earticle

영어

This study observes the different patterns of personal type categorization in Korean and English along with their different cultural value system, i.e. Confucian collectivism among the Koreans and Christianity-based equality and individualism among the Anglo-Americans. As the two peoples are radically different in their cultural background, the terms for human types, which reflect the belief system of a given culture, are assumed to be used in different patterns. The purpose of the study is not just establishing any explanatory linguistic theory on either Korean or English, but searching for the deep-seated cultural implications for those essential linguistic phenomena. This study is based on the Korean and English terms for human reference, which the author has collected from various authentic sources like newspapers, magazines, novels, and dictionaries as well as oral records of the two languages, and will classify those wide varieties of the terms according to their morphological features and semantic properties. After presenting the general facts of the two languages, the cultural implications will be discussed.