It’s finally happened — a non-Korean ethnic group has adopted the hangeul alphabet as its writing system:
A minority tribe in Indonesia has decided to use the Korean alphabet, Hangeul, as its official writing system, a Korean language research institute said Thursday.
This is the first case of Hangeul becoming an official tool for communications outside Korean territory, the institute said.
“A tribe in the city of Bauer and Bauer in Sulawesi has selected Hangeul as the official alphabet to transcribe its native language that has no writing system,” the Hunminjeongeum Research Institute said in a statement. “The tribe with a population of 60,000 was on the verge of losing its language due to a lack of tool to hand it down to its descendants.”
Since last month, the children of the tribe having been using a textbook provided by the Institute to learn how to read, write and pronounce the alphabet. It contains a little bit more, too:
The textbook written in Korean tells about the tribe’s history, language and culture.
“Among the contents of the book is a Korean fairy tale,” it said.
The city in question, incidentally, is Bau-Bau.
{ 86 comments… read them below or add one }
Oh no! Now Korea can’t claim it has its own unique alphabet.
Should I see missionaries at play here?
BTW, if the language is being used how could it be on the verge of being “lost”? However, if more and more tribesmen are using Bahasa Indonesia then I doubt Hanguel – or any other alphabet, for that matter – will stem the decline of the tribal language. Of course, here’s hoping some Korean entrepreneurs establish green grocers, dry cleaners, etc. and then can lord over the village.
“This is the first case of Hangeul becoming an official tool for communications outside Korean territory, the institute said.”
Well, except for the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanbian_Korean_Autonomous_Prefecture
… and Koreatown Los Angeles.
There is nothing unusual in this. Perhaps hangeul adapts well with their language? Most of the Western world uses, for better or for worse, the Roman alphabet (which is just an adoption of the Greek alphabet).
Roman characters are actually not very good at conveying English sounds. Perhaps the Germanic languages should have stuck with Runic script…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runic_alphabet
Hey, isn’t this how Portugal circa 15th century started an empire?
“The tribe with a population of 60,000 was on the verge of losing its language due to a lack of tool [sic] to hand it down to its descendants.”
Because the Roman-English letters used by other Indonesians . . . what. Couldn’t really express the tribe’s unique ability to confuse “f” and “p” sounds, “r” and “l” sounds, “p” and “b” sounds?
Mocked their inability to makeFailed to appreciate their lack of need for “v” and “w” sounds?(Yes, I similarly deplore the obnoxiousness of western missionaries, as well.)
@ #1,
I wonder how much of a role missionaries played a role in spreading the Roman (Catholic) alphabet in Northern Europe, eh?
WeikuBoy,
I’m guessing that they wanted an alphabet that is easy to learn and distinct from the Roman alphabet (ie. Indonesian). Maybe illiteracy is a problem there. By using Korean, which is quite easy to learn, they are ensuring that a greater number of people will continue to use their native language.
Or rather, by using hangul…
Outside Europe, too. Vietnam, for instance.
Why not just use Indonesian style Roman letters?
from the KT article:
MOUs are a mutual exchange. What do you $uppose the Bau-Bau city government got in exchange for adopting Hangeul?
No linguistics-majors going to take the bait? Pity…
The so-called Roman alphabet that we currently use as the English alphabet is not to be considered the same as other languages despite the similarities. Using a similar-looking alphabet does not mean they are one and the same. The names of the letters are different and indeed, if not for Shakespearean simplification, we might still be using thorn, wynn, and yogh… It is interesting to see how our 26 letters evolved from Phoenician characters to their present form.
It is funny that some Koreans genuinely believe that Great King Sejong invented Hangul when he more likely borrowed most of it from the Mongolians and Chinese. The myth about the mouth shape and positions of earth and sky are cute, though…
Yes, the 훈민정음 해례 is actually bullshit and was written by a professional troll.
