#124. 불 -- The Korean dollar (Hanja 5)

Being a hobbyist blogger and also a perfectionist, sometimes it becomes really hard to focus on writing a post. On one hand, I really love blogging and want to be writing a post every day, but on the other hand, I should really focus on my career and work on my projects. Of course, I end up being overwhelmed and usually end up not accomplishing either of these.

Anyway, I'm trying to push a project to its end and ran into several snags, and I was mostly obsessing over those for the past couple of weeks (still not resolved). As writing a blog post and doing sufficient research for these posts takes up an entire evening of maybe 6 hours, I have been too intimidated to start writing a new post. But I don't want to put off posting forever, and here's a quick post.

In Czech Republic, there is a town named Jáchymov. Pre-WWII, the town was occupied by mostly German speakers (after 1945, the German population was driven away), and it had the German name of Joachimsthal. Going nuts on etymology today, Joachim is the father of the Virgin Mary (this makes him the grandfather of Jesus!) and "thal" in German means "valley."

Joachimsthal in the 19th century.

Nowadays, Jáchymov is a spa town, thanks to the radioactive thermal springs near the former Uranium mines. Even prior to the mining of Uranium (which is no longer done, since 1964), Joachimsthal had its fame as the silver mining town since the early 1500s.

Silver mined from this town was used to make currency for the Kingdom of Bohemia, of which Joachimsthal was a part of. This currency was called "Joachimsthaler" (a thing from Joachim's valley). Soon, many other silver mining towns were producing their own "thalers," and coins became known as "thalers." The thaler was used all throughout Europe for about four hundred years since its conception in the early 1500s. Of course, as you might be able to guess from here, this is the origin of our word "dollar."

Here is one of the earliest Joachimsthalers, in which Joachim is pictured on the front.

However, the Spanish Empire, instead of using the German thaler, made their own currency called "Peso de Ocho" (piece of eight, the eight comes from the fact that one peso de ocho was worth eight Spanish reales). One peso de ocho corresponded roughly to one German thaler, as they were both silver coins of similar size. Many people believe that the shorthand for "peso de ocho," written as pˢ, is what gives rise to our symbol for the dollar sign "$".

Weirdly enough, the story does not end here. If you have interacted with Koreans of any age, you might have noticed that Koreans rarely use the word "dollar (달러)" in their conversations. Instead, you will hear confusing expressions such as:

"야, 저 카페는 커피 한잔에 2불밖에 안해!" (Hey, that cafe sells coffees at 2 dollars!)

Even the young Koreans (myself included) often substitute the word "불" for "달러," and the reason for this is somewhat interesting. The Hanja for negation of verbs is the following:

This Hanja is called 아닐 불, which means that it is pronounced as "불" and means "아닐 (not)."

Perhaps you can guess where I am going with this already -- this Hanja looks a lot like the dollar sign "$" if you squint your eyes. So instead of calling the foreign currency "dollar," which is admittedly very different from the Korean phonics, the Koreans decided that they would use the more familiar word "불," and it stuck to this date. Maybe because of its predominant usage to denote the foreign currency, this Hanja is used almost nowhere else (yet every Korean knows this Hanja!)

It is difficult to find out when this usage started, or whether it was actually the Koreans who started this (it could very well be the Chinese, for example, and the Koreans could have just followed suit), but this usage is interesting to me for many reasons.

First, this usage feels incredibly old-fashioned -- even in the 90s, it was common to see Hanja characters in newspapers and literature to clarify certain words, but this has gradually fallen out of fashion nowadays. The fact that the Koreans are voluntarily bringing Hanja back to everyday conversation almost feels anachronistic, although the usage is so widespread.

Secondly, I feel that substituting the foreign word "달러" for the familiar word "불" shows the Koreans' aversion to change (to be fair, many nations and cultures dislike change; I'm not trying to single out Korea here, just that the Koreans are one of them!) and their struggle to fit in something they have never seen before into their world views. To me, this fits in with the foreign policies of the late Joseon dynasty, where the monarchs tried to shut the entire country against the foreign explorers, for the fear of the unknown.

This is 흥선대원군, the father of the last king of Joseon. Instead of his very young son, he ruled Joseon for many years. There are so many stories to tell on this guy, and I hope I'll eventually return to him one day!

In any case, I love it when I see a recognizable piece of history in our everyday language, and I like to think that this bizarre mutation of the word "달러" into "불" counts as one of these instances!