Re: Co-ordinated spelling

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:

> I am told that was by deliberate design, which is possible since the
> alphabet was designed by a committee of scholars, but OTOH I had that
> from another Korean, and I'm always wary of nationalism.  :-/
No, it's all true this time.  This message was posted to Linguist List
(a primarily professional mailing list) back in 1992:

> Date: Tue, 24 Nov 1992 14:24:53 World Linguistics Day
> From: <HASPELMATH@...>
> Subject: World Linguistics Day
>
> After suggesting a while ago that we celebrate October 9th, the day of
> the Korean alphabet (Hangul Day), as World Linguistics Day, I got a
> couple of messages that objected that the day of the creation of the
> Korean alphabet is no more universal than, e.g., Pentecost (the Christian
> holiday celebrating the coming of the Holy Spirit and the speaking in tongues
> by Christ's disciples).
>   But one does not have to see the creation of the Korean alphabet primarily
> as an achievement of the Korean nation, but as an achievement of linguistic
> science, which is universal by definition. To be sure, there are other
> great achievements of linguistic science, e.g. the creation of speech-
> based writing, the creation of segment-based alphabets, Humboldt's
> "Ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaus", Chomsky's
> "A minimalist program for linguistic theory", etc. But for the earlier
> great events in the history of linguistics, those on which the dust has
> settled, exact dates are not known. In addition, the (sad) fact that
> the (South) Korean government has just abolished Hangul Day makes it less
> of a primarily national holiday. (What about North Korea, by the way?)
>   Incidentally, I just found out that there is another country where
> the creation of the alphabet is celebrated as a national holiday: in
> Bulgaria, May 24th is the Day of Slavic Writing (in the 9th century,
> St. Cyril and St. Method[ios] created the first Slavic written language and
> created the Glagolitic alphabet, whose structure, but not the form of the
> letters, is based on the Greek alphabet).
>
> Martin Haspelmath, Free University of Berlin
--

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