I’m an Asian language scholar, so perhaps I can offer some insight into why Korea’s Hangul was chosen by an Indonesian tribe. Unlike Chinese characters, which evolved from pictures, Hangul is a phonetic system of symbols that show specific sounds.
Each Korean character actually represents a combination of components representing a single sound.
This gives Hangul a significant advantage over Roman letters used in the English alphabet. English letters are not good for phonetics, unfortunately, as there are too many variations of pronunciation.
The Japanese have a combination of Chinese characters (kanji) and phonetic symbols.
Hiragana is used as phonetic symbols for Japanese words while Katakana is used primarily for foreign vocabulary.
However if the Indonesian tribe tried to use Japanese katakana, then it would still not be as precise as Korean hangul. this is because each katakana can only represent one sound while an individual Hangul can represent sound combinations.
Therfore Hangul was deemed as the most efficient and practical symbols for the sounds of the Indonesian tribal language. Of course one could argue that the tribe could invent their own phonetic system, but I think the adoption of Korea’s hangul is a good choice. Will the Indonesian tribe’s members be able to order food at a Korean restaurant in Jakarta? They will be able to read the menu, but they won’t understand what they are ordering. It would still be necessary for them to learn what the Korean words mean, but they might still have a future going to Seoul and appearing on South Korean comedy shows singing Korean karaoke.
#6
Interesting to see how this will all play out.
This development begs the question: How does the Hunminjeongeum Research Institute plan to accomadate Hangeul to languages that contain sounds that Hangeul does not accurately represent? They should reinstate the old character for “z” and come up with a few more.
Back in ’94 I cooked up my own “hangeulish” characters for “v”, “th” (hard and soft) and “f”; of course they got nowhere. Do Koreans expect people who have these sounds in their languages to adopt the current (atrocious) Korean workarounds?
Will Koreans impose the unreleased consonants rule even though it is linked to spoken Korean and not to Hangeul?
“Hangeul not habeu ehpeh andeu bwee, so you not suppose to!”
It’s hilarious to read such an ‘informed’ opinion from someone who doesn’t read the language.
Many English letters represent more than one sound because there aren’t enough consonants and vowels in particular to represent English phonemes. While Korean has a a highly transparent orthography, its letters do not represent only one sound in every single word. As Korean speakers know, there are mostly regular pronunciation changes that occur when certain phonemes appear together. Korean has comparable sound-letter correspondence to Spanish. Hangeul has more than twice as many vowels as the Roman alphabet but fewer consonants and presently no ability to accurately represent consonant blends like bl, pr, nd, sk. Without knowing the sounds and sound combinations of the Cia-cia language, it is impossible to judge whether Hangeul or the Roman alphabet is a better fit.
Hangeul is a better fit for Korean because it was mapped to the sounds of that particular language. The Vietnamese, as far as I know, didn’t adopt a native script to map out the sounds of their language so to spread literacy to the masses (and influence via the French) they converted to Roman characters (from Chinese characters).
Actually, I experimented with hangeul and Japanese words. I could comfortably fit a lot of Japanese words using hangeul characters. What hangeul doesn’t have that are in a lot of Japanese words that have the “f” and “z” sound at the begining of a lot of words and the strong “e” or “i” sound at the end of words.
WangKon, I learned spoken Japanese using hangeul. It was just more quickly recognizable than the Japanese characters, and of course I found out that I was pronouncing Japanese with a Korean accent due to the things you mention.
Japanese does not have the phoneme /f/. When /h/ appears at the beginning of a word, it sounds close to /f/, hence the Romanized spellings of names like Mt. Fuji.
Spelunker raises an interesting point about whether they would be able to read a menu in a Korean restaurant in Jakarta. I’m more interested in whether the people of this village would now be able to read ANY menu in Jakarta, or any sign at all, in their own country, outside their village. Odd choice.
I love Hanguel. Easy to read, aesthetically pleasing, and a perfect fit for the Korean language. However, like many things in Korea, it does not deal well with foreign interests. I chuckle when Koreans bristle because they’ve written their name in Roman script, and someone mispronounces it (“Sun” instead of “Soon” or whatever). In the reverse, however, Westerners don’t even expect Koreans to be able to pronounce our names. There’s no reason why they should be able: in their alphabet, our names only vaguely resemble their true pronunciation.
