[Lexicog] social change in lexicon

[billposer at ALUM.MIT.EDU]

I have to say that I am stunned by the change in use of
Fraulein, but then for me German is pretty much fossilized
anyhow, in the sense that I know it primarily as a language
in which one reads serious things such as linguistics and
mathematics and not as a spoken language. I think that I
am not exagerating in saying that I could probably have
a more fluent conversation in Latin than in German.

When I first went to Germany I had the odd experience of being
able to understand most of the signs and so forth but discovering
that I lacked very basic conservational vocabulary. On the plane
on the way over I had read a 200 page computer-science document
in preparation for the meeting we were going to, but as we were
jostled in the crowded airport I had to ask my companion, whose
German is excellant, how to say "Excuse me", an expression which
seems not to be frequent in the linguistic or mathematical
literature, or even in German poetry. And in spite of my ability
to say such things as "sound law", "juxtaposition", and "Hilbert space",
I knew the names of very few of the items on the breakfast table.

There has been a similarly curious change in Korean
apparently in one generation. Korean girls address boys
of the same age or somewhat older with whom they are familiar,
friends of the family, boys whom they know fairly well from
school, and so forth, as "oppa", literally "elder brother
(with respect to female)". For my own generation and people a few
years younger, this stops with marriage. A girl who has been 
calling her boyfriend "oppa" has to switch to using "husband".
However, in watching Korean soap opera I noticed that the
young women were calling their husbands "oppa", and subsequently
noticed this among young Korean friends. Evidently it has become
acceptable to call your husband "oppa", with a gap of no more
than about 15 years between those for whom this usage is bizarre
and those for whom it is normal.

Bill

--
Bill Poser, Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wjposer/ billposer at alum.mit.edu


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