Superscript: South Korea celebrates an ingenious writing system

http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21672358-country-celebrates-ingenious-writing-system-superscript?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/Superscript

by nether • 11 years ago

50 26 11 years ago

economist.com

brobinson• 11 years ago

You can learn to read Hangul quite quickly: http://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/

Pronouncing it properly (especially the single/double consonants) is another thing entirely.

giancarlostoro• 11 years ago

I've taken a similar approach into learning to read Hebrew, and hopefully one day speak it. I'm basically going back to the pictographic Hebrew, before the paleo and learning it from there, each letters an image of something, so it registers quicker, then I learn the modern alongside it. My only issue is I'll eventually have to learn the vowel system introduced by the Masoretes, but at least this is a huge chunk of the battle.

apu• 11 years ago

It took me a bit longer than 15 minutes (maybe a hour or so), but this guide really worked for me when I visited Korea for a week last year. I couldn't really believe it was that simple!

schoen• 11 years ago

I'm really impressed by these people! It's pretty rare (by fraction of languages) to know exactly who originally devised your writing system.

riffraff• 11 years ago

that is in fact a very interesting list, although I guess this page[0] is a bit more useful, as it contains "what was invented by whom".

Personally I've always been fascinated by Spurius Carvilius Ruga[1], who invented the single letter "G" for the latin alphabet :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_creators_of_writing_sy... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spurius_Carvilius_Ruga

Asbostos• 11 years ago

Sadly J must have not been invented yet since G suffered the same fate of overloading that its predecessor C did :(

pavlov• 11 years ago

Emperor Claudius (the successor to Caligula) invented three new letters for the Latin alphabet, but they didn't stick:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudian_letters

devonkim• 11 years ago

Most written languages are not engineered and created as an orthography by a definitive, singular entity but usually organically grown over time with a great deal of authors. Some people joke that Arabic scholars are thought to have created a great Standard Arabic written language because every Arabic dialect speaker is convinced their dialect is the closest to the standard. But Cherokee's written language was created by a single person (Sequoyah) but unfortunately far too late in their history to help save the collapse of the civilization through the benefits of written, standardized communication.

Koreans learn a lot about their written language throughout school much in the same way people in America learn about American history legends, and given it's one of the crowning achievements of their culture, Koreans not knowing about its history would be like Americans never learning about the Industrial Revolution in their courses or Democracy. I suppose the difference is that most Koreans know enough about 한글 that they can explain its inception while most Americans hardly know the differences between the executive and legislative branches.

memming• 11 years ago

Korean has so many vowels it's not even funny.

yongjik3• 11 years ago

Hmm? Modern Seoul dialect only has seven simple vowel sounds (ㅏ/ㅓ/ㅗ/ㅜ/ㅡ/ㅣ/(ㅐ=ㅔ)), not counting semivowel combinations. Even the (largely unrealistic) "standard pronunciation" only has ten vowel sounds (ㅐ and ㅔ are considered different sounds, and ㅚ is considered a simple vowel instead of a diphthong).

So it actually has less vowels than English.

By the way, any scholar who still claims that modern "standard" Korean has vowel length distinction hasn't been paying attention for the last 50 years or so.

cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#Vowels

kragen2• 11 years ago

If you think Korean's bad, you should try English! It has fourteen or fifteen vowels!

1ris• 11 years ago

But how many letters for vowels does it have? German has A, Ä, E, I, O, Ö, U, Ü, Y. I think english has mainly diphthongs.

felipebueno• 11 years ago

"Subscribe now for full access or register to continue reading." No, thanks!

dghughes• 11 years ago

I didn't see that I could read the entire article.

“LIKE trying to fit a square handle into a round hole” is how Sejong the Great, a Korean king, viewed the practice of using hanja, classical Chinese characters, to transcribe Korean. Hanja recorded meaning alone, not sound, and only aristocrats knew it. So the king and his literary circle crafted an alphabet from scratch and started promoting it in 1446. Known as hangul, it consists of 24 elements that can be grouped into blocks of syllables. Some take the shape that lips and tongue form in speech. It is fantastically easy to learn. The 80,000 speakers of the Cia-Cia language are also being encouraged to use the script on the Indonesian island of Buton.

