A Holiday in Honor of the Korean Writing System

http://www.mentalfloss.com/article/53091/today-holiday-honor-world%E2%80%99s-greatest-alphabet

by walid • 13 years ago

120 79 13 years ago

tokenadult3• 13 years ago

A rare example of a useful Wikipedia article, "Hangul,"

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

fills in many of the details about the elegant alphabetic writing system used in Korea since about the same year that moveable-type printing began in Europe. The development of this writing system was a great advance over the former use of Chinese characters to write Korean (which is NOT a language cognate with Chinese). The simplicity and consistency (even with five centuries of subsequent sound change) of hangul spelling for learning to read Korean helps school pupils in Korea learn more in fewer total hours of schooling than is possible in Chinese-speaking countries.

atlanticus2• 13 years ago

Why the hate for Wikipedia? In my humble opinion it is the clearest embodiment of internet ideals.

tokenadult3• 13 years ago

I'm a Wikipedian, and between posting my first comment here and replying to yours, I was just posting to a talk page of a biography article on yet another pseudoscientist who has too many credulous followers on Wikipedia. I like Wikipedia well enough to roll up my sleeves to try to make it better, but I dearly wish that more Wikipedians knew more about how to look up reliable sources before adding edits to the encyclopedia that any bozo can edit.

mathattack• 13 years ago

I've had people tell me that Korean is much easier to learn than Japanese and Mandarin. Perhaps this is why.

w1ntermute• 13 years ago

The writing system is easier to learn. But the pronunciation is a lot harder to learn than Japanese, and the grammar harder to learn than Mandarin.

There's also the fact that Mandarin has a lot of non-native speakers who are Chinese. I believe 400 million in the PRC, or 1/3rd of the population, only have a basic grasp of the language. Even a lot of the fluent speakers have thick accents. So the Chinese are used to speaking in Mandarin with non-native speakers, something that the Japanese and Koreans aren't as accustomed to.

wonderzombie3• 13 years ago

Korean is easier to learn to read and write, but much as w1ntermute says upthread it is harder to pronounce. Mandarin is quite regular & systematic in pronunciation; the tone just becomes part of the pronunciation. Grammar is relatively simple compared to Korean. This is an imprecise metric but it also seems to me that Korean has way more syllables for the same words, if nothing else because of all the particles and politeness levels.

But Mandarin reading & writing is punishingly hard. I studied Mandarin for a few years and although I could have some really basic conversations, I never learned to read or write. Korean has felt more rewarding in this regard-- I enjoy sounding out the words and delight in the occasional loanword.

nerfhammer2• 13 years ago

reading it looks efficient but what about hand writing it?

newsoundwave• 13 years ago

As someone who is Korean, I don't find it all that more efficient or less efficient than Latin characters. I also speak Mandarin, however, and I do appreciate Hangul's terseness.

I wrote my name in Hangul and it came out to 16 "strokes", in English I approximated about 18 strokes (things like m/n I'm not quite sure how to calculate in strokes, so I counted both as a single stroke).

Meanwhile my Chinese name is a whopping 52 strokes. I hate writing my Chinese name.

ineedtosleep2• 13 years ago

As someone who took 5+ years of college-level Japanese and majored in (applied) Linguistics, recently learning Korean in my free time has made me appreciate the simplicity of the writing system.

In Japanese, a (non-native) reader can go from understanding one sentence to not even being able to read the next. Sure, there are instances where one may be able to _understand_ a sentence you can't read through inferring meaning from the kanji -- if one couldn't read [水力], but knew both characters (water and power), one could infer that it's "water power" or something hydroelectric. It's a slight advantage to have meaning inside of the characters, however, it's a wonder if the Japanese writing system is too information dense.

