Re: Co-ordinated spelling

On Mon, 21 Aug 2000, John Cowan wrote:

> On Mon, 21 Aug 2000, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>
> > I have heard, however, that the Korean writing system was invented
> > deliberately for the sake of being "different" from Chinese. So much for
> > trying to reconcile members of a language family... :-)
>
> Yes, but Japanese and Korean aren't Sinitic languages at all.  Han writing,
> while well-suited for the situation in China, is very crappy for writing
> any other language, particularly ones that are very different typologically
> (lots of empty words and inflectional suffixes).
<wry g>  So is it Chinese with the suffixes, or Korean?  I've never seen
a grammatical description, and while I can speak conversational I can't
match terminology to something that's more instinct than knowledge (what
little I remember).

> The Korean alphabet (which is what it is, even if written in little
> clumps to make it visually compatible with hanzi) works well for Korean.
I'm fond of the little clumps, but that may be cultural bias.  :-)  The
Chevraqis alphabet clumps by syllable as well, though it's arranged
differently.

YHL