Lars,
> * Michael Everson
> |
> | Hangul is an alphabet. It organizes its letters into syllable
> | clusters, but it is an alphabet.
>
> This is what Kenneth Whistler also says, and I agree that it makes
> sense. Peter T. Daniels, on the other hand, says that it is a featural
> script[1], while Ross King says that it is a "phonemically based
> alphabet"[2].
>
> From this it seems possible to draw three possible conclusions:
>
> 1. Hangul is a featural script, which is means a script where
> the shapes of the basic symbols are organized by phonetic
> principles.
I disagree with this characterization of a featural system. It isn't
that the "shapes of the basic symbols are organized by phonetic
principles", but rather than aspects of some of the shapes of
the symbols (not necessarily "basic symbols") are *correlated*
with segmental distinctions made by the language(s) which are
written with the script.
>
> 2. Hangul is a featural script, and featural scripts are a subclass
> of alphabets, distinguished by the fact that the shapes of the
> basic symbols are organized by phonetic principles.
Featural syllabaries are *not* a subclass of alphabets. That much
is clear.
>
> 3. The whole idea of the type of featural scripts is bogus and
> invented only to deal with the troublesome Hangul, who are
> clearly unlike any other known script. Jamo is an alphabet, and
> that's all there is to it.
No, see my separate discussion of this.
>
> So, which is it? To me 2. seems like the answer, but I am certainly
> open to argument.
The answer, as we sometime joke in the U.S., is that it is both:
a floor wax *and* a dessert topping.
Hangul is structured from an alphabet (the jamo). That alphabet is
so tightly coupled to the phonology of Korean that it can be
considered a phonemic alphabet -- it is very regularly related to
the sound of Korean. But the alphabet is then used by syllabic
principles to build up syllabic units that are the *typographic*
atoms for Korean. Since the syllabic units themselves are constructed
by regular rules from the jamo, they are featural as well.
So the Korean writing system, as Jungshik suggested, is both
an alphabet (at the lower level) and a featural syllabary (at
the higher level).
--Ken
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