Now Korean (and my limited knowledge of it) seems, to me, that it might be the sweet spot. It's relatively information dense (takes less room than just writing things in Japanese kana[1], or hell, even just regular Latin alphabet), but it's quicker to read (and write).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kana

Jtsummers5• 13 years ago

What resources are you using to learn Korean? I spent a few years there as a kid, but on a military base, so my exposure was limited. Outside a handful of expressions I've almost completely forgotten it at this point (certainly the script). I've spent the last couple years around a lot of native Spanish speakers so I've been relearning that, and it rekindled my interest in languages so now seems like a good time to start on something new.

ianb• 13 years ago

I'd be curious if a strongly phonetic alphabet/writing leads to less changes in the sounds in the language...?

jessaustin3• 13 years ago

ISTM this would be difficult to study for periods that predate the phonograph? I guess one could look at rhyming poetry, but it's not clear how much that would help.

deepblueocean• 13 years ago

Reminds me of this comic:

(Learn to read Korean in 15 minutes)

http://9gag.com/gag/3968335

walid2• 13 years ago

WOW! This is actually a very useful comic :)

philsnow• 13 years ago

For example ㄱ g and ㅋ k are basically the same sound, a consonant formed by a closure at the back of the mouth, except that there is a stronger burst of air with the k.

't' and 'd' are the unvoiced and voiced alveolar stop, 'k' and 'g' are the unvoiced and voiced velar stop.

It just so happens that in English (and I guess Korean) that 't' and 'k' are somewhat heavily aspirated, but consider the sound 't' in French: much less aspiration (and IIRC the onset of the aspiration is earlier in French).

taejo• 13 years ago

Voice distinctions are allophonic in Korean; the phonemic difference between ㄱ and ㅋ is purely aspiration.

jessaustin3• 13 years ago

Are you saying the "g" is unvoiced? That's surprising. I don't speak Korean, but I've heard quite a bit of it, and I'd never picked up on that.

merkitt• 13 years ago

Sinhalese, spoken only in Sri Lanka, naturally has some of these features: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinhala_alphabet

1. Fully phonetic

2. Syllables are formed by a logical and consistent system of vowel signs that can be attached to consonant characters

3. Uses pure vowels and largely un-accentuated except for some minor stress on the first syllable of words

4. Alphabet order is logical -- a grid arranged by tongue position and nasalization

The biggest bad thing about the language: the formal grammar is very much latin-like, and equally difficult to master. Fortunately, the spoken version is largely grammar-less.

Source: I speak it.

guard-of-terra3• 13 years ago

There is a word for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida

yongcat• 13 years ago

I think that it's really neat that the Korean alphabet has a near-equal number of distinct characters compared to the Latin/Greek/English alphabet because this allows it to have a very compatible key layout in a standard keyboard :D

nepaHack• 13 years ago

This is what I commented on the blog post:

Really nice article. But the claim of "World's greatest alphabet" is a bit misleading. Please read about the alphabet system of Sanskrit and various modern languages that derives from Sanskrit like Hindi, Nepali etc. You'll find that all the things you've mentioned in the article are already used in Sanskrit and that too from the ancient times that predates the creation of Hanguel. In addition to that, sanskrit alphabets encompasses almost every possible consonant and vowel sounds that a human can generate. You'll also find how interestingly the consonants are grouped according to the place of the origin of the sound, starting from the throat and ending to lip sounds.So the real "Greatest alphabet system" is Sanskrit.

Sanskrit grammar is again another beautiful and well thought creation that is considered the best grammar to be used for scientific work. That's entirely different topic though. Hope I've made you interested in Sanskrit now. Thanks

michael_dorfman• 13 years ago

Please read about the alphabet system of Sanskrit and various modern languages that derives from Sanskrit

The Sanskrit alphabet is very elegant indeed, but Sanskrit doesn't have a writing system. None of the various scripts used to encode Sanskrit (Siddham, Lantsa, Devanagari, Kharoshti etc.) are, in my opinion, anywhere near as well-structured as the Sanskrit alphabet.

In addition to that, sanskrit alphabets encompasses almost every possible consonant and vowel sounds that a human can generate.

That's nowhere near true; listen to some languages like Xhosa, or even a tonal language like Chinese, and try to transliterate them using Sanskrit.

Sanskrit grammar is again another beautiful and well thought creation that is considered the best grammar to be used for scientific work.

