This is a weird and nice find for me. I'm going on a tad tangent and a bit of a story. I'm from an international border state in India. I grew up studying a part of our local language[1] written in an Indian-specific script[2], but now it has reverted to the original script that has existed since 500-600AD. Surprisingly, when I visited my hometown about 10 years after I left, the first thing I noticed was that the young people could speak and converse in Korean!
Right now, reading from the comic tutorial, I can understand why -- they have similar ideas. I never learned our local script properly; perhaps, now, I can read both and try to learn. I have heard people say that our local script is super easy to learn, and almost everyone, old and young, knows it. Perhaps these similarities help the people from that region to easily tune in to Korean media and speak and understand the language.
Hangul is really only impressive if you're a native English speaker. It's probably somewhere between German and French in terms of ease of use and nothing special in that regard. Of course the cultural bubble of Korea includes Chinese languages and Japanese so the bar to be considered a simple writing system is incredibly low. But every single alphabet would meet those expectations. Amongst writing systems that use alphabets, Hangul is probably in the middle.
A lot of the difficulty of reading Korean comes from double letters (when you have 4 letters in a syllable) where it's not necessarily clear which one to pronounce, diphthongs that lost their original pronunciation so the spelling changed a lot., letters at the end of a syllable get reduced down to a smaller set of sounds and the fact that Korean as a language cares more about aspiration than voicing resulting in, for a western ear, very minor differences that are explicitly expressed in the writing system (ㅂ vs ㅍ) and very big differences that are implied (밥 is [pap̚] but 보리밥 is [poɾibap̚]).
I like that people get excited about languages but it's kinda nuts how the English speaking Internet celebrates Hangul as this genius invention of a writing system that makes perfect sense when it is just an averagely well maintained alphabetical writing system.
What you are implicitly describing is called a phonemic orthography and it has a well-known share of problems. Fully phonemic orthography means that any pronunciation difference should be more or less reflected to that, but that means all dialects of a single language should be recorded differently. Also many such differences are linguistically transparent, that is, native speakers actually don't really realize and so can't really distinguish them. Therefore it is desirable to weaken the phonemicity a bit to make it more palatable for native speakers.
Hangul was originally highly phonemic, but a modern reform is much more hybrid ("morphophonemic") mainly because it's much easier and relatively more stable in the long term. Double letters, for example, are used when a syllable coda (jongseong) affects the following syllable onset (choseong). Such cases can be quite regularly described as having two codas, where the first coda remains in the original syllable and the second coda is merged to the following syllable in a specific way. The actual difficulty in the Korean language is much more subtle than that in my knowledge.
Coming from a background whose native tongue is completely phonetic, English feels like absolute madness w.r.t written words and their spellings.
What's interesting is, in some places those inconsistencies are acknowledged and even celebrated annually in the form of spelling bee competitions. They make zero sense for any of the phonetic languages including Korean.
For a native english speaker, I suspect Hangul/Korean is impressive because of its simplicity (and the popularity of K-pop and k-drama also help to an extent) in writing with a smaller alphabet compared to the relative madness of the English language.
The complexity of English spelling reflects the origin of the language as a trade tongue, also possibly reflecting influence from Latin, which went so far as to add redundant letters for the sole purpose of indicating foreignness. The majority of words are loanwords, and the spelling reflects the origin of the word (unless you're British, in which case some of the spelling reflects the British desire to be French). This can actually be very useful for divining pronunciation and meaning, but I admit I do sometimes think about dropping the redundant letters and reforming the alphabet to one sound per letter.
… for now in the 21st century. There is no guarantee the current spelling will accurately reflect the pronunciation in the 23rd century.
