Translation

[harold]

I am curious; which word means which in the term Ho Sin Sul. Also, is it sin or shin and is it sul or sool?

 

[MBuzzy]

First off, the correct pronunciation is Shin and sool.

As for the translations...
"Ho Sin" means "self protect"
"sul" means technique.

In Korean, it is written: 호 신 술

BUT, the true translation for these words comes from the Hanja. They are really Chinese words, translated or borrowed by Korean. So it is really 護身術

 

[harold]

First off, the correct pronunciation is Shin and sool.

As for the translations...
"Ho Sin" means "self protect"
"sul" means technique.

In Korean, it is written: 호 신 술

BUT, the true translation for these words comes from the Hanja. They are really Chinese words, translated or borrowed by Korean. So it is really 護身術

So then does Ho mean " self" and Sin mean "protect" or is it the other way around?

 

[MBuzzy]

The character 護 means "to protect" and the character "身" means person. So basically, ho means protect, and sin means self or person. Put them together and it is protect self.

 

[harold]

I was told that "mom" also means self.Can you clarify? Also, is there a book I can find that might be helpful?

 

[MBuzzy]

The first thing to understand here are the basics of translating in ANY language. You must first understand that words do not have mutual exclusivity in differeing languages; i.e. 1=/1. What I mean to say is that in English we use the word "self" to communicate a specific meaning. In Korean, they may have 10 words that do the same idea, but in slightly different ways.

Korean is much more complicated, because you are really dealing with two languages. You see, until 1443, the Korean people used the Chinese writing system exclusively and many of their words were influenced by Chinese. These "borrow words" are sometimes still written in Chinese, in Korean, called Hanja. Particularly Martial arts terms are still written in Chinese in some texts. Many academic texts in Korean are written strictly in Chinese. The thing is, these Chinese or Hanja characters are pronounced differently in Korean than they are in Chinese. Therefore, some words have two different "spellings" or as you would think of - symbols.

So, when I say that 身 means person, I mean that the Hanja character, pronounced "shin" in English and spelled 신 in Hangul (Korean written language). The word hosinsul comes from Hanja, so the characters and pronunciations differ slightly from strict, every day Korean since this is a martial arts term. If you are familiar Tae Kwon Do, you will notice that many of their words for techniques differ from other Korean styles, this is because some organic KOREAN words were created to describe these techniques, instead of using the Chinese influenced Hanja words.

So, to answer your question about the word 몸 meaning self. That begs a lot of questions. First of all, what is the hangul spelling? Is it 몸, 멈, 몀, 묨? Or something else? I realize that you may not read hangul, but depending on who you heard this from, it could be any of these...believe it or not, most American's pronunciation of Korean is pretty bad. And even if you "heard it from a Korean," no offense, but I hear this A LOT and most of the time, it was either mis-heard or mis-respoken. That is not to say that the person who told you this was wrong....it is just that I have never heard of it that way. It could be slang, it could be from someone much more fluent than me, it could be another part of speech, who knows....Think about it, how often do we use the SAME word for multiple parts of speech? Other languages may use COMPLETELY different words. In fact, that is often true in Korean, the verb and noun will sound nothing alike. (although, usually the ending -hada makes the verb). Here are the results from an online Korean dictionary when looking up "self"

A 같은 재료의, 단색의, 나무로 된, 섞이지 않은 N 자기, 자기의 이해, 본성, 본인, 단색의 꽃, 단색의 동물, 자연색의 꽃, 자연색의 동물 PRON 자신이라는 뜻 V 자가 수분시키다, 자가 수분하다

I assure you that none of the words here are pronounced "mom" or any variation thereof. The closest that I know of is 나 자신 (na chasin) which means "myself." Like I said, I am far from fluent, so there may be some who know of it a different way.

If you are interested in a reference, your first step will be to learn to read Hangul. That is easy, you can even learn that from wikipedia....but then you can pronounce, but you can't read. So a simple Korean-English dictionary will work. But like many translation dictionaries, it will include a small fraction of the words in Korean, so you need a regular Korean dictionary. I generally use Korean search websites...but you need to read hangul for that. You can also get a Korean/Hanja dictionary....that's even harder because they have even less words in them. I use a chinese dictionary for a lot of it, find the character, look it up in a Chinese dictionary, then use open okpyon to try to make the jump to Korean.

