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Re: Tyl Sjok in Korean script

From:Sanghyeon Seo <sanxiyn@...>
Date:Thursday, February 10, 2005, 3:30
Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
> I just struggled over an old project: a Tyl Sjok text in Korean > (Hangeul) script. For any who wants to have a look at Hangeul, > here's the Northwind and the Sun:
> What I'm interested in is whether it looks weird to Korean eyes. Or > whether is looks like garbage or interesting or whatever.
Hello, I am a lurker, and I am a native Korean speaker. Yes, it looks weird to me, but still interesting. Perhaps that's because I am a conlanger though. :-) First, we Koreans are not accustomed to the language written in Hanguel which has many monosyllable words like yours: so the word spacing looks quite weird. We sometimes write Japanese or Chinese, even English in Hangeul, but we don't see all words[!] written in one Hangeul 'unit'. For example, "strange" is a monosyllable but we write it as 스트레인지. Next, any syllable ending in khieukh looks very weird. We don't use that even for transcribing foreign languages. But I can understand that you need to differentiate g/k and x... Official Hangeul transcription of German uses 흐 for ach-laut, and 히 for ich-laut. Hangeul choice for t, s, n, l, k, h is good, using ieung for both ng and ' is brilliant. Vowel assignments also make a lot of sense. I'd use ㅣ and vowel separately for [j]+vowels, remove space between particle-like prefix words and core words, change [x] as above, perhaps write [3] and [E] has two vowels -- to make it "look natural" to Korean eyes. But of course then you lose the beauty of one-to-one correspondence. By the way, the most interesting way to use Hangeul for conlang would be adopt Modern Korean's "morphophonemic spelling". That is, where many agglutinative suffixes has well-understood automatic changes, those phonemic changes are not written to keep inflected forms as close as possible to the root. Seo Sanghyeon

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Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>