Hoija on Catholicism, Economics, and Linguistic "Policy"

Readers of Korean interested in archaic orthography and/or Catholicism will enjoy these posts, the first self-explanatory — Older Forms of Korean Baptismal Names (my favorite pair is "요왕금구 – 요한크리스토모") — and the second showing images of "one of the first Korean Catholic prayerbooks" and "the original translation of the Ave Maria (Hail Mary) into vernacular Korean" — 天主聖敎公科 – 텬쥬셩교공과.

Readers interested in the Austrian School of Economics will appreciate his diagnoses that (1) "the new 50,000 Won is another sign of the Korean Won’s weakness," (2) "[m]onetary inflation also has social ramifications[, ... [w]ith people’s expectations of the future devalued, they consequentially become more present-oriented, the basis of many of the social ills" (Time Preference, any one?) and (3) that the "solution to this... is the return of the monetary standard based on precious metals" because these "as money will not ruin us morally or economically" — Inflating the Korean Won – 大韓通貨極膨脹!.

Readers interested in linguistics will be interested in his reporting of the tragic news that "the PRC government will have a computerized identification database, designed to recognize people’s names, and will only be able to read 32,000 characters of the total 55,000 characters, leaving out the more obscure and less used characters," and his correct suggestion, among many, that "Simplified Chinese is merely an embodiment of the political ideology behind the Chinese Communists, as was the push for Hangul-only writing by the North Korean Communists" — NYTimes – Chinese Language Debate.