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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

> In particular for Korea: Hangul [0], which is a "simpler" language

It's not a language, it's an alphabet. And I fail to see the need for quotes, there's really no denying hangul is simpler than hanja.

However the syllabic structure of hangul would still make it a lot more challenging printing than the linear structure of the latin alphabetic script: you'd need either a type piece per syllable (of which there are >10000), or you'd need a variant for each possible block layout.

There are 9 possible layouts, though there are limitations which cuts down on the complexity of that option. But still, assuming you want fixed-size blocks and depending on your decisions on complex finals you'd need 6-9 variants of each initial, and 2-3 version of each final.

If you're fine with variable-size blocks (and spacers to line things up) then you can probably cut down to 3 or even 2 of each initials, but it's not going to look great.

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To add, Korean as a language existed long before hangul. There was a writing system where they used Chinese characters to encode the words semantically. Like how modern Korean still uses Chinese words in the "backend" so to speak, and the old system was exactly how Japanese Kanji works, you write the Chinese character and you read it with the Korean pronunciation (unwritten, and you had to memorize it, just like Japanese--difficult!)

Now the kicker is, they encoded pure-Korean words using stand-ins using Chinese. Particles would be written in Chinese with ridiculously complex rules, and pure Korean words were written phonetically in Chinese, with the pronunciation of the Chinese characters would be "close enough" to the pronunciation of the Korean word. It was a horrendous system which is why hangul was made (like the yangban nobles literally needed full time learning all day for like a decade to master it, and the literacy test to get into high status government jobs was literally just to write a few essays)

The first few lines of 훈민정음 (basically a declaration that hangul is a thing we made, please use it) starts off with "the language of our land is different to that of the chinese and our writing system is not compatible. For that reason the uneducated subjects of the kingdom have trouble accomplishing their desires. So I (king sejong) find pity in this so I have created a new system of 28 characters, and would like everyone to practice it daily so that people can use it comfortably"

Is there some way to learn hangul to be able to write it?

I dont ask about learning actual Korean. Just Hangul yo say "write English in Hangul" - if it is possible.

Or some service that "translitetates" your name to Hangul?

Hangul itself is quite easy: https://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/

But the Korean phonology is different from English and generally simpler so you’ll need to approximate a fair bit (not unlike English words in Japanese phonology).

Korean phonology is interesting. As a beginner in the language, it seems like the vowel sounds are richer and more complex while the consonants are simpler and less varied than English.

You also mostly can’t have consonant clusters in Hangul. It’s not a problem for Korean because they don’t have them to begin with.

This means that when Koreans adopt an English word that has multiple consonants not separated by a vowel then they need to add in some new vowels to be able to pronounce it. Thus words like Starbucks have two syllables in English but six in Korean.

Correct but with a minor correction. Starbucks becomes four syllables in Korean. A vowel (ㅡ) is inserted between the 's' and the 't' in 'star', and also after the last 's' in 'bucks'.

I came to say the same thing. wondering how he counted it as six.

I though the same thing happened often in Japanese where vowels are added into English words, for example Starbucks becomes Sutābakkusu, or Englishman becomes Igirisu hito.

> need to add in some new vowels to be able to pronounce it.

The fancy/searchable term for this is epenthetic vowels / epenthesis, FWIW.

As a Korean native, I agree.

Has anyone designed a Hangul-like alphabet that supports IPA (or even just English) phonemes?

IPA probably doesn’t work like you think it does. I also had this misconception that it was a “universal alphabet,” but apparently even linguists have to learn subsets of IPA in order to properly pronounce phonemes in different languages.

The person you're replying to said phoneme, suggesting awareness of the phonetic/phonemic distinction.

> apparently even linguists have to learn subsets of IPA in order to properly pronounce phonemes in different languages

I don't actually understand what you mean by this clause, but if we strip some words, "linguists learn subsets of IPA in order to properly pronounce phonemes in different languages" is in fact exactly what IPA is for.

The point is you can’t just learn IPA and know how to pronounce everything with it. No one knows “all” of IPA.

>I also had this misconception that it was a “universal alphabet,” but apparently even linguists have to learn subsets of IPA in order to properly pronounce phonemes in different languages.

What exactly do you mean above? If "subsets of IPA" are enough to "properly pronounce phonemes in different languages" then IPA is indeed a "universal alphabet".

More or less, the same way different subsets of Unicode cover most/all languages, which makes it a universal encoding.

Did you meant to imply that IPA would be a universal alphabet only if all of it was needed to cover each language - and e.g. no IPA-letters were redundant for covering this or that language?

