There are those who advocate eliminating kanji and going to an exclusively kana based system. The government has simplified the language before, going form over 20,000 kanji to around 2,000 “official” ones. I think the movement has lost momentum with the advent of easy computer input which has resulted in a new term, “wapurobaka” (word processor fool, for those who can only write kanji with the help of a computer).
I dunno. One cool thing about using kanji (other than bragging rights when you finally learn them) is how easy it is to scan a passage and pick up the gist since a kanji usually stands for a whole word. It’s a little tougher when it’s a bunch of letters or kana.
I lived in Korea for a couple of years as a missionary/english teacher and learned to speak Korean somewhat proficiently. I think their writing system is fabulous. Their alphabet or whatever you’d like to call it leaves no room for ambiguity - words are pronounced the way they are spelled. One does need to keep in mind that korean does lack consonant sounds that english contains, like F, V, Z, and TH. It was always fun to teach koreans that the proper english pronunciation of “pizza” was more like “pete-suh” and not “pee-juh”. Many of their words contain syllables that are rooted in chinese, and thus they will interject chinese characters in order to specify meaning. For example, the word or part of speech “sung” can have the meaning of sex(intercourse) or gender, or holiness, and have appropriate chinese characters which clarify meaning.
It is most definitely written. I’m not sure why you’d think it would exist in “abstract”.
the glyph for “ng” /N/ is used as a vowel carrier. When used for initial vowels, it has no sound. At the ends of words it is “ng” (/N/)
Not sure how I missed this before my last reply but, what exactly do you mean “by itself”. Do you mean sitting apart from other glyphs, alone, without being written in syllable blocks?
If so, no, it’s never written “by itself”. Then again none of the consonants are written by themselves.
The idea has been around for a while, but a kana-based system is pretty unimaginable for me. The language would lose much of its depth, and the problem of homonyms would be pretty staggering. It may just be because I’m a foreigner, but reading a page written solely in kana is much harder for me to read than a kanji-kana mix.
I understand what you mean now, about it not being an alphabet. However, does that mean that the English alphabet is not an alphabet either, since characters can be pronounced more than one way? In the exampl you give, with the eeyoung character (the one that looks like an o), it seems to function like an English vowel to me. That is, it can be pronounced two different ways.
Oh, and as far as I know, Korean school children are still taught some of the Chinese characters (hanmoon). You’ll see it replacing the words month and day, for instance. It’s not used nearly as extensively as it is in Japan (or China, obviously), but it still has some use. I’d say it’s like Latin in English, only more prominent.
Alphabets have glyphs that represent vowels, consonants or dipthongs.
Syllabaries have glyphs which represent a consonant+vowel, as well as a vowel for each symbol. Occasionally will they represent a consonant (this is an exception, not a rule). In Japanese, “n” has its own character because “n” is considered syllabic, I believe.
Pronunciation of a letter in different ways doesn’t change what the script type is. It just means pronunciation has shifted.
So, while Korean has letters that can represent t/d, depending on where they are in a word, Spanish (which also uses an alphabet) has letters that can represent d, or /D/ (the “th” in “that”). That doesn’t mean that Spanish doesn’t use an alphabet, nor does it mean that Korean doesn’t use an alphabet.
That’s true. I’m among those who referred to it as a syllabary, but I mostly hear it called an alphabet. The “featural code” thing is new to me.
By the way, I occasionally see Hangul written linearly–most recently in some medical insurance documents at a hospital. It works well enough, but it takes me longer to read it, and it doesn’t look as good to me.
I’m not sure I’ve understood this correctly, and I do agree that Hangul doesn’t work for writing most other languages. (But didn’t I read somewhere that East Timor was considering adopting it?) But Hangul does distinguish between g/k, b/p, and d/t in the sense of aspiration–the first of each pair is unaspirated, the second aspirated. I think both would be considered unvoiced, but since they’re combined with vowels, they are voiced in practice. But while I read and write Hangul every day, I’m not a linguist, and I may well be confused here.
Again, I’m no linguist, but the glyph you are talking about (“rieul” in the Omniglot link above, right?) is not perfectly transliterated by either “l” or “r.” The position of the tongue, it seems to me, is between the two English sounds–it’s curled back as in the English “r,” but touches the alveolar ridge as in the English “l.” It’s the bottom of the tip of the tongue that touches the alveolar ridge, which like neither “l” nor “r.”
Ultimately, though Hangul is touted as being pronounced exactly as it is written, it isn’t. It’s very close–it doesn’t have anything like the bow/bow difference that English has, or the silent “gh.” But to take examples from some subway stations in Seoul, the name transliterated as “Wangshimni” looks, in Korean, like it should be pronounced “wang-ship-li” (the “biyeup” glyph is pronounced like an “m,” and the “rieul” is pronounced like an “n”); the name transliterated as “Jongno” looks like it should be pronounced “jong-lo” (again, the “rieul” sounds like an “n” here).
