Very large ones.
That’s because lower case letters have decenders and ascenders.
Cortana: The Hangul letters are combined beside & top of each other to form the syllable. Very many folks agree with you, as I do, as to its simplicity and ingenuity.
I would agree, hangul should be the easiest alphabet to read and as much as its touted as a pure phonetic alphabet its not. There still remains annoyingly “silent” letters, as in english and the phonetic value of letters change dependent on their placement. And some letters, according to placement, mimic the sound of an existing letter… with no explanation as to why that letter isn’t simply used instead.
Hangul has the same annoying problems that English has.
Ermm… yes and no.
*Disclaimer: I am NOT fluent in Korean (AKA Hangul, in the language itself), but I can read it, write it a bit, and speak it enough to pester pretty girls in bars and have pizza delivered to my place… *
There are some silent letters in syllables in Hangul, but not NEARLY as many as in English (it seems to me, though I have not done a study…). There are a few (very few, when compared to English) easily learned rules about when a letter is going to be silent and when it is not.
I would argue that the Korean alphabet is much more simple than the English alphabet. Is it the simplest alphabet? That I don’t know.
Although Hangul (Korean) has about 40 letters (the actual number is debatable, as a few of them are archaic, and not used often now…) compared to the 26 letters of the English alphabet, it is much easier to memorize and use. Here is a site to show those who are interested.
When I first came to Korea with my best friend, I knew nothing about Hangul at all. However, about 2 hours of study in our hotel room allowed us to venture out and read signs, menus, and such with a little effort. We still didn’t understand what 99.9% of it meant, mind you, but we could read it! I still remember my first actual real-life Korean word: after exiting the hotel lobby, I spotted a car, and the license plate had the word “Seoul” printed on it. ‘Hmmm,’ Methought, ‘Seo… Ull. Seo… Ull. WTF does that mean? Seo… Ull… (a little faster) Seoul… Seoul! AHA!!’
With our new-found Hangul proficiency, we proudly strutted into a restaurant and grabbed a menu! We could read it with no problem… but had no idea what any of the food items were. So-Ko-Gi To-Pab? Kim-Chi Chi-Gae? Whay To-Pab?
Perplexed, we looked around to see what the other patrons were eating… the waitress approached, and after a hurried whisper-conference, we gestured at the guy sitting at the table next to ours and stuck two fingers in the air.
We ended up with ‘Whay To-Pap.’ It was good! It wasn’t until MUCH later that I learned what we had eaten and enjoyed.
Whay= raw fish. Pap= rice. To-Pab= on top of rice (or mixed with rice, sometimes).
What we had was raw fish on top of a bed of veggies on top of rice… watching other people we learned that we were to dump a large quantity of this red sauce on top of it and mix it up before ingesting.
The red sauce was pepper paste, and that was what disguised the taste of the fish from me… I hate fish.
It was good!
The only actually silent letter in Hangul is the NG when it’s used to carry the vowel for a syllable which begins with a vowel. The others are pronounced when the morpheme which they’re being used to write are in the proper phonetic environment for that to happen. Basically, Sejong and his guys went “the extra mile” when they developed the script and figured out what phonetic shifts happen on a regular basis in Korean. Also there is zero knowledgeable debate about the number of letters in the script: 24. That’s it: 24. As I mentioned above, they’re combined into syllables which happen to be written in the space the Latin alphabet uses for one letter.
FYI: “Seo-ul” means “Capital” as in capital city." Last I checked (1979), the full name of the place was “Seo-ul Thook-P’yuhl-Shi” aka The Special City of the Capital. Pusan is another “special city.”
KOREAN hands down. it was devised 700 years ago by the smartest minds in all of Korea to be a written language that ANYONE can learn to read. There are a few silent letters, but these are mainly a spoken thing, so if reading is the only goal I believe this is the easiest language to read/write.
I say this from the perspective of holding a degree in Linguistics, and at the same time not believeing that I could gradiuate from a university studying something like linguistics.
“SPEAKING” Korean is another story though.
I speak fluent Japanese and the Grammar is nearly identical to Japanese, but there is something about the pronunciation that is just difficult in that language.
ohlssonvox
ohlssonvox: Consider what I posted above and then think about the Korean word for “chicken.” It’s spelled “talk” which is pronounced “tak.” Now if you follow it with “ool” (as in the direct object particle), then you’ll say “tal-kun” clearly hearing all the letters. Basically, it’s an alphabet used to write morphologically. Kind of ingenious, in my humble opinion.
Not an internet site, but it’s in James Burke’s THE AXEMAKER’S GIFT. I’ll find the pagination.
I realize “pictographic alphabet” is a contradiction in terms- I should have said “pictographic writing system” .
“What could be simpler?”
