Re: Co-ordinated spelling

On Mon, 21 Aug 2000, H. S. Teoh wrote:

> Interestingly, Korean and Japanese have adapted the Chinese writing system
> in addition to their own script, so that when written in the Chinese
> writing system, it can be understood (with some effort) by someone who
> reads Chinese. I'm not very familiar with Korean or Japanese, though, so
> perhaps somebody more suitably clued can elaborate on this one. :-)
Well, if you pick up a Korean newspaper, a Chinese reader will be able to
read some headlines and isolated characters (maybe with semantic shift,
but I'd have to ask good ol' Mom about that) and not much else.  You only
need about 100 Chinese characters for anything you're going to do in
Korean, *unless* you're a historian pre-1800's (?  that's a very rough,
and I'm not patient enough to scour Cumiings' _Korea's Place in the Sun_
for it), in which case all the aristocracy's writings and documents are
going to be in Chinese.

> 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... :-)
Hmm.  Well, imagine trying to write English in Chinese characters.
Korean *isn't* Chinese despite lots of loan words, and one of the reasons
I've heard given is that due to the differences in the languages it's a
bloody pain to learn Chinese (essentially) just to be able to write your
own language in it.  King Sejong also supposedly wanted more people to be
literate, rather than just the yangban elite; this didn't work out for
the following centuries, mainly because the yangban elite weren't going
to relinquish their social superiority to a bunch of peasant upstarts who
thought they could read and write.  (Gaw, I *hate* Confucius.  Horrible,
horrible man.)  So Chinese-in-Korean hung on for quite a while due to the
prestige factor.

'Course, then the Japanese came in 1910 and tried to wipe out the
culture...is it any wonder that Koreans are so defensive about their own
alphabet, which has the added bonus of being learnable (reading, *not*
writing) in practically an afternoon?  (I've known Americans who've done
it, with no other language exposure or experience.)

YHL