π Korea Named Children Before the World Did — A 1923 Story — Woody Magazine, May 3, 2026
In English, the word "child" carries no built-in insult. The Korean equivalent was not always so neutral.
The modern Korean word for child, eorini (μ΄λ¦°μ΄), looks gentle on the page. It is the word printed on holiday cards, on government posters, on the entrance signs of public libraries. But until about a century ago, the same word carried a sting. Its root, eori-da, meant "to be foolish, unenlightened." When King Sejong, the 15th-century inventor of the Korean alphabet, wrote about the "eorin people" he wanted to help, he meant the ignorant ones — not children. To call someone eorini was to call them undeveloped, less than fully a person.
The man who pulled the word out of that meaning was a 20-year-old translator named Bang Jeong-hwan (λ°©μ ν, 1899–1931), an activist in Korea's nationalist movement under Japanese colonial rule. In 1920, in the third issue of Gaebyeok — a literary magazine published by Cheondogyo, an indigenous Korean religion — Bang published a translated children's poem titled "The Lamplighter." In its lines, he chose eorini deliberately, placing it alongside two existing Korean words: jeolm-eun-i (the young) and neulg-eun-i (the old).
The grammar made the argument. If "the young" and "the old" were full members of society, so was the child. Bang's word was not a coinage in the strict sense; it was a repositioning. He took a faintly insulting term and assigned it the dignity of an adult noun.
Three years later, on May 1, 1923, Bang and his colleagues at the Korean Youth Movement Association held the country's first Children's Day ceremony in central Seoul. Some 200 young men fanned out across the city and distributed 120,000 leaflets. The leaflets contained a short text addressed to adults and another to children, plus a three-point manifesto: that children must be treated with personal dignity, must not be made to labor, and must be given space to learn and play.
Read today, the text feels modest. Read against its moment, it is striking. The British activist Eglantyne Jebb — founder of Save the Children — drafted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child the same year, but it would not be formally adopted by the League of Nations as the Geneva Declaration until September 26, 1924, sixteen months after the Seoul ceremony. The Korean children's literature scholar Yoon Seok-jung would later describe Bang's 1923 statement as the world's first declaration of children's rights.
Bang did not live to see it spread. He died in 1931 at the age of 31, of nephritis and hypertension. According to those at his bedside, his final words were, "I leave the children behind. Please look after them."
This Tuesday, May 5, marks the 103rd anniversary of the first Children's Day in Korea — and the day a single word completed its long climb out of meaning "foolish" into meaning, simply, person.
Korea's Children's Day didn't begin with a parade. It began with a translator deciding that one disrespected word deserved better grammar.
- Bang Jeong-hwan Foundation, "Domestic Children's Declarations." Source ↗ children365.or.kr
- Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, "Children's Day." Source ↗ encykorea.aks.ac.kr
- National Archives of Korea, "Declaration of the Rights of the Child." Source ↗ archives.go.kr
- Seoul Metropolitan Government, "Korea's First Children's Day Was on May 1." Source ↗ mediahub.seoul.go.kr
- Save the Children Korea, "Bang Jeong-hwan × Eglantyne Jebb on Children's Day Rights." Source ↗ sc.or.kr
Comments
Post a Comment