French teachers from all over Northeast Asia descended on Seoul to try to figure out why anyone should learn French. Apparently, the group came up short for answers, but it did provide us with this bit of insight, courtesy former French minister of culture Catherine Tasca:
Tasca based her support for the French language on contempt for English, which she said was “not a quality language.” She added the hegemony of Hollywood movies had brought no improvement to the quality of films.
118 Comments
Pourquoi pas apprendre le français juste pour le simple plaisir de savoir parler une belle langue?
Kevin
Kevin Kim makes a good point. Must there be a reason? Can’t learning the language be the ends in itself rather than a means to some other selfish end?
Tasca based her support for the French language on contempt for English, which she said was ?橫not a quality language.??
Hee-hee-hee.
She added the hegemony of Hollywood movies had brought no improvement to the quality of films.
Ha-ha-ha.
Those crazy French. Having a conference on their language and not being able to come up with a really decent reason why anyone should learn it.
BWAH-HA-HA!
I have to admit, that this is a great propaganda victory for French bashers. Also, why is the Belgian ambassador to Korea Chinese? Is that a mistake or is Wei actually a Belgian name?
The English language supports the use of adjectives, which in the case of Minister Tasca’s comment would have been useful. ‘Quality’ exists irrespective of the individual; perhaps she meant to say that English is not a ‘high’ quality language.
An example: ‘French wines are quality wines - their quality is high in comparison with the wines of Iceland, but low in comparison with the wines of Australia or the US’.
Now I understand! French foreign policy is also based on contempt: for the USA.
Incroyable! The French language, and its main products in literature and philosophy, don’t need a defense. Proust, Barthes, Celine (Louis-Ferdinand Celine, not Celine Dion…) are proof enough of how complex and beautiful it is. I likes my Freedom Fries, but mon dieu! But it’s true, the language is not so popular these days–an official at the French Embassy told me he was dismayed that far more Korean women than men were learning it, but I asked him what was so bad about being surrounded by Korean women speaking French, and I think he saw my point.
Tasca based her support for the French language on contempt for English, which she said was ??not a quality language.??
In Estonian schools, French instructor has shifting in the last few years behind both English and German.
She added the hegemony of Hollywood movies had brought no improvement to the quality of films.
Oh, I don’t know. Team America: World Police had at opening scene in Paris getting shot to hell, and Deep Impact had the scene were France is destroyed by a tital wave. Both scequences brought out applause from my red-state audience.
French is a fine language. France is a good country. French culture is just as good as any other.
But c’mon: Shakespeare, Hemingway, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Beat poets, Arthur Miller, Oscar Wilde and a whole lot of the guys give people more than enough reason to learn English.
Here’s one reason for Koreans to learn French: it’s so much like English, it’s an easy second language to pick up.
lierlou,
les americains are trying to steal your history!
shout “??????????????? ????? ???????!”
p.s. although i never experienced the places you speak of, i mourn their loss (if it comes to that).
Maybe Korea might someday want to have relations with one of the many French speaking African nations?
Yeah, seems like several other UN countries are already having relations with French-speaking nations in Africa.
Oddly enough, I was just commenting to someone on how great the French language was, of how many great literary works are in French and of how musical poetry can be in French.
If the French were to focus more upon “virtu” instead of other petty vices, it would draw better attention to themselves.
French-it used to be that US passports were printed in both English and French. I do not know when that has changed but now they are also printed in Spanish. I suspect that it all boils down to this-how usable is it. For most people in the states, Spanish is much more usefull-there is a clear need while French… Not only that but English is the second language most commonly studied in the world. As far as it being a worthy language to learn-no argument. Is is better than say Navajo or Lakota-questionable. I am a little suprised the French didn’t do more to sell themselves to Korea when ??????? ????? was popular here. There wasn’t much French but it wasn’t completely devoid of French either. French is like German in a way-its popularity has declined as a foreign language to learn. Perhaps they ought to focus more on those particular reasons.
“Once again, the French get it wrong.” etc.
Once again too many US citizens mistake “the French” and “some French asshole” or “the French government” or “Jacques Chirac”. Let me try this way: “GW Bush says blah blah and, once again, the American get it wrong.” or “The USA allow death penalty to be applied to children, and, once again, the Americans are barbarians.” I could go on for hours.
Interestingly, some americans bashing France use to come to military victories/defeats, like school boys: “Hey! My old bro is stronger than yours!” Nice analysis, thanks.
It is a shame I hear such kind of bullshit in France and from US citizens, and from readers of the Marmot — who think before writing.
I think that the conference was focusing on _economic_ reasons to learn the French language. I am French (though my family is Spanish), and I cannot find one. This is the cause of the embarassment.
Maybe, as native English speakers, many of you do not suspect that too many non-native English speakers “think” that English is a rather poor language. Probably madame Tasca is one of them. All that this proves is these persons have a poor knowledge (read: only use English for technical conversations) of English.
I wish I could master a better English.
R. Elgin comment is right: the French like to discuss everything, analyse all, so, inevitably, a lot of vices show up.
lirelou also touched me with the evocation of Lousiana, not because of a los t colony (again, Napolean never asked me my opinion on that, I am not Napoleon, I am not the French governement, just a person), but because I believe diversity is richness. True gold.
I’m not sure how to measure the quality of vocabulary, but as for quantity, the OED lists about 500,000 words. German has a vocabulary of about 185,000 and French fewer than 100,000.
Maintenant nous farmons, eh M. Kim?
Kim Jong-Il (aka christopherjohn_smith), I’d suggest you try again harder. What you said barely makes sense.
