Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Say Uncle

I found a cafepress shop recently where somebody has some adoption-themed shirts with words like mother, grandmother, etc, in different languages. Including Korean. Some of it is right, but some isn't. The word they have for uncle is actually the word that you'd use to address a bus driver or some guy on the street. The problem is that family words in Korean are pretty complicated. The word for uncle is different depending on whether you're talking about your father's older brother, your father's younger unmarried brother, your father's younger married brother, your mother's brother, your father's sister's husband, or your mother's sister's husband. "Aunt" is similarly complicated. That would be a lot of different T-shirts to offer!

1 comment:

Ernie said...

But what if your uncle is a bus driver or some guy on the street?