Re: Featural Alphabets (was Re: Boustrophedon and Chinese (was Re: A single font can

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Henrik Theiling <theiling@A...> wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> tomhchappell <tomhchappell@Y...> writes:
> >...
> > King Sejong's Hangeul system for Korean is supposed to be a
> > featurography, but I don't think it really is.
> >...
>
> Hmm??  Errm, how close a look did you have?  The layout of the vowel
> letters (almost!) looks like an IPA vowel space map and the
consonants
> are also obviously assigned by POA plus consonant modifications
> (e.g. 'plus one stroke') do the same thing to different letters
> (e.g. add voicing).  It's strange to me that you say that that
system
> is not really featural.  It looks surprisingly featural to me and
also
> very constructed.
I read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Jamo_design
and now I agree with you.  I had never seen any such explanation
before and had not noticed the system myself.

Up 'til I read your post, I had only seen such explanations as
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Syllabic_blocks
together with assertions that this constituted "featurography".
It is that to which I was objecting; I don't think building syllable-
blocks out of symbols for consonants and vowels constitutes
a "featural alphabet", nor even a "featural syllabary".  Since the
syllable-block-construction was the only systematic component of
Hangul of which I was aware, I said I didn't think it was quite as
featural as it was made out to be.  I now see that I just needed
the "jamo design" explained to me.

Thank you for educating me.

Tom H.C. in MI