Michael: cute :-)…
Tasca is an idiot, and trying to sell learning French isn’t a sign of greatness… It’s like asking for the price of a Rolls: if you have to ask, you have no business there; if you have to explain why French is a great language and should be learned, maybe it’s time you go somewhere else chase other ambulances — no market for you here.
When I was a student, learning English didn’t equate to high-treason, but didn’t qualify as “real” studies either. English was a tool, which you could wield awkwardly and still get away with it — as long as you came from a “serious” department, like political studies and/or economics. People like Tasca are a by-product of such a system. Today we have Starbucks and TGIF in Paris, but people still don’t speak English, and learning/speaking English is now — except for a small `elite` — something that is apparently really useless and shameful…
And meanwhile, wine producers are surprised they sell less abroad — and are demanding the government compensates them for their loss. Whaddafuck am I doing here?
That’s probably because so much of English vocabulary isn’t English, but borrowed from all over the place. While French purists are too busy trying to keep their own language stagnant, English is constantly evolving and assimilating. P.S. the new word of the day is Santorum. If you want to know what this particular word means, just google(another new word!) it.
How could this former Minister of culture ever say another language is not a quality language? What is it about French government officials, not ordinary French citizens, that makes them so petty, childish, and arrogant? French is a good quality language that doesn’t have to drag other languages down to pull itself up. I believe the English speaking countries of the world are doing quit well in spite of not having a quality language.
Must be frustrating as hell for people like Tasca, way way out here in the “Extreme Orient” having natives speak English at you all the time.
Probably speaks better English because of it, though surely not English of “quality.”
Obviously her problem is that she’s confusing English with the crap at http://www.engrish.com.
I wish I knew better French for a lot of personal reasons, but those are just personal reasons.
typo
quit =quite. English is pretty tricky sometimes.
Must be frustrating as hell for people like Tasca [...] having natives speak English at you all the time.
Probably speaks better English because of it,
I don’t think she speaks English — or at least, if she does, not for that reason. These people come fully equipped with translators (or the Embassy provides one — in Korea oftentimes the evil but ubiquitous ????????). I remember former French “State Secretary” [to align terminology on the US] and now in at more fitting (if not adequate; at least he doesn’t have to speak English
role at Interior (something akin to Homeland Security, something that has existed for centuries here…) Dominique de Villepin being interviewed in his ministry by — was it CNN. Questions were asked in English, and answered in French (CNN helpfully providing subtitles). As I said above, these guys are the by-product of an education system that refuses to see foreign languages as a “real” field.
French writing s*ck. Why an extra silent letter attached to every word? No wonder the rest of the world look at the French as looney people. Too emotional. Lack of proportion.
??? is the most scientific writing system in the world. It may be used in computer system worldwide someday. Probably only writing system in the world based on phonetics.
Koreans were and are smart people.
I left out Russian. English is another language loosely based on phonetics. ???? is the best one.
And Koreans invented ??穫? out of nothing. They set up a research team that studied every sound a human can make. Then, they assigned one symbol for each sound. They correctly divided ???? and ?????.
All this without any outside help or precedence. Literally out of nothing.
Very scientific and very, very creative. Only race in the world that developed its own unique system of writing that can be as modern as the computer. Almost space alien technology!
We can start the conversion by directly translating Korean and using that as English.
??? -Whatdo?
????? - Knows.
????? - Did.
??????? - Hug gives.
??? ?????? ?? ??????? - Flavor having thing give.
Then we can have the same sorts of confusion you see in Korean, where no one knows who did what in informal speech! I think it would also be great if we instituted a Confucian based conjugation system. I know I would feel a lot better having to use different conjugations because some guy was born one year after me.
yomo,
psst… ix-?? on the pace-??? liean-?????? echnology-??.
here’s their problem, to find out what french has on anglais, they should have asked english-speaking french learners.
french is a beautiful language, and it seems to me that with the liaison in korean, and the average korean’s familiarity with english, that french shouldn’t be too terribly hard to master.
learning french is a great way to improve gre scores.
and if you want to work in a french company, french is, well, the lingua franca. they should have pointed out that, like anywhere else, you can get by with english, but in france you thrive with french.
and then they should have had a job fair for france-, quebec-, and haiti-based companies, plus the various u.n. services where french is a plus (there are some).
every year l’oreal has an internship that people in korea would step over their own mother to get into; imagine the boost to french if they required that people spoke french in that internship!
nora ne sais rien!
My students always tell me they want to learn French because “it’s the language of love.” At the very least the conferees could have declared that was a good reason for Asians to study French.
In all seriousness, however, the reason why most Asians study a foreign culture and language is for the sake of making money, and there’s just not a lot of money to be had speaking French, aside from getting jobs in French companies. The big kick push now is for everyone to have Chinese as their second or third language, and French gets pushed farther down the totem pole. I also suspect that with the rise of Asian-Latin American trade, Spanish is going to become more popular. (Or at least more popular than French.)
learning english is all part of the herd mentality in asia. everyone else is doing it, so i have to do it too (although it’s not like asians have a monopoly on this).
but if a korean were to learn french, then they could fulfill a niche market. if the french want people to learn la langue d’amour, then they have to convince the koreans and the japanese, etc., that there really is a niche market to be filled.
in korea there are certainly enough people bucking the english trend to learn japanese or chinese instead.
uh-oh. i just realized that i’m bashing english teachers again, however subtlely and indirectly. i’d better wrap this up by saying that even if french (and chinese and japanese) were ever to drastically increase its market share, there will always be a need for quality english professionals (and i’m saying that with a straight face) here.
Vietnamese = French speaking asians
Yomo, you speak the unfiltered Korean truth. You are the essence of Korean fact finding. So many Koreans say as you so, but only to each other. It??s almost like they are ashamed of all the magnificent accomplishment of the ?橫dae han gook?? (great Korean people). You say it loud. Watch out, there are lots of Japanese types here. Keep speaking the truth.
