Language desk
< April 27	<< Mar \| April \| May >>	April 29 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

April 28

Korean language

When North Korea and South Korea fielded a combined ice hockey team for the Winter Olympics, I remember there being some comment on the news about language difficulties, and the need for separate translators from English to North / South Korean. However, on the news today there were shots of the presidents of North Korea and South Korea apparently conversing without any translators present. Can these two men understand each other without any problems? 86.191.58.157 (talk) 00:08, 28 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

See North–South differences in the Korean language. The differences are overall pretty slight and the two presidents shouldn't have any more difficulty communicating than Donald Trump and Theresa May would. For the hockey team specifically, as noted in our article, the problem was mostly due to vocabulary, since the South has borrowed terminology from English while the North has created its own Korean hockey terms. Adam Bishop (talk) 00:56, 28 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. I have just been reminded now of a note that I left on that article's talk page some while ago. I think the problem still exists. While the article does go into detail about specific topics, it is hard to get a general idea of how easily the average North Korean can converse with the average South Korean -- whether it is 80%, or 90% or 99% intelligibility, for example. I know these things can be hard to quantify, but at the moment the Intro is rather useless in this respect, in my opinion. 86.191.58.157 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 11:31, 28 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Perpetuate

Is "perpetuate" a negative word? Can I say "This organization is committed to perpetuating the glory of Indian-culture music? 2601:147:200:664B:F820:B060:CE00:F7F0 (talk) 00:14, 28 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I see it as neither negative nor positive in any automatic way. Your proposed usage seems fine to me. HiLo48 (talk) 00:17, 28 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Perpetual, which means never-ending, has an interesting history.[1] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:23, 28 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe the negative feeling you have comes from the fact that it is so close to perpetrate? --Lgriot (talk) 12:28, 30 April 2018 (UTC)[reply]