
Superscript: South Korea celebrates an ingenious writing system - nether
http://www.economist.com/news/asia/21672358-country-celebrates-ingenious-writing-system-superscript?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/ed/Superscript
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brobinson
You can learn to read Hangul quite quickly:
[http://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/](http://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/)

Pronouncing it properly (especially the single/double consonants) is another
thing entirely.

~~~
apu
It took me a bit longer than 15 minutes (maybe a hour or so), but this guide
really worked for me when I visited Korea for a week last year. I couldn't
really believe it was that simple!

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yongjik
By the way, from the article: "The 80,000 speakers of the Cia-Cia language are
also being encouraged to use the script on the Indonesian island of Buton."

Many Koreans regard the whole Cia-Cia affair as a farce, or a misguided
attempt to "prove" the excellence of our writing system by advertising it onto
people who would really, really be better served by adopting the same
character system as everyone else around them (that is, the Latin alphabet).

If you can read Korean, here's a fascinating (though maybe biased) summary of
the affair:

[https://namu.wiki/w/%EC%B0%8C%EC%95%84%EC%B0%8C%EC%95%84%EC%...](https://namu.wiki/w/%EC%B0%8C%EC%95%84%EC%B0%8C%EC%95%84%EC%96%B4)

> 한국인들은 과연 찌아찌아족을 위해 한글을 전파하고 있는 것인가, 아니면 한국인들 자신을 위해 전파하고 있는 것인가. (Are
> Koreans teaching Hangul to the Cia-Cia for their benefit, or for the Koreans
> ourselves?)

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schoen
See also

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Creators_of_writing_s...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Creators_of_writing_systems)

I'm really impressed by these people! It's pretty rare (by fraction of
languages) to know exactly who originally devised your writing system.

~~~
riffraff
that is in fact a very interesting list, although I guess this page[0] is a
bit more useful, as it contains "what was invented by whom".

Personally I've always been fascinated by Spurius Carvilius Ruga[1], who
invented the single letter "G" for the latin alphabet :)

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_creators_of_writing_sy...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_creators_of_writing_systems)
[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spurius_Carvilius_Ruga](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spurius_Carvilius_Ruga)

~~~
Asbostos
Sadly J must have not been invented yet since G suffered the same fate of
overloading that its predecessor C did :(

~~~
boken
J is in fact a much more recent invention than many of us would suppose[0]. It
is worth adding, however, that it would not have saved G, except in English;
our pronunciation of J, while close to the French and a couple others (with an
added /d/ at the front), is quite unique among languages that were written in
the Roman alphabet at the time.

In any case, English suffers quite a few more more overloaded consonants that
C and G. Most occurrences of /z/ (a frequent sound in English) are marked with
an S ( _codes_ ), and a great many /t/ sounds are written D ( _typed_ ).

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J#History)

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BoysenberryPi
I learned Japanese while a friend of mine learned Korean. We would talk
sometimes and teach each other languages. One thing I grew envious of was
hangul. It is such a drastically better writing system than the Japanese
system of kana and kanji that it isn't even funny. It really makes writing
Japanese feel hacked together.

~~~
stephengillie
The Japanese writing system uses different letters for the same sounds,
depending on their source - foreign languages and animal sounds use Katakana,
not Hiragana. If it were intentional, it might be considered rude to
foreigners to organize a language that way - grouping foreigners with the
animals, based on their sounds.

~~~
yongjik
Well, but that's not too different from the use of Italics in English
orthography, which also includes sound effects and foreign words:

> It made a distinct _thunk_ as it hit the bottom.

> She's so _blasé_ about HN comments these days.

~~~
stephengillie
> _Well, but that 's not too different from the use of Italics in English
> orthography, which also includes sound effects and foreign words._

True. But using italics with foreign words is not a de facto English language
rule.

~~~
pietjepuk88
Please note that Japanese words themselves can also be written in katakana,
sometimes as a sort of emphasis. Other reasons can be it being a brand/name,
or because it is easier on the eyes, or because the kanji are too difficult.
So it's not like every word written in katakana is a foreign one.