I have heard, and read in lots of Korean newspapers that Hangul is the most scientific language ever. They say its pure logic!!! Sojung, created each(letter) from pure genius and unlike English, didn??t copy anything. He didn??t copy a letter, because Koreans are (among for now, later perhaps they will be alone in the leadership) greatest inventers of human kind. It??s unimaginable that such genus existed with out perhaps higher (GOD) guidance. But somehow the Korean race did this. By taking language and actually putting it in some kind of written form around 1450, Koreans are unique in the world!!
Yomo, stay strong from all the people or spies that wish to stop your message!!!
dda, I comepletely agree with Michael: your knowledge of English is extensive, and your use of it is remarkably good. I’m also really impressed by your knowledge of lingustics in general. Thanks for posting here.
dda, is linguistics your vocation or avocation?
And Koreans invented ???? out of nothing. They set up a research team that studied every sound a human can make. Then, they assigned one symbol for each sound. They correctly divided ???? and ?????.
All this without any outside help or precedence. Literally out of nothing.
No fucking way.
Item 1: the very idea of a vernacular alphabet in a Chinese-as-a-foreign-language-writing country (something that was a freaking no-no, and actually stayed a freaking no-no in Korea until the 20th Century) came from the Y?an dynasty. Qubilai Qa’an had a monk, hPags-Pa [????? if memory serves], his own pet lama (as in monk, you tard, not the animal), create a vernacular script for the Mongol language. Some of the letters of ??? actually resemble some of hPhags-Pa (??? in particular, ?? somehow). That was in 1269, waaaaay before ???? was a light of desire in his father’s eyes, and a shout of pain in his mum’s throat. The script was in [official] use until the end of the Y??an dynasty, 1352. The ????? court could only be aware of the existence of such a script [and Royal effort to make one] as emissaries from the Y?an court carried “passes” written in Chinese and hPhags-Pa. So the idea of creating a script, under royal command, didn’t exactly come outta nowhere.
Item 2: They set up a research team that studied every sound a human can make. I shouldn’t think so. The scientists at the ?????? analysed their language (which is kind different from today’s) and tried to put the sounds of Korean in writing. Never was it question to analyse the sound of Farsi, Mongol, Chinese, Arabic or other languages Korea had been in contact with (again, thanks to Qubilai and Co).
Item 3: They correctly divided ??? and ?????. While this is [barely] factually true in today’s terms (note that ???? and ????? are Chinese words), back then, and even a coupla centuries after the creation of the ?????, they still didn’t call it that. Influenced by Chinese phonology (and not out of freaking nowhere) — ?????? and other works — they divided a syllable into three sounds ?좶??: ?????? [initial], ??? [middle], and ?????? [final], a slight departure from Chinese phonology, which split syllables into initial and rhyme, but not that big a leap. Check out, if you read Classical Chinese, the ???????????. Or a commented version by one of the big guns of Korean historical linguistics, like ??? .
Item 4: English is another language loosely based on phonetics. This is a real tough world out there: all languages are based on phonetics. Ouch! All of them. Whether writing systems are or not is another issue. And ??? is not a language, by the way, it’s a script.
Item 5: [????] Probably only writing system in the world based on phonetics. Still a lot of hock. If you mean each letter in ???? have one phonetic value and just one, you’re only partially wrong
But please explain why ????? is pronounced ?????. If you mean that outside its normal use in the Korean language, ???? is a script that can be used phontically to transcribe sounds — sure, ?????????? and all. But then again,
Japan’s kana are 100% phonetic. Hebrew’s script is, too, as that of other semitic languages. The Uigur-Mongol script is phonetic, too, and the Manchu script is, too. Ah, and the Latin alphabet is phonetic, too…
You are really, really way over your head here, YoMotherfuck…
“Almost space alien technology!”
E.T. says its time you go home
YoMo dont believe the serpent’s lies and succumbed the temptation!!
Its impossible that Hangul is anything less the pure language. How else is it uses so well for text messaging. You have heard the truth, dont listen to the lies of the serpent! Do you think that all that you have been taught is false!! Impossible. Korea is the highest form of language. Do other languages use words like JJANG? NO!!! or use the magic of korean text messasging? Or the internet? Hardly any.
dda wrote about the Y?an dynasty script:
The ????? court could only be aware of the existence of such a script
I don’t think so. Mongolia is too far to see from Kory??.
dda,
I guess a little embellishment is necessary in any culture. And, the truth is somewhere between “total fabrication” and “the most magnificent achievement”.
I worry about you, though. You are a great intellectual, with superior ability in language, free to speak and write French, English, Chinese and Korean. Your English writing is superb with all nuances correct, which I believe is difficult to do for a second-languge speaker.
Yet, you have strong hate toward Koreans. I do not understand that. You must have had pretty bad experiences in Korea. In one post, you wrote some Koreans called your wife with names.
Hey, dda, I, as a Korean, do not like many of my countrymen either. Many are materialistic. They like to look down on other Koreans. Some did pretty bad things to me. However, living in America which is totally different from Korea I realized that in every country and culture, there are 50% bad guys. One out of two!
I am sure that you met some honest and good Koreans while you were in Korea. Why can’t you picture them as Koreans? Why only remember the bad Koreans?
This is a real tough world out there: all languages are based on phonetics. Ouch! All of them.- dda
The Chinese characters are not phonetic.
Japan??s kana are 100% phonetic-dda
But, it cannot cover all the sounds as well as ??? can. Russian is the only writing system that can match ????.
I get it now; you mean all “languages” are phonetic. I meant English “writing system”(alphabet) in my original post. And, you were making fun at me using “language” instead of “characters”.
