From: ywlee@herodotus.cs.uiuc.edu (Youngwhan Lee)
Subject: Re: Han-gul
Keywords: Korea, writing system
Organization: University of Illinois, Dept. of Comp. Sci., Urbana, IL
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1992 17:03:38 GMT


In <1992Apr3.212002.3758@casbah.acns.nwu.edu> phantom@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (James Choi) writes:

>2.  Another reason Koreans feel so good about han-gul is because they were
>told to by their teachers.  

Maybe not. Hangul is indeed a superb writing system.

>3.  Being able to express a few more sound than Japanese kana gives a sense
>of superset, thus superiority.  But as I said many times, one language's
>writing system need not represent the sound of the other.  As it is
>demonstrated with hangul itself, one's that are not used die out.  Japanese
>kana had more characters for more sounds also.

As I said numberous times, a writing system is a tool. Human being's 
ability is multidimensional. Why on earth one has to limit his/her 
ability by using poor tool? Hangul was an attemp to encircle the sounds 
existed in many other languages. Although many elements of the attempt
have been extinct, it is still a superb writing system in representing
sounds.

>4.  han-gul is just another phonetic alphabet.  Any symbol can be
>associated with any sound.  In fact, a linguist friend of mine read korean
>out of a romanized text.  It looked weird complete with 'q' ending words.
>But his pronounciation was clearly Korean.  Obviously, hangul is not the
>only way to represent Korean sound.

Of course not. This is why you want to distinguish writing systems from
language. Hangul is and was a writing system and it is far better than
many other. (I suppose I don't go over to repeat the reasons I enumerated
in my other postings.)

>5.  Someone pointed out that Korean is a syllabic language.  True.  For
>that matter, many others are.  If not all languages.  English words can be
>broken into syllables in which each syllable corresponds to a single letter
>in Korean.  The stop sound (bat-chim) is not unique in Korean language.
>Korean writing system happen to put it in 2D arrangement.

Being a syllable based writing consitute the element of fast reading, but
create some other problems as pointed out by Andrew T. Kim.

>6.  Learning hangul may be easy at first.  But to become functionally
>literate, it takes just as much effort as the other languages.  Learning to
>prounce properly all the connected sounds (ex shin-ra is pronounced shilla)
>takes a lot of time and practice.  And han-gul is cpu intensive at first.
>By the time you get to be a fluent reader, you are recognizing the whole
>letter, not each components.  At this stage, the reading mechanism is the
>same as reading Japanese Kana or English words. (fluent reader reads each
>word,not each letter in the word).

Right. Learning language takes time. I think Korean language is 
particularly difficult. But we are discussing about Hangul, the writing 
system. 

>7.  As for the beauty of its shape, it is strictly in the eyes of the
>beholders.  A friend of mine told me hangul seems to be bunch of lines and
>circles.

Agreed.

>8.  I never wished a foreign language used hangul as its writing system.  I
>feel each language is best represented with its writign system.  I learned
>a few foreign language.  I never wrote pronounciation key in hangul.  Even
>Japanese, which has subset of Korean sound according to some people, is
>much harder to understand when its sound is written out in hangul.  

Maybe is it because you are not used to Japanese written in Hangul?

>That's it for now.  Any comment is welcome.

I know.


youngwhan.