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ajosshi
Joined: 17 Jan 2011
Location: ajosshi.com
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 Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2012 12:13 pm Post subject: Solomon Islanders adopt Hangeul, keep spoken language alive |
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Solomon Islanders to adopt Hangeul to keep spoken language alive
The inhabitants of the Solomon Islands will adopt Hangeul, the Korean alphabet, to preserve their spoken languages, officials announced on Tuesday.
Two provinces, Guadalcanal and Malaita, which have a population of some 60,000, recently designated Hangeul their official written system to transcribe their spoken languages, the Center for Humanities Information of Seoul National University said.
The SNU center, with support from United Nations Global Compact in Korea, developed textbooks, and also helped two local teachers begin teaching Hangeul using the textbooks at two local schools from this month.
The SNU center said it plans to expand the distribution of textbooks and Hangeul teaching meterials to more schools in the region next year and further to the entire islands if successful.
�The Solomon Islands attempted to teach the English writing system, but failed to do so due to financial difficulties and other reasons,� Lee Ho-young, a professor of SNU, who led the project, said.
�But the Guadalcanal province actively sought to introduce Hangeul,� he added.
The Solomon Islands, located east of Papua New Guinea, consist of nearly 1,000 islands. Since its independence from the United Kingdom in 1978, the Solomon Islands have been struggling to raise the literacy rate among its 70 different tribes, all of whom speak their own languages. Only 2 percent of the population speaks English.
However, the news came as the Korean language school for the Cia-Cia, an Indonesian tribe which adopted the writing system in 2009, closed due to financial and cultural problems, according to the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.
The King Sejong Institute in Bau-Bau, the city where the tribe resides, closed its doors in August, only seven months after it opened, due to financial hardships and difficulties with the management, the ministry said.
http://view.koreaherald.com/kh/view.php?ud=20121009000822 |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2012 3:48 pm Post subject: |
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| The Chinese should also use Hangeul instead of Pinyin as their auxilliary phonetic spelling system. The consonants could serve as initials and finals, and the vowels could be tone markers. ㅡ: high, ㅗ: rising, ㅛ: falling & rising, ㅜ: falling. Latin letters are a bad fit for Asian languages; they all look absolutely hideous written in our script. |
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Spartacist
Joined: 18 Feb 2012
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| Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2012 4:32 pm Post subject: |
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| So people learning Chinese would first have to learn Hangeul and then learn Chinese characters, just to learn Chinese? I can't see it happening. While Hangeul doesn't take long to learn, Roman script is more widely recognised and is thus an easier way to transition to reading characters. Plus there are sounds in Chinese that can't be adequately represented in Hangeul e.g. in Pinyin, 'zh', 'ch' and 'c'. |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2012 5:06 pm Post subject: |
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| Spartacist wrote: |
| So people learning Chinese would first have to learn Hangeul and then learn Chinese characters, just to learn Chinese? |
Who are these "people" you are talking about? Foreigners? Any foreigner willing to spend the years it takes to read Chinese at an adequate level in Chinese characters is going to be willing to spend the hours it takes to figure out Hangeul. Native Chinese? They'd have to learn a new script (Roman Script) to learn pinyin anyway, so learning an easier script that is a better fit for their language (Hangeul) makes plenty of sense.
| Spartacist wrote: |
| Plus there are sounds in Chinese that can't be adequately represented in Hangeul e.g. in Pinyin, 'zh', 'ch' and 'c'. |
Hangeul is a script, not a set of sounds. The sounds would obviously be reassigned, just like the latin letter sounds are for pinyin. I even said that in my previous post.