OkiDoki…
There are levels of phoneticism, I guess. Are those middle Eastern writing system can represent all sounds as well as ????? Hangul can cover wide range of sounds; I like to say all but dda will object with examples.
dda, where do you rate Hanguel? Better than those Middle Eastern writing system? I know Hanguel is better than Kana.
yomo,
english is phonetic, but not completely so. that’s why it’s okeedokee instead of okidoki.
but we should avoid this phrase, because it’s just a short step away from oki-dokdo, which is how shimane plans to brainwash the masses into accepting japanese sovereignty over the islets.
need… sleep… now
I write some comments at OhMyNews( Korean commie paper) too.
http://english.ohmynews.com/TA.....=1bb_ord=N
Come and read more of my “enlightened” views.
YoMo,
Please, stay out of discussion about phonetics, and linguistic at large, you really know diddly-squat about it.
Item 1: The Chinese characters are not phonetic. Two things here:
* I said all languages are based on phonetics. Not scripts. ?顧????? ?????? ????????????!
* The words phonogram and phonologogram won’t mean anything to you, probably. They are two categories of sinograms (??? to the unwashed). Both categories are phonetic, as the phono- root hints to. ?? is a phonologogram.
Item 2: There are levels of phoneticism Go away. Being ignorant is one thing. Spouting uninformed drivel with words longer than three syllables is a crime.
Item 3: Japan??s kana are 100% phonetic-dda
But, it cannot cover all the sounds as well as ???? can. Russian is the only writing system that can match ????.
??????? -????????? Have you any knowledge of the sound system of Russian? Of its script? Look, linguistics is not a pissing contest. A french gagman said once:The correct length for legs is when both feet reach the ground.
A writing system is good for a language is good when it represents all sounds of this language… ????? didn’t do the job, ????? didn’t either, ??? does: okay, fine. BUT… but, but, but, you would be hard pressed to represent accurately the sounds of Mandarin, Hakka, Cantonese of Hokkien in ???. Same goes for Russian, Mongol, Vi??t… or French! Try to represent “Je mange du pain” accurately in ???. No way, Jos??! Or that vi??tnamese noodle soup that is more and more trendy in Seoul: pho’. You can’t. Because ??? is not a system devised to represent the sounds of other languages — other it was used to that end during the first few centuries fater its invention (it was actually its sole use): to represent the sounds of Chinese, and then later Mongol , Manchu and Japanese). Ah, you look down at Japanese. Try to represent ??[?????::matsu] in ???. No can do.
Swedish has, I hear (or more accurately I was told, as I can’t hear it) seven sounds that sounds to normal people all like [sh]. And Swedish is still written with the 26 letters of the alphabet. Only thre European languages have nasal vowels (French — which has the most — Polish and Portuguese). How do you represent that in ????? Hindi has retroflex dentals, which anyone who has heard an Indian say “Tomorrow, I try to go to Toronto” know about without knowing what they are called (Hint: those strange t’s and d’s). How do you represent that in ????? Korean has an interesting phonetic corpus, but not especially rich or wide. ???? is a fine tool for the job of writing Korean, but the buck stops here. And don’t get me started on tones [????] — learn Burmese and die — or Xhosa’s clics. While I mention Africa, have you heard of Laurent Gbagbo? If not Google for his name. Not a particularly interesting person, but his name is. That pair of [gb], is one sound, not two. Impossible to pronounce if you were not born and raised in that part of the world. ??? any-freaking-one?
norapark
dda wrote about the Y??an dynasty script:
The ????? court could only be aware of the existence of such a script
I don??t think so. Mongolia is too far to see from Kory??.
Well, cute but defo no cigar for the lady. This, BTW, relates to our disagreement on the French-bashing, some time ago, in a lopsided way.
If you had been a woman in Korea back then during Qubilai Co’s rule over Korea,
1/ You’d know that half of Korea was part of the Y?an territory (?????? was still ?????, but just; I think anything north of modern ??????? was Y?an territory).
2/ You’d have seen a Mongolian dick every single freaking day, reminding you that you were property of the Chinese emperor, by way one of his thugs having appropriated you as his personal plaything.
So no, Mongolia wasn’t that far…
dda,
I am totally impressed that you know your s*. Now, tell me how you rate Hanguel compared to other writing systems. You wrote each writing system caters to local language but can Hanguel be more universal than other writing systems?
I have studied science and now I study computer science. Hanguel can represent sound very well. It may be easily computerized and used in commanding robots. Much simpler than English. Can you think of other writing system that is as compact and separates vowels and consonants as well as Hangule can?
Can you say anything good or unique about Hanguel which I can pass on to posterity? Any other good accomplishment by Koreans you can think of?
dda,
lighten up. i was making a lame (but, i hoped, amusing) allusion to one of the tokto threads, about koreans not knowing about tokto because it’s too far to see from ull?ngdo. while not an expert, i know enough about korean history to know that y??an can cook korea’s goose anytime it wanted.
as for seeing a Mongolian dick every single freaking day, reminding me that i was property of the Chinese emperor, i debated whether or not to give a pithy reply about how during mongol rule i would have latched on to a secretly sapphic member of the ruling class as a way of getting protection in exchange for, ahem, ’services,’ but instead i’ll just say that you taking a discussion of french and gratuitously twisting it into a daily sexual assault on me personally was ????? tr?s classy.
