This special issue deals with the multifaceted roles of Professor Cho Seung-bog (Cho Sŭngbok 趙承福, 1922-2012), one of the founders of post-war Korean and Japanese studies in Sweden. Concurrently with his academic career, he was active in Korean diaspora socio political movements, including those advocating peace, democratization and reunification of North and South Korea. This special issue aims to clarify the deep interrelationship between Cho’s academic and socio-political commitments. His research in linguistics, his primary discipline, focused on Korean and Japanese sociolinguistics but also included cultural studies. Cho’s political views and commitments were inextricable from his academic life and underpinned his close connections with Eastern European colleagues across the dividing lines of the Cold War.
In the early 1950s, Europe was still marked by the chaos and trauma caused by the world war that had ravaged the continent. Sweden was an exception. Stubbornly clinging to its centuries-long neutrality policy to the extent possible, the country had been spared many horrors other countries had had to endure. With its industrial apparatus intact, Sweden’s export of industrial goods and machinery expanded. In early January 1952, Cho Seung-bog (1922–2012), a stateless refugee of Korean ethnicity, knocked on the door of “the safe Folkhemmet of Sweden.” He entered the country when the formation period of “the Swedish model” 1920–1950 had gone over into the harvest period 1950–1975. The foundations of the Swedish welfare state were laid, which contributed to the fact that he, unbeknownst to himself at the time, would live here for the rest of his working life, moving to France after his retirement.
The Korean diaspora has lived in the Russian Far East since the nineteenth century. The history of the Korean diaspora’s existence in the region was politicized for several reasons. Due to Chosŏn’s pursuit of an isolationist policy until the mid-nineteenth century, to the Russian population Koreans were almost unknown. Small groups of Koreans were located in the south of the Far East of Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century, but they rarely contacted the administration. The Russian population met with Koreans during the forced mass migration from the Korean peninsula in the second half of the nineteenth century. The attitude in Russia toward Koreans often changed and was based on the impressions and conclusions of those who met them or gathered information about them and subsequently published their notes in print. The description of these representations is limited to 1911—the beginning of the Amur expedition (1911–1912)—which changed not only the representation of the Koreans in the Russian Far East but also many other aspects of the region. The aim of this article is to consider and analyze representations of Koreans in Russian society before 1911. Elements of the sources and narratives for this piece are introduced to science and academia for the first time.
The Treaty of Kanghwa, 1876, was the first in succession of what are known to historians as "unequal treaties" that integrated the state of Choson (Korea) into the global diplomatic and economic processes in the late nineteenth century. Korean historiography has traditionally emphasized the involuntary nature of the treaty, stressing that the Choson government was forced to sign it following the threat of Japanese retaliation. At the same time, the actions of the government in Tokyo are often assessed as pre-meditated, part of a wider plan, and, sometimes, aimed at the eventual annexation of the Korean Peninsula. In other words, so far as the events of 1876 are concerned, Japan is the aggressor, and Choson the victim. The author of this paper aims to provide a more balanced and objective assessment of the series of historical events that led to the signing of the Korea-Japan Treaty in 1876, based on a comprehensive analysis of the domestic political circumstances in both countries and the geopolitical situation in the Northeast Asian region. The paper offers a critique of the analytical theory that the Treaty of Kanghwa was part of a plan to colonize Korea, and highlights the possibility that the government of Choson made its own decision to sign the treaty.
The modern Korean language is changing in a number of directions and is actively replenished with new lexical units, among which a significant role is played by abbreviations-complex words formed with the help of morphological reduction, combination and contamination, including borrowed morphemes. These units are formed by means of morphological compression, abbreviation and combination, which contributes to the optimization of language nomination, the acceleration of communication and implementation of the principle of linguistic economy. This article analyzes the structural and semantic analysis of abbreviations, as well as their word-formation models. The relevance of the study is due to the dynamism of word formation processes in Korean, which reflect social and cultural changes. In the conditions of digitalization of the state and society, development of media discourse and internationalization of communication, abbreviations acquire special significance, as they are widely used in Internet communication, neologization of colloquial speech and youth slang, and actively enter into everyday speech, forming a special layer of modern Korean vocabulary. The demand for this study is determined by the need to systematize the mechanisms of abbreviation formation, analyze their morphological structure and derivational models. The results of the study presented in this article could be useful for further study of nomination mechanisms and word formation strategies in Korean, as well as for identifying general trends in the dynamics of lexical composition of languages actively influenced by globalization and technological progress.
