A Study on the Contrast of the Spelling Regulationsbetween North and South Korea : For “South Korean Style Spelling” Education for North Korean Defectors

Abstract

Understanding the sociocultural background of a country where a specific language is being spoken is a key to systematically understanding the language. In other words, important aspects of a specific language can be comprehended only in a particular cultural and world view context as much as the language makes an integral part of a particular culture. Japanese culture and language are known for their peculiar characteristics that are hidden from the bare eyes of the westerners. They are heavily influenced by Buddhism and Shintoism which emphasize spiritual depth instead of material affluence. This study examines the relationship between Japanese culture and language to provide a framework for understanding the multi-layered meaning structure of the language by focusing on the aesthetic lexicon in Japanese using the text of the Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari) to show the multi-layered structure of Japanese culture and the language. The Japanese language is known for its bountiful lexicon expressing abstract concepts, natural phenomena, human emotion, moral and aesthetics. As a matter of fact, the ambiguity of the Japanese language has been a source of curiosity for many western linguists. This study uses a visual analysis (VA) which can be effective in investigating the structure of a specific language by showing the semantic structure of the lexicon of the language. The results show that the Japanese language reveals a complex semantic structure for the aesthetic lexicon that appears in the Tale of Genji. This complexity may arise from the sociocultural background of Japanese culture with multi-layered context and the communication pattern that results from the cultural context. The results of the study also suggest that the construction of an interactive system of visual thesaurus for the aesthetic lexicon can provide a useful tool for understanding the complicated semantic structure of the Japanese language. It should be an interesting and demanding task to apply the same tool to the studies of other Asian languages such as the Korean and Chinese languages.