A Holiday in Honor of the Korean Writing System

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.)

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.

WOW! This is actually a very useful comic :)

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.

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'".

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

>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

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

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

reading it looks efficient but what about hand writing it?

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

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

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

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.

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