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Tue, Apr. 12th, 2005 06:02 pmAs 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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.