Sanskrit grammar is highly regular, which is why it is used in some AI applications, but there's no reason to think it is "the best grammar to be used for scientific work." And, as structured as Sanskrit grammar is, it still opens itself up to ambiguities-- it is nowhere near as clean as an artificial language would be.

Sanskrit is a great language, but there's no need to oversell it.

walid2• 13 years ago

Add to that the 15th Arabic letter ض [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%B6] cannot be pronounced in any other language to the point that Arabic is sometimes referred to as the language of ض.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet

yongjik3• 13 years ago

Well, I'm sure that Sanskrit and its descendants are awesome languages, but your claim that "sanskrit alphabets encompasses almost every possible consonant and vowel sounds that a human can generate" is just bollocks. (Many Koreans make the same claim about Hangul, which is equally stupid.)

In fact, if any writing system could write every possible sounds that appear in a human language, it won't be a great system. It will be a terrible system for any single language. Why would an English speaker want to learn symbols for nasals, clicks, ejectives, implosives, laryngeals and tones?

It's even worse. For example, English alphabet doesn't distinguish aspiration, which is actually very convenient because the "p" in "pin" or "spin" are perceived as the same sound (even though only "pin" has aspiration). To English speakers, a writing system that distinguishes aspiration is actually worse, not better.

justincormack• 13 years ago

It might look much like the IPA...

cynwoody• 13 years ago

Sanskrit grammar is again another beautiful and well thought creation that is considered the best grammar to be used for scientific work.

J Robert Oppenheimer was a fan of Sanskrit. He quoted the Bhagavad Gita, "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," to express his feelings on observing the Trinity test.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e67mIPR6ryA

tejaswiy2• 13 years ago

This is almost exactly like Sanskrit and the derivative Indian langauges. Convergent Evolution I guess?

auctiontheory3• 13 years ago

I don't see it. Devanagari characters are not assembled by combining smaller blocks of sound.

tejaswiy2• 13 years ago

Why not?

Vowels are a, aa, e, ee and so on

Consonants are kk, gg, rr and so on.

kk + a is pronounced ka kk + e is pronounced ke

kk with a subscript of rr becomes kr. Kr + a is again kra, kr+e is Kre and so on.

Korean seems exactly the same from: http://9gag.com/gag/3968335 atleast.

sergiotapia• 13 years ago

I learned to read and write in korean letter in a lazy afternoon - it really is miles ahead of roman alphabet. Extremely simple!

Jun82• 13 years ago

Orthographic reforms are usually associated with a revolution of some kind, some recent examples are the introduction of Simplified Chinese (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters), the change in Russian orthography (http://russiasgreatwar.org/media/culture/orthography.shtml, although this started earlier than the Bolshevik Revolution) and the Turkish Spelling Reform. In these cases the new regime sees the change as a way to cut ties with old one. The ones that don't have the hard-core backing of an autocratic government generally don't succeed, e.g. the very recent one that was attempted in Germany in 1996.

It is interesting to compare Japanese and Korean writing systems: Both of these started with borrowing Chinese characters, due to the immense cultural prestige of the Chinese Empire. These languages show striking similarities to each other (and Turkic languages of Central Asia; although they are usually considered language isolates this may stem more from a cultural bias). Although the Chinese logographic writing system seems hopeless to an outsider, it is uniquely suited to the to tonal Chinese language. The problem is that Korean and Japanese are very different from Chinese (i.e. Mandarin and its "dialects" spoken in China which are part of the Sino-Tibetan family). Koreans have solved this problem cleanly in the 15th century by inventing Hangul while the Japanese approach was to create an extremely complicated writing system with different characters, including many Chinese ones.

Maybe Japanese writing was more culturally ingrained by the Middle ages in Japan compared to Korea to make such a sweeping reform unthinkable or perhaps its feudal structure (i.e. the regional daimyo) and a weak emperor did not have the clout of a ruler like King Sejong in Korea.