This global tendency to use Roman letters for everything needs to stop. Roman letters are a great fit for Latin. They're a decent fit for Romance languages. They're a tight but adequate fit for English. Trying to stuff Asian languages like Chinese and Vietnamese into them as well is ridiculous. The madness needs to stop. |
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CentralCali
Joined: 17 May 2007
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| Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2012 8:06 pm Post subject: |
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| Fox wrote: |
| Latin letters are a bad fit for Asian languages; they all look absolutely hideous written in our script. |
This is a statement based on personal esthetics, not on any scientific basis. Of course, there's also the issue that a fair number of scripts used in Asia can be traced back to the same source as the Greek and Latin scripts. |
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lichtarbeiter
Joined: 15 Nov 2006
Location: Korea
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| Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2012 8:56 pm Post subject: |
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| Fox wrote: |
This global tendency to use Roman letters for everything needs to stop. Roman letters are a great fit for Latin. They're a decent fit for Romance languages. They're a tight but adequate fit for English. Trying to stuff Asian languages like Chinese and Vietnamese into them as well is ridiculous. The madness needs to stop. |
I'm quite interested in hearing you substantiate this argument.
I suspect you see the Roman alphabet as a "tight fit" for English because many English spellings are not phonetic. In reality, that's not a shortcoming of the Roman alphabet, but simply the way English has "chosen" the segments of the alphabet to form its spellings.
If wi had insted bilt aur orthogr�fi tu �pir s�mthing laik this, th� roum�n alf�bet w�d iz�li s�fais. |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2012 9:24 pm Post subject: |
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| CentralCali wrote: |
| This is a statement based on personal esthetics, not on any scientific basis. |
Where does "science" even come into this? What part of the scientific method am I claiming to have applied here?
| CentralCali wrote: |
| Of course, there's also the issue that a fair number of scripts used in Asia can be traced back to the same source as the Greek and Latin scripts. |
Whales and humans also ostensibly have some common ancestor. Sharing a common point of descent -- be it biologically or intellectually -- does not imply equivalency. Indeed, even those scripts diverged for good reason, and this whole, "Let's just use Roman Script for everything, ever!" position spits in the face of that.
-edit: whole, not hole.
Last edited by Fox on Thu Oct 11, 2012 9:46 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2012 9:50 pm Post subject: |
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| lichtarbeiter wrote: |
| Fox wrote: |
This global tendency to use Roman letters for everything needs to stop. Roman letters are a great fit for Latin. They're a decent fit for Romance languages. They're a tight but adequate fit for English. Trying to stuff Asian languages like Chinese and Vietnamese into them as well is ridiculous. The madness needs to stop. |
I'm quite interested in hearing you substantiate this argument.
I suspect you see the Roman alphabet as a "tight fit" for English because many English spellings are not phonetic. In reality, that's not a shortcoming of the Roman alphabet, but simply the way English has "chosen" the segments of the alphabet to form its spellings. |
The Roman alphabet is a tight fit for English because:
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| The phonemes of English and their number vary from dialect to dialect, and also depend on the interpretation of the individual researcher. The number of consonant phonemes is generally put at 24 (or slightly more). The number of vowels is subject to greater variation; in the system presented on this page there are 20 vowel phonemes in Received Pronunciation, 14�16 in General American and 20�21 in Australian English. |
There are no where near enough letters in the Roman alphabet to portray the sounds of the English language without having to utilize multiple letters to represent single, distinct sounds (and even then often doubling up!). This is not the sign of an alphabet which matches well the language it serves, and that's not a "scientific" position, but a simple mathematical one. It's not a shortcoming of the Roman alphabet in itself, it's a shortcoming of the Roman alphabet with regards to the task of modelling English. This was no where near as much of a problem with Latin itself, which had a lesser number of phonemes, and whose phonemes were much more closely related to the letters of its alphabet; even sounds which shared a letter (like I-consonant and I-vowel) made a degree of sense.
When it comes to Asian languages, things are worse. Reading Korean in Hangeul, for example, is pleasant and relatively easy. Reading it Romanized is a painful exercise in annoyance. Chinese characters fit Chinese well, but their complexity justifies a secondary, auxilliary alphabet. Hangeul shares the character-focused nature of Hanzi, and as I pointed out, could even incorporate an initial, a tone, and a final in every character using the current script convention. It would work perfectly, but evidently it is an absolute necessity that we keep pretending the Roman Alphabet is some sort of universal cure-all for our written-language needs. |
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lichtarbeiter
Joined: 15 Nov 2006
Location: Korea
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| Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2012 10:57 pm Post subject: |
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| There are a totally insufficient number of Roman letters to emulate the variety of non-dipthong sounds available in the English language on a one-for-one basis. |
As I've demonstrated, if you include diacritics, then there absolutely is a sufficient number. General American English has 10 monophthong phonemes in its inventory. Our orthography includes 5 letters for vowels. That means we would only need an average of one diacritic alternant for each vowel to account for our entire inventory.
