Discussion UsefulNotes / SeparatedByACommonLanguage

Two suggested addenda/edits:

1. The differences between North and South Korean languages are simultaneously smaller and larger than the description offered here. While there are stylistic differences in public speaking styles in TV broadcasts and such, they are not so extreme that the language is incomprehensible—it's not too much different from watching newsreels from, say, 1950s. During 1990s, when South Koreans saw North Korean leaders speaking publicly for the first time (showing their speeches and even photographs was banned before that), they were surprised that the Northerners were speaking pretty much the same standard Korean as the Southerners. The subtler differences, however, crop up because of two reasons. First, North and South standardized Korean slightly differently during 1950s: the most obvious difference is that, in the South, when words (including names) start with a "ㄹ" (roughly halfway between R and L sounds), it's rendered silent or becomes a "ㄴ" (basically N) depending on context. (But this has not been consistently done: thus, the last royal dynasty that ruled Korea has been rendered as Lee, Rhee, Yi, or technically more correctly, I, dynasty—although the official South Korean version has now settled on Yi. Still, this inconsistency leads to members of the same family in history books having seemingly very different surnames). The North has standardized on keeping the "ㄹ" as is, so the name of the dynasty would be pronounced Rhee. (Note that, South Korea's first president, Syngman Rhee, a member of the royal clan, used what is now the standardized Northern pronunciation—he was a native of the region that would become part of the North but also quite close to Seoul.) Second, a vast number of vocabulary has been imported from foreign sources (especially English in the South) and equally large number of words were purged and replaced (mostly from Japanese) from 1950s onwards and dramatically transformed the everyday language. While this took place in both Koreas, the change has been more dramatic in the South. In fact, the use of neologisms is so pervasive that people who left South Korea in 1980s often have trouble understanding what today's Koreans are saying nowadays (even terms of English origin are used in sufficiently different contexts that they are incomprehensible to English speakers.). So this is less an instance of North and South Koreans as much as the way Korean language, especially the vocabulary in the South, has been changing rapidly in the past several decades. This is, incidentally, not unique to South Korea: Japanese vocabulary absorbed English terms rapidly in the postwar era, enough that some Japanese commentators noted that the language that Japanese actors were speaking in Clint Eastwood movie Letters from Iwo Jima would have sounded very foreign to the 1940s' Japanese, who lived in a society that looked askance at foreign customs and influence. (This is also noted in another work set during World War 2, Zipang—where the World War 2 era Japanese comment on how strange the language spoken by the 2000s Japanese sent back in time: "it's unmistakably Japanese, but there's a lot of Western influence in it.")

2. One important class of example would be terms in "Chinese" characters but mean different things in Mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea—and to a different extent, Vietnam. "Chinese" characters were sufficiently indigenized in Japan, Korea, and Vietnam that they are used quite differently. While one can make educated guesses, they are still quite different and "foreign." This is even more true when it comes to terms that were adapted as translations for Western concepts in 19th century, mostly by the Japanese. One subtle example is "警察", typically meaning just police (regular cops) in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. While it's commonly pointed out that regular police is called "公安" ("Public security" or "public safety") in Mainland China, this is not exactly true since the entire body of law enforcement and security agencies in PRC is in fact called "警察" as well—the civilian portion is called "人民警察," or People's Police; the paramilitary gendarmerie portion that answers to the military chain of command is called "人民武装警察," or People's Armed Police. The catch is that People's Police, by itself, consists of five separate organizations of which the regular police is but one, called "Public Security/Safety Bureau (People's) Police (公安机关人民警察)." So many seemingly identical (and closely related in the end) terms reflect the historical baggage in which the terminology has evolved in in different contexts.

Can there be an addition to the Dawg entry under English, can an exception be added for moronic Supreme Court Justices in Louisiana, where it's a canine?