Maybe someone with knowledge of Southeast Asian history care to comment on this.

tokenadult3• 13 years ago

The Wikipedia article about the hangul script points out that people who were literate in Chinese characters resisted a simpler writing system that would broaden literacy, and thus threaten their social position. The same happened in Japan (where kana syllabaries were derided as fit only for women) and in China (where a brief period of using Chinese characters for sound only, rather like Japanese kana, occurred at the beginning of the Han dynasty, but was suppressed by scholars). The Chinese case of early sound writing was only recently rediscovered by history, as archeology in sites from that period showed how many writings there were that used Chinese characters strictly for sound value, in violation of etymology. Chinese development might have been very different if broad literacy had occurred two millennia earlier.

Jun82• 13 years ago

Thanks for pointing out the early Chinese phonetic effort, I remember reading it about in the excellent The World's Writing Systems by OUP.

Resisting efforts to broaden literacy for the masses is also cites as the reason why the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing did not evolve much over the vast time period (first inscriptions around BCE 2800, last inscription dated to CE 394, that's more than 3,000 years!). Specifically, although they did have 24 uniliteral signs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_uniliteral_signs#Unili...), which they could have used as an alphabet they never did so.

dgabriel• 13 years ago

Even now, knowledge of classical Chinese is considered an important part of an elite Korean education.

nyc640• 13 years ago

Korea, Japan, and China are not part of Southeast Asia.

anonymous• 13 years ago

The way I've heard it explained is that Japanese has too many homonyms and simply writing things by sound would be too ambiguous.

On the other hand, a friend who spent a year in Japan remarked that, e.g. policemen carry dictionaries with them. When you need to carry around a book on how to write your own language because it has way too many complicated glyphs for everyday people to learn to 100%, maybe it's time for an orthographic reform.

auctiontheory3• 13 years ago

a friend who spent a year in Japan remarked that, e.g. policemen carry dictionaries with them.

Wow. I write fiction, but this is one of those cases where truth is so much weirder than anything I'd feel comfortable "inventing."

srunni2• 13 years ago

The way I've heard it explained is that Japanese has too many homonyms and simply writing things by sound would be too ambiguous.

I explored this concept in this Reddit comment: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14bv4p/wednes...

maaku• 13 years ago

On the other hand, a friend who spent a year in Japan remarked that, e.g. policemen carry dictionaries with them.

From my experience this is more of a cultural thing than linguistic...

enko• 13 years ago

a friend who spent a year in Japan remarked that, e.g. policemen carry dictionaries with them

I am not at all surprised to hear that. I have family in Japan and have observed many times an inability to remember how to write a certain kanji eg. when filling in a form. Typically people will then type the word phonetically on a cell phone or computer, which prompts them with matching kanji, jogging their memory. There is a strong reliance on these technologies or, I suppose, dictionaries, which are also organised phonetically.

It is of course the case that English speakers occasionally forget words - I've looked up "diarrhoea" more than once in my life! But it's not an everyday thing like I've seen with my japanese relatives.

srunni2• 13 years ago

Maybe Japanese writing was more culturally ingrained by the Middle ages in Japan compared to Korea to make such a sweeping reform unthinkable

I don't think this is true. By "Middle Ages", I'm guessing you're referring to the period from 1185 to 1600 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Japan#Medieval_Japa...). I've been working on translating two classical Japanese texts on my blog (http://www.kakekotoba.com/), one from the 1830s (http://www.kakekotoba.com/2012/08/introduction-to-shunshoku-...) and one from the 1100s (http://www.kakekotoba.com/2012/11/introduction-to-konjaku-mo...).

If you look at the texts, there's a huge difference in the writing style, which is partially due to the nature of the content and the target audience. As more people became literate, there was a marked shift in how Japanese was written.

Tobias42• 13 years ago

Why do you think the German spelling reform of 1996 didn't succeed? Of course some people, especially older ones, didn't make the switch in their own writing, but basically all newspapers, magazines and books use the new spelling nowadays.

yongjik3• 13 years ago

Well, to be fair, many Korean bureaucrats resisted using Hangul for centuries, and Koreans kept three different writing systems: scholarly works and government documents in classical Chinese, lower-level bureaucrats using Idu (a system of writing Korean words using Chinese characters with the same sound), and Hangul. I think the move to write everything in Korean only happened in 20th century. Even then, most documents contained a liberal amount of Chinese characters to write Sino-Korean words (maybe due to Japanese influence?), which could be seen well into 1980s.

