tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sat Jul 26 00:21:07 2008
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Re: idea for writing system
- From: Benjamin Barrett <[email protected]>
- Subject: Re: idea for writing system
- Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:19:12 -0700
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The issue I'm referring to isn't whether it's a perfect match, but
whether it's phonetic or phonemic. Korean is phonemic; languages such
as English and French are phonetic. The character corresponding most
closely to "k," for example, stands for the sounds "k" and "g"
depending on the context because voicing is phonemic in Korean. It is
this feature plus the fact that the characters mimic the shape of the
mouth that makes King Sejong's work so incredible. AFAIK, there is NO
dialect of Korean that doesn't have this representation regardless of
local variation. BB
On Jul 25, 2008, at 8:16 PM, Lawrence John Rogers wrote:
> What you-all mean by "phonemic", right, isn't how scientists call it.
> Scientists would say something like "each phoneme corresponding to a
> single
> sign". For alphabets or syllabaries, the rule that everyone ends up
> following is this: whenever your language standardized that
> syllabary or
> alphabet, that's when the spelling got fixed in its place. Even
> non-alpha-syllabic writing systems work this way. People like the old
> spelling because it makes reading old stuff easier and stuff like
> that.
>
> <snip>
>
> Korean uses (mostly and increasingly) the alphabet invented by King
> Sejong
> about 1440. However, it wasn't popularly used until 1945. (And
> know that
> EVERYONE claims their writing systems is this "phonemic", even the
> Spanish.)
> So I suspect that you're right, their ortho-graphy (correct or
> standard
> writing) dates back to 1945 and so reflects the modern language
> pretty good,
> but probably not exactly and for all dialects.
>
> Certain African (and I know Africa always gets a bad rap by
> Westerners)
> languages have been written down even more recently and correspond
> even
> better than Korean to their Modern Language.
>
> But give them all 1000, 2000 years. The way things go, you may be
> surprised, spelling for English will be far, far more goofy in 1000
> years,
> (if a written English is used at all by non-specialists).
>
> http://www.ancientscripts.com/ws_timeline.html
>
> Benjamin Barrett writes:
>
>> Korean is phonemic. A few languages such as French and English
>> deviate
>> quite radically from their intended phonetic writing systems. BB
>>
>> On Jul 25, 2008, at 12:47 PM, Jonathan Webley wrote:
>>
>>>> Lawrence John Rogers writes:
>>>> Well, all writing systems are phonetic.
>>>
>>> Except for ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, Chinese, and some others
>>> (such as
>>> numerals - 10, 11, 12 are definitely not phonetic).
>>>
>>> Jon