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You can do that because it's on purpose. King Sejong wanted every Korean to be literate. "A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over
by neom 3y ago
You can do that because it's on purpose.
King Sejong wanted every Korean to be literate. "A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul
- Hamuko 3y agoSeems like a better system than the Japanese one of cramming 2000+ kanji into students in the span of nine years.
- Alex4386 3y agoWell, That's only after late 90s. Before that, hanja (equivalent of kanji in Japanese) was used in news, official documents and etc. alongside the hangul. You need to know hanja to say out what it read
- AndrewOMartin 3y agoThis is just the myth of the rockstar 10X alphabet learner.
- dguest 3y agoI've also heard the opposite claim about other languages: they were intentionally obfuscated to keep the lower classes illiterate. I won't say which because I'm not about to cite hearsay to criticize a major world language. But I can still ask: are there documented cases where a language was intentionally obfuscated?
- resolutebat 3y agoThe ordering of letters in Thaana, the Maldivian writing system, is (as far as linguists can tell) completely random and the working hypothesis is that this was done intentionally to make it more cryptic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaana
- layer8 3y agoTo be fair, the order of the Latin alphabet looks rather arbitrary as well.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoNot at all; it matches the order of the Greek alphabet from which it is derived.
- layer8 3y agoBeing derived from another arbitrarily-ordered looking alphabet doesn't make the order non-arbitrarily looking.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoIt does, in the sense that nobody ever wonders why the order is like that, and if they do it takes about one minute to give a correct and nearly complete answer. There is no natural ordering for sounds, so it's true that the ultimate reason for an alphabetic sequence can't exist. But then, since the concept is ill-founded anyway, that's not what anyone is ever talking about when they talk about the reason for an alphabetic sequence. It is obvious that any fully original writing system will be ordered in large part arbitrarily. But an explanation is called for when an unoriginal writing system puts its symbols in a strange order. Even where the writing system is autochthonous, but the concept of writing is not, the system is likely to be conventionally ordered, as in the case of the Japanese syllabary, which conforms to the traditional ordering of Sanskrit. Thaana is overtly strange, as you can see in the wikipedia entry: > The first nine letters (h–v) are derived from the Arabic numerals, whereas the next nine (m–d) were the local Indic numerals. The remaining letters for loanwords (z–ch) and Arabic transliteration are derived from phonetically similar native consonants by means of diacritics (like nuqta), with the exception of y, which is of unknown origin. > The order of the Thaana alphabet (ha, shaviyani, noonu, raa, baa, etc.) does not follow the order of other Indic scripts or of the Arabic script.