Hangul is actually very easy to learn, so much so that it can trick you (me) into thinking Korean should be a snap. To answer you're question, you can find multiple pre built anki decks just for hangul. If you want a quick reference page on the characters, search 'hangul character guide'. This video was also helpful for me: https://youtu.be/TVqJbiSLw-E

> Hangul is actually very easy to learn, so much so that it can trick you (me) into thinking Korean should be a snap.

I don't really understand this. It's even easier to learn the Italian writing system, coming from English, than it is to learn the Korean writing system.

Who concludes from that that it's going to be easy to learn to speak Italian?

> Who concludes from that that it's going to be easy

Peoples' preconscious lizard brain, that generates gut feelings and first impressions based on superficial brute-force pattern-matching, presumably.

It's actually easy enough to be done in 30 minutes (the guide says 15 but I'm old and slow): https://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/

you simply insert padding-vocals and "silences" to make the syllable stuff line up, my name (Igor) becomes (silence)I-go-ru.

That sounds more like a Japanese transliteration. Korean provides for the "gor" to be expressed in a single character. 이 "ee" 골 "gor"

Korean consonants have slightly different sounds at the beginning and end of a syllable. ㄹ is pronounced as L at the end of a block, but R at the beginning of one, hence the additional syllable.

You can transliterate English to Hangeul but you'll end up missing some sounds (e.g. you'll not be able to super easily get 'th' or 'f' or 'v' or 'z') because Korean doesn't use those

You could learn most of it in about five minutes! Search on YouTube and you’ll find some guides.

You're right, I meant that Hangul's alphabet is simpler than Hanja. Thanks for pointing that out.

> And I fail to see the need for quotes, there's really no denying hangul is simpler than hanja.

Simpler is a culturally conditioned subjective value judgement rather than a scientific one and therefore it expresses an opinionated view. It may be more correct to say it is a more systematic script.

I understand that many things in life are cultural and relative. Saying one language is "easier" may reveal many biases.

But "simpler" can be used in fairly objective ways. Spoon is a simpler mechanism than internal combustion engine. "Yes" is a simpler way of saying "absolutely I would be willing to undertake that endeavour". Square of plain colour is simpler than a painting. Some formula are simpler than others.

In this case the Immediate difference in sheer count makes it difficult for me to understand what point you're trying to make about this particular example, try as I might, because in this case I aftually think "more systematic" is the less defined, more ambiguous term :-(

The State Department has long experience with teaching employees a working capacity in other languages. [1] is the summary of it.

Obviously, "native English-speaking" is assumed, so the time for a Mandarin speaker to learn Swahili or vice versa is not considered. This isn't really "complexity" in a universal sense.

It would be interesting to see a similar chart from the Chinese foreign service's language institute (I assume they must have one). Or the Egyptian one.

[1] https://www.atlasandboots.com/travel-blog/foreign-service-in...

It’s interesting the site says Vietnamese takes 44 weeks versus 88 weeks for Korean. I assume it’s because Vietnamese has a western alphabet. But I thought Vietnamese pronunciation was more difficult due to tones.

No idea. But at least this is empirical data from a lot of samples.

What if we had the results of learning difficulty for native speakers of all the major languages, and some languages were hard for everyone? In principle, this is an experiment that's doable, if the foreign ministries of the other countries also publish this data.

There are numerous mathematical measures of complexity.

Do you think people believe “tic tac toe is simpler than chess” because of cultural conditioning?

I quickly googled: Hangul has 24 different symbols/characters. Hanja had something around 214 radicals that can be combined to thousands of meanings.

So in which case Korean can said to be a "simpler" language than Chinese (which uses Hanja). But in modern linguistics you would not exactly say any language is "simpler".

Langage and script are two completely different and largely orthogonal concerns.

While there is a “floor” to the complexity of a script in its ability to faithfully reproduce a langage, there is no “ceiling”, you can always pile on complexity.

Although I would say that logographic scripts are the other kind of complexity, they’re complicated to learn and use because they’re simplistic in their approach.

Syllabic or alphabetic scripts require higher concepts, but that makes them more flexible and composable.

There’s also the fact that Hangul is phonetic, whereas Hanja has very little to do with Korean language that isn’t of Chinese origin.

Hangul is simpler, that’s not really in dispute. It was literally designed to be simple so that a native speaker could become literate in ten days.

> There’s also the fact that Hangul is phonetic

Hangul is not phonetic, it's a morphophonemic script. The Korean language has a lot of rules that applies at different boundaries, which make the pronunciation of words different from what is written. The best example of this is the "Korean wave" /han/ + /lyu/ => [hallyu], written has "hanlyu" (한류) which is conforming to the phonemic decomposition but certainly not to how the word is pronounced.

“If” “we” “take” “that” “argument” “to” “it's” “logical” “conclusion” “…”

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