As others have said, we’d have to know more about this tribes’ linguistic sound scheme to judge how well Hanguel fits. Maybe it’s a perfect match. But one thing is for sure: this tribe can give up on their children ever pronouncing “t.v.” correctly.
Personally, I find hangeul more complicated than the English alphabet because English reads simply in one direction only – from left to right.
Hangeul phoenemes require the eye to travel circuitously – left – upper right – down before the eye moves right to the next phoeneme. The spacing between phoenemes is also awkward, whereas in English there is simply a space between each word and the eye naturally flows from word to word.
Hangeul is rather limited in the sounds that it can be used to produce as well because it omits vowels like z, v, f as well as some dipthongs, and doesn’t establish a properly distinction between l and r and sometimes n. By contrast, the English alphabet can be adopted to most languages.
@Gran
The whole name thing…so is that why nearly every fucking expat blog in Korea thinks it’s cool to write their name in hangeul?
At least do something cool, like take the English word’s Korean pronunciation and Romanize that. Llright??
/blockquote
t_song:
Don’t have an expat blog myself, but I suspect they do it because the (white) folks back home are always real impressed that we here in Korea have learned to read Korean. Keep it on the down-low: I like that my mother thinks I’m some kind of linguistic genius, so please don’t tell her that Hanguel is fall-off-a-log easy to learn.
And hey, let’s not look down on the expat bloggers too much. It’s the one’s who CAN’T read Hanguel that I reserve my derision for.
“It is funny that some Koreans genuinely believe that Great King Sejong invented Hangul when he more likely borrowed most of it from the Mongolians and Chinese.”
Some would classify Hangul as a Brāhmī script (yes, I studied linguistics, too).
The idea that he invented it is a quaint one indeed (some people never see what they’ve been told as a child to be a simplification or a lesson in morality…Do I need to bring up all those tales about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln?). But, it’s commonly known in Korea that King Sejong did not create Hangul by himself.
The reason he is revered is that he wanted to spread literacy despite the opposition he face. You see, it was a politically charged decision (Korea being a vassal state of China and he faced opposition by the literate elite). For those who see this as an example of altruism and nationalism, it makes him quite and endearing figure.
I suspect Mizar may be correct for people just learning Hangeul – then your eye does have to range around in more than one direction and then go on. But like any language, if you’re going to be a good reader you need to take things in chunks, even up to entire phrases and sentences, and at that point Hangeul might actually be faster, since it has nice regularized syllable structure, which I don’t think English does (NOTE: I am in no way a linguist, so this represents 100% speculation and is only tossed out there for conversation).
Also, isn’t an example of what Sonagi is talking about is 의 the sound of which changes depending on which syllable it is in?
Unrelated, Sonagi, I wonder if you took your name from the word for rain-shower, or from the story by Hwang Sun-won? If the latter, here’s a cute video of the story “modernized” by a couple of kids.
“When /h/ appears at the beginning of a word, it sounds close to /f/, hence the Romanized spellings of names like Mt. Fuji.”
/h/ doesn’t appear at the beginning of any Japanese word, though linguistically speaking the sound /h/ does, in some. Japanese (imagine that)characters such as はor ふ may appear but there’s no rule that says the phoneme associated must be described as “h” or “f.” The phoneme depends entirely on the vowel following. The “H” and “F” sounds are distinctive enough to notice the difference. So, yes, the phoneme /f/ does appear in the Japanese language. In fact, in the example used above it would be precisely an /f/ phoneme since the sound emitted is closer to Fuji than to Huji.
#28
Indeed my understanding is that he issued the order to his ministers to come up with a writing system for the common people, who then organised scholars to come up with something.