Pronunication and spelling inevitable diverge over time in nearly any sufficiently widely used language due to languages being living things. People lament the perceived absurdities of the English spelling, yet they do not realise that it is a far more common problem across many languages. Take Tibetan as another and perhaps an even more extreme example where the spelling today is fixed to the pronunciation that existed in the 11th century, a millenium ago. The Icelandic spelling is also very complex and is not reflective of the modern pronunication. French, Burmese and Thai are susceptible to the same problem of varying extents as well. English receives the majority of the criticism by virtue of being more widespread than the other languages that face the same problem.
There are pretty much only two ways to deal with the problem: regularly purge obsolete/changed phonetic rules/encodings from the writing system, which will result in a loss of historical continuity over a long period of time where future generations will not be able to directly read texts written by their ancestors, or keep the spelling intact and allow pronunciation to depart from the spelling in the future.
The only solution that is immune to the spelling / pronunciation dilemma is a logographic script albeit in a different way. The most glaring example is, of course, the Chinese traditional characters. The phonetic quality today is so vastly different from their pronunciation of Old Chinese, Middle Chinese and multiple modern Chinese languages that it is somewhat amusing to see names of historically significant people of the ancient past to be spelled out using the modern Mandarin pronunciation. It is a convention and a common denominator, though.
So the logographic scripts offer a semantic continuity solution to the writing system problem whilst allowing the pronunciation to evolve independently.
Granted, the grammar will also diverge at some point as well but, as the natural language processing (early word2vec, the Bayesian topic model, BERT etc) has demonstrated, the grammatic markers in the writing can be safely ignored to a large extent – at the expense of losing nuances of the colloquial speech. Yet, with a logographic writing system, the semantic meaning and the context will remain largely retained for a far longer time compared to an alphabet based writing system.
My native language is Russian, which is very non phonetic, but it's nothing compared to English. Russian just has some vowels and consonants pronounced and written differently in some situations, but there are rules and nothing like "ghoti" is possible. I think English and French take it way out there.
It is interesting to see a perspective of someone who seems to have studied multiple languages.
I think it would be useful to clarify what is meant by "writing system". The term may refer to the alphabet or the orthography of a language. (or other things that's out of the scope here)
In the context of "Hangul hype", what is being discussed is usually about the alphabet, or, at least that is how I understand it. I do think Hangul as an alphabet is pretty intuitive and is modularized into components that compose well.
On the other hand, Korean orthography doesn't really seem to be the easiest to learn and the complexity has bled into writing and pronouncing Hangul, as in written Korean. I don't have experience with languages other than English to compare with, but if someone says Korean orthography is in the middle of the camp I'd buy that.
> Korean as a language cares more about aspiration than voicing resulting in, for a western ear, very minor differences that are explicitly expressed in the writing system and very big differences that are implied
That's a really interesting point. I think it has something to do with pronunciation more than a writing system. For example I can't disambiguate the pronunciation of "밥" from that of the last syllable in "보리밥". I've been told they're different.
It's not though: it's a unique in that it's both alphabetic and a syllabary at the same time, and there's nothing quite else like it. Judging it by how phonetic it is kind of beside the point, and given that it's been 600 years since King Sejong came up with the system, it's held up much better than many other writing systems (looking at you, English).
Is there actually a big difference in the p and b sounds? Eg. Finnish p sounds about halfway between English p and b, same with k and g, t and d. What you're describing sounds like an emphasis rule that probably comes naturally when speaking with the proper accent.
At elementary school in Spain, we were taught pnemonics PeTaCa and BoDeGa to remember the difference between consonants categories. I don't remember the names: fricatives? occlusives? Something like that.
Totally agree that difficulties comes from doulbe letters but Korean it is not sothing between German and French in terms of ease of use. As I know Korean doesn't belong to any language family, making it unique and not directly related to any other language. English, like German and French, belongs to the Romance-Germanic group of languages so Hangul is equally impressive for native English speaker, native French or German speaker.
> and the fact that Korean as a language cares more about aspiration than voicing resulting in, for a western ear, very minor differences that are explicitly expressed in the writing system (ㅂ vs ㅍ) and very big differences that are implied (밥 is [pap̚] but 보리밥 is [poɾibap̚])
To an anglophone ear, [paʔ] and [baʔ] are indistinguishable - we also care more about aspiration than voicing. So it's odd to describe this, in English, as "a very big difference that is implied".