Luckily since hosinsul is a standard Korean Martial Arts term, it is in my personal Korean martial arts dictionary, which I built from a variety of references. If you are interested in a more reliable reference than my excel file, you can use zkorean, but searches are limited without paying. Here is a SMALL portion of the results from "self" that relates to martial arts. ZKorean unfortunately does not include Hanja.

self-protection

• 호신

• hoshin

self-defense

• 호신

• hoshin

to protect one-self

• 호신하다

• hoshinhada

for self-protection

• 호신용으로

• hoshinyong-euro

for use in self-defense

• 호신용으로

• hoshinyong-euro

sword for self-protection

• 호신도

• hoshindo

art of self-defense

• 호신술

• hoshinsul

By the way....the strictly KOREAN word for Self Defense (with no influence from Hanja or Chinese), is jagi bang-eo (자기 방어).

I hope this helps....

 

[Laurentkd]

As a language teacher once told me "another language is not a code for English". Like MBuzzy said, you often can't just take one word in a sentance and have a direct translation to another word in the English meaning of that sentance.

Maybe harold got self from "mom" like "momtong maggi"? I am not sure if momtong together translates as body or if there is a seperation there, but maybe that's the connection?

 

[MBuzzy]

It could be, it just depends where he got it from. If it was spoken....it is tough to track down. It could be a word root also, like you said.

A lot of Americans do exactly what you said and think that other languages work EXACTLY like english...like, way too often, I run into Americans who think that each Jamo block (character combination) is an individual word....but they aren't. They are syllables of the SAME word. Which is why you end up with Romaja translations like ho sin sul instead of hosinsul. It is all one word. It just so happens that it was composed of Chinese characters, so it CAN be broken down.

English uses a Latin base, in which roots are central to the language. Korean is an Altaic base, so roots are not central. In fact, sometimes roots have NOTHING TO DO with the word. Just because the first few letter or even the first syllable is the same in two words does not mean that they are related.

Self is such a weird word...it has 4 possible parts of speech and so many synonyms and ways of expressing it. There are probably a dozen translations for it in another language depending on the idea being expressed.

 

[Rumy73]

I was told that "mom" also means self.Can you clarify? Also, is there a book I can find that might be helpful?

I am guessing someone said 몸, which can be transliterated as mom. It means body. Or you might have heard 난, which can be transliterated as nahn. It is an informal way to refer to oneself.

When dealing with Korean you will encounter the problem of transliteration. This is the practice of taking a Korean word and spelling it with the Roman alphabet based upon the word's sound. There are different systems and practices out there. So you might see a Korean word transliterated in different ways. In these cases, English speakers argue about "spelling" correctly when in fact multiple spellings could be legit. Whereas translation is the attempt to explain the meaning of a word in one language in another. Culture, nuance and circumstance - a big part of Asian languages - is often difficult to translate.

Studying Korean is a big undertaking, but I encourage you. It will better connect you with your martial art.

I suggest taking a look here: http://korean.sogang.ac.kr/

 

[oftheherd1]

It could be, it just depends where he got it from. If it was spoken....it is tough to track down. It could be a word root also, like you said.

A lot of Americans do exactly what you said and think that other languages work EXACTLY like english...like, way too often, I run into Americans who think that each Jamo block (character combination) is an individual word....but they aren't. They are syllables of the SAME word. Which is why you end up with Romaja translations like ho sin sul instead of hosinsul. It is all one word. It just so happens that it was composed of Chinese characters, so it CAN be broken down.

English uses a Latin base, in which roots are central to the language. Korean is an Altaic base, so roots are not central. In fact, sometimes roots have NOTHING TO DO with the word. Just because the first few letter or even the first syllable is the same in two words does not mean that they are related.

Self is such a weird word...it has 4 possible parts of speech and so many synonyms and ways of expressing it. There are probably a dozen translations for it in another language depending on the idea being expressed.

I agree with your other comments, but I have to disagree with your comment that English uses a Latin base. English is a Germanic language. The Latin influence comes from the Norman Conquest. The Norman French tried to eradicate the then English language. It didn't work, but it sure brought in a lot of Norman French borrow words. Koreans, being a vassal of China for so long, accepted a lot of borrow words into their language as well. "English" also has borrowed words from other Germanic languages of the island, which is why we can have so many words with very similar, but slightly differenct connotations.

Another difference besides English and Korean being in different language groups, is that English is a distributive language, and Korean is inflected. In English, the meaning of the sentence is derived from the distribution of the words. Korean, like Latin, Greek, and some others, is inflected, so that in general, suffixes are used to show meaning in the sentence.

As to borrow words, I have read anywhere from 30 to 60 percent of Korean words are borrow words from Chinese. I don't really know, but suspect it is no more than 30 to 40 percent. I studied and used to speak Vietnamese. It is a Chinese family language, Viet Nam meaning Southern People. Chinese family languages are distributive, and tonal. But when I studied Korean, I was amazed at the words I could immediately recognize as being from the Chinese, due to their being close or the same as a Vietnamese word I knew. Of course, no tonality.