The fact that they went through a scientific process, even if inspired by other graphological systems is in itself pretty unusual even if they didn’t start from scratch, as is the fact they were willing to dump hanja as a base and try something totally new, unlike the japanese who’s hiragan and katakana is still kanji based.
Thats close enough for me to attribute hangeul to King Sejong.
Agreeing wholeheartedly with Sonagi on this…
The backslashes are a phoneme indicator. /h/ means the sound, not the letter itself. It’s arguable whether the initial sound in words beginning with ふ is closer to /h/ or /f/.
Would also disagree with Mizar, the difficulties of reading the hangeul syllabic groups are for learners. Just as in english proficient readers do not read letter by letter, with proficiency the mind recognises grouping of letters and whole syllables/words are read on sight.
I do agree though that more spacing between words would help, as separating words/meaning does still slow me down.
#33 Agree, and would add that for me the sound is much closer to h.
Although converted in romaji to Fuji, or for example the name Fukiko, I have always had my pronunciation corrected by Japanese friend if I said fooji or fookiko rather than closer to hooji or hookiko.
@ccmontgom:
There are many sound changes besides 의 as a possessive particle. Below are a few examples. There are names for pattern groups, but I first learned Korean so long ago, I forgot the names. Pronunciation changes like these are why pronunciation guidebooks are published for native speakers and Koreans.
1. 대학로, 속리산, 선릉, 곤란,
2. 여권, 갈등, 발전
3. 좋다, 같이, 먹히다
There are other rule groups, but it’s been so long ago, I’ve forgotten.
@ccmontgom:
I was inspired to choose my name by a mid-90s Korea University student rock band called Sonagi. I’ve read excerpts from the novel and like the imagery evoked by a sudden afternoon shower.
People lose traditional languages because they stop speaking them regularly and children stop learning them as they grow up. Being able to write a language is not the same as being able to speak it. Regardless of how accurate hangeul may be at representing their language in written form, if the younger generation doesn’t pick and use the spoken language, it still becomes a dead language.
True, but having a written samples, or in these days audio, allows that language to be revived again in the future, such as some native languages which were dead long ago, even more so for monoglots, but have been revived and are now in limited use again, and even taught in schools.
Indeed if only there were more written samples then arguments about which parts of old, middle, ancient etc. should be adopted in the revived language may be greatly reduced.
Phagspa
Arse! This should work.
Phagspa
“True, but having a written samples, or in these days audio, allows that language to be revived again in the future, such as some native languages which were dead long ago, even more so for monoglots, but have been revived and are now in limited use again, and even taught in schools.”
Excellent point. One more reason why a well-known phonetic alphabet is well suited for their needs.
Gari Ledyard’s phagspa link seems pretty tenuous. When you start trying to form simple shapes to represent a variety of sounds, some overlap is inevitable.
b ㅂ (mirror)
d ㄷ (draw a vertical line)
p ㅍ (rotate 90 degrees)
J ㅈ (mirror)
@Sonagi
“Hangeul has more than twice as many vowels as the Roman alphabet ”
Well but there are signs that change the sounds of the vowels in some languages, so just by having more vowels doesn’t mean there are more sounds. Ex.: ㅗ,ㅓ, in Portuguese would be “o” and “ó”.
@Mizar
“Hangeul is rather limited in the sounds that it can be used to produce as well because it omits vowels like z, v, f as well as some dipthongs, and doesn’t establish a properly distinction between l and r and sometimes n. By contrast, the English alphabet can be adopted to most languages.”
Depends where the reference is. To reproduce English or any Latin based language words, Hangeul is limited (f,v,p,z,etc.). However, Hangeul has its own specific sounds (ㅃ,ㅂ,ㅍ or ㄱ,ㄲ,ㅋ or ㄷ,ㄸ,ㅌ) that we non-koreans struggle to reproduce correctly and differentiate when speaking. You may say “Gangnam” or “Kangnam”, “Busan” or “Pusan” and you will never be granted the privilege of being praised to have said the right phonem. Unless you’ve learned as a kid and your brain and vocal chords were developed and adjusted for that.