I think the Korean “riyeul” sound requires a little more tongue movement than the “nieun,” so when it follows certain other sounds (like “p” or the “ng”), it’s easier to pronounce it like an “n.” I suspect that it’s something that’s become acceptable over many years, though it doesn’t perfectly follow the rules of Hangul pronunciation.
I don’t know the technical terms (aspirated?), but there is a definite difference between g/k, b/p, d/t, since there are even different characters for each. You’d have a better case for R/L, since it’s really sort of in between the two depending on if it’s at the beginning or in the middle/end.
Yes, Korean does have separate glyphs for aspirated /k/, /t/, /p/, and /tS/., but these cannot be voiced, so the glyphs for those represent one phoneme.
However, unaspirated k, t, ch, and p do not have separate glyphs than their voiced counterparts g, d, j, and b. The reason it works to have the same glyphs for k/g, t/d, p/b, and ch/j is that the glyphs represent voiced stops word internally, and devoiced stops word finally (and I believe word initially as well).
There are separate glyphs for aspirated k, t, g, and ch, but there are not separate glyphs for k and g, t and d, p and b, ch and j. So, are you saying that Ross King, who is a professor of Korean at the University of British Columbia is incorrect? Because that’s where i’ve gotten the information.
Take a close look at that chart located in the link above.
I’m not saying anybody is wrong, especially since I have no idea what the aspirated means or not. My own background is just as a second generation Korean speaker with no linguistics training. I’m sure that Dr. Ross King is right, and by extension you, but could you please explain what aspirated means?
Here’s how a native English speaker can detect aspiration vs no aspiration. And also voiced vs unvoiced.
Hold your hand about a half inch in front of your mouth. Put a finger from your other hand on your voicebox. Say “po”, then “bo”. Concentrate on the consonant part of the sounds. With “po” you will notice more air expelled than with “bo”. This is the aspiration. With “bo” you will notice more vibration in your voicebox than with “po”. This is the voiced.
In English, the unvoiced plosive consonants are always aspirated (p, t, k). The voiced plosive consonants are never aspirated (b, d, g). Plosive consonants thus come in pairs: unvoiced aspirated, voiced unaspirated (p/b, t/d, k/g). (In initial consonants; it’s different in medial and final consonants.)
In Korean, instead of pairs, plosive consonants come in triplets: unvoiced unaspirated (ᄇ, ᄃ, ᄀ), voiced unaspirated (ᄈ, ᄄ, ᄁ), and unvoiced aspirated (ᄑ, ᄐ, ᄏ). The voiced unaspirated plosives are fairly close to English b, d, g, and the unvoiced aspirated plosives are fairly close to English p, t, k. But the unvoiced unaspirated plosives do not fit into any English phonemes and are thus very tricky for native English speakers to learn.
Thanks for that! I think I understand what was being said before now. So can a native English speaker distinguish between the unvoiced unaspirated plosives?
Aspiration is not phonemic in English. Meaning an unaspirated consonant is not perceived as significantly different than an aspirated consonant. Most English speakers wouldn’t perceive a difference unless it were pretty explicit, or it was pointed out to them.
I’d say that if the Japanese didn’t use Kanji, the language would become exponentially more difficult to read. As it is, Japanese is a fairly compact language and quick to read because you can easily pick out characters and get the gist of a sentence without having to look at every single character. If it were all kana, the only things that would really stand out for sure would be maybe be を, and you’d have to carefully read the sentence to figure out what characters actually go together since there’s no distinguishing between “words”.
You know, at least for me that’s not the case. I think I make the distinction between /p[sup]h[/sup]/ and /b/ on the basis of aspiration, at least in the syllable-initial position. Whereas the voicing difference between /p/ and /b/ is almost undetectable for me. I don’t speak a language that distinguishes between /p/ and /b/, but when I learn one (chances are it’ll happen sometime) I imagine I’ll develop the ability to detect it more easily.
Does anyone have any information on why aspirated voiced plosives are so rare in world languages (or am I perhaps wrong about that?) There’s lots of languages that have either two or three series of consonants: Spanish has /p/ and /b/, Mandarin has /p[sup]h[/sup]/ and /p/, and Thai has (and Middle Chinese had) all three, and while I can’t think of any other easy examples at the moment, it seems like these configurations are all common. But I don’t know of any language with /b[sup]h[/sup]/. Is there some reason that I’m not aware of that makes that last sound more difficult to produce?
Many of their words contain syllables that are rooted in chinese, and thus they will interject chinese characters in order to specify meaning. For example, the word or part of speech “sung” can have the meaning of sex(intercourse) or gender, or holiness, and have appropriate chinese characters which clarify meaning.