Re: Language changes, spelling reform (was Conlangea Dreaming)

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
> On Wed, 11 Oct 2000, Robert Hailman wrote:
>
> > Not me, that's for sure. All I know about Korean is that the writing
> > system isn't really a syllabary, but it looks like one, and that Korean
> > is spoken in Korea.
>
> It's pretty alphabetical, but it isn't quite arranged linearly.  :-p
Ah yes, now I remember. All the letters in one syllable are put together
in some non-linear way, and then these groupings of letters are arranged
linearly.

> I have no idea what my conscript looks like to others, though I'd love to
> hear from anyone who wants to venture opinions.  Like Korean, it's a
> syllabically-arranged *alphabet* but it probably looks like logographs or
> something funky from a distance.
Is there a website for it? I'm more than willing to venture opinions,
once I see it.

I'd like to have an alphabet similar to that of Korean as a conscript,
but I don't know anything about the Korean alphabet except for what I
said not 3 paragraphs above.

> Korean also is apparently spoken by Koreans living in Russia, China, and
> Japan.  But it isn't exactly a popular language by world standards.
I've never encountered someone who was (to my knowledge) speaking
Korean, tho that's more because I never bother to find out what
languages people are speaking more so than it's because there are no
Koreans in Toronto, I'm sure there are quite a few. I'd like to learn
more about Korean, I should add it to my list of "Languages I Want to
Know, but Probably Will Never Learn", where it will be accompanied by
Polish, Icelandic, Finnish, Swedish & Japanese.

> > I try to be well informed, but at the end of the day there are some
> > things I know nothing about.
>
> Goes for all of us...:-p
Yeah, probably. As far as Languages Other than English, I know
embarrasingly little. I know a bit of French, and I'm taking 2nd year
High School German, but beyond that, it's an endless expanse of
ignorance.

<snip>

> > The odd thing is that the language that could (arguably) have the most
> > use for a spelling reform is the one where it's least likely to happen.
>
> Could be.  I dunno--I find I'm used enough to the spelling that it
> doesn't bother me, and most of the time it amuses me.  I'm sure foreign
> learners of English would like it, though.
It doesn't bother me either, but I have a few immigrant friends, and
they oftentimes complain about the particularly bizzare points of
English spelling.

My Polish friend proposed a spelling reform that uses sz & cz where we
use sh & ch, and I guess logically tz rather than th and pz rather than
ph, but he's pretty much nuts, and the rest of his reform was pretty
much spelling English as if it were Polish. It was interesting to read,
but not feasible at all.

<snip>

> Fast reading has a few downsides...among other things, I run out of books
> in the summer so quickly it isn't even funny.  <wry g>  (This was a
> problem in Korea because the school library was closed during the summer....)
I spent the whole summer reading one book... but then again, it was The
Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoyevsky, so that can explain it - 700 pages,
and 700 of the densest pages I've ever read. It takes forever to read
just one chapter! After that I knocked off Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut in
a few days. It was like 75-100 pages a day - that's no 1000 pages, but
it's pretty good for me - it beats the 12-odd I was doing for the
Brothers Karamazov. Of course, this was only reading for an hour or two
a day, I filled my time otherwise as well.

> My eyesight is completely horrible.  My hand blurs some 6 inches from my
> face when I'm not wearing glasses, but usually when I'm reading I hold
> the book close so I don't have to guess.  For reading road signs, though
> I have to resort to shapes and contours and guesswork (mostly guesswork
> when unfamiliar names of cities and streets occur--things like Vly
> Street).  That and a boyfriend with 15/20 vision.  <grumble>
Unfamiliar words and misspelled words pose the most trouble for me,
because I can't pick out the shape right away. Guesswork will only work
some of the time, so it can be a problem.

My eyesight isn't nearly that bad, but from the back of my World
Religions classroom (probably around 12-15 meters) I can't make out
individual letters at all when written on the board. I'm going to
probably need glasses when I get my driver's license, which means I'm
going to have a nice "X" on my drivers license - they could have picked
a letter that has less connotations of "defective" and such, but nooooo,
in Ontario they use "X" for "needs corrective lenses" - very nice.
</irrelevant rant>

> Hate 'em myself, but I've never been able to convince anyone to let me
> *not* take them.  Thankfully I've got the general GRE over with, and the
> math GRE will be over with soon.  Exams in grad school sound like they
> hurt, though....
It's hard to get out of useless tests - today and tomorrow, I didn't &
don't have class in the morning because the students in Grade 10 (a year
younger than myself) have to write a 5-hour literacy test (split over
two days) in order to graduate, as part of the new curriculum. Never
have I laughed so hard at so many people, but in a way it's sad that
they're forced to waste so much time doing something so pointless.

--
Robert