(And these days Koreans decided to put English vocabulary in the position of literary significance, and some would write sentences which are just strings of English words connected by Korean suffixes. Grrrr.)

* Also one of the reason modern Korean spelling is so regular is that it's totally revamped in 1930s thanks to the heroic work of Korean scholars who considered the work as means of preserving Korean culture under the oppressive Japanese regime. It involved discarding four letters, adding a horde of new letter combinations to represent underlying forms, and a drastic shift from purely phonemic to morphophonemic script. (Something like English always using "-ed" to mark past tense even though they sound different in parted, picked, and seemed.)

bane4• 13 years ago

Some thoughts:

- To an outsider, Zhuyin Fuhao (注音符號) aka Bopomofo, c 1912 seems like an obvious and easy solution to the problems of the Chinese system. Yet it wasn't adopted during the simplification movement of the 1950s. Why is that? I think the reasons are complex and largely have to do with strong cultural biases towards logographs and a cultural comfort with education being the same as memorization, but other, more practical reasons may have contributed. For example, the very large number of homophones in spoken Chinese -- which are partially resolved via tones and context and unambiguously resolved by referencing the appropriate written character (do you mean this character or this one when you say that?) Chinese speakers on HN will probably be familiar with this kind of conversation clarification style.

- Korean, which has a very large number of Chinese loan words (한자어, 漢字語), but doesn't have tones to help resolve homophones, and Hangul (한글) doesn't even have different written forms, ambiguity can become problematic. Koreans will also often reference the Chinese written forms to resolve this! It's not uncommon, in formal Korean writing, to see a bit of Chinese written in parentheses next to the Hangul form to clarify the meaning. The same kind of conversation, referencing the appropriate Hanja (한자, 漢字) to sort out ambiguous homophones is also probably familiar to Korean speakers on HN.

- Knowledge of written Chinese is a social prestige marker in Asia, like knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek, and later French used to be prestige makers in the West. Men, traditional holders of most of the prestige positions have cared about these kinds of markers more, and spending lots of time and money educating girls in useless (for women) prestige things like reading/writing wasn't traditionally important. Using Chinese characters in Korea and Japan was important for social standing, and using "simple" non-Chinese systems might have been viewed as a shameful mark against...not too unlike Westerners, with perfectly fine native languages, writing to each other in French or Latin instead. For example, Isaac Newton, who I assume was perfectly capable of writing in English, wrote Principia in Latin.

- Hangul, though a 15th century invention, wasn't widely used except as a feminine script until Korean Nationalist and Identity movements in the late 19th century, intended to help cultural resist Japanese annexation pushed Hangul into prominence. During the occupation, writing in Hangul was considered a form of protest and resistance against the attempted cultural dominance of the invaders. Only Japanese was officially allowed during most of the occupation and downtown Seoul looked like a Japanese city with all of the Hiragan and Katakana on the street signs. - Old letters in Hangul are almost exclusively written between women, or between women and men who were close to one another http://imgur.com/a/IZpqn

- Hangul underwent a number of orthographic reforms, modern Hangul is a bit different the original, losing quite a few letters, some spelling formalization and a modernization movement in the 20th century establishing many rules that school children learn today. 15th century Korean written in Hangul is about as readable to a Korean today as 15th century Chaucer written in the original English is to a native English speaker.

This frere bosteth that he knoweth helle, And God it woot, that it is litel wonder; Freres and feendes been but lyte asonder.

lobo_tuerto• 13 years ago

I remember first reading about it on a Zed Shaw's article:

"Ever seen the Korean alphabet? It’s called Hangul and it is probably the most advanced alphabet humans have right now while also being simpler than most of them at the same time. It can be stacked like Chinese characters, but it’s also built more like ours with an ability to construct unusual vowel sounds. Get this, it was invented in about 1443 AD and even mimicks the way the mouth is constructed. That’s right, the characters actually look like how the mouth, jaw, and glottis form to make the sound. It’s brilliant and a gorgeous piece of work that demonstrates how something simple can also have incredible complexity lurking under the surface.

