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A Holiday in Honor of the Korean Writing System
- tokenadult 13y agoA rare example of a useful Wikipedia article, "Hangul," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul fills in many of the details about the elegant alphabetic writing system used in Korea since about the same year that moveable-type printing began in Europe. The development of this writing system was a great advance over the former use of Chinese characters to write Korean (which is NOT a language cognate with Chinese). The simplicity and consistency (even with five centuries of subsequent sound change) of hangul spelling for learning to read Korean helps school pupils in Korea learn more in fewer total hours of schooling than is possible in Chinese-speaking countries.
- atlanticus 13y agoWhy the hate for Wikipedia? In my humble opinion it is the clearest embodiment of internet ideals.
- tokenadult 13y agoI'm a Wikipedian, and between posting my first comment here and replying to yours, I was just posting to a talk page of a biography article on yet another pseudoscientist who has too many credulous followers on Wikipedia. I like Wikipedia well enough to roll up my sleeves to try to make it better, but I dearly wish that more Wikipedians knew more about how to look up reliable sources before adding edits to the encyclopedia that any bozo can edit.
- atlanticus 13y agoI know the editing wars take a toll on Wikipedians(thanks for being one) but I still have to take issue with the idea that useful articles on Wikipedia are rare. As for being the encyclopedia that any bozo can edit, that is true, but unavoidable. Think how much worse off HN would be if it disallowed comments by any bozo(looking in mirror).
- rmc 13y agoThe opposite problem can happen. I've had a problem with the page for my local hackerspace. Someone nominated it for deletion. I found numerous legit sources, which the deltionist did no research and dismissed with bogus arguments the source (a government funded technology incubator was dismissed as "only a blog"). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/TOG_(hackerspace) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...
- mathattack 13y agoI've had people tell me that Korean is much easier to learn than Japanese and Mandarin. Perhaps this is why.
- w1ntermute 13y agoThe writing system is easier to learn. But the pronunciation is a lot harder to learn than Japanese, and the grammar harder to learn than Mandarin. There's also the fact that Mandarin has a lot of non-native speakers who are Chinese. I believe 400 million in the PRC, or 1/3rd of the population, only have a basic grasp of the language. Even a lot of the fluent speakers have thick accents. So the Chinese are used to speaking in Mandarin with non-native speakers, something that the Japanese and Koreans aren't as accustomed to.
- b6 13y agoI agree 100%. This is, I think, and underappreciated aspect of language study. Chinese people speak Mandarin with accents, so they're not irritated to hear my accent.
- wonderzombie 13y agoKorean is easier to learn to read and write, but much as w1ntermute says upthread it is harder to pronounce. Mandarin is quite regular & systematic in pronunciation; the tone just becomes part of the pronunciation. Grammar is relatively simple compared to Korean. This is an imprecise metric but it also seems to me that Korean has way more syllables for the same words, if nothing else because of all the particles and politeness levels. But Mandarin reading & writing is punishingly hard. I studied Mandarin for a few years and although I could have some really basic conversations, I never learned to read or write. Korean has felt more rewarding in this regard-- I enjoy sounding out the words and delight in the occasional loanword.
- failrate 13y agoI find Korean easier to speak and be understood. I know some Mandarin, but native speakers don't even know what I'm trying to say to them when I attempt it.
- nerfhammer 13y agoreading it looks efficient but what about hand writing it?
- newsoundwave 13y agoAs someone who is Korean, I don't find it all that more efficient or less efficient than Latin characters. I also speak Mandarin, however, and I do appreciate Hangul's terseness. I wrote my name in Hangul and it came out to 16 "strokes", in English I approximated about 18 strokes (things like m/n I'm not quite sure how to calculate in strokes, so I counted both as a single stroke). Meanwhile my Chinese name is a whopping 52 strokes. I hate writing my Chinese name.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoLatin alphabet's main problem is that it doesn't have any fricative consonants (sh ch j...) so every language has to roll out their own in incompatible fashion leading to confusion. Languages using alphabets specially tailored for them have much more consistent spelling.
- nerfhammer 13y agoalso long and short vowels
- guard-of-terra 13y agoLatin actually had them I think, they just got lost because romance languages didn't have much use for them, and english famously went proprietary with its great vowel shift.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ineedtosleep 13y agoAs 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kana
- Jtsummers 13y agoWhat resources are you using to learn Korean? I spent a few years there as a kid, but on a military base, so my exposure was limited. Outside a handful of expressions I've almost completely forgotten it at this point (certainly the script). I've spent the last couple years around a lot of native Spanish speakers so I've been relearning that, and it rekindled my interest in languages so now seems like a good time to start on something new.
- yebyen 13y agoOne site is: http://koreanclass101.com http://koreanclass101.com I am not a subscriber or even a speaker of Korean, but I did learn the alphabet in College and if I ever had time, I feel like I could learn Korean at this site.