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| One cannot write English phonetically without defining letter-clusters as representative of individual sounds. |
IPA, which is based on the Roman alphabet, does exactly that.
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| It's not a shortcoming of the Roman alphabet in itself, it's a shortcoming of the Roman alphabet with regards to the task of modelling English. |
The shortcoming is in the manner in which is was applied, not in the application itself.
| Quote: |
| Reading Korean in Hangeul, for example, is pleasant and relatively easy. Reading it Romanized is a painful exercise in annoyance. |
I can list 3 major reasons for that:
1. We haven't had enough practice reading Romanized Korean. If Korea exclusively used a Romanized alphabet, I don't think we'd be having much difficulty with it by now.
2. While the Korean government is quite consistent in their use of Revised Romanization, in a more every day sense we're exposed to a combination of Revised Romanization, McCune-Reischauer Romanization, Yale Romanization, and completely arbitrary Romanizations that people just make up.
3. Like English, none of the Romanization systems have been designed to capture the pronunciation perfectly. For example, just looking at the word "Hangeul"; how do we know whether it's pronounced /han.geul/ or /hang.eul/? However, this can be easily fixed with better design, such as the use of hyphens or diacritics.
| Quote: |
| Hangeul shares the character-focused nature of Hanzi |
I don't really understand your point here. Hanzi is pictographic, while Hangeul and Roman characters are both phonetic. What does Hangeul share with Hanzi that Roman characters don't?
| Quote: |
| and as I pointed out, could even incorporate an initial, a tone, and a final in every character using the current script convention. |
Pinyin already does that, unless you're not satisfied that /sh/, /zh/, /ng/, etc. constitute single phonemes. Again, that could be easily changed through the use of diacritics.
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| ...but God forbid we use anything that isn't Roman script. |
My preference for Romanized script is borne neither from ethnocentrism nor a notion that Romanized script is inherently superior to Hangeul. Both can be adapted to any language in the world and learned with ease (though Hangeul, with its lack of diacritics, would need to either increase its inventory substantially or create its own system of diacritics). The reason I prefer Romanized script is that it's already established as the international standard, and being familiar with it will allow a person more opportunity. I'm sure you won't argue with the notion that Indonesian or Filipino students will feel more comfortable in reading English (the world's lingua franca) than Japanese or Thai students. If your language is written in Hangeul, that's great, but that only makes you well-versed in a script that's confined to a tiny dot on the world map, rather than one that's found in every continent. Further, a language with Romanized script will generally feel more accessible to foreigners needing to learn it.
Last edited by lichtarbeiter on Thu Oct 11, 2012 11:09 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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lichtarbeiter
Joined: 15 Nov 2006
Location: Korea
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| Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2012 11:08 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| 20 vowel phonemes in Received Pronunciation, 14�16 in General American and 20�21 in Australian English. |
That includes dipthongs, which can be formed by combining two monophthong segments (which Hangeul would also have to do).
Even if you wanted dipthong also to be restricted to a single phoneme, Roman script could do that, though I think it's far more logical to let readers sound out dipthongs by reading their individual components. |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2012 11:31 pm Post subject: |
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| lichtarbeiter wrote: |
| Quote: |
| There are a totally insufficient number of Roman letters to emulate the variety of non-dipthong sounds available in the English language on a one-for-one basis. |
As I've demonstrated, if you include diacritics, then there absolutely is a sufficient number. |
If you include diacritics, then binary is a sufficient number. The inclusion of diacritics to indicate a difference in sound is an indication of alphabetic insufficiency. If you can't or won't accept that, then there's not much more to say. I won't accept that binary with dozens of diacritical marks is adequate for rendering English, and as such, I cannot accept your less extreme, yet identical in character, variation on that argument.