@KrZ
What you’re saying makes some sense, but Ledyard’s theory isn’t built solely on the apparent similarity of letter shapes. I find the following particularly compelling:
Dude, the Latin alphabet is older than the Catholic faith…
Mwahahahahaha. Silly fucken rabbit.
One word: 가격.
#46 What has the age of the latin alphabet got to with to do with its supplanting of the runic alphabets in northern europe much later?
They can be represented in English as bb, b, p, g, gg, k, d, dd, t. However, z th, f cannot be represented in hangeul.
I noted in a previous comment that English vowels represent more than one sound.
One thing I forgot to mention yesterday is the fact that before Indonesia was a Dutch colony the people of Java and Bali used a phonetic script language called “Kawi” for over 800 years. The scripts are abugida, meaning that characters are read with an inherent vowel. (I actually had my name written in Javanese script by an old man as a souvenir during a trip to Bintan 10 years ago.) It would be interesting to hear why the Sulawesi tribe did not choose the ancient Javanese script for their particular dialect and went with Korean hangul instead. Maybe the Hangul is easier to read and write?
We can agree to disagree, then. While I agree that it can be readily sightread, it is inherently more tiring on the eyes to have to move around from left to right and then down, or top to middle to bottom, than to simply read from right to left.
Each phoneme consists of 3 independent sounds. Additionally, each phoneme must be juxtiposed with others to convey a complete unit of meaning. Changing just a single piece changes the word entirely, which means that you cannot always take in the grouping. Take 곤란. No matter how proficient you are at sight reading the language, the pronunciation is affected by the juxtiposition of the lower character on the left with the upper character on the right. The phonemes also lack uniformity, which causes the eyes to labor harder. Yes, it’s easy to learn, but more disjointed than English. That is not to say that English does not also have its faults.
Let’s see how long this tribe continues to attempt to use hangeul, when there are probably better alternatives. My guess is that it won’t last very long.
“Bauer and Bauer”? Isn’t that a talent agency or something?
God I hate the Korea Times.
Sorry, this is still just you being either dumb and/or shitty at Korean. I think you and Jon Huer need to get together for a man-date.
No need to apologize. Keep trying and someday, you could catch up.
검은 머리 외국인.
Black haired foreigner.
책
Book
똥
Shit
Poop
Dung
As seen, in the eyes of wjk, the Unique, Hangul is pretty cool in having the distinct advantage in being a definite space saver, versus the Greek originated western alphabet 26 set.
Hangul doesn’t have too many characters to remember, either.
In Japanese Hira/Kata, you have to memorize 2 sets, saying the same more or less.
Chinese is a nightmare.
The world will not learn their language. Few will. Most of them will learn English.
But, nobody will bother to learn French.
And that’s a fact.
you know what’s more amazing to me?
With only 26 letters, yet there are a bundle of US highschool aged students in public school who cannot read.
you know what else is amazing to me?
Despite what Aaron M says, it seems there is racial discrimination for certain in good old Indonesia against its own citizens. How else do you explain the need of an isolated group to learn Hangul to keep their language?
The closest discrimination I can even think of in Korea is in large, the Jeolla thing. In a smaller scale, the North Korean thing. On another scale, the Josunjok thing. I am still waiting for the US gyopo thing, but it seems the US passport in the hands of a Korean is a bang ticket in Apgujongdong. You can be fairly ugly and short and fat. That’s my assessment.
don’t confuse yourselves, US gyopo Democrats. Clinton=Kim Dae Jung. Obama=Noh Moo Hyun. George W. Bush = Lee Myung Bak. As far as I know, I was one of the earliest to provide this useful, yet amazingly accurate parallel.
I’ve always wondered if the more compact structure of hangul makes it easier or more efficient to process and retain what you read, as compared to english for example. Doesn’t it at least mean that, everything else being equal, you’ll be done reading faster? Since there’s less words to process? Also, I remember Pascal saying something along the lines of, quite often in order to understand an overall point being made by a text, it’s important to be able to read not too slow, and not too fast. Well, if the compactness of hangul allows more people comparatively speaking to read at the right speed, then obviously that’s a pretty huge benefit, I would think.