- Jtsummers 13y agoThanks, I'll check it out later.
- ineedtosleep 13y ago
- ianb 13y agoI'd be curious if a strongly phonetic alphabet/writing leads to less changes in the sounds in the language...?
- jessaustin 13y agoISTM this would be difficult to study for periods that predate the phonograph? I guess one could look at rhyming poetry, but it's not clear how much that would help.
- Avshalom 13y agoRhymes, common misspellings, and often just primary texts talking about how words or letters sound.
- deepblueocean 13y agoReminds me of this comic: (Learn to read Korean in 15 minutes) http://9gag.com/gag/3968335 http://9gag.com/gag/3968335
- walid 13y agoWOW! This is actually a very useful comic :)
- philsnow 13y ago> For example ㄱ g and ㅋ k are basically the same sound, a consonant formed by a closure at the back of the mouth, except that there is a stronger burst of air with the k. 't' and 'd' are the unvoiced and voiced alveolar stop, 'k' and 'g' are the unvoiced and voiced velar stop. It just so happens that in English (and I guess Korean) that 't' and 'k' are somewhat heavily aspirated, but consider the sound 't' in French: much less aspiration (and IIRC the onset of the aspiration is earlier in French).
- taejo 13y agoVoice distinctions are allophonic in Korean; the phonemic difference between ㄱ and ㅋ is purely aspiration.
- jessaustin 13y agoAre you saying the "g" is unvoiced? That's surprising. I don't speak Korean, but I've heard quite a bit of it, and I'd never picked up on that.
- yongjik 13y agog is "by default" unvoiced, but it becomes voiced between other voiced sounds (vowels or nasals). So in gagu "가구" (furniture), the first g is unvoiced but the second is voiced. What complicates matter is that, in English, word-first g (as in "game") can become partially unvoiced, so g in English "game" is actually fairly close to the first g of "gagu"!
- jessaustin 13y agoWonderful explanation. Thank you!
- ledge 13y agoIf a "g" is voiceless, then it's the same as a "k". If we are going by IPA notation, the only distinction between the sound represented by "g" and the sound represented by "k" is voicing. What taejo is saying is that native Korean speakers will hear [g] and [k] as the same (they are allophones in Korean), however the sound [kʰ] (aspirated voiceless velar stop) will sound distinct to them compared to [g] or [k]. Aspiration is a large cue for English speakers as well in distinguishing between voiced and voiceless consonant pairs ([pʰ] and [b], [tʰ] and [d], [kʰ] and [g]), hence why partial or even full devoicing can occur in word-initial voiced stops like the /g/ in "game" (as yongjik mentioned), or why English speakers have such trouble replicating voiced and voiceless pairs in languages like Spanish that do not rely on aspiration.
- merkitt 13y agoSinhalese, spoken only in Sri Lanka, naturally has some of these features: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinhala_alphabet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinhala_alphabet 1. Fully phonetic 2. Syllables are formed by a logical and consistent system of vowel signs that can be attached to consonant characters 3. Uses pure vowels and largely un-accentuated except for some minor stress on the first syllable of words 4. Alphabet order is logical -- a grid arranged by tongue position and nasalization The biggest bad thing about the language: the formal grammar is very much latin-like, and equally difficult to master. Fortunately, the spoken version is largely grammar-less. Source: I speak it.
- guard-of-terra 13y agoThere is a word for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida
- yongcat 13y agoI think that it's really neat that the Korean alphabet has a near-equal number of distinct characters compared to the Latin/Greek/English alphabet because this allows it to have a very compatible key layout in a standard keyboard :D
- nepaHack 13y agoThis is what I commented on the blog post: Really nice article. But the claim of "World's greatest alphabet" is a bit misleading. Please read about the alphabet system of Sanskrit and various modern languages that derives from Sanskrit like Hindi, Nepali etc. You'll find that all the things you've mentioned in the article are already used in Sanskrit and that too from the ancient times that predates the creation of Hanguel. In addition to that, sanskrit alphabets encompasses almost every possible consonant and vowel sounds that a human can generate. You'll also find how interestingly the consonants are grouped according to the place of the origin of the sound, starting from the throat and ending to lip sounds.So the real "Greatest alphabet system" is Sanskrit. Sanskrit grammar is again another beautiful and well thought creation that is considered the best grammar to be used for scientific work. That's entirely different topic though. Hope I've made you interested in Sanskrit now. Thanks
- michael_dorfman 13y ago> 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.
- walid 13y agoAdd to that the 15th Arabic letter ض [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%B6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%B6] cannot be pronounced in any other language to the point that Arabic is sometimes referred to as the language of ض. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet
- tejaswiy 13y agoThis is almost exactly like Sanskrit and the derivative Indian langauges. Convergent Evolution I guess?
- auctiontheory 13y agoI don't see it. Devanagari characters are not assembled by combining smaller blocks of sound.
