[mbubb]

some years back I worked on a project with Korean Air on exactly that topic, cockpit communication and honorifics... A compounding factor was that pilots and crew often came from military backgrounds.

I learned about a number of air disasters and PanAm/KLM crash[1] in Tenerife 1977 really stuck with me. In the transcript a Dutch pilot says something like "We are now at take off" when he was indicating that the plane was in the process of taking off. (an idiomatic way of expression)

There was already much stress on the situation as an incident at another airport caused massive traffic rearrangement across Europe. Under stress we revert to native ways of expression. I tried to keep this incident in the back of my mind throughout the project, and since...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster

edit - include the transcrpt: https://tailstrike.com/database/27-march-1977-klm-4805/

[tomatowurst]

What is really maddening about Korean neo-confucian society is this automatic social hierarchy based on your age, as if to suggest someone who is older than you is automatically infallible and has authority over you. It was exported to Japan (Senpai and kōhai is a direct model of Korean sunbae, hoobae) but it doesn't seem to practice Confucianism this strictly, there really is no other countries that take it this extremely.

It reminds me of the Japanese invasion of Chosun dynasty, how the rigid military/confucian structure made communication impossible and largely allowed unopposed landings by Hideyoshi's army.

[yongjik]

> It was exported to Japan (Senpai and kōhai is a direct model of Korean sunbae, hoobae) ...

Hmm I don't exactly know which way the terms were exported, but many people blame modern Korea's ageism on colonial Japan (at least partially), where the Japanese Empire tried to run itself as grandiose military barracks and trained everyone to be subject to the social hierarchy. Rigid hierarchy and hazing was a huge problem in the Imperial Japanese military.

The Joseon dynasty (1392-1910) had numerous issues but actually ageism wasn't as prevalent. Confucian scholars regularly made friends with each other over five or ten years of age difference. (You may think "so what?" but that pretty much never happens among students in modern Korea.)

Also, one reason that Joseon allowed Japanese landing at the start of the invasion of 1592 was that that division of the navy was led by Won Gyun, one of the worst admirals in Korea's history. Shortly after the war began he ordered his own fleet burned and ran away.

(Later, the legendary Yi Sunshin was imprisoned after being framed by Japanese espionage, and Won became the commander again. He then sailed the whole Korean fleet into a death trap at the battle of Chilcheonnyang, losing almost the entire fleet. Won ran away and likely died. We don't know exactly what happened to him.)

[kevin_thibedeau]

It isn't based on individual age. I know Korean cousins with a 20 year age difference where the younger one gets the honorific because his lineage is older and he's an earlier generation. They never speak Korean with each other.