Superscript: South Korea celebrates an ingenious writing system

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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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

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