Original post here.

Edited by author 01-31-2002 09:43 AM
Okay now that's settled, I'm curious to know the etymology of "waeguk".

I'm wondering if it is a related (conceptually) to the Chinese word for Westerners, "gwailo" which literally means ghost (gwai) man (lo). Does "wae" mean ghost by any chance?

Edited by author 01-31-2002 11:39 AM
wae means "outside" and guk means "nation" (essentially meaning foreign country). in means "person" so waegukin would mean "foreigner" (naturally). Each sylllable has a chinese character that it is based on--this word, like many Korean words, has its roots in Chinese. (for clarification: the chinese character meaning "outside" would be pronounced totally differently in Chinese. That character is known as wae only in Korea.)

The attempt at humour comes from the fact that many Korean soups, which I enjoy mightily, end in the particle '-guk' as well, like mandu-guk (dumpling soup)....

Thanks folks, I should have guessed that only the Chinese could have come up with a barb like that.

I discovered the other day that the Thai word for foreigner "falang" originally came from Persian and meant "French" (or rather its older version "Frank").

A link: http://www.emich.edu/~linguist/issues/4/4-492.html

Why care? I dunno, I'm just full of this stuff.

mmm manduguk.

That's pretty cool, lagado. It reminds me of the pronunciation of "France" in Korean, which is probably closer in spirit to the real pronunciation, not the one English speakers use : sounds like "Puh-rahng-suh", with a soft 'p'. Not unlike falang/farang...