Linguistic Gap Analysis

Korean’s gaps for this curriculum are narrower than in the other languages in this pipeline, concentrated in a few specific areas: honorific grammar encoding, and a small cluster of spirit/power/family terms needing active disambiguation.

Terms requiring mandatory honorific grammar

• Lord (주님) and all direct references to God or Christ require the 님 honorific suffix and, in verbs, honorific conjugation (하십니다-style forms). This is a genuine linguistic-gap issue distinct from anything in Hindi, Mandarin, or Japanese in this batch: Korean grammatically marks social hierarchy in a way that requires an explicit, consistent editorial decision about how reverence for God is encoded structurally, not just lexically.

Terms requiring active disambiguation from shamanistic vocabulary

• Power of God (능력): the correct word is also the word used for a shaman’s claimed spiritual power (영력 as a near-synonym in casual usage); this doesn’t require a different word so much as consistent qualifying context (Romans 1:16’s specific saving-power sense).
• Grace (은혜): no single-word fix exists for the 기복신앙 transactional-exchange risk; it requires structural teaching (explicit denial of reciprocity) rather than word substitution.

A genuine Korean linguistic asset

• Covenant vs. contract: unlike Japanese, where 契約 (keiyaku) serves double duty for both covenant and commercial contract, Korean already maintains clean, distinct vocabulary — 언약 (covenant) and 계약 (contract) — solving by existing lexical choice a dilution risk that requires active management in at least one other language in this pipeline.

Gap-filling strategy

Where Korean’s existing vocabulary is sound but culturally pulled toward shamanistic or Confucian-ritual associations (은혜, 능력, 아버지), this Language Package keeps the established term and requires explicit structural/teaching disambiguation rather than inventing an unfamiliar coinage that would break consistency with the Korean Revised Version tradition.