Hacker News Reader

What you are implicitly describing is called a phonemic orthography and it has a well-known share of problems. Fully phonemic orthography means that any pronunciation difference should be more or less reflected to that, but that means all dialects of a single language should be recorded differently. Also many such differences are linguistically transparent, that is, native speakers actually don't really realize and so can't really distinguish them. Therefore it is desirable to weaken the phonemicity a bit to make it more palatable for native speakers.

Hangul was originally highly phonemic, but a modern reform is much more hybrid ("morphophonemic") mainly because it's much easier and relatively more stable in the long term. Double letters, for example, are used when a syllable coda (jongseong) affects the following syllable onset (choseong). Such cases can be quite regularly described as having two codas, where the first coda remains in the original syllable and the second coda is merged to the following syllable in a specific way. The actual difficulty in the Korean language is much more subtle than that in my knowledge.

Coming from a background whose native tongue is completely phonetic, English feels like absolute madness w.r.t written words and their spellings.

What's interesting is, in some places those inconsistencies are acknowledged and even celebrated annually in the form of spelling bee competitions. They make zero sense for any of the phonetic languages including Korean.

For a native english speaker, I suspect Hangul/Korean is impressive because of its simplicity (and the popularity of K-pop and k-drama also help to an extent) in writing with a smaller alphabet compared to the relative madness of the English language.

> […] is completely phonetic […]

… for now in the 21st century. There is no guarantee the current spelling will accurately reflect the pronunciation in the 23rd century.

Pronunication and spelling inevitable diverge over time in nearly any sufficiently widely used language due to languages being living things. People lament the perceived absurdities of the English spelling, yet they do not realise that it is a far more common problem across many languages. Take Tibetan as another and perhaps an even more extreme example where the spelling today is fixed to the pronunciation that existed in the 11th century, a millenium ago. The Icelandic spelling is also very complex and is not reflective of the modern pronunication. French, Burmese and Thai are susceptible to the same problem of varying extents as well. English receives the majority of the criticism by virtue of being more widespread than the other languages that face the same problem.

There are pretty much only two ways to deal with the problem: regularly purge obsolete/changed phonetic rules/encodings from the writing system, which will result in a loss of historical continuity over a long period of time where future generations will not be able to directly read texts written by their ancestors, or keep the spelling intact and allow pronunciation to depart from the spelling in the future.

The only solution that is immune to the spelling / pronunciation dilemma is a logographic script albeit in a different way. The most glaring example is, of course, the Chinese traditional characters. The phonetic quality today is so vastly different from their pronunciation of Old Chinese, Middle Chinese and multiple modern Chinese languages that it is somewhat amusing to see names of historically significant people of the ancient past to be spelled out using the modern Mandarin pronunciation. It is a convention and a common denominator, though.

So the logographic scripts offer a semantic continuity solution to the writing system problem whilst allowing the pronunciation to evolve independently.

Granted, the grammar will also diverge at some point as well but, as the natural language processing (early word2vec, the Bayesian topic model, BERT etc) has demonstrated, the grammatic markers in the writing can be safely ignored to a large extent – at the expense of losing nuances of the colloquial speech. Yet, with a logographic writing system, the semantic meaning and the context will remain largely retained for a far longer time compared to an alphabet based writing system.

The complexity of English spelling reflects the origin of the language as a trade tongue, also possibly reflecting influence from Latin, which went so far as to add redundant letters for the sole purpose of indicating foreignness. The majority of words are loanwords, and the spelling reflects the origin of the word (unless you're British, in which case some of the spelling reflects the British desire to be French). This can actually be very useful for divining pronunciation and meaning, but I admit I do sometimes think about dropping the redundant letters and reforming the alphabet to one sound per letter.

The great vowel shift is complicit in the divergence of the pronunciation and spelling in English, not the loan words.

Loaned or not, the «bite», «meet», «meat», «serene», «mate», «out», «boot», «boat», «stone», «day», «they», «boy», «law», «knew», «dew», «know» were pronounced differently before and after the great vowel shift.

The GVS was a gradual process that encompassed several centuries and – in some dialects of English in Britain – the remnants of the pre-GVS pronunciation have persisted into today.

