The Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked that ‘the limits of one’s language is the limit of their world’ – and there is a certain truth to be found in this. So it was with some interest that I read a recent piece by Fyodor Tertitskiy in which he took rather considerable aim at those that study North Korea without having a functional working knowledge of the Korean language itself.

“People who call themselves scholars” are “English-only pseudo-professionals” that would be less able to disentangle the current situation than a “Korean janitor” employed to clean up after conferences finish, he said.