We're told that Niunja means L, as in Niunja Sogi is L stance. But as there isn't an "L" in Korean, surely it can't. So, what is the literal translation? Mitch
Not sure what it means. But I agree with you it doesn't mean "L-stance". Just like "san makgi" doesn't mean "w-shaped block"; "san" translates into English as "mountain" i.e. Taebaeksan = Mt. Taebaek. Therefore "san makgi" is "mountain block" (as I believe it is called so in the Kukkiwon syllabus).
Think of other words in terminolgy, mainly 'Digutja' meaning 'C' shape (tikut in the chart..phonetics..).. I figured it must mean an 'L' shape. So I did a hangul search and found this: See 2nd from left, in top row, with the following text underneath: 'Niun'.. though I'm no linguist, i would think this is the letter in the Korean alphabet it refers to. Now I'm wondering if 'ja' refers to 'shape'!!! Stuart
Quite a few karate techniques or stances are named after Chinese characters that they look like. My guess would be that "san" in "san makgi" is the Korean reading of the Japanese "yama", which means mountain, and is sometimes pronounced "san" as in "Fuji-san" - mount fuji. If you imagine a man stading straight upright with his arms in the "W-shaped-block" position, that's what the character "yama" looks like. So a "yama uke" or "san makgi" isn't a mountain-block, it's a block that looks like the character for mountain. Probably the same is true for the niunja stance.
Perhaps it means "character"? Just a somewhat wild guess. I'm not familiar with Korean. This is used in Japanese such as in names like Renoji Dachi ("Character-of-Re Stance"), Hachiji- or Hachimonji-anything ("8-character" or "8-text-character"), Juji- or Jumonji-anything ("Ten-Character" and "Ten-Text-Character"), among other cases.
I check with a friend of mine who translates Korean and he had this to say: Hey Stuart, 'ja' is a nominal marker for things that are letters or shapes, etc. In Korean, when you refer to a noun, you need to add markers at the end of the noun to show what kind of thing it is....we don't have the same thing in English, so it's a bit hard to explain. The niun in niunja refers to L, which to us looks like the letter L but which in hangul represents the 'N' sound - hence it's called 'niunja', or 'the thing that is an N'. Similarly, kyocha (or kyoja) means 'the thing that is a letter shaped like a cross' (because in hangul they don't have anything that looks like that). I don't know what a 'digut' is and I can't find it in the dictionary, but I imagine it's another way of describing a shape which to us looks like a U. So, in short, I would say it means 'letter' or 'shape'. Stuart
