One of my favorite pastimes is looking at names, particularly unique names. I guess it's the genealogist in me. When I watch sporting events, other people look at the athletic skill of the competitors — I look at the names on the backs of the jerseys. In American sports, there is always a new name I’ve never seen before.
Korean surnames on the backs of jerseys, on the other hand, have no or little interest, usually. Which team was it recently (an Olympic soccer team?) where most of the players were surnamed Kim. That’s interesting, I guess, in an odd sort of way. I rather like to see the unusual names — give me an Bu, Ok, In, Wi, Bong — something a little less common. Of course there are prominent people with unusual surnames — Michelle Wie, the golfer, now Michelle Wie West; and Bong Joon-ho, the movie director.
Recently a Korean American prosecutor was tasked with determining whether to charge Joe Biden with criminality for holding classified documents in his private possession. His name is Robert Hur. Hur. Not Heo, or Huh, but Hur. Americans have no idea of how to pronounce the name correctly, and without the “r” sound at the end.
And there is a news anchor on MSNBC named Katie Phang. “Fang” is not a Korean sound at all, and I initially thought it was an odd spelling of Bang, a not-too-uncommon surname. But looking her story up online, I find she was originally a Paeng. The P H is to show aspiration — the harder “P” sound.
There are the really rare surnames like Paeng, Ong, Pung — of which I know a representative of each of these family groups. I own an Ong family jokbo (printed genealogical chart) that I picked up in a used bookstore. There are only 967 people named Ong according to the latest census.
Years ago, when I spent a year at Kyujanggak, the royal library of the Joseon Kingdom which has an archive housed at Seoul National University, I met an older gentleman also doing research whose name was Pung. He explained that his ancestor was a general during the Ming Dynasty who was called upon to go to Korea to fight the Japanese in 1592, and he stayed on in Korea after the war. The Chinese character for his name is really different; you would anticipate the common characters for “wind” or “bountiful harvest.” But no, it’s horse, with a “two water” radical — two dots on the left — 馮. There were 651 Pungs in the last census.
And a gentleman I knew as a retired school teacher and principal was named Paeng. We were “buddies” because we both had been given the same level of cultural citation from the Korean government, “dongbaeksang.” I knew him late in his life before he was diagnosed with rapidly spreading cancer; I sat by at his bedside several times before he left this planet. There were only 2,935 Paengs in the last census.
While it’s not truly a rare surname, one of my good friends is named Wang — she teaches Korean at Brown University. The thing about the Wang surname group is that many people, falsely, think they were annihilated at the close of the Goryeo Kingdom in the late 14th century. Which leads me to one of my favorite harangues, that the Wangs were not annihilated — there are 25,000 Wangs in Korea — not a lot, but not a little. The point about the end of Goryeo is that the royal family of the kingdom was named Wang, and the “fact” that they were annihilated supports the theory that the fall of Goryeo and the founding of Joseon was a “revolution.” My counter-argument is that it was not a revolution at all — that the aristocracy, including the Wangs, continued on into the Joseon Kingdom. The founder of Joseon was part of the Goryeo aristocracy, and all the aristocracy of Goryeo became part of the aristocracy of Joseon — including the royal Wang group. Mostly. There were two branches of the royal Wangs that were massacred — they were closest to the king and had intermarried with the overlord Mongol Yuan kingdom.
But in the Wang story, the Wangs don’t help their case because their numbers were few before the fall of their dynasty. They had a tight, intermarriage practice, marrying within the clan, so they never had the big numbers that the subsequent Joseon royalty, the Jeonju Yi clan, had. The Jeonju Yis are among the most prolific clans in Korea, even today. We don’t have good census data for the Joseon period, but we do have a window on the population via the numbers of aristocrats who passed the exams. The Jeonju Yis were the most successful with 872 passes in the Joseon Dynasty. How many Wangs passed the high Goryeo state exam? Four. Only four. Goryeo royalty was very different from Joseon royalty, but still their bloodline lives on today.
There is a story or two behind every surname on the planet. And Koreans certainly have theirs.
Mark Peterson (markpeterson@byu.edu) is a professor emeritus of Korean, Asian and Near Eastern languages at Brigham Young University in Utah.
Stories held in Korean names
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17.03.2024
One of my favorite pastimes is looking at names, particularly unique names. I guess it's the genealogist in me. When I watch sporting events, other people look at the athletic skill of the competitors — I look at the names on the backs of the jerseys. In American sports, there is always a new name I’ve never seen before.
Korean surnames on the backs of jerseys, on the other hand, have no or little interest, usually. Which team was it recently (an Olympic soccer team?) where most of the players were surnamed Kim. That’s interesting, I guess, in an odd sort of way. I rather like to see the unusual names — give me an Bu, Ok, In, Wi, Bong — something a little less common. Of course there are prominent people with unusual surnames — Michelle Wie, the golfer, now Michelle Wie West; and Bong Joon-ho, the movie director.
Recently a Korean American prosecutor was tasked with determining whether to charge Joe Biden with criminality for holding classified documents in his private possession. His name is Robert Hur. Hur. Not Heo, or Huh, but Hur. Americans have no idea of how to pronounce the name correctly, and without the “r” sound at the end.
And there is a news anchor on MSNBC named Katie Phang. “Fang” is........
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