Try parsing Korean using NLP YoMo. You get so many branches so fast it’s nearly impossible to resolve it. They dropped so much of the intonation information that it’s extremely difficult to parse out most Korean sentences. While you get a few thousand branches from a lengthy English sentence you get a few million with Korean. Although most legal documents do tree out better (thanks in no small part to their inclusion of ??쩫???) you still have to help the process along much more than with English. Studying NLP makes me hate language in general though.
yomo,
hang?l was a great, forward-thinking invention from a great, forward-thinking man who is directly or indirectly for the invention or development of a lot of things.
in particular, all those centuries ago, it was quite sagacious and forward-thinking to try to give the masses an easily accessible way to read and write, something we wouldn’t necessarily expect from royal elitists (even if it didn’t quite pan out that way).
it is even poetic to say that hang?l can represent any sound, like birds chirping or water gurgling.
but attaching all these superlatives (the most this, the best at that, etc.) detracts from why hang?l was a great invention in the first place. and in the end, the poetic description is no more accurate than saying that “the land of ten thousand lakes” really has ten thousand lakes.
words mean something, and the superlatives tend to rule out other possibilities that are equally or more valid. without the superlative description, the historic development of hang?l is still an excellent piece of work.
“A man is doomed when he starts to believe his own propaganda.”
Dda–if you ever return to this part of the blog (why would you?) I have to say your command of English is exceptional for someone who considers it merely a tool. I studied French for years, mais…j’ai oublie beaucoup.
You da man dda!
YoMo…better luck next time…
James, I stand corrected on the new passport. You are right, the “prie” is now also in Spanish. Edgar Rice Burroughs vision of a United States that stretches from Patagonia to the Artic Circle may yet come to pass. (But, why didn’t they also add Portuguese, which is spoken by more South Americans than Spanish).
KrZ,
Korean sentence structure is difficult because Korean language does not have solid grammar rules. Almost anything goes as long as the sentence is understood. This is the main reason why I wrote Korean is a difficult language to learn for non-Koreans.
An example is a (what I call) multiple negagtion.
???? ???????? ?????????? ????????????????????? ??????? ???? ??????????????????? ???????????????? ??????????? ???????? ????? ????????????? ??????먣??? ?????????????????????? ???????? ????????????????? ???????????.
“Korean language does not have solid grammar rules”–ah, so I don’t have to learn those modals and comparatives after all! Thank you space alien!
dda,
Chapeau bas!
YoMo, you’re talking nonsense. The same trick with endless negations can be done in English or for that matter any other language. Furthermore the sentence you call an example of “multiple negation” would be impossible for any native speaker of Korean to make sense of, too. Though back in my linguistics classes we might be able to write it on the chalkboard and dissect it into pieces and pick it apart like a mathematical equasion to find that it means something, but any native speaker who tells you they can look at that and have it make sense without staring at it for a very long time, at best, is lying.
Korean is difficult for English speakers to learn because of the grammar, and then as you seem to say the grammar is ignored, and that’s true to. Particularly in South Korea, and by that I mean not so much at all in the North or Manchuria, “anything goes as long as the sentence is understood” and I agree with you on that, but if anything the “anything goes” leads to oversimplification, not deliberate overcomplication or writing sentences designed to be incomprehensible. No amount of grammatical “?????????” would let that sentence fly, no way at all.
Nora,
Brighten up! You and I have obviously different visions of the world, and thus a different sense of humor. I got your point in your joke (referring to all the “can you see this place from that place?” questions), and since I was, because of YoMo, in a foul and academic mood, I decided to make an equally lame but “informed” joke. No worries, I am back to normal today :-)…
The reason I mentioned ??????, the r?pe of Korea for a hundred years by the Y?an Army (and I am putting a capital A here for a specific reason, read on), and the partition of the peninsula is this: when the Mongols first knocked on the door er… make that entered freely the country with a gazillion horsemen, the line being so long that when the rear arrived, there wasn’t a single virgin left, the Royal Court of ?????, in a display of astute cowardice, decided to emigrate on ??????” (and they moved also as many scrolls — and books — as possible, establishing the ???????????, which the French helped themselves to, a few centuries later). And no, there was no bridge then. Now, try to image the scene, ?? la Hollywood:
The King, his sex toys concubines and wives, and all other tossers on boats, slaves rowing like crazy, a Mr. Kim crazily waving bye bye (you know the type, there’s one freak like that in every company — and every drama), and the Mongol Army (capital A, as opposed to Navy, which they didn’t have, and didn’t care to have), banging their swords on the ground, a safe few feet from the water, shouting “Come back you bastards!”
(I am blockquote’ing this, but the scene here is all mine :-)…)
Voil??…
Lirelou, Michael, gbnhj, Iceberg, Christian, thanks for the support… Lirelou, as usual, your knowledge of France-related trivia amazes me.
For those who wonder, I have an email signature I use sometimes, which sums it up well:
Linguist by skill, dilettante programmer by choice, and businessman by obligation.
I used to be a PhD candidate in Korean linguistics, my thesis being about the Korean language between the 9th and 11th Century. I didn’t finish it half by choice (was realizing that there wasn’t much of a future for me in that branch), and half by obligation (money was running out). Those who know me in person could vouch for me, I have the same relationship to languages, a sponge has to water. Prolly my only talent, but a useful one. And since I had to attend all these classes on phonetics, phonology, physics for phoneticians (yuck!), grammar, syntax (can’t remember a word of any of the last two subjects), I’m not just a guy who can drive a car fast: I am also my own mechanic. Be warned if you ever want to sprinkle this blog with chest-thumping rants…
Now, ??????????, I may have to repeat myself, but when I was a prof, I used to repeat myself endlessly until my students actually listened!
I have studied science and now I study computer science. Hanguel can represent sound very well. It may be easily computerized and used in commanding robots. Much simpler than English. Can you think of other writing system that is as compact and separates vowels and consonants as well as Hangule can?