| lichtarbeiter wrote: |
| Quote: |
| One cannot write English phonetically without defining letter-clusters as representative of individual sounds. |
IPA, which is based on the Roman alphabet, does exactly that. |
The IPA includes a large variety of non-Roman characters in its inventory, which is precisely why it can have a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. We need the IPA in our English dictionaries precisely because of the Roman alphabet's inadequancy. You're making my case for me here!
| lichtarbeiter wrote: |
| Quote: |
| It's not a shortcoming of the Roman alphabet in itself, it's a shortcoming of the Roman alphabet with regards to the task of modelling English. |
The shortcoming is in the manner in which is was applied, not in the application itself. |
False. No application of the Roman alphabet as it stands can ever avoid the current complications. A more intelligent orthography might reduce them, but it will still never approach the easy clarity with which the Roman alphabet represents Latin words due to the dearth of letters.
| lichtarbeiter wrote: |
| Quote: |
| Reading Korean in Hangeul, for example, is pleasant and relatively easy. Reading it Romanized is a painful exercise in annoyance. |
I can list 3 major reasons for that:
1. We haven't had enough practice reading Romanized Korean. If Korea exclusively used a standardized Roman alphabet, I don't think we'd be having much difficulty with it by now. |
Who is "we?" I can't speak for you, but in my years of study I've seen plenty of romanized Korean, and it's always been an ugly mess.
| lichtarbeiter wrote: |
| 2. While the Korean government is quite consistent in their use of Revised Romanization, in a more every day sense we're exposed to a combination of Revised Romanization, McCune-Reischauer Romanization, Yale Romanization, and completely arbitrary Romanizations that people just make up. |
This is true, but I have specifically in mind the Revised Romanization, as it's the one I am most familiar with, and most exposed to. Every single god-damn sign board in my town has it beneath the Hangeul.
| lichtarbeiter wrote: |
| 3. Like English, none of the Romanization systems have been designed to capture the pronunciation perfectly. For example, just looking at the word "Hangeul"; how do we know whether it's pronounced /han.geul/ or /hang.eul/? However, this can be easily fixed with better design, such as the use of hyphens or diacritics. |
So instead of just using a clear, easy, and effective alphabet which was custom-designed to model the language, we need to load up the Roman alphabet with diacritics and force a fit?
| lichtarbeiter wrote: |
| Quote: |
| Hangeul shares the character-focused nature of Hanzi |
I don't really understand your point here. Hanzi is pictographic, while Hangeul and Roman characters are both phonetic. What does Hangeul share with Hanzi that Roman characters don't? |
Natural orthographic inclusion of syllable breaks. You don't need to load up Hangeul with hyphens and diacritics to see the natural breaks of the syllables, since just like Chinese, it is built specifically to show them already.
| lichtarbeiter wrote: |
| Quote: |
| and as I pointed out, could even incorporate an initial, a tone, and a final in every character using the current script convention. |
Pinyin already does that ... |
Yes, by using awkward auxilliarum marks which are difficult to render in digital mediums (which is why you see people using tone numbers so often) and which are not especially visually distinct. The vowel-slot of an Hangeul character is better on all counts, retains a large inventory of syllables ready to emulate the additional tones found in other Chinese dialects, and simultaneously has no reciprocal downsides.
| lichtarbeiter wrote: |
| ... unless you're not satisfied that /sh/, /zh/, /ng/, etc. constitute single phonemes. |
Well I'm not.
| lichtarbeiter wrote: |
| Again, that could be easily changed through the use of diacritics. |
Diacritics are a plague.
| lichtarbeiter wrote: |
| My preference for Romanized script is borne neither from ethnocentrism nor a notion that Romanized script is inherently superior to Hangeul. Both can be adapted to any language in the world ... |
I don't think so. English in Hangeul would be horrible. It would take so much modification of the base alphabet to make it work (here come those diacritics again, right?).
| lichtarbeiter wrote: |
| ... and being familiar with it will allow a person more opportunity. |
Having to remember one set of letter pronunciations for your own language, and another for another language, and another for another language, is absurd from my perspective. Learning new alphabets is generally not an especial challenge, and it helps keep phonics straight. It's probably too late to switch over to a new alphabet for English, but in an ideal world we would not be using Latin letters either.