I doubt if the primitive Indonesian tribe chose Hangul for speed reading competitions.
Probably a bigger factor was how well it matched the sounds of their native language. But who knows, maybe they wanted to economize on space, and enjoyed Hangul’s compact consonant-vowel-consonant combinations.
#52: The problem with this notion is that it relies on the thought that when we look at a word, the letters are processed individually and thus the meaning derived. This is generally only true when one begins learning the script. After time with a language, people do not focus so much on the letters in a word but rather the bigger picture (this is especially true for faster readers); the length of the word, relative lettering, and context referenced from memory. Thus, even if you have a block of words that are spelled with nonsense letters a reader can decipher the whole text very accurately when asked to speed read it.
As for spacing efficiency, I’m not so sure of the advantage either, as the print of Hangul tends to be a bit larger than English in order have similar ease of readability, though I have not compared the pages of a book in Korean vs English.
Before choosing Hangeul, a group of tribal officials got an expenses-paid trip to Seoul from the Korea’s national language institute, which also paid for a language learning center in Bau-Bau equipped with books. I suspect the junket and the financial support were significant factors in the selection of Hangeul.
Perhaps this is a little tangential, but regarding written Korean’s readability:
Most people are familiar with this old piece ‘o fun:
But does anyone know if it works in agglutinative language such as Turkish and Hungarian? And given written Korean’s “faux-hanja” structure, is this kind of thing impossible?
“faux-hanja” structure?
Sorry. I meant morpho-syllabic block-like structure – imitating Chinese characters.
Sonagi,
Sure beats script adoption via colonialism and/or forced religious conversion!
Hey, WJK-nom,
Thanks for referencing my name on yet another matter you know absolutely three thirds of four tenths of fuck-all about. The blinding ignorance of being a yank and an adjoshi must make your life a fun-filled one indeed.
Ya think? LOL. Korea – bringing bribery to the world in the service of Korean Pride™. Sparkling!
aaronm: still working on those anger issues, mate?
Do they have expat blogs about Indonesia? Do you participate in them?
“While I agree that it can be readily sightread, it is inherently more tiring on the eyes to have to move around from left to right and then down, or top to middle to bottom, than to simply read from right to left.”
Thats, the whole point Mizar if you are sightreading your are reading the whole word, you are not moving left to right then down etc, anymore than you would if you were sightreading Hanja.
Ditto if you are sightreading you have already recognised the word, and therefore know immediately 한라, is Halla not Hanra and 신림 is Sillim not Sinrim etc…because you are not reading up right down right etc you are sight reading the whole word grouping.
Anyway we’re not talking about korean, but a completely different language starting from scratch. So there is no reason this language cannot used hangeul purely phonetically, without any of the baggage of korean writing such as pachims, morphological changes such as ㅂ니다 being pronounced “__mnida” but still spelt “__bnida”, stems retaining their spelling even when pronunciation is modified by the suffix etc.
[There are anyway similar issues of pronunciation of letter groupings being dependent on what they follow in english using the roman alphabet]
While we’re on the subject of ㄴ+ㄹ, why is it most Koreans want to pronounce 선릉 as “선능” instead of “설릉”…?
dda, here is another one… why do Koreans pronounce 조건 （条件） as 조꿘 instead of well, 조건.
조건 is pronounced 조,껀 but no one would pronounce it 조꿘..I think you misheard it.
it’s a gutteral stop after 조. There are quite a few of these which I think are evolving. For example, not long ago 불법 (illegal) used to be pronounced 불뻡 but now all the newsreaders start to say 불법, which could be misconstrued as fire law, though 불 is a Korean Korean word so you wouldn’t really have a mixture of the On and the Kun reading to borrow the Japanese analogy. Language evolves and pronuciations, especially the exceptions, evolve.