Did you know that Hangul is so good at mimicking other language constructs that some anthropologists want to use it to record near-extinct languages? It takes an average person about 3 days to learn it, whether they speak Korean or not, and they can use it to write down their own language even if it’s completely different from Korean. It’s that universal. Imagine being able to get native speakers of dying languages to actually write down how their language is pronounced. Now that’s power.

I’ll give you a great example. I was walking around Seoul one day and drinking this soda call “Pocari Sweat” (said so in English on the side). Yeah, it says it’s got sweat in it but damn it was good. I turn to a Korean woman, point at the Hangul on the side of the can, and ask in bad Korean, “Can you say this?” She reads each character of Hangul as:

“poh car ee sw et”

That’s right, the English on the can was mimicked nearly exactly by the Hangul and it made no sense to her either. But, she could read it and we both said the same exact verbal noises even though we read different alphabets. She thought it was funny too."

http://zedshaw.com/essays/fortune_favors_big_turds.html

curuinor• 13 years ago

It must be noted that most Korean people can read the Latin alphabet, because they get taught English. Now, it is not necessarily the case that they _learn_ English, but they get taught English.

Also, the orthography is not perfectly regular. 합니다, if it were regular, would be spoken "hapnida", but for phonetic convenience in the Seoul dialect it is spoken "hamnida". Something similar goes on for things like 학년.

It remains a legitimate focal point for the pride of the Korean people, however.

korussian• 13 years ago

Hangul is great, but don't try to use it for English. Try writing "Larry really loves the zoo very much". You get "Raeri ri-a-ri reo-beu-seu da joo bae-ri meo-chi".

In other words, you lose the L/R and V/B differences, and words like "much" can't end on consonants, so you get "Muchi".

Hangul has no sounds corresponding to "V, F, R-L, Th, and 'woo'".

memsom2• 13 years ago

Following Korean spelling rules, yes, but when I was a kid I had a slightly adapted Hangul that I used for English all the time. It was a brilliant secret code and only took a couple of days to master it. All I did was add a couple of characters borrowed from Hiragana and put a floating bar above T and S to make TH and SH. I can still more or less remember it and read it 30 odd years later.

dnqthao2• 13 years ago

The simplicity of Hangul is partly because of the simplicity in the Korean syllables. It will be much harder to derive a simple writing system for a complex-sounding language like Vietnamese or English.

Btw, for the 3 countries, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, that were influenced by Chinese writing deeply, each of them has a different approach.

Korean came out with its Hangul writing system. Japanese came out with hiragana and katakana (together with Kanji). Vietnamese came out with Chu Nom ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chu_nom) , a logographic script that is even more complex than Chinese characters.

memsom2• 13 years ago

Modern Vietnamese is written in romanised characters though, and Chu Nom is archaic and pretty much dead.

bane4• 13 years ago

Korean is terrible for writing languages that don't have a strong syllabic structure like English.

On the flip side, writing Korean in Latin script is a fool's errand and is almost always easier to read an pronounce correctly in Hangul.

failrate2• 13 years ago

I'm an American who learned to read Hangul. I had also tried learning to read Japanese and Chinese, but those were difficult for me. With Hangul, I just picked it up almost accidentally.

[EDIT] It was really kind of weird/awesome that one day while riding through Koreatown in L.A., I looked over at a sign and blurted out "I can read Korean!". I was completely surprised.

bane4• 13 years ago

Fun fact, you can already read it backwards. Try reading Hangul that's painted on a piece of glass from the wrong side. It's almost as easy as reading it written correctly.

donpark• 13 years ago

Almost as interesting is Hangul keyboard layout:

http://www.ke5ter.com/archives/2008/02/26/hangul-keyboard-la...

It is logical yet efficient. If you know Korean, you should be able to learn to touch type Hangul with just a few hours of practice as I had to about a decade ago. Even on iPhone, I found the layout easier to peck on.

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