Hanja lingered for centuries after the introduction of hangul. Nobles scorned the newfangled alphabet as being for peasants, women and children. But after the end of over three decades of Japanese occupation in 1945, the governments in both South and North Korea promoted hangul fiercely, ordering that hanja be expunged from all texts and no longer taught in schools.

Today hanja pepper South Korean newspapers, while older South Koreans still use them to write their names. But hangul is a source of patriotic pride. As North Koreans were preparing this week to mark the 70th anniversary of the ruling Workers’ Party with the usual display of bellicosity, the South had a day off to celebrate something indigenous, brilliant and pacific—their alphabet.

The annual October 9th holiday, scrapped in 1991 at employers’ request, was reinstated in 2013. Woo Eun-kyung, a hotelier in Seoul, feels “pride and gratitude” when Hangul Day comes around. Kim Ki-beom, a young lawyer, frets that Korean is being “destroyed by alien words”. A national day, he says, helps to keep the language intact; he laments a preference for English signs on streets.

Still, Mr Kim admits the holiday is firstly a welcome respite from long office hours. It is also a way to entice South Koreans to splurge. One alien word now doing the rounds is beulfe, a conflation of “Black Friday”, America’s huge autumn sale, transliterated into hangul. The government has prodded 27,000 shops to slash prices in the first half of October to pep up sluggish consumer spending; in four days Lotte, a department store, sold almost a quarter more than a year earlier. Electronics and clothes are much in demand—another way for South Koreans to express themselves.

rasz_pl• 11 years ago

delete cookies

yongjik3• 11 years ago

By the way, from the article: "The 80,000 speakers of the Cia-Cia language are also being encouraged to use the script on the Indonesian island of Buton."

Many Koreans regard the whole Cia-Cia affair as a farce, or a misguided attempt to "prove" the excellence of our writing system by advertising it onto people who would really, really be better served by adopting the same character system as everyone else around them (that is, the Latin alphabet).

If you can read Korean, here's a fascinating (though maybe biased) summary of the affair:

https://namu.wiki/w/%EC%B0%8C%EC%95%84%EC%B0%8C%EC%95%84%EC%...

한국인들은 과연 찌아찌아족을 위해 한글을 전파하고 있는 것인가, 아니면 한국인들 자신을 위해 전파하고 있는 것인가. (Are Koreans teaching Hangul to the Cia-Cia for their benefit, or for the Koreans ourselves?)

BoysenberryPi• 11 years ago

I learned Japanese while a friend of mine learned Korean. We would talk sometimes and teach each other languages. One thing I grew envious of was hangul. It is such a drastically better writing system than the Japanese system of kana and kanji that it isn't even funny. It really makes writing Japanese feel hacked together.

stephengillie3• 11 years ago

The Japanese writing system uses different letters for the same sounds, depending on their source - foreign languages and animal sounds use Katakana, not Hiragana. If it were intentional, it might be considered rude to foreigners to organize a language that way - grouping foreigners with the animals, based on their sounds.

yongjik3• 11 years ago

Well, but that's not too different from the use of Italics in English orthography, which also includes sound effects and foreign words:

It made a distinct thunk as it hit the bottom.
She's so blasé about HN comments these days.

vorg• 11 years ago

There's a Unicode cost to Korea's writing system: it needs 11,172 codepoints to represent. This is because there are 19 mandatory leading consonants, 21 mandatory vowels, and 27 optional trailing consonants, giving a total of 19 x 21 x 28 possible syllable blocks, which are then generated by formula into range U+AC00 to U+D7A3 to comply with Unicode's policy that only the components of horizontal text be encoded, and any components built otherwise, e.g. Korean's square structure, be represented compositely.

Superscript: South Korea celebrates an ingenious writing system

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