Yesterday, 06:37 PM
(Yesterday, 06:20 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Quote: A freshly designed script, of course, could be much more 'rational', but this surely requires a lot of work and especially a lot of knowledge about phonetics and linguistics, and it would be hard to get people to accept it (even if there are examples where this happened, but starting from no script at all, as for Cree, or in the case of Hangul from a script which was based on a foreign script and was replaced for nationalistic reasons, if I'm not mistaken).Hangul did not borrow anything from the Chinese script that was used before in Korea, except the square outline of the characters (each being a phonetic encoding of a syllable), the writing direction (originally top-down with columns right to left) and the assumption that the characters would be written with a brush. Unlike Chinese, where each syllable is a word with some generic meaning, Korean has polysyllabic words, thus each character is purely phonetic -- a combination of consonant signs and vowel signs -- without any specific meaning.
All the best, --stolfi
I used a bad wording when talking about Hangul. I did not mean Hangul characters borrowed from Chinese ones, I meant Korea went from a Chinese-based script to a brand new one, and the acceptance problem was overcome through nationalistic and patriotic reasons.