Korean 'maum' vs. English 'heart' and 'mind': Contrastive Semantics of Cultural Concepts

Knowing other cultures and understanding their cultural values and norms are critical in this era. The close link between the life of a society and the lexicon of the language spoken by that society has been validated (cf. e.g., Sapir, 1951; Wierzbicka 1997a). However, without a rigorous linguistic framework for semantic analysis, the exact meaning of culture specific concepts cannot be represented to outsiders of the culture in question because different cultures develop different psychology and different conceptualisational patterns. Consequently these concepts cannot be translated cross-linguistically without a change in their meanings. However, the NSM approach has been found to be a practical semantic analysis tool for culturally salient concepts since it is designed to be independent of any particular language or culture (cf. e.g., Wierzbicka, 1999: Goddard, 1996a, 1996b, 1997a, 2001a; Harkins and Wierzbicka (eds.), 2001; Hasada, 2000, Ye; 2000, see also 2.5 for detail). Among the different perspectives on the study of meaning, the NSM theory assumes that there are semantic invariants that are understood and communicated among the speakers of the language in question, and that meaning analysis has to be able to articulate these invariants clearly enough to insiders as well as to outsiders of the language. The NSM approach is interested in capturing the necessary semantic components of the defined concept and paraphrasing them into a simple language that is self-explanatory.