Can anyone translate a little Korean?
This isn't anything incredibly important, just a minor mystery.
선곡하세요
A Japanese/Thai restaurant that I go to occassionally has a large TV on which they typically display videos of natural scenery, along with quiet music. Although I've never been there (and quite deliberately avoid being there!) when they do Karaoke, I believe that these videos are playing through the same hardware they use for Karaoke.
In green characters, obviously machine-generated and not part of the actual video content, the above message flashes on the display every few seconds. I figure it's some sort of warning like "Hey! Plug in the microphone!" or something like that, but, not knowing a word of Korean I can't really tell. It just annoys me that week after week, month after month, no one has yet heeded this message and stopped it from flashing on the screen all of the time.
I copied the green flashing characters down on to a scrap of paper from my chopsticks wrapper, using the pencil meant for placing sushi orders, decided to have a little fun trying to translate this mystery message. The only reason I even knew this was in Korean is that I've seen enough Korean spam to recognize the look of Korean characters. That's not a lot to go on, but much better than not even knowing what language I was looking at. (Sure, maybe I could have asked someone in the restaurant, but where's the challenge in that?)
The obvious thing to do was use an Altavista Babel Fish translation. The not so obvious thing was how to type in the Korean characters I needed into the web page.
I was under the impression that Korean uses an alphabet -- and it does -- but I was thrown off at first when I brought up OS X's Korean character palette. There were a lot of Korean characters, way more than I expected to see, even knowing that Korean writing (much like Japanese writing in its use of kanji) sometimes incorporates Chinese characters (called hanja). There was obviously some sort of order and organization to all of these thousands of character glyphs, but I didn't understand it well enough to find the five characters I was looking for.
I put this puzzle aside for a while, but then picked it up again last night, and googled up some more info about Korean. I think what I found was pretty interesting (at least if you have a geeky interest in languages like me): The way you use the Korean alphabet is to group Korean letters into squarish blocks in order to form syllables. The Korean character set is so big because it includes separate glyphs for all of the permutations of syllables that you can form using the component letters.
Once I knew that, it was a lot easier to find my characters in the character palatte, as well as come up with a romanization of the text:
seon gog ha se yo
I've reached an impass now, however. Part of the problem is that I don't know how the above syllables are grouped into words. If I paste all five characters into Babel Fish without spaces, I get "Grain sorting do". Maybe there are some strange aspects to Korean culture that I have yet to understand, but I kind of doubt that the Koreans make devices for sorting grain while singing in bars.
If I put spaces between all of the characters, I get "Three bedspreads under line musics". Amusing, but probably not what the green flashing message is trying to get at either.
Other spacings generate things like "Line music do", and "Under line music it is strong". At least these translations are probably more on track, having to do with music, and perhaps "line" as in a signal line or connection.
Since I feel like I've already expended way more effort than this puzzle is worth, and at least had a nice learning experience about the Korean language on the way, I'm now ready to give up and just ask for the answer from someone who can read Korean.
선곡하세요
A Japanese/Thai restaurant that I go to occassionally has a large TV on which they typically display videos of natural scenery, along with quiet music. Although I've never been there (and quite deliberately avoid being there!) when they do Karaoke, I believe that these videos are playing through the same hardware they use for Karaoke.
In green characters, obviously machine-generated and not part of the actual video content, the above message flashes on the display every few seconds. I figure it's some sort of warning like "Hey! Plug in the microphone!" or something like that, but, not knowing a word of Korean I can't really tell. It just annoys me that week after week, month after month, no one has yet heeded this message and stopped it from flashing on the screen all of the time.
I copied the green flashing characters down on to a scrap of paper from my chopsticks wrapper, using the pencil meant for placing sushi orders, decided to have a little fun trying to translate this mystery message. The only reason I even knew this was in Korean is that I've seen enough Korean spam to recognize the look of Korean characters. That's not a lot to go on, but much better than not even knowing what language I was looking at. (Sure, maybe I could have asked someone in the restaurant, but where's the challenge in that?)
The obvious thing to do was use an Altavista Babel Fish translation. The not so obvious thing was how to type in the Korean characters I needed into the web page.
I was under the impression that Korean uses an alphabet -- and it does -- but I was thrown off at first when I brought up OS X's Korean character palette. There were a lot of Korean characters, way more than I expected to see, even knowing that Korean writing (much like Japanese writing in its use of kanji) sometimes incorporates Chinese characters (called hanja). There was obviously some sort of order and organization to all of these thousands of character glyphs, but I didn't understand it well enough to find the five characters I was looking for.
I put this puzzle aside for a while, but then picked it up again last night, and googled up some more info about Korean. I think what I found was pretty interesting (at least if you have a geeky interest in languages like me): The way you use the Korean alphabet is to group Korean letters into squarish blocks in order to form syllables. The Korean character set is so big because it includes separate glyphs for all of the permutations of syllables that you can form using the component letters.
Once I knew that, it was a lot easier to find my characters in the character palatte, as well as come up with a romanization of the text:
seon gog ha se yo
I've reached an impass now, however. Part of the problem is that I don't know how the above syllables are grouped into words. If I paste all five characters into Babel Fish without spaces, I get "Grain sorting do". Maybe there are some strange aspects to Korean culture that I have yet to understand, but I kind of doubt that the Koreans make devices for sorting grain while singing in bars.
If I put spaces between all of the characters, I get "Three bedspreads under line musics". Amusing, but probably not what the green flashing message is trying to get at either.
Other spacings generate things like "Line music do", and "Under line music it is strong". At least these translations are probably more on track, having to do with music, and perhaps "line" as in a signal line or connection.
Since I feel like I've already expended way more effort than this puzzle is worth, and at least had a nice learning experience about the Korean language on the way, I'm now ready to give up and just ask for the answer from someone who can read Korean.
Comments
Aung yung ha se yo is Good bye, I think. Damn my Korean is non-existent anymore.
My guess is that it is a welcome or farewell of sorts. I'll check with my mom the next time I call her.
edit: Sad thing is that Korean was my first language and I've lost almost all of it.
Originally posted by LiquidR
Yobo se yo is Hello.
Aung yung ha se yo is Good bye, I think. Damn my Korean is non-existent anymore.
My guess is that it is a welcome or farewell of sorts. I'll check with my mom the next time I call her.
edit: Sad thing is that Korean was my first language and I've lost almost all of it.
Originally posted by LiquidR
Yobo se yo is Hello.
Aung yung ha se yo is Good bye, I think. Damn my Korean is non-existent anymore.
My guess is that it is a welcome or farewell of sorts. I'll check with my mom the next time I call her.
edit: Sad thing is that Korean was my first language and I've lost almost all of it.
I thought Aung yung ha se yo was hello, and aung yung kye se you was goodbye. My spelling is off, but that's roughly what it would sound like.
?
oh wait, you already knew that, guess i should read the whole post next time
originally posted by bunge
I thought Aung yung ha se yo was hello, and aung yung kye se you was goodbye. My spelling is off, but that's roughly what it would sound like.
You could be right. Like I said I lost almost all of my Korean. Actually, if I remember correctly, Aung yung ha se yo is how are you, hence hello.