From: yjhbhc@dante.lbl.gov (Joe Huang)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.korean
Subject: Re: "Superiority"
Date: 10 Apr 1992 21:42:58 GMT
Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Berkeley
Reply-To: yjhbhc@dante.lbl.gov (Joe Huang)
NNTP-Posting-Host: 128.3.254.106

Yorubun, annyunghashimnikka !

As a reader of soc.culture.china and soc.culture.taiwan, as well as soc.culture.korean, 
I want to share some observations about Scott Horne for those trying to 
reason with him.  My main advice is to ignore him.  Like a naughty ten-year
old, Scott relishes being the center of attention and will say anything to get it. 
His voluminous postings are highly inflammatory but rarely convey any meaningful 
information. Those of you who suspect Scott of being a "Sino-phile" probably 
have not seen his behavior on soc.culture.china or soc.culture.taiwan. 

On s.c.c., he has raised the ire of most Chinese readers by his slavish adherence 
to the Chinese Communist Party line. He has called pro-democracy activists and their 
American supporters "whores" and "bitches", argued against allowing Chinese students 
to stay in the U.S., taken a self-assumed mission to propagandize against the 
Dalai Lama (as seen in his recent posting on sck), and at the time of Tiananmen
posted a personal letter of support to Deng Xiaoping fingering several overseas 
Chinese students by name. Concerning Taiwan, he has irritated readers by saying 
Taiwan has neither culture nor any achievements in the last 40 years, that it has
only "sleazy" South Korea and South Africa as friends, and that the People's Republic 
is Taiwan's "legitimate government".  

Now, it seems that Scott has hopped over to s.c.korea to infect you with his particular 
brand of grandstanding (his favorite adjective for the Dalai Lama :-)).
It's hard for me to fathom where Scott is coming from or what his "message" is.
The more you talk to him, the more he will go to extremes to challenge your statements.
Unless you like to indulge in pointless sophistry, please ignore his articles and 
forget him.

Now, speaking as someone who is not Korean (I'm Chinese), but has lived in Korea 
for two years and learned Korean, I think Hangul is a marvelous writing system
of which Koreans can be justifiably proud. The only influences I see from Chinese 
characters are aesthetic ones in the square form of the syllables, and the vaguely
similar stroke order. The salient fact about Hangul is that it is a phonetic rather 
than an ideographic writing system that makes it functionally more like a Western 
written language than Chinese or even Japanese, whose syllabaries do not distinguish 
between consonants and vowels. Some of the linguistic intricacies in Korean, such as 
the hidden ending consonants in many verbs, were lost to me until after months of study, 
only to discover that they have been faithfully captured all along in Hangul. I remain 
amazed that a writing system invented by a committee 500 years ago has proven to be so 
well suited to the needs of an entire people despite tremendous historical and
social changes in the following centuries.  Who was it that said a camel is a horse 
designed by a committee? 

Joe Huang  (Hangungmalo Hwang Uk-irago hamnida)
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