" sound distinction becames a big problem. 나 becomes 내가 while 너 becomes 네가. And the formerly audibly distinct possessive forms, 내 (from 나) and 네 (from 너) also ended up sounding alike.  Visible distinctions to the eye on the page, but in modern standard Korean no longer distinctions generally perceptible by ear. 

The thing about language change is that when a loss of a distinction like  the one between "ㅐ" and "ㅔ" causes everyday comprehension problems, people don't wait for linguists or politicians to do something about it. They intuitively alter their pronunciation so that the ambiguity is removed. _That_ they should do so is perfectly understandable; but _how_ precisely they manage to do it in the same way and at more or less the same time across a large language community (even, in the case of earlier language changes, long before the age of mass media) is one of the big still-unexplained questions in historical linguistics. 

In this instance, Koreans solved the problem by starting to say 니가 for 네가 and 니 for 네, thus making those pronoun forms sound plainly distinct from their first person counterparts once again. This clip shows very plainly why that was necessary. Just suppose Baekhui had thought his schoolmate had said, not "YOU'RE the lookout", but "I'M the lookout."  Each would then have thought the other was keeping watch, but neither of them would have been, and so they'd both have got caught. That's why linguists often turn to evolutionary biologists to account for language change of this type.

But but unlike everyday speakers of the living language, the academics and irate citizens who write to newspapers react to such changes by tut-tutting, and educational politicians (in Korea or France especially) respond by declaring them to be "mistakes" which parents and teachers have a duty to stamp on. It helps their cause that in Korea (again similar to France) official rulings on "correct" grammar and spelling have the force of law behind them. So 네가 remains the correct spelling for the word many people now actually pronounce as 니가, and kids all over Korea get marks deducted for using their wondrous writing system in exactly the way its royal inventor intended them to and spelling the word as it sounds. Though King Sejong was a remarkably mild ruler for his time, I'm sure heads would roll in the current Education Ministry over this and similar rulings on correct spelling if he returned for the sort of personal inspection his Ministers had to cope with in his lifetime.


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## ddungbo

개/게 - to make 게 sound,  you need to pull your lips back a bit more than 개, and make it a long vowel sound. This is pretty much everything I can say about this. 

내/네 is I would say for some reason much harder than 개/게 to distinguish the sounds. 



> face as red as a freshly-boiled dog


  Good one.  I cracked at this one not because of dog/crab confusion but 'freshly-boiled dog' being ... if you know what I mean.


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## 조금만

From a general linguistics rather than a Korean phonology viewpoint, I think the reason for the sound distinction between 내 and 네 being harder to distinguish than the one between 개 and 게  is that, in the latter case, it's extremely rare to encounter a situation in which there is much doubt about whether the reference is to a crab or a dog, so the brain doesn't perceive the sound identification as a problem. The eyes (or plain common sense if the situation is being merely reported rather than visibly witnessed) resolve the theoretical ambiguity before the brain needs to bother about fine acoustic distinctions. Similar things apply to most other words where the loss of the 내/네 sound distinction ought to cause problems, but doesn't.

Cases like that subtitling goof are very much the exception, and can indeed probably be explained by the subber being preoccupied with a certain culinary practice found in many parts of East Asia (maybe because he felt a private need for the sort of boost which consumption of the item concerned is said to provide). But even then, a more careful translator would have heeded the maxim drilled into me over half a century ago by my formidable first Latin teacher: If it's DAFT, it's WRONG!. I have never seen a boiled dog, but I'm pretty sure the unfortunate creature wouldn't be red.

However, as that little clip about the clandestine smokers so forcefully indicates, real life is full of situations where the difference between 내 and 네 matters a great deal, and where the context doesn't provide immediately obvious certainty. When one language change creates such sitations, speakers tend to make another change that removes the ambiguity where it matters. And no amount of official disapproval can stop that process. That's why the term "living" language is more than a mere metaphor, and why historical linguistics sometimes resorts to Darwinian explanations.


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## Superhero1

vientito / My pleasure!

I wanted to be a superhero but succumbed to the genial Geordie accent.  In south Korea, we have two languages. One is general Korean, the other is JeJu dialect and if the residents of JeJu island persist to say their own dialect, native korean speakrs will not understand anything At all. JeJu dialects has its own words, phrasal expression and peculiar accent, so we only share our structure of making sentences and letters, similar to Geordie dialect in the U.K.

Before vientito asked for the transcript, I had already seen the film 파수꾼(in English, vigilance or watchman) which is the provenance of the dialogue, and I could recall those scene as soon as I heard the soundtrack forthwith. If I recall correctly the B's name is not 백희. I reckon his given name was 희준, sur name was 백, but as many korean teenagers do, A called him 백희(the combination of sur name and the first letter of given name, it's quite RUDE). The name 백희 is really rare and when I heard the soundtrack, I first thought it sounds like Becky(english name) but I had a background information about his name so I could write what he had been called.

The reason why I put the name marker as A, B, and *C *is I know C was another mate of A and B. At this point, C felt the ambience of conflict and tried to pretend not to know their conflict with an unnecessary mention 일단 불 붙이고. 백희 was angry about A's command but couldn't express his displeasure because A was standing on the peak when it comes to fighting (Like in the U.K. secondary school, high school in Korea is very tough because of the peer pressure, seducing bunk-off, picking on somebody and even bullying, especially to boys in single-sex schools). 백희 could just give the silence to A, but then, A said again, "I SAID you watch out". 백희 grumbled with humilitation, "Wh...a...t...?" (He should have said, "What the xxxx did you say?" or "Are you insane? wanna fight?"), that's the story.


Mr. 조금만, how about writing a Korean grammar book with your incisive, witty illustration about Korea culture and history? I WILL buy your book at a book store.
(I agree with your point of absurdity of Korean grammarian and beuracracy)


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