(no subject)

[oyceter]

As a sort of addendum to the cultural appropriation post, there are some interesting at Salon. Gwenihana and then letters agreeing and disagreeing with the article (you have to watch a little ad to get in).

Read up a little bit on the invention of the Korean alphabet, thanks to yhlee, and it is so incredibly cool! The chapter was going on about how some of the alphabet shapes were formulated to imitate the shape of your mouth and tongue when you voice it, and then other small parts are added on if the sound is harder or softer or has a "y" in it or something more linguistically technical than I can accurately remember. But it makes so much sense! And it's so interesting looking at the similarities between some of the Korean alphabet with Japanese katakana, and ditto with the letter for the mouth shape looking like the Chinese character for "mouth" and the tooth shape looking like part of the Chinese character for "tooth."

And it was so nice that the article had the actual Hangul and the Chinese characters printed out, because I could read what Sejong was saying about the alphabet in literary Chinese! I mean, I only understand a very, very general bit of that, but still, so cool!

I'm forever irked about the simplified Chinese in mainland China, mostly because I find the fact that I can still read much of the inscriptions dating back to the Tang Dynasty (~700 AD) absolutely incredible. Obviously the syntax and the pronunciation has changed somewhat, analogous to something between Chaucerian and Shakesperian English, I would say, but it is just so neat! And also, the way they've gone about simplifying the characters makes no sense whatsoever, imho. For "ho (4)" meaning "after or later," they use the character pronounced the same but used as "empress." And everyone in Taiwan jokes about how they took out the radical for "heart" in the simplified character "love." Heh. I mean, obviously languages aren't static or anything, but... gah. They are just ugly and nonsensical to me. Ah well. Not that I am the grand arbiter of the Chinese language!

Anyhow, yes! I really must try and pick up Korean now, because I can see some of the analogues to Japanese (the object and subject markers, the "to be" marker at the end of many sentences sounding rather like the Japanese "iru/imasu"). And it's just so interesting reading the transcriptions of the pronunciation, because I can sort of see the similarity to the Chinese and the Japanese pronunciation, and I'm sure if I learned more it would fit together like this giant three-way puzzle and have I mentioned OMG SO COOL?! I was reading the article to put myself to sleep (no offense, yhlee, but I figured it would be a little dry and technical, and I ended up getting extremely excited and worked up about it. And I love that Korean has on and kun reading of kanji/han zi/hanja like Japanese! The parts on how the Koreans sort of navigated the use of classical Chinese and the migration toward mostly Hangul writing is also quite fascinating.

Comments

[avrelia.livejournal.com]

find the fact that I can still read much of the inscriptions dating back to the Tang Dynasty (~700 AD) absolutely incredible.

Russian alphabet changed several times since its creation (cyrillic was created in 9th cent.AD), and get a huge thrill reading the old forms. Especially graffity on the church walls. ;)

and I know next to nothing about Chinese, but it's fun to read you writing about it.

[oyceter]

Oh cool! Someday I shall pick up Russian as well ;). Ah, if only there were enough time...

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

Why did they change the characters in mainland China? Did they think the difficulty of reading/writing them was a way of excluding the working class?

[oyceter]

I think they changed it to try to improve literary rates? I'm not sure myself; I googled that info. I get their reasoning, but the look of it still irks me, and I do forever feel odd that Taiwan/Hong Kong and China have a written language that they mutually can't even understand at times, despite all having Mandarin as the official language. Of course, I think some political groups in Taiwan are trying to change that as well as a way to distance themselves from the mainland.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

Fear not; I thought the book would be pretty dry and technical myself, but given a little linguistics and/or Korean background, it's actually pretty engagingly written for the subject material. :-)

[oyceter]

I really must find a copy of that book somewhere now! That chapter was really, really interesting and got me all worked up and excited about these things.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

Hell, I'll drop it in the box and you can borrow it as long as you like while you search. ;-)

[oyceter]

Ooo, thank you!

Btw, did you get the package yet?

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

I don't think so, unless it's the one I have to go to the post office to pick up. *wry*

[kandelschwartz.livejournal.com]

In my opinion, Hangul is the greatest alphabet ever invented. I also like how I was able to get at least somewhat comfortable with it in a relatively short period of time, since there are only 24 characters and you only have to learn about half of them.

I never had the patience to learn to read Japanese.

[oyceter]

Hangul does seem quite nifty!

Japanese I found really fun to learn, but then, I like things like puzzles and the like, heh heh. Also, I just really like writing hiragana for some reason.