Incidentally, I'm sorry, I should not be so sarcastic as I have been, because I think you're trying to engage in this discussion in good faith and from an informed standpoint, but look at all the hoops you're trying to jump through here just to defend the usage of an alphabet which is not only arbitrary, but which actually needs diacritical-inclusion just to just to hypothetically break even with Hangeul. |
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lichtarbeiter
Joined: 15 Nov 2006
Location: Korea
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| Posted: Fri Oct 12, 2012 1:12 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| The inclusion of diacritics to indicate a difference in sound is an indication of alphabetic insufficiency. If you can't or won't accept that, then there's not much more to say. |
I might accept it if you make a real argument for it, but as for now it simply stands as an arbitrary sentiment. How is it an alphabetic insufficiency to have two similar characters with one minor difference represent two similar sounds? Think about Korean, and how they indicate a vowel and its palatized correspondent by using an extra stroke (e.g. 아 vs. 야), or how they indicate a stop consonant and its aspirated correspondent by using an extra stroke (e.g. ㄱ vs. ㅋ). That's not much different at all from a diacritic, and yet I would definitely not consider that to be an "insuffiency", but rather an advantage when it comes to learnability.
| Quote: |
| The IPA includes a large variety of non-Roman characters in its inventory, which is precisely why it can have a one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds. We need the IPA in our English dictionaries precisely because of the Roman alphabet's inadequancy. You're making my case for me here! |
No, we need an IPA because so many spellings are not phonetic (but could be if they were revised). In terms of adding segments that don't currently exist in a script:
1) There's nothing wrong with that. For Hangeul to be applied to many other languages, it would also require the addition of new characters (in fact, more than Roman script) for unfamiliar segments to which it's applied. In fact, a new Hangeul character for [v] (which could be classified as a ㅂ with a diacritic) was already invented when the script was applied to the Cia-Cia language.
2) Again, if you were adament on avoiding new segments, you could do so by including diacritics (whose exact evils I am waiting to hear about). Or you could assign a preexisting letter to a sound which it doesn't normally apply (for example, /x/ could be assigned to English's /ng/ digraph).
| Quote: |
| False. No application of the Roman alphabet as it stands can ever avoid the current complications. |
You're saying that there is no way in which Roman characters could be used to represent English completely phonetically? If you look at the experimental sentence in my first post, I've already demonstrated that it can.
[quote]it will still never approach the easy clarity with which the Roman alphabet represents Latin words due to the dearth of letters.[quote]
Any alphabet you invent for Latin will be superior to any alphabet you invent for English if your criteria for "easy clarity" is a low number of characters. This says absolutely nothing about the qualities of an alphabet. It only means that Latin has a smaller phoneme inventory.
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| I can't speak for you, but in my years of study I've seen plenty of romanized Korean, and it's always been an ugly mess. |
I was trying to make a distinction between *seeing* Romanized Korean and *practicing* Romanized Korean. Sure you see a lot of place names written in Roman characters, but how often are you going to be reading entire sentences written like that? Tourity phrasebooks have that kind of transcription, but most people who have been in Korean for a while and are familiar with the language do not consult those kinds of phrasebooks.
The Romanized script is indeed often an ugly mess for the reasons I've mentioned, but it wouldn't be very difficult if it were revised and standardized.
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| So instead of just using a clear, easy, and effective alphabet which was custom-designed to model the language, we need to load up the Roman alphabet with diacritics and force a fit? |
I'm not at all suggesting that Korea (or any other country with a preexisting phonetic alphabet) should transform their system to Romanized script. My arguments have strictly been in the context of (1) a language that currently lacks a phonetic writing system; or (2) a hypothetical scenario in which Korean or another major language lacked a phonetic writing system.
| Quote: |
| Natural orthographic inclusion of syllable breaks. You don't need to load up Hangeul with hyphens and diacritics to see the natural breaks of the syllables, since just like Chinese, it is built specifically to show them already. |
Syllable breaks are not important for readers to see. You can mention my /han.geul/ example, but the shortcoming in the Romanization in this case isn't so much the ambiguity of the syllable break, but moreso the ambiguity of whether the /ng/ is a combination of two phonemes or a single velar nasal. If it's a single velar nasal, it doesn't matter to a reader whether it's the coda of the first syllable or the onset of the second syllable; the pronunciation is going to be the same.