A snide remark first: if you studied science, why didn’t you get a scientific, analytic mind? Did you graduate from a shithole in ???????? by sucking dick, or did you actually get something from your education? I said once, already, and I’ll say it again, that one should not compare a writing script like ???? with a freaking language like English! Is it that hard to understand? ???*?*??? ?????? ??*???*?? ??????!
I know a bunch of writing scripts, and most of them make a very accurate distinction between consonants and vowels. Actually, the latin alphabet is, on this point better — at least in certain languages, since each uses it its own way, according to its own underlying phonological system — since many languages make the distinction between consonnants, vowels, and semi-vowels… But, as I said before, and yes I’ll bore you to death in hope you listen this time, languages and writing scripts are not a pissing contest. Today, after lunch, I can devise a script that can represent more sounds than Burmese, Korean, Russian and French altogether. What will I achieve, besides losing an afternoon? Diddly squat.
If I was interested (not!) I’d ask you whachu mean by compact, although I think I have an idea, and this argument — while it achieves nothing — only works one way. ??? may be graphically compact, but it only makes it more profuse phonetically. Example: ?????. ??’s all around, three different sounds. wdf? The Hebrew script is, on this specious aspect, much more “efficient” (count on the Israelis to be efficient). So much so that vowels are only written in Hebrew in dictionaries and books for kids/learners. A very classical semitic feature, which we find also in the Uigur-Mongol script (derived from Syriac, maybe another day…).
On the subject of elitism and intent behind the ?????, I have the conviction (which you are welcome to discard in the Dumpster of blog-history) that while the displayed purpose was to give the masses a script to write the language (a whole lot of hock in my opinion: what were the ?좬? supposed to write with/on?), its real purpose was to analyze the Korean phonetic system and provide a way of standardizing the pronounciation of sinograms in Korean. Look at the documents produced with any amount of ??? in it during the first few centuries: appart from ????????좴?, what have we got? ???졩??, ?????????? and other “dictionaries” of ???; transliterated texts and glossaries in Mongol, Chinese, Japanese, and later Manchu (????????? et altri). The only texts of any serious lengths written in ???? came from women, of course supposed to be deprecatory, but women of the elite, not the semi-slaves of the plebe… ??? my ass. Teach ‘em how to behave, yeah…
Lirelou, as usual, your knowledge of France-related trivia amazes me.
This sounds very much deprecatory, and it wasn’t meant to, of course…
dda,
wherefore your fascination with the word dick today?
i still think what you said to/about me was rather crass and unwarranted, your anger at yomo not mitigating what you said to me one bit.
but i’ll let it go, because tomorrow is another day. yadda yadda yadda
by the way, i do know about the cowardly exile in kanghwa-do. i’ve read the carter eckert book. well, parts of it. the remedial history lesson via hollywood imagery was a nice touch, though.
YoMo…next time you want to venture from the small pond to the deep end I suggest you learn how to swim first.
Nora,
If you took it personally, you have a much thinner skin than I thought, and wild imagination, as the rpe of you ancestors happened +/- 8 centuries ago. As my prof of economics used to say (and I am sure he is still using this line any time they let him) If you… I mean you as an impersonal pronoun, whoeverthefuck you may be
Here it was meant as you a woman, knowing that it would still get your attention. Apparently, it did, but not on the right bit, but whatever works…
I haven’t read the book you mention. My sources were closer to the event, but far less readable. I wish I had had back then access to western sources… Of course, official records never mentioned words like “cowardly” of course
If I can find again a reference to the ??? incident (I put it on purpose in ??? although at that time there wasn’t any ????, because there was a play on the sound of the words ??? and ??), I’ll post it: the Y??an did not have all the fun (but then again, they had 99%)…
dda,
For a scientist, every sound is just a vibration in different frequency. I am not deep into this subject yet, but I may be in the future. Having a computer or a robot to understand a human speech is the most important research area of 21st century.
All big corporations including Microsoft are running race on this subject. One language which uses this vibration spectrum well can be chosen as the language of 21st century. Sounds have to be well-separated in the frequency spectrum so as to be easily identified. It could be an esoteric language like Korean or it may have to be synthesized from known languages.
English will not be the languge of choice. It does not separate words very well. Words come one after another and mixes. This is difficult for a computer which keeps the word in the database to compare to the speech.
Korean and Russian does stop at each word. Much easier for a computer to parse the word out from speech. English speaker can do this to only by speaking one word at a time slowly.
This is why I think some languages will have better chance to communicate with machines. What are your thoughts?
You still did not answer my question about any salvaging merits for Hanguel? Can you play, for one moment, an proponent of Hanguel and list some advantages of Hanguel? A great scientist or a professor should be able to play both sides of an argument.
Or, any other accomplishments or historical acts by Korean people, you can think of?
dda,
In liberal art subjects like political science, psychology or linguistics, there are no truth. You can make arguments for both sides. If you are good in linguistics, you should be able to make some claims to “uniqueness of Hanguel” or “Excellence of Hangul”. If you cannot , then you are no good in your field.
These liberal arts are not like physical science. “1+1″ is not always equal to 2 in these psedo-intellectual endeavors. That is why I stay in physical science; things can be proven beyond the shadow of doubt only in real sciences - mathematics, physics, computer science and some areas of chemistry.
The other disciplines are all garbage. Whatever one says goes. No proof can be given either way. “Lawyers” can twist facts in many different directions and “Spin doctors” can produce counter-argument for any fact.
Can you prove yourself to be good in your field?
Can you prove yourself to be good in your field?
The unenlightened listens, but doesn’t hear…
The unenlightened reads, but doesn’t comprehend…
YoMo from United States Says:
March 30th, 2005 at 8:06 am e
dda,
I am totally impressed that you know your s*.
You betcha.