Nah, Hunminjungeum (The initial blueprint), which initially designed for phonetic alphabet did support differentiating those phonemes.
It's just until early 1900s that a "nationalist" (SiKyeong Ju) decided to use the "phonetic alphabet" into a primary writing system and revamped the system to be focused on words to be identifiable, rather than following the pronunciation.
hangul now is just like equivalent of using a modded Phonetics alphabet that made each words identifiable. It's not representing the actual pronunciation, nor the actual pronunciation of the word. That's also the reason why the hanja (= kanji or "Chinese characters" or whatever your country calls it) was around until late 90s.
If you think Korean grammar is crazy, It's all thanks to him.
While learning to read an alphabet isn't at all the same as learning to read the actual language, I strongly encourage learning an alphabet if possible before visiting somewhere -- even if you don't know the language written in it, it is often possible at least in places like Greece and Cyrillic-using nations to understand a lot of street signs and shop names which often have names recognizable to English speakers if you can get past the alphabet issue.
An interesting thing, I learned to phonetically read Cyrillic many years ago and still mostly can read it even if I don't know the meaning of most words, and one day I was looking at something someone wrote in Greek and realized I could read it! I had no idea that Cyrillic was derived from the Greek alphabet, it was pretty surprising to look at something that should look like Klingon and to just spontaneously know what it says.
Seconded! As an add-on to just navigating things, my native language is German, and when I first learned to read Cyrillic I was extremely surprised to realize how many words in Russian are similar to German. It's not like you get reading comprehension "for free", but I understand more than I would have expected given the totally different alphabet.
I taught myself the Russian variant of Cyrillic when I was in college after I had finished my Spanish courses, and I found that the other variants aren't that difficult to pick up. One thing I noticed was there are a lot of English cognates as well. Then again, borrowings happen in both directions. I'm pretty sure the English word "hooey" has a Slavic origin. :)
I never would have properly guessed the pronunciation of the Serbian city of Subotica had I not seen the name rendered in Cyrillic: Суботица. "C" in South Slavic Latin script has no relation to "C" in English.
King Sejong wanted every Korean to be literate. "A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days"
Well, That's only after late 90s. Before that, hanja (equivalent of kanji in Japanese) was used in news, official documents and etc. alongside the hangul. You need to know hanja to say out what it read
I've also heard the opposite claim about other languages: they were intentionally obfuscated to keep the lower classes illiterate. I won't say which because I'm not about to cite hearsay to criticize a major world language.
But I can still ask: are there documented cases where a language was intentionally obfuscated?
The ordering of letters in Thaana, the Maldivian writing system, is (as far as linguists can tell) completely random and the working hypothesis is that this was done intentionally to make it more cryptic.
I might be biased as I’m Korean myself, but written Korean is probably the easiest of the East Asian languages to read if for no other reason than that you don’t have to memorize hundreds to a thousand+ Chinese characters as in Chinese or Japanese to become functionally literate.
Chinese characters (called Hanja) are still used here and there in Korea but they are very rare and you don’t need to know them at all to function. Versus Japan where knowing Kanji is pretty much necessary.
Yes, but if I recall my personal life correctly, there were many holdouts of Hanja use as recently as the 1980s and 1990s. I remember seeing my dad’s newspapers were full of Chinese characters and were nearly unreadable for me. Hanja was also heavily taught while I was in grade school. Now, I don’t think it is, or at least nowhere near to the same extent?
There are still people (mostly elderly arch-conservatives) that bemoan the decline of Hanja use in Korean society, much like how some conservative Catholics bemoan not having Latin Mass.
Kind of like the Greek vs. Latin discussion in that recent thread on the Byzantine Empire, even after Hangul was invented, knowing Hanja was probably a sign of being educated, elite, or part of the nobility. Nowadays no one cares other than as a curiosity.