Yes, to be perfectly phonetic, adjustments would need to be made to the alphabet, just like adjustments would need to be made to Hangeul if it were applied to a new language.
| Quote: |
| English in Hangeul would be horrible. It would take so much modification of the base alphabet to make it work (here come those diacritics again, right?). |
Three vowels would need to either be digraphs (which Revised Romanization uses), assigned diacritics, or assigned newly invented segments. Then the [ng] problem. Four modifications. I wouldn't consider that to be "so much."
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| Having to remember one set of letter pronunciations for your own language, and another for another language, and another for another language, is absurd from my perspective. |
Again, we're talking about people whose language lacks a phonetic alphabet (including Chinese, which I think we both agree should have an alternant phonetic writing system).
| Quote: |
| Learning new alphabets is generally not an especial challenge, and it helps keep phonics straight. |
Depending on the alphabet, I agree with this, though many people don't realize it. I agree it's absurd for people to be intimidated by new writing systems, but the fact that they are hinders foreign language learning immensely.
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| Incidentally, I'm sorry, I should not be so sarcastic as I have been |
Indeed, I am enjoying this discussion, and have no intention of making it hostile.
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| defend the usage of an alphabet which is not only arbitrary. |
What exactly do you mean? Every phonetic alphabet in the world is arbitrary. There is nothing inherent about the letter /a/ or 아 that is related to the sound [a].
| Quote: |
| but which actually needs diacritical-inclusion just to just to hypothetically break even with Hangeul. |
I don't see how you could possibly say that. The Roman alphabet, even without diacritics, has more segments than Hangeul. Hangeul is far more likely to have to develop a system of diacritics or new segments to be sufficiently applied to a new language. |
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lichtarbeiter
Joined: 15 Nov 2006
Location: Korea
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| Posted: Fri Oct 12, 2012 1:32 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: |
| Yes, by using awkward auxilliarum marks which are difficult to render in digital mediums (which is why you see people using tone numbers so often) and which are not especially visually distinct. The vowel-slot of an Hangeul character is better on all counts, retains a large inventory of syllables ready to emulate the additional tones found in other Chinese dialects, and simultaneously has no reciprocal downsides. |
For some reason I missed responding to the point on my first run. So here goes:
1) Calling the diacritics awkward is an arbitrary sentiment.
2) They're not difficult to render in digital mediums if you have a pinyin layout on your keyboard. The numbers as tone markers are simply easier if you aren't using that type of keyboard.
3) I'm curious to see your explain your idea for creating tone in Hangeul in more detail. Are you suggesting we write two vowel characters for one syllable (one for vowel place feature, the other for tone)? |
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CentralCali
Joined: 17 May 2007
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| Posted: Fri Oct 12, 2012 3:55 am Post subject: |
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Your case seems to be that you think there is some kind of magical correlation between the sounds of a particular language and the script used to write that language, so magical that no other script can do the language justice. That, simply, is poppycock. This might surprise you but a language's orthography is not really a linguistic issue. Any script can be put to use to write any language, with the appropriate tweaking.
As for diacritics, so what? One can make a good case that Hangeul uses two diacritics. If the diacrictics are absolutely bad, then one would have to abandon a fair number of Hangeul letters.
By the way, the evolution of a script has no relationship whatsoever to the evolution of animals. That was a strawman on your part. |
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some waygug-in
Joined: 25 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Fri Oct 12, 2012 7:46 am Post subject: |
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Sounds represented by letters, pictures? what a concept!
Really, in all fairness the Chinese by and large are learning English
anyway, so they are somewhat familiar with the "roman script",
besides already having pinyin.
I doubt they'd want to throw that aside and learn yet another script.
Not to mention the fact that the Chinese would be way too proud to
do so. |
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