
A Holiday in Honor of the Korean Writing System - walid
http://www.mentalfloss.com/article/53091/today-holiday-honor-world%E2%80%99s-greatest-alphabet
======
Jun8
Orthographic 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
The 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.

~~~
enko
> a friend who spent a year in Japan remarked that, e.g. policemen carry
> dictionaries with them

I am not at all surprised to hear that. I have family in Japan and have
observed many times an inability to remember how to write a certain kanji eg.
when filling in a form. Typically people will then type the word phonetically
on a cell phone or computer, which prompts them with matching kanji, jogging
their memory. There is a strong reliance on these technologies or, I suppose,
dictionaries, which are also organised phonetically.

It is of course the case that English speakers occasionally forget words -
I've looked up "diarrhoea" more than once in my life! But it's not an everyday
thing like I've seen with my japanese relatives.

------
deepblueocean
Reminds me of this comic:

(Learn to read Korean in 15 minutes)

[http://9gag.com/gag/3968335](http://9gag.com/gag/3968335)

~~~
walid
WOW! This is actually a very useful comic :)

------
lobo_tuerto
I 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)

~~~
korussian
Hangul is great, but don't try to use it for English. Try writing "Larry
really loves the zoo very much". You get "Raeri ri-a-ri reo-beu-seu da joo
bae-ri meo-chi".

In other words, you lose the L/R and V/B differences, and words like "much"
can't end on consonants, so you get "Muchi".

Hangul has no sounds corresponding to "V, F, R-L, Th, and 'woo'".

~~~
memsom
Following Korean spelling rules, yes, but when I was a kid I had a slightly
adapted Hangul that I used for English all the time. It was a brilliant secret
code and only took a couple of days to master it. All I did was add a couple
of characters borrowed from Hiragana and put a floating bar above T and S to
make TH and SH. I can still more or less remember it and read it 30 odd years
later.

------
merkitt
Sinhalese, 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
There is a word for it:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida)

------
nepaHack
This 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
> 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
Add 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)

------
tokenadult
A 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.

~~~
mathattack
I've had people tell me that Korean is much easier to learn than Japanese and
Mandarin. Perhaps this is why.

~~~
w1ntermute
The 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
I 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.

------
philsnow
> 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
Voice distinctions are allophonic in Korean; the phonemic difference between ㄱ
and ㅋ is purely aspiration.

~~~
jessaustin
Are 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
g 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
Wonderful explanation. Thank you!

------
yongcat
I 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

------
failrate
I'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
Fun 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.

------
tejaswiy
This is almost exactly like Sanskrit and the derivative Indian langauges.
Convergent Evolution I guess?

~~~
auctiontheory
I don't see it. Devanagari characters are not assembled by combining smaller
blocks of sound.

~~~
tejaswiy
Why 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
Yes, 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
Er, maybe not in Devanagari, but you sure as hell do in Nastaliq.

------
donpark
Almost as interesting is Hangul keyboard layout:

[http://www.ke5ter.com/archives/2008/02/26/hangul-keyboard-
la...](http://www.ke5ter.com/archives/2008/02/26/hangul-keyboard-layout)

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.

------
sergiotapia
I learned to read and write in korean letter in a lazy afternoon - it really
is miles ahead of roman alphabet. Extremely simple!