Best way to learn Korean is to learn to read Hangul first. Romanization of Korean is misleading, and leads to pronunciation mistakes. For example, 부산 is romanized to Busan, but the actual pronunciation is more like Pusan, which is a p with less aspiration than the English p. However, a Korean speaker will still understand if you said Pusan with an English accent, rather than Busan.
The comic also missed some details, as there are many more sound changes on certain consonants when combined together, However, those could be introduced later as you progress. Definitely cannot be done in 15 min if you want to master all :-)
I read this several years ago and was so hyped about learning korean language. Oh, characters have almost perfect phonetical mapping, I thought. How cool. Then I started really learning korean and found out that while mappings are indeed very precise, korean phonetics are very different from languages I know. Only after several months I managed to pronounce what I read properly and write what I hear
Funny that this answered my questions about the comic version so quickly. Was trying to resolve 김밥 starting and ending with a b sound in the second syllable.
Readit News
Right now, reading from the comic tutorial, I can understand why -- they have similar ideas. I never learned our local script properly; perhaps, now, I can read both and try to learn. I have heard people say that our local script is super easy to learn, and almost everyone, old and young, knows it. Perhaps these similarities help the people from that region to easily tune in to Korean media and speak and understand the language.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meitei_script
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_alphabet
A lot of the difficulty of reading Korean comes from double letters (when you have 4 letters in a syllable) where it's not necessarily clear which one to pronounce, diphthongs that lost their original pronunciation so the spelling changed a lot., letters at the end of a syllable get reduced down to a smaller set of sounds and the fact that Korean as a language cares more about aspiration than voicing resulting in, for a western ear, very minor differences that are explicitly expressed in the writing system (ㅂ vs ㅍ) and very big differences that are implied (밥 is [pap̚] but 보리밥 is [poɾibap̚]).
I like that people get excited about languages but it's kinda nuts how the English speaking Internet celebrates Hangul as this genius invention of a writing system that makes perfect sense when it is just an averagely well maintained alphabetical writing system.
Hangul was originally highly phonemic, but a modern reform is much more hybrid ("morphophonemic") mainly because it's much easier and relatively more stable in the long term. Double letters, for example, are used when a syllable coda (jongseong) affects the following syllable onset (choseong). Such cases can be quite regularly described as having two codas, where the first coda remains in the original syllable and the second coda is merged to the following syllable in a specific way. The actual difficulty in the Korean language is much more subtle than that in my knowledge.
What's interesting is, in some places those inconsistencies are acknowledged and even celebrated annually in the form of spelling bee competitions. They make zero sense for any of the phonetic languages including Korean.
For a native english speaker, I suspect Hangul/Korean is impressive because of its simplicity (and the popularity of K-pop and k-drama also help to an extent) in writing with a smaller alphabet compared to the relative madness of the English language.
… for now in the 21st century. There is no guarantee the current spelling will accurately reflect the pronunciation in the 23rd century.
Pronunication and spelling inevitable diverge over time in nearly any sufficiently widely used language due to languages being living things. People lament the perceived absurdities of the English spelling, yet they do not realise that it is a far more common problem across many languages. Take Tibetan as another and perhaps an even more extreme example where the spelling today is fixed to the pronunciation that existed in the 11th century, a millenium ago. The Icelandic spelling is also very complex and is not reflective of the modern pronunication. French, Burmese and Thai are susceptible to the same problem of varying extents as well. English receives the majority of the criticism by virtue of being more widespread than the other languages that face the same problem.
There are pretty much only two ways to deal with the problem: regularly purge obsolete/changed phonetic rules/encodings from the writing system, which will result in a loss of historical continuity over a long period of time where future generations will not be able to directly read texts written by their ancestors, or keep the spelling intact and allow pronunciation to depart from the spelling in the future.
