From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.korean
Subject: Re: "Superiority" (Re: Representation of Korea in East Asian Studies)
Date: 7 Apr 92 10:20:49 GMT
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK

In article <1992Apr5.093749.28477@seas.gwu.edu> se020151@seas.gwu.edu (Hyok Lee) writes:
<replying to Scott Horne>
>: <>But please tell me why the
>: <>Korean letters `m' and `r' are written as follows if not for Chinese
>: <>influence:
>: <>
>: <>	|	|----|	|----|
>: <>	|	|    |	|    |
>: <>	|	|    |	|    |
>: <>	|	|    |	|----|
>: <>
>: <>
>: <>	-----	-----	-----
>: <>	     |	     |	     |
>: <>	     	-----	-----
>: <>	     	 	|
>: <>			 ----
>: 
>No, there only so many ways to draw a square and a circle.

There certainly are umpty-eleven ways to draw a square.  The Chinese
way (`left bar (stroke 1); upper and right bar (stroke 2); lower bar
(stroke 3)') is just one of them.  If you just ask people around you
to draw a square, I doubt that this is likely to be the way they'll do
it, short of having had an exposure to writing han4zi4, kanji,
katakana or han'gu<l.

>  Just because
>the bow and arrow existed many different parts of the world that there is only
>one place origin and the rest of the world copied the originators?
>Ridiculous.

Well, if people in some place suddenly start using the kind of bow and
arrow that their neighbours have already been using for a few thousand
years, then there are good chances that the case is not one of
independent invention.

>Any idiot knows that no invention is completely independent.
>By your extreme logic no human being has ever invented in the
>course of human history.  Could Einstein have existed without Newton? No.

Writing has been invented independently in several places.  For
example, the Greek, the Chinese and the Mayan writing system have
really nothing to do with one another.  Han'gu<l, on the other hand,
has experienced the influence of one of these (guess which one), and
by virtue of this fact is not as independent a creation.

>: Certainly Koreans were involved.  But so were many Chinese scholars.  And
>: *ALL* of the scholars, whether Korean or Chinese, were educated in (written)
>: Chinese and knew no other written language.

Are you sure about that, Scott?  I wouldn't be surprised if at least
some of them knew, say, Sanskrit or Tibetan.  But no doubt all of them
knew Chinese and were used to writing the primitive elements which
make up the Chinese characters in a certain way and to assembling them
into square-shaped compound characters, so it was only natural for
them to use the same primitive elements as letters of the new
alphabet, which were to be put together into syllables.  The position
of the organs of speech determined which sound was to be assigned to
each such letter.

>What you don't know is that Koreans have always used the Chinese character
>in a different manner.  Many--not all-- times the characters were used
>merely for phonetic content, so a Chinese reading it would have no
>idea what is written.

(You know that, Scott, don't you?) - Yes, well, that's what speakers of
pretty much any other language in the area (Japanese and Vietnamese,
for example) used to do before they had their own writing systems.
-- 
---- --- -- -  Long Live the Rose and the Heather!  - -- --- ----
Ivan A Derzhanski   (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk;  iad@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu)
* Centre for Cognitive Science,  2 Buccleuch Place,  Edinburgh EH8 9LW,  UK
* Cowan House, Pollock Halls, 18 Holyrood Park Road, Edinburgh EH16 5BD, UK
Newsgroups: soc.culture.korean,soc.culture.japan