Oct. 9 is the 557th aniversary of Korean alphabet, hangul

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mingshey
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Oct. 9 is the 557th aniversary of Korean alphabet, hangul

Post by mingshey »

It had been a national holiday in Korea since 1945 till 1990.

http://www.korea.net/learnaboutkorea/ha ... eul01.html
-- You'll find some of the romanized transcription of Korean words unpronounce-able.

MDS
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Post by MDS »

Ah, thats an interesting site there. Thanks for the link!

bingley
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Post by bingley »

What a great reason for a public holiday. Why did they stop celebrating it?

mingshey
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Post by mingshey »

It is still celebrated officially. Special programs about how hangul is created are on TV these days. But not a holiday any more in the way that you don't go to work, :cry:

Episcopus
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Post by Episcopus »

Did they say er...easy learnability..?

What I call easy is the Greek alphabet. Certainly not Korean...I just can not understand what's going on :?

N

bingley
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Post by bingley »

If compared to Chinese characters?

mariek
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Post by mariek »


Chinese characters look complicated sometimes. But it can be made easier if you use your imagination. For example, the character for "middle" looks like a rectangle with a vertical line drawn through the middle. That vertical line illustrates the meaning. The character for "woman' kinda looks like a woman curtsying. The character for large looks like a person with outstretched arms to illustrate the idea of large.

mingshey
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Post by mingshey »

Episcopus wrote:Did they say er...easy learnability..?

What I call easy is the Greek alphabet. Certainly not Korean...I just can not understand what's going on :?

N
That is, that the similar phonemes take the same base form. There are five basic forms for consonants and harder or stronger consonants take additional strokes on these base forms, or doubles the base forms, after their natures;
Plus a couple of exceptions for a liquid and a nasal gamma(or english -ng), and a sign for empty consonant(like smooth breathing of greek).
And all the vowels are combinations of three elementary strokes(a dot, a horizontal bar, and a vertical bar) and sorted after their natures.

Korean alphabet consists of simple geometrical elements much like greek, and shows a couple of coincidents: hard 'g' is like flipped gamma, 'i'(english ee) is like iota, 'ae' looks like greek eta, 'p' looks like greek pi with an additional level stroke, 'dz' looks somewhat like zeta.

The apparent complexity comes from that korean alphabets are gathered to form a syllabic block after a format when they are written. This could be the influence of chinese characters which were used by scholars and the ruling class for thousands of years. Since another aim for the invention of korean alphabet was for fixing down the pronunciation of the chinese characters, which then was differently rendered between scholars, it is a possible speculation. But linguistic study might tell a differnt story.

P.S.
Meesa likes your new avatar. But what is it? :)

P.S.
The only other writing system I know of in which the related phonemes take the same basic form is tengwar invented by Tolkien.

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Post by ingrid70 »

mariek wrote:
Chinese characters look complicated sometimes. But it can be made easier if you use your imagination. For example, the character for "middle" looks like a rectangle with a vertical line drawn through the middle. That vertical line illustrates the meaning. The character for "woman' kinda looks like a woman curtsying. The character for large looks like a person with outstretched arms to illustrate the idea of large.
I read an article recently in which someone described how she related our latin alphabet to shapes like that: snake for s, house with a chimney for h, etc. She taught her 3-year old to read that way, slowly and with lots of fun. I'm thinking of trying it with my 3-year old son, he loves letters.

Ingrid

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Post by mariek »

There are toys and games out there to help children learn letters and math while they're "playing". There's even educational software for the computer.

I was really amused when I went to an Open House where the parents had a computer station set up for their young child near the kitchen. It was a Mac on a very small/short table with a small/short chair. It was really cute.

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Post by mingshey »

My wife's gona be a mother coming January. Me? A father of course. (Didn't I say I'm married?) And I definitely want a greek toy letter set for my kid. With magnets behind it so as to put it on an iron board. But greek doesn't sell in Korea and there's no such thing around. I'd think of conjuring up such stuff myself somehow... But that can wait until my kid is born healthy. :)

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Post by mariek »


Congrats to you and your wife! Do you know whether you will have a boy or a girl? I guess it doesn't matter ... as long as you have a healthy baby.

mingshey
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Post by mingshey »

Thank you, Marie!
I don't care very much about it. Though I prefer a girl, so that I can call "her" by a nickname Nausikaa(too exotic here for a real name). :)

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Post by Clemens »

Congrats from me, too. Is it your first kid? :)

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Post by Emma_85 »

Congratultions from me, too.
I suppose any name you choose will sound really exotic to me, though :) .

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Post by mingshey »

Clemens wrote:Congrats from me, too. Is it your first kid? :)
Thanks, and yes it's, er, it will be, my first kid.
Thanks to all.

A close friend of my wife got pregnant a few weeks ago but she got a miscarriage a couple of days ago. So I got a little worried, tho' my child's developing with little problem so far. Only it's stading upright for now. We're hoping it changes it's stance in the following month before we get the next ultrasonic scan. My first concern is, anyway, it's healthy delivery. (my fingers crossed)
Emma_85 wrote:I suppose any name you choose will sound really exotic to me, though :)
No question. :)

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