YoMo,
I agree that voice recognition is an important, growing element of computer development. Indeed, computer-aided language learning will benefit greatly by the advances made in this technology. Even so, I don’t concur with your opinion regarding language choices for use with this technology.
You write: ‘English will not be the languge of choice. It does not separate words very well. Words come one after another and mixes. This is difficult for a computer which keeps the word in the database to compare to the speech.’
As has already been noted, ??? is a writing system, whereas English is a language; really, we should compare ??橫???? with English, especially in consideration of voice pattern recognition. That said, both languages employ the use of blends - particularly in the case of their actual use. It is only true that Korean stops at each word if the user does so. As an example, ask the posters here if they can completely understand Korean speech as it is spoken in every case, and you will likely be told that they cannot.
Pronunciation lies primarily with the speaker, not the language. Languages exist, and speakers make use of them; how well or how poorly a computer can understand human speech is ultimately connected with how well or how poorly the speaker pronounces the words relative to the computer’s programmed understanding of that sound pattern.
Regarding the merit of ???: it exists, of course. ???? is particulrly useful in reproducing the sounds of ??????? (as I believe dda remarked). Yet, computer voice recognition is not tied to a writing system, but to a linguistic/phonic/phonetic relationship.
I like English; I like Korean. Furthermore, they are both useful - sometimes, in fact, one can be more useful to me than the other. But I would never say that one is better or worse. And, I wouldn’t describe one writing system as being an accomplishment any greater than any other writing system.
YoMo…
I, for one, think ??? is super-duper peachy keen.
Are you happy now?
You remind me of the poor saps back home who somehow think that they are really cool simply because their favorite sports team won the championship. Like they personally had something to do with it.
Dda, brevet?? parachutiste a titre ??tranger a Pau (l??ETAP) avec le 11me Cie, 6me RPIMa. Numero de mon plaque a velo??? ?? 512390. Je suis pas ?橫francophile?? dans le sens stricte du mot, mais bien sur ??paraphile, l??giophile, grognardophile, bnducor??eophile, Indophile, Algerophile, Henri-IV-ophile, et plus g??neralement, histoirophile, sans compter oenophile et femmeophile?? Actuellement, je suis pas ?? sojuphile ??, mais le baekseju ne me tombe mal.
re YoMo: “Korean and Russian does stop at each word. ”
But then there’s the problem of identifying where the words start and where they end, as in ???????????????????????? and ther “spacing” (????????) problems.
And lets not forget that words combine in Korea, too, like how ?? and ??? become ?????. That’s so common that it’s now part of official orthography, but there’s no limit to the number of words that can combine like that.
YoMo! Your sentence above, “???? ???????? ?????????? ?塤???????????????????….” I’m betting you can’t tell what it means. I’ll bet you can’t find any genuine grammatical errors either.
Any common fool can write a sentence like “I didn’t tell her what he didn’t show me where we didn’t meet like we didn’t last time so I can’t recognize what might have happened,” but he would be particular fool if he thought he could tell you what it all really means and a total fool if he thought people would believe him if he said sentences like that are what make English difficult for people who study it as a foreign language. I think you should go try the same talk over at http://www.igoo.com and see how people take in. Good luck
Lirelou,
Je me souvenais de la partie “para” ?? Pau…
mais le baekseju ne me tombe mal.
Tr?s joli ! ?a sent plus le fran??ais parl?? au Qu??bec ou au sud des Avoyelles que le fran??ais de chez moi…
I’d like to see a Korean language recognition programme being beta-tested on a series of people from ????????衰 (let’s say ?????), ?????騫??? (???? would provide a good corpus :-)…), ????????? (????? or ?????? should do), and if the computer hasn’t burned out yet, I’ll throw in a coupla speakers of the ??? dialects (???????). Should be fun to watch the processor melt…
At least the French are not going out without a fight: http://www.iht.com/articles/20.....racte.html
“things can be proven beyond the shadow of doubt only in real sciences - mathematics, physics, computer science [..]” - YoMo
Dear YoMo,
Can you prove that a given programme stops for all inputs? Beyond any doubt? For real? Take as example any of your favorite programme (except M$ Windows, which stops for almost all inputs).
As a professor in Computer Science, I am waiting anxiously for your insights. Maybe I will offer you to me a PhD candidate of mine, who knows.
Oh, by the way: I am an alien in Korea.
Why have I heard so many times that “Hangeul can represent all the sounds a human can make”, yet no one can tell me how to represent using Hangeul the English-language sounds of “f”, “sh”, both “th”’s, “v”, not to mention words as simple as “are”?
Try this one. Take an integer. If it’s even, divide it by 2, otherwise triple it and add one. Repeat the operation. Can someone prove this will finish? Moreover at the value 1? No. No one succeeded yet. It could be because this problem is undecidable, i.e. neither it can be proved or disproved, but that would remain to be proved. Such a powerful science…
Hopefully YoMo is here to save us, with the help of aliens, to sort out the garbage of science.
Yes, almost Koreans are genius.
dda,
I wish you could write something good about Hanguel. If you write a good paper on this subject, Marmot maybe able to sell it as a publication. Every Korean who reads it will be so proud of you.
You still don’t get my point. As a scholar, you should be able to argue about any subject in both directions. For example, a history professor should be able to argue for and against Germany’s invasion of France during WWII.
A liberal art professor should be like a lawyer who can argue for any client. Or, like a prostitute who can do it in “traditional way” if the customer wants or “backdoor” if requested.
If you are good in your profession, you should be able to list arguments “for” Hanguel as well as “against”.
