A few weeks ago one of our readers made an off-hand comment about language being technology and I’ve been thinking about that periodically since then. This is a level of discourse that I can get behind because I’m frankly not much of a techie. I tend to buy an electronic device, take it home, set it in a corner for a few weeks, unpack it and then grudgingly learn to use about 5% of its capabilities. Old-tech, however, I get. One of the best examples I can think of with regards to language being technology is the Korean alphabet, known as ‘hangeul’. “Big woop”, you might say, “we’ve all got alphabets”. But what makes hangeul unique is the way it came into being.
About five hundred years ago the Korean nation was fortunate enough to have a good and smart king (very likely their only one, ever). This king, Sejong the Great, recognized that the Korean language was not well-served by the Chinese writing system which they’d used for centuries because they’d had none of their own. One reason Chinese characters didn’t always work so well for Koreans is that Korean and Chinese are linguistically unrelated, even though Korean has taken on Chinese loan-words in much the same way that Anglo-Saxon became heavily contaminated with Greek and Latin. In addition, Chinese, known as hanja, takes years to learn to read and write.
King Sejong, in his wisdom, decided that his people should become literate and stop wasting so much time studying hanja. He set top men to the task, and within a few months they had the makings of an incredibly useful and time-saving tool. So effective was hangeul that instead of taking years to learn, it took anything from a few hours to a few days to learn. One key factor is that hangeul is a series of letters, like the Roman alphabet we use, rather than kernels of concepts, like the Chinese writing system. The alphabet was drawn to mimic in a way the shape of the mouth and tongue needed to produce the sounds they represent. Visually hangeul can seem similar to Chinese characters because it is constructed in phonemic blocks: one word can have from two to four letters in one little box.
Not everyone appreciated the efforts of Sejong the Great, or his ministers. The wealthy, literate class (virtually all male), felt that hangeul undermined the scholarly grandiose of taking years upon years to become properly literate. They were clearly threatened by a tool that could bring literacy to the entire populace. As such, the alphabet was repressed after Sejong’s death and it took centuries for hangeul to be widely adopted. Even into the 1980s one needed a significant knowledge of hanja to read a Korean newspaper. Today, however, hangeul is the only alphabet one needs in Korea. Hangeul has become a major source of pride for the Korean people, who like to remind everyone that their’s is a “scientific alphabet”.
For a really mind blowing system, to most Westerners at least, try Japan's many writing systems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_writing_sys…
I worked for a couple of Japanese companies. Sometimes the words are symbols, sometimes a phonetic alphabet, sometimes read right to left, sometimes read left to right. It was amazing to me when native speakers could not translate technical documents. Four distinct systems that are intermingled together.
I was astounded watching my Japanese girlfriend typing on the keyboard of a Japanese-layout laptop. I didn't have the slightest idea of how she managed to get anything written.
I've seen a few of those, a bunch of Ctrl, Alt, and/or Shift. Then suddenly two characters become one. I think if the Japanese had a simpler written language they would go from working 12-15 hour days to a 6-7 hour workday.
I guess where hangeul did manage to gain traction in Korea, the same did not happen with hirigana and katakana in Japan. The Japanese take real pride in their obfuscation.
That is a reasonably awesome story. You've elevated my fondness and respect for Korea.
Now if we could just get them to spell "Forte Coupe" correctly.
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Or when they're talking, how do they understand each other when each 'word' might sound like 3 or 4 different kanji, and each of those kanji might have 3 or 4 totally different meanings. It's all so bloody vague! I'm amazed that they can communicate at all.
And to answer your unasked question, Yes I've tried to learn Japanese (and am still trying) and I suck at it. I think my brain is wired wrong.
Japanese names appear to be formed of specific pronunciations of random kanji. People will introduce themselves with "My name is John Jones, it's spelled with the character for 'transistor radio' and the character for 'bacon cheeseburger'."
This comes up in anime a lot, and I've specifically avoided looking it up because it seems so mind-bendingly obtuse; like if you write the name 'Itoshiki' with the characters too close together then it says 'zetsubou'.
thanks for share.. just wanna say that ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ : Atomic Toasters realy inspire me.
hhhe