A lot of Korean words made up of Chinese character readings confuse things. I wish we’d kept the use of Chinese characters and I wish we’d kept the old romanization and I wish we’d use more words made up of the pure Korean words instead of the Chinese words.
설릉 is the right pronunciation. those who say “선능” are probably the same lot who would type “shoud of” instead of “should have” in English.
10월 should be 시월 not 십월…
Delicious, 맛있다 , my dad insists should be pronounced 마디,따 instead of 마시,따 but he is now a 60 year old and I have not come across anyone else who says 마디따.
If I were to say 조건, it sounds like a name of a male. Though Mr.조 건 would be a funny name.
The pronunciation change is called tensification or something like that in English, and it is taught as a pattern group in beginning Korean language classes.
Not sure what you mean here, but there are a number of Korean words that combine native and Sino-Korean roots.
While I was living in Seoul, the bilingual subway stop announcement for the station used both pronunciations, 선능 in Korean and 설릉 in English, the latter choice probably determined by the Romanized spelling “Seolleung.” I always wondered why another Green Line station had one Korean name in Korean, 을지로 입구, and another Korean name in ‘English’, Euljiro-1-ga (을지로 1가). One Korean thought that using 1-ga might be easier to remember since it is similar to the names of two stations that follow, 을지로 3가 and 을지로 4가.
One Korean name in Korean and another Korean name in English is almost as ‘helpful’ as a Korean woman surnamed 곽, who introduced herself as Mrs. Kirk. When I phoned later to speak again to Mrs. Kirk, nobody in the office knew who she was. I thought she had taken the surname of her foreign husband. Instead she had Anglicized the pronunciation of her name to a foreigner living in Korea.
Hamel, yes and yes, but not to the extent I used to here. Too busy getting paid for my opinion these days.
Adam @62,
I’ve seen something similar done for Korean, but what was striking was that it could only work for word blocks of four syllables or more. The Roman alphabet’s lengthier separable strings makes it more suitable for such things, although I suppose it can work for three-letter words as well: most people will read over hte error in this clause without trouble.
Also, re JW @ 58, I’d love to see some research on speed reading in Korean vs. English, Japanese and Chinese. One thing I’ve noticed with my own reading speed for Korean is that I find it significantly harder to skim quickly for meaning than with an English text, but I’ve never know whether this is because I was an adult learner or a function of the nature of the script itself, as I can now read it at pretty much the speed I can subvocalize. My own hypothesis has been that the lack of capital letters to give important words salience may have something to do with this. I’ve been told by another native speaker of English who has outstanding Japanese and Korean is that as you become advanced you can read Japanese much more quickly because kanji give the important words the salience which Korean now lacks without the use of hanja. Anybody know of any research on this topic?
“the lack of capital letters”
I had nearly forgotten about that, but it is indeed one of hangeul’s limitations, another reason that it is harder to sight read. That said, it is far superior to the Chinese characters that preceeded it.
Great news! I hope more indigenous people in the world who doesn’t have their own writing script adopt hanguel as their writing.
Some day, even China and Japan will use Hangeul.
No, toxic waste disposal firms, per Frank Hoffman at The Korean studies Listerv:
“One thing I’ve noticed with my own reading speed for Korean is that I find it significantly harder to skim quickly for meaning than with an English text”
As well as being an adult leaner I suspect s syntax issues may also be a contributory factor. I’ve heard, though don’t have the skills to confirm, that even in spoken korean picking up clear meaning can be more difficult.
@Sperwer:
How do I get on this Korean Studies listserv?
@Sonagi:
Go here and follow directions to subscribe:
http://koreaweb.ws/mailman/listinfo/koreanstudies_koreaweb.ws
Thanks, Sperwer.
More from Frank Hoffman (via the Korean Studies Listserv) on the importation/imposition of foreign scripts for native languages as a reflection of power relations – in other words, isn’t it ironic that Korea is doing to the Indonesian tribe what Japan tried to do to Korea during the colonial Period?:
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