Once a troll, always a troll…
WHY ARE ALIENS AND UFO’S IMPORTANT TO THE APPEARANCE OF ANTICHRIST? WHEN THE ANTI-CHRIST STAGES HIS APPEARANCE, HE WILL CLAIM TO BE AN ASCENDED MASTER FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION, I.E., AN ALIEN BEING. HE IS JUST AS FRIENDLY AS THOSE ALIENS YOU HAVE BEEN SEEING ON TV AND MOVIES. HIS NAME, YOMO.
Why are you citing unsolved problems in information and number theory Christian? What does that have to do with the distinction between hard science and pseudo-science (AKA Social Science)?
Further, what does, “Maybe I will offer you to me a PhD candidate of mine” mean?
YoMo:
Give it up. You’ve been consistently wrong all thread. Swallow your pride, say you were wrong and move on. Or just move on.
dda has not denigrated hangul. He merely pointed out that you have no idea what you are talking about. These points are not the same thing.
Kromozone -
Number Theory, yes.
Real Analysis (sequences and series, convergence and divergence), probably.
But I doubt it counts as “Information Theory.”
What would you call this,
“Can you prove that a given programme stops for all inputs? Beyond any doubt? For real? Take as example any of your favorite programme (except M$ Windows, which stops for almost all inputs).”
kromo-
To tell you the truth, I don’t quite understand that question. But it doesn’t seem to have much to do with Shannon’s theorem on information capacity, does it?
It’s just the halting problem, and the way he worded it makes it into a trick challenge of sorts. I think computability theory should be grouped with information theory, although I suppose that’s debatable.
My dog is the best dog in the world. He can handle any trick or task you present him with. If any dog trainer wishes to challenge my claims, then I have this to say to you: I CHALLENGE YOU TO SAY SOMETHING NICE ABOUT MY DOG! If you don’t do it, then I question your qualifications as a dog trainer….nah nah nah nah nah nah!
Oh, and one more thing! Since my dog is the best in the world, doesn’t that in fact by extension make ME something pretty damn special too?
wooj,
While I don’t think that my efforts above constitute a ‘tremendous job fucking up all the concepts with a sloppiness that would shame the Slimer ghost in Ghostbusters’, I’d like to thank you for clarifying the distinction between voice recognition and speaker understanding. It’s all the more clear now, thanks to you, wooj.
Why are Koreans always fishing for complements?
Yoma Wrote:
Can you play, for one moment, an proponent of Hanguel and list some advantages of Hanguel?
Or, any other accomplishments or historical acts by Korean people, you can think of
Jesus, Koreans are so self absorbed and brainwashed into believing they are some kind of super-race. Usually if I am abroad and in a shithole country like Korea and somebody is fishing for a complement about their nation, I will give it to them. But Koreans are just looking for foreigners to reinforce their national self-opinion. So when Koreans ask me about Korea I enjoy telling them the truth. Usually, they will just come back with excuse after excuse and in the end they inevitably blame me. If I say it??s dirty and people are rude. The Korean will blame me. Its pretty funny after awhile
It’s called Natural Language Processing, usually, although some people use the term Natural Language Understanding.
speaker understanding - speech understanding, or speaker recognition (or speaker verification).
Always pleased to be at your service
wooj,
If Hanguel or other system can represent the sound very well, then wouldn’t the following possible?
“??”sound can be captured and transformed to frequency domain through FFT amd “??” as well. Wouldn’t they combine to form “??” matching? In other words, can we parse and identify a sound through its parts?
Thank you for explaining somethings about speech recognition. I need to study more in this area.
wooj,
And, about robotics. Robots have to understand human speech and translate it into text. You can keep it in a non-text format and do a matching with database, but then the commands you can give to a robot will be severly limited.
It has to be speech recognition first. Then, understanding the text and carrying out the command. If some language is very easy to do speech recognition and has reasonable grammar, then that language should be used in robotics. I was hoping that Korean may be the language of choice in robotics.
Or, some other language can be spoken but parsed internally with Hanguel as the text.
ex) “Pick it up” recognized as ??? ??? ??? inside the robot’s brain.
About measuring Hanguel against other writing systems in the world, I do not think one can draw any conclusion. Everything dda said, I am sure that there are counter-arguments and counter facts. And, there are other scholars, mostly Koreans, who will vehemently point out dda’s flaws in logic.
In liberal art subjects, there are no absolutes. One can make arguments for and against anything. Facts (if they are real facts) can be twisted to draw any conclusion you want.
Therefore, I will keep on believing Korean is THE BEST writing system in the world. It is the same logic that I believe the U.S.A is THE BEST country in the world. Everything is subjective in these matters.
Therefore, I will keep on believing Korean is THE BEST writing system in the world.
I tend to agree with you that hangul is the best writing system in the world, but I have neither studied all of them nor do I have dda’s natural facility with languages. My language study has been limited to Latin, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, and — of course — English. I can’t claim to have mastery of any of them but English. In my opinion, though, the Korean hangul is a masterful creation.
As for your earlier point about how a “real scholar” should be able to argue for or against any issue, I wonder why this kind of license is not afforded the poor fools who try to argue that the Japanese colonial period was not entirely without redeeming features.
YoMo,
“?橫Pick it up?? recognized as ??? ??? ??? inside the robot??s brain.”
Only if it’s a Korean robot, programmed to recognize what any native English speaker would consider to be a particularly ugly accent.
Those Hangul syllables would sound more like “Peek Eat Ahp”…which, especially when stripped of a context, is utterly incomprehensible.
Seriously, man….it doesn’t take a genius linguist to refute the claim that “Hangul can represent all possible vocal sounds”. In fact, that particular claim has been completely debunked at least 5 times in this thread.
Not only that, but, as it has been pointed out several times, Hangul has nothing to do with speech recognition. Nothing.
Damn that Tasca - she’s probably sent an army of robotics students to move this thread off topic! I’ll