The only solution that is immune to the spelling / pronunciation dilemma is a logographic script albeit in a different way. The most glaring example is, of course, the Chinese traditional characters. The phonetic quality today is so vastly different from their pronunciation of Old Chinese, Middle Chinese and multiple modern Chinese languages that it is somewhat amusing to see names of historically significant people of the ancient past to be spelled out using the modern Mandarin pronunciation. It is a convention and a common denominator, though.
So the logographic scripts offer a semantic continuity solution to the writing system problem whilst allowing the pronunciation to evolve independently.
Granted, the grammar will also diverge at some point as well but, as the natural language processing (early word2vec, the Bayesian topic model, BERT etc) has demonstrated, the grammatic markers in the writing can be safely ignored to a large extent – at the expense of losing nuances of the colloquial speech. Yet, with a logographic writing system, the semantic meaning and the context will remain largely retained for a far longer time compared to an alphabet based writing system.
It is interesting to see a perspective of someone who seems to have studied multiple languages.
I think it would be useful to clarify what is meant by "writing system". The term may refer to the alphabet or the orthography of a language. (or other things that's out of the scope here)
In the context of "Hangul hype", what is being discussed is usually about the alphabet, or, at least that is how I understand it. I do think Hangul as an alphabet is pretty intuitive and is modularized into components that compose well.
On the other hand, Korean orthography doesn't really seem to be the easiest to learn and the complexity has bled into writing and pronouncing Hangul, as in written Korean. I don't have experience with languages other than English to compare with, but if someone says Korean orthography is in the middle of the camp I'd buy that.
> Korean as a language cares more about aspiration than voicing resulting in, for a western ear, very minor differences that are explicitly expressed in the writing system and very big differences that are implied
That's a really interesting point. I think it has something to do with pronunciation more than a writing system. For example I can't disambiguate the pronunciation of "밥" from that of the last syllable in "보리밥". I've been told they're different.
It's not though: it's a unique in that it's both alphabetic and a syllabary at the same time, and there's nothing quite else like it. Judging it by how phonetic it is kind of beside the point, and given that it's been 600 years since King Sejong came up with the system, it's held up much better than many other writing systems (looking at you, English).
To an anglophone ear, [paʔ] and [baʔ] are indistinguishable - we also care more about aspiration than voicing. So it's odd to describe this, in English, as "a very big difference that is implied".
It's just until early 1900s that a "nationalist" (SiKyeong Ju) decided to use the "phonetic alphabet" into a primary writing system and revamped the system to be focused on words to be identifiable, rather than following the pronunciation. hangul now is just like equivalent of using a modded Phonetics alphabet that made each words identifiable. It's not representing the actual pronunciation, nor the actual pronunciation of the word. That's also the reason why the hanja (= kanji or "Chinese characters" or whatever your country calls it) was around until late 90s.
If you think Korean grammar is crazy, It's all thanks to him.
I never would have properly guessed the pronunciation of the Serbian city of Subotica had I not seen the name rendered in Cyrillic: Суботица. "C" in South Slavic Latin script has no relation to "C" in English.
King Sejong wanted every Korean to be literate. "A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul
But I can still ask: are there documented cases where a language was intentionally obfuscated?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaana
Chinese characters (called Hanja) are still used here and there in Korea but they are very rare and you don’t need to know them at all to function. Versus Japan where knowing Kanji is pretty much necessary.
There are still people (mostly elderly arch-conservatives) that bemoan the decline of Hanja use in Korean society, much like how some conservative Catholics bemoan not having Latin Mass.
Kind of like the Greek vs. Latin discussion in that recent thread on the Byzantine Empire, even after Hangul was invented, knowing Hanja was probably a sign of being educated, elite, or part of the nobility. Nowadays no one cares other than as a curiosity.
The comic also missed some details, as there are many more sound changes on certain consonants when combined together, However, those could be introduced later as you progress. Definitely cannot be done in 15 min if you want to master all :-)
http://letslearnhangul.com/