Aug 27

Written by: Renegade
Thursday, August 27, 2009 2:01 PM

It can be very difficult to know what "etc." means in Konglish. The following is to help clarify that.

The Korean for "etc." is "기타등등" (其他等等) but sometimes just "등" (等) is used or "등등" (等等). This is the source of confusion. 등 is a plural marker that indicates that the preceding is a list of more than one item; It makes it explicitly clear that there are more than one. Forget what you read in the dictionary. It's wrong.

Most often, 등 simply refers to the preceding list. So when it is translated into English, as you see in the dictionary, you get "and so on" or "etc." or something bizarrely similar like "and etc.". But in English this means that there is something else following and that the list is not complete. The reader is left to imagine the rest of the list or deduce the rest of the list. However, if it's actually just a plural marker and it is referring to the previous list, then this is simply wrong in English as we have no way to do that other than to state the obvious, e.g. This articles has an introductory paragraph of 1 sentence, a second paragraph about a problem, a third paragraph about solving the problem, and a final summary paragraph, and the preceding list has more than 1 element in it. Like WTF is that? You just can't get it in English and sound sane.

So, pretty much whenever you see "etc." in Konglish, you can just drop it entirely to come up with the correct English translation.

Cheers,

Ryan

 

Copyright ©2009 Ryan Smyth

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