Okay. So... This feels super weird because I have never done this before so...here goes. Since this is a story about people who do not speak English, and since sometimes I think emotions are better conveyed by the characters in their own native language, occasionally I will hit up my friend and ask her what a word is in Hanguk (because she speaks it mostly fluently) and throw it into my story when the context fits.
It has also occurred to me that Google and Microsoft translate sucks, and you can get some weird ass, off the wall translations that have nothing to do with the context in which the word is used. Therefore I will attempt to place T/Ns in the story when needed.
I guess for some basics we will touch on the basics of honorifics just so everyone is clear.
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1) Honorifics: I pulled all of this information from Wikipedia (en(dot)wikipedia(dot)org/wiki/Korean_honorifics) and here (pejorist(dot)livejournal(dot)com/1313(dot)html), so feel free to double check it. Several of these honorifics are used throughout the entire series.
● The Korean language reflects the important observance of a speaker or writer's relationships with both the subject of the sentence and the audience. Korean grammar uses an extensive system of to reflect the speaker's relationship to the subject of the sentence and to reflect the speaker's relationship to the audience. Originally, the honorifics expressed the differences in social status between speakers. In contemporary Korean culture, honorifics are used to differentiate between the formal and informal speech based on the level of familiarity between the speaker and the listener.
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Honorific Nouns
When talking about someone superior in status, a speaker or writer must indicate the subject's superiority by using special nouns or verb endings. Generally, someone is superior in status if he or she is an older relative, a stranger of roughly equal or greater age, an employer, a teacher, a customer, or the like. Someone is equal or inferior in status if he or she is a younger stranger, a student, an employee or the like. The use of wrong speech levels or diction is likely to be considered insulting, depending on the degree of difference between the used form and the expected form.
One way of using honorifics is to use special "honorific" nouns in place of regular ones. A common example is using (jinji) instead of (bap) for "food". Often, honorific nouns are used to refer to relatives. The honorific suffix (-nim) is affixed to many kinship terms to make them honorific. Thus, someone may address his own grandmother as (halmeoni) but refer to someone else's grandmother as (halmeonim).
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Honorific Verbs
All verbs and adjectives can be converted into an honorific form by adding the infix (-si-) or (-eusi-) after the and before the ending. Thus, (gada, "to go") becomes (gasida). A few verbs have honorific forms i.e.:
Base verb/adjective
Suppletive honorific
English translation
(itda)
(gyesida)
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