North Korea Says It's Found a 'Unicorn Lair'

[Calliegirl]

The Onion needs to hire Kim Jong-un as a reporter.

It looks like North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has his father's sense of humor: The state-owned Korean Central News Agency reported Thursday that archaeologists in the country had found a "unicorn lair" in Pyongyang.

According to the tough-to-believe report, the Academy of Social Sciences "reconfirmed a lair of the unicorn rode by King Tongmyong, founder of the Koguryo Kingdom," who ruled the area between 37 and 19 B.C.

The news is just the latest in a series of myths trumpeted by North Korean news sources: They had previously reported that Kim Jong Il was born beneath a double rainbow and that a new star appeared when he was born, that Jong Il learned to walk at three weeks old, and shot a round of golf that included 11 holes-in-one...

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/11/30/north-korea-says-its-found-a-unicorn-lair

 

[Scorpius]

Amazing.

 

[kazyeeqen]

Horses don't live in caves, even magical horses with horns. Actually, especially magical horses with horns.

 

[das_nut]

I hate to be a downer, but what NK actually appears to have said is that they found a place that was attributed to be a unicorn lair at an historical time due to an ancient inscription.

It's similar to an Irish press release describing how they found a cave marked as the spot where St. George fought the dragon. It doesn't mean Ireland claims that dragons exist, only that the locals at that time in history thought that dragons existed.

NK has plenty of insane press releases though. But I'd rather focus on their horrible human rights records and concentration camps. North Korea is arguably the worst country in the world when it comes to human rights abuses. Individuals like Gaddafi and Assad are benevolent leaders compared to the likes of the Kim family.

 

[yakherder]

Unfortunately the period they're dating the inscription to was before the Korean alphabet had even been constructed. At that time they had a Chinese based writing system. So they're full of **** either way, and don't even know their own linguistic history (or refuse to admit Chinese domination leading up to that time).

 

[kazyeeqen]

(or refuse to admit Chinese domination leading up to that time).

Sounds reasonable from a propaganda perspective. So many cultures like to think they are somehow the first culture, don't they?

 

[yakherder]

Indeed Spoken Korean belonging to the same language family as Turkish further complicates the belief. Unicorns or not, you can tell a lot about a people's history from their language. Maybe Pyongyang was important at some point, maybe not. I think it's funny people place so much importance on it as a method of deciding who has the right to leadership. If I were to apply the same logic on a global scale, the only rational conclusion would be that we all belong to Africa.

 

[das_nut]

Indeed Spoken Korean belonging to the same language family as Turkish further complicates the belief.

! I thought the general consensus is that Korean's a language isolate.

Hmmm, google seems to indicate the who origin of the Korean language is up for debate. There's the Altaic language family, which is controversial, and includes (usually) everything from Japan to Turkish, and then the major alternative appears to be "we don't know what the origin is, but we reject the Altaic grouping because...". (This sounds like I'm dismissing the alternative, but sometimes saying "we don't know" is the right answer for now.)

 

[yakherder]

! I thought the general consensus is that Korean's a language isolate.

Hmmm, google seems to indicate the who origin of the Korean language is up for debate. There's the Altaic language family, which is controversial, and includes (usually) everything from Japan to Turkish, and then the major alternative appears to be "we don't know what the origin is, but we reject the Altaic grouping because...". (This sounds like I'm dismissing the alternative, but sometimes saying "we don't know" is the right answer for now.)

I guess I hadn't really kept up on the debate. The Korean language books I used when I was studying Korean defined it as sharing a common origin with Turkish, but having evolved alongside Chinese. I never even realized that was so disputed until just now

At any rate, the creation of the Korean writing system, Hangul, is fairly well documented.

 

[Josh James xVx]

And then there was THIS *******