Umm… you’re kidding, right? Devanagari uses all those conjunct consonants that are a major hurdle for anyone learning to read it. Sometimes it’s easy enough to figure out which consonants are being combined, because recognizable pieces of them are used. But other times they are fused together in such a way that they have to be memorized as separate characters. This in addition to the 50 or so basic consonantal characters and 12 vowel diacritics. Most other Indian alphabets share this complication. The sole exception is the Tamil alphabet, which is the easiest of all of India’s alphabets to learn. When a Tamil consonant is followed by another consonant, it just gets a dot on top to show the absence of the inherent vowel. Simplifies learning greatly.
That should have said “about 30.” There were originally 28 letters in Hangul, but 4 are now archaic and not usually used. Some Korean teachers will tell you there are 28 letters (counting the archaic ones) and some will tell you there are 24 letters.
I have to disagree with you about this, Monty:
The ‘l’ sound remains silent no matter what particle you attach to it (at least here, in Seoul… there are differences in accent or dialect in different parts of Korea.) So you have ‘tak-ool’ or ‘tak-un’… no ‘l’ sound in either. Similarly, if the word chicken is combined with other syllables to form the name of a food (for example), the ‘l’ sound remains silent. ‘Tak-kalbi,’ ‘Tak-tori-tang,’ etc. I verified this just a few minutes ago, by having Astrogirl (a native speaker of Korean) say ‘Tak-ool’ and ‘Tak-un’ very slowly several times. No ‘l’ sound.
There are a few other cases where letters in a syllable remain silent, but very few in comparison with English.
Ah, Astroboy; thanks for bringing up the dialectal comparisons. That’s always the fly in the ointment in discussions such as these!
Example ? Take this page.
A word in Hindi/Marathi is pronounced the way it’s written. Unlike English or French where the spellings didn’t bother to keep up with the pronounciation quirks. Which I believe is the aim of the OP.
The major problem I see in Devanagari as someone who can’t read it is many of the consonants look very similar to each other, and there are 33 of them. I wonder if this “negative” is at all present in someone fluent in the language.
I would say Spanish, taking out the letter x (which has multiple sounds), and the h at beginning of words (which are used to distinguish homonyms). Z, s, and c can sound the same depending on the dialect, but again, when reading they help distinguish homonyms. Relatively simple rules. Each vowel has the same sound, accents (´) are used to indicate stressed syllables, and diereses (¨) are used to pronounce denote that the u between g and another vowel is pronounced instead of silent. Guerra has a hard g with e, u is silent, pingüino, hard g but with u, i is also pronounced, diereses are only needed if u is pronounced and is placed before an i or an e. For example, guante doesn’t need a dieresis.
Note: I’m not saying Spanish is an easy language to learn… I’m saying that relative to other languages, like English or French, you can read it easily and have a very good idea on how it must sound.
Not at all. They all look pretty distinct. But I guess that’s true for anyone fluent in any script
I have to put in my vote for Korean as well. Yeah, the language itself is a bitch, but the alphabet is easy to learn and VERY consistent.
PREACH IT!! 
Maybe you can address the transitional nature of some letters based on placement in the syallable character. Which is why hangeul doesn’t get my vote for easiest alphabet, because if a language is phonetic a symbol should retain phonetic value, regardless of placement, thus making it simplistic.
For instance, the sios (s) sound transforms to a soft “t” when its the terminating sound, but retains its “s” sound if it carries over to the next syllable. Flower, when transliterated directly is kkoch, but the trailing chiuch (ch) is barely voiced and not aspirated as it should be. The hiuh (h) is silent in both “cho-ah” and “kwaen-chan-a”.
Finally, the piup (b/p) is voiced as a mium “m” when it is the final letter in a group, such as in “emmneeda” or “soomneeka”, yet in some cases, even when it is the final sound it retains the (b/p) such as in “kapshida”, or food/rice “bap”.
I can take a stab at the piup issue, although it will be only a guess.
The rule for this is “b+n=m.” So in the word ‘imneeda,’ where the first syllable (ib) ends in a piup (b sound) and the second syllable (nee) begins with an ‘n’ sound, one applies the rule and ends up with an ‘m’ sound.
“But why?” you ask. (Yes you do! Don’t lie to me!;))
My guess is this: the rule stems from common usage. If you say the first two syllables of that word together slowly you hear a ‘b’ and an ‘n.’ ip (sounds like ‘lip’) and nee (sounds like ‘knee’). However if you begin to say them more and more quickly, you will end up with an ‘m’ sound… try it…
So, with the passage of time, a rule was formed: “b+n=m.”
Again, that’s only a guess… but it sounds likely to me.
As I said earlier there are a few rules like this in Hangul, but not nearly as many or as complex as in a language like English.
Compare “b+n=m” to “i before e except after c… or when sounding like ‘a’ as in ‘neighbor’ and ‘weigh’”… a bit more straightforeward, I think.
The other anomalies you mention Nemo I can’t address. But they are easy to memorize…