Re: Co-ordinated spelling
| From: | John Cowan <cowan@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, August 21, 2000, 13:52 |
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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).
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.
--
John Cowan cowan@ccil.org
C'est la` pourtant que se livre le sens du dire, de ce que, s'y conjuguant
le nyania qui bruit des sexes en compagnie, il supplee a ce qu'entre eux,
de rapport nyait pas. -- Jacques Lacan, "L'Etourdit"