My native language is Russian, which is very non phonetic, but it's nothing compared to English. Russian just has some vowels and consonants pronounced and written differently in some situations, but there are rules and nothing like "ghoti" is possible. I think English and French take it way out there.

Disclaimer: I'm a Korean native speaker.

It is interesting to see a perspective of someone who seems to have studied multiple languages.

I think it would be useful to clarify what is meant by "writing system". The term may refer to the alphabet or the orthography of a language. (or other things that's out of the scope here)

In the context of "Hangul hype", what is being discussed is usually about the alphabet, or, at least that is how I understand it. I do think Hangul as an alphabet is pretty intuitive and is modularized into components that compose well.

On the other hand, Korean orthography doesn't really seem to be the easiest to learn and the complexity has bled into writing and pronouncing Hangul, as in written Korean. I don't have experience with languages other than English to compare with, but if someone says Korean orthography is in the middle of the camp I'd buy that.

> Korean as a language cares more about aspiration than voicing resulting in, for a western ear, very minor differences that are explicitly expressed in the writing system and very big differences that are implied

That's a really interesting point. I think it has something to do with pronunciation more than a writing system. For example I can't disambiguate the pronunciation of "밥" from that of the last syllable in "보리밥". I've been told they're different.

> alphabetical writing system

It's not though: it's a unique in that it's both alphabetic and a syllabary at the same time, and there's nothing quite else like it. Judging it by how phonetic it is kind of beside the point, and given that it's been 600 years since King Sejong came up with the system, it's held up much better than many other writing systems (looking at you, English).

Is there actually a big difference in the p and b sounds? Eg. Finnish p sounds about halfway between English p and b, same with k and g, t and d. What you're describing sounds like an emphasis rule that probably comes naturally when speaking with the proper accent.

At elementary school in Spain, we were taught pnemonics PeTaCa and BoDeGa to remember the difference between consonants categories. I don't remember the names: fricatives? occlusives? Something like that.

Ah yes, "petaca" and "bodega" were the canonical example of voiceless (p/t/k) vs. voiced (b/d/g) occlusives.

Totally agree that difficulties comes from doulbe letters but Korean it is not sothing between German and French in terms of ease of use. As I know Korean doesn't belong to any language family, making it unique and not directly related to any other language. English, like German and French, belongs to the Romance-Germanic group of languages so Hangul is equally impressive for native English speaker, native French or German speaker.

> and the fact that Korean as a language cares more about aspiration than voicing resulting in, for a western ear, very minor differences that are explicitly expressed in the writing system (ㅂ vs ㅍ) and very big differences that are implied (밥 is [pap̚] but 보리밥 is [poɾibap̚])

To an anglophone ear, [paʔ] and [baʔ] are indistinguishable - we also care more about aspiration than voicing. So it's odd to describe this, in English, as "a very big difference that is implied".

Nah, Hunminjungeum (The initial blueprint), which initially designed for phonetic alphabet did support differentiating those phonemes.

It's just until early 1900s that a "nationalist" (SiKyeong Ju) decided to use the "phonetic alphabet" into a primary writing system and revamped the system to be focused on words to be identifiable, rather than following the pronunciation. hangul now is just like equivalent of using a modded Phonetics alphabet that made each words identifiable. It's not representing the actual pronunciation, nor the actual pronunciation of the word. That's also the reason why the hanja (= kanji or "Chinese characters" or whatever your country calls it) was around until late 90s.

If you think Korean grammar is crazy, It's all thanks to him.

I can't tell what you're saying "nah" about. The comment I responded to said that, to a Western ear, [pap̚] vs [bap̚] is a "very big difference" that isn't noted by the Korean writing system, because Korean cares more about aspiration [of stop consonants, presumably] than voicing. It was in English.

I observed that English shares that quality with Korean, and English speakers are not even able to hear the difference between [pap̚] and [bap̚], making this an odd choice to exhibit as a "very big difference" which will, by its lack of representation in the writing system, confuse English-speaking Westerners. It's a difference they can't perceive; why would they be confused over the fact that two identical sounds are both written the same way?

> hanja (= kanji or "Chinese characters" or whatever your country calls it)

(Also, for reference, we say "Chinese characters" because that's what every country calls them. Hanja is just the Korean reading of 漢字. Kanji is the Japanese reading of 漢字. 漢字 means "Chinese characters".)