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From: EURMXK@sdcmvs.mvs.sas.com
Subject: Re: Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese and Chinese literacy
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Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 16:20:00 GMT
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In article <Dnvzz9.3tq@midway.uchicago.edu>,
deb5@kimbark.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff) writes:
 
<.snip>
 
>        However, the Koreans did not follow the same path as the
>Japanese and develop a commonly-used syllabary.  Instead, in the latter
>half of the 16th century, a team of scholars under King Sejong created
You probably mean the first half of the 15th century since Han'gul
was invented around 1446.
 
Regards, 
Manfred Kiefer
 
>an alphabet basically from scratch.  Like hiragana, han'gul was also
>disparagingly called "women's characters" (one of the names for it
>was amk'ul or "female [i.e. impractical, useless] learning" and little
>used until after the fall of the monarchy.  The name "han'gul", in fact,
>is an early 20th century neologism.
>
>>In Korea, after Hangul (a phonetic script which is actually based
>>around pictographs of the tongue and mouth's movement) was invented,
>>the Korean people became able for the first time to write their own
>>language in their own script.  Chinese characters are still used
>>somewhat in South Korea, mostly for writing newspapers, but their use
>>in most areas is very limited and in some fields, such as for writing
>>school textbooks, it is banned.  Note that anyway they are only used
>>for writing Chinese and Japanese loan words, and they only have one
>>pronunciation for each character.
>
>        They are ubiquitous in newspapers, especially in headlines,
>and are still heavily used in some fields, notablly history.  It is
>also not strictly true that each character has only one reading; as
>is the case with Hanzi, many have two readings and a tiny fraction
>have more.  Also, morphophonological processes can produce striking
>contrasts between the readings of compounds and those of characters
>in isolation.  For example, <tok> and <lip> together become tongnip
>"independence", but <lip> and <lon> yield imnon "argument".  (Similar
>processes operate in Japanese, but with less regularity.)
>
>
>
>
>--
>         Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
>        (deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
>                                   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