- tejaswiy 13y agoWhy not? Vowels are a, aa, e, ee and so on Consonants are kk, gg, rr and so on. kk + a is pronounced ka kk + e is pronounced ke kk with a subscript of rr becomes kr. Kr + a is again kra, kr+e is Kre and so on. Korean seems exactly the same from: http://9gag.com/gag/3968335 http://9gag.com/gag/3968335 atleast.
- auctiontheory 13y agoYes, the overall organization of the alphabet is similarly logical. But for the physically written letters, you don't get from "ch" to "chh" by adding a line or other small graphical element.
- selimthegrim 13y agoEr, maybe not in Devanagari, but you sure as hell do in Nastaliq.
- sergiotapia 13y agoI learned to read and write in korean letter in a lazy afternoon - it really is miles ahead of roman alphabet. Extremely simple!
- Jun8 13y agoOrthographic reforms are usually associated with a revolution of some kind, some recent examples are the introduction of Simplified Chinese (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters), the change in Russian orthography (http://russiasgreatwar.org/media/culture/orthography.shtml http://russiasgreatwar.org/media/culture/orthography.shtml, although this started earlier than the Bolshevik Revolution) and the Turkish Spelling Reform. In these cases the new regime sees the change as a way to cut ties with old one. The ones that don't have the hard-core backing of an autocratic government generally don't succeed, e.g. the very recent one that was attempted in Germany in 1996. It is interesting to compare Japanese and Korean writing systems: Both of these started with borrowing Chinese characters, due to the immense cultural prestige of the Chinese Empire. These languages show striking similarities to each other (and Turkic languages of Central Asia; although they are usually considered language isolates this may stem more from a cultural bias). Although the Chinese logographic writing system seems hopeless to an outsider, it is uniquely suited to the to tonal Chinese language. The problem is that Korean and Japanese are very different from Chinese (i.e. Mandarin and its "dialects" spoken in China which are part of the Sino-Tibetan family). Koreans have solved this problem cleanly in the 15th century by inventing Hangul while the Japanese approach was to create an extremely complicated writing system with different characters, including many Chinese ones. Maybe Japanese writing was more culturally ingrained by the Middle ages in Japan compared to Korea to make such a sweeping reform unthinkable or perhaps its feudal structure (i.e. the regional daimyo) and a weak emperor did not have the clout of a ruler like King Sejong in Korea. Maybe someone with knowledge of Southeast Asian history care to comment on this.
- anonymous 13y agoThe 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.
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- lobo_tuerto 13y agoI remember first reading about it on a Zed Shaw's article: "Ever seen the Korean alphabet? It’s called Hangul and it is probably the most advanced alphabet humans have right now while also being simpler than most of them at the same time. It can be stacked like Chinese characters, but it’s also built more like ours with an ability to construct unusual vowel sounds. Get this, it was invented in about 1443 AD and even mimicks the way the mouth is constructed. That’s right, the characters actually look like how the mouth, jaw, and glottis form to make the sound. It’s brilliant and a gorgeous piece of work that demonstrates how something simple can also have incredible complexity lurking under the surface. Did you know that Hangul is so good at mimicking other language constructs that some anthropologists want to use it to record near-extinct languages? It takes an average person about 3 days to learn it, whether they speak Korean or not, and they can use it to write down their own language even if it’s completely different from Korean. It’s that universal. Imagine being able to get native speakers of dying languages to actually write down how their language is pronounced. Now that’s power. I’ll give you a great example. I was walking around Seoul one day and drinking this soda call “Pocari Sweat” (said so in English on the side). Yeah, it says it’s got sweat in it but damn it was good. I turn to a Korean woman, point at the Hangul on the side of the can, and ask in bad Korean, “Can you say this?” She reads each character of Hangul as: “poh car ee sw et” That’s right, the English on the can was mimicked nearly exactly by the Hangul and it made no sense to her either. But, she could read it and we both said the same exact verbal noises even though we read different alphabets. She thought it was funny too." http://zedshaw.com/essays/fortune_favors_big_turds.html http://zedshaw.com/essays/fortune_favors_big_turds.html
- curuinor 13y agoIt 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.
- korussian 13y ago
- failrate 13y agoI'm an American who learned to read Hangul. I had also tried learning to read Japanese and Chinese, but those were difficult for me. With Hangul, I just picked it up almost accidentally. [EDIT] It was really kind of weird/awesome that one day while riding through Koreatown in L.A., I looked over at a sign and blurted out "I can read Korean!". I was completely surprised.
- bane 13y agoFun 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.
- donpark 13y agoAlmost as interesting is Hangul keyboard layout: http://www.ke5ter.com/archives/2008/02/26/hangul-keyboard-layout http://www.ke5ter.com/archives/2008/02/26/hangul-keyboard-la... It is logical yet efficient. If you know Korean, you should be able to learn to touch type Hangul with just a few hours of practice as I had to about a decade ago. Even on iPhone, I found the layout easier to peck on.