That said, most words written in katakana are probably foreign.

~~~
stephengillie
This is a nuance to Japanese I did not know. Thank you for educating me. :)

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vorg
There's a Unicode cost to Korea's writing system: it needs 11,172 codepoints
to represent. This is because there are 19 mandatory leading consonants, 21
mandatory vowels, and 27 optional trailing consonants, giving a total of 19 x
21 x 28 possible syllable blocks, which are then generated by formula into
range U+AC00 to U+D7A3 to comply with Unicode's policy that only the
components of horizontal text be encoded, and any components built otherwise,
e.g. Korean's square structure, be represented compositely.

------
felipebueno
"Subscribe now for full access or register to continue reading." No, thanks!

~~~
dghughes
I didn't see that I could read the entire article.

“LIKE trying to fit a square handle into a round hole” is how Sejong the
Great, a Korean king, viewed the practice of using hanja, classical Chinese
characters, to transcribe Korean. Hanja recorded meaning alone, not sound, and
only aristocrats knew it. So the king and his literary circle crafted an
alphabet from scratch and started promoting it in 1446. Known as hangul, it
consists of 24 elements that can be grouped into blocks of syllables. Some
take the shape that lips and tongue form in speech. It is fantastically easy
to learn. The 80,000 speakers of the Cia-Cia language are also being
encouraged to use the script on the Indonesian island of Buton.

Hanja lingered for centuries after the introduction of hangul. Nobles scorned
the newfangled alphabet as being for peasants, women and children. But after
the end of over three decades of Japanese occupation in 1945, the governments
in both South and North Korea promoted hangul fiercely, ordering that hanja be
expunged from all texts and no longer taught in schools.

Today hanja pepper South Korean newspapers, while older South Koreans still
use them to write their names. But hangul is a source of patriotic pride. As
North Koreans were preparing this week to mark the 70th anniversary of the
ruling Workers’ Party with the usual display of bellicosity, the South had a
day off to celebrate something indigenous, brilliant and pacific—their
alphabet.

The annual October 9th holiday, scrapped in 1991 at employers’ request, was
reinstated in 2013. Woo Eun-kyung, a hotelier in Seoul, feels “pride and
gratitude” when Hangul Day comes around. Kim Ki-beom, a young lawyer, frets
that Korean is being “destroyed by alien words”. A national day, he says,
helps to keep the language intact; he laments a preference for English signs
on streets.

Still, Mr Kim admits the holiday is firstly a welcome respite from long office
hours. It is also a way to entice South Koreans to splurge. One alien word now
doing the rounds is beulfe, a conflation of “Black Friday”, America’s huge
autumn sale, transliterated into hangul. The government has prodded 27,000
shops to slash prices in the first half of October to pep up sluggish consumer
spending; in four days Lotte, a department store, sold almost a quarter more
than a year earlier. Electronics and clothes are much in demand—another way
for South Koreans to express themselves.

------
memming
Korean has so many vowels it's not even funny.

~~~
kragen
If you think Korean's bad, you should try English! It has fourteen or fifteen
vowels!

~~~
1ris
But how many letters for vowels does it have? German has A, Ä, E, I, O, Ö, U,
Ü, Y. I think english has mainly diphthongs.

~~~
taejo
English only has six vowel letters (the same ones as German without the
umlauts), but it has lots of vowels (monophthongs). Wikipedia's article on
lexical sets lists the following words as having distinct vowels in General
American (the exact number varies between dialects): _trap, lot, face, dress,
nurse, fleece, kit, goat, cloth, goose, foot, strut_. That's twelve, and
doesn't include vowels which only appear in unstressed syllables (there's at
least one: for example, the second syllable in _comma_ ).

~~~
kragen
The situation with English is similar to the situation with Korean being
written with hanja, although not as severe. We're using the Latin alphabet,
which was designed for a language with many fewer phonemes, and we're using it
in a quasi-ideographic way in which spellings reflect etymology as much as
they do pronunciation. So even though we have between thirteen and twenty
vowels, depending on how you count, we attempt to represent them all with only
six graphemes — and irregularly at that.

