On Sun, 28 Oct 2001 Peter_Constable@sil.org wrote:
>> At 16:44 01/10/11 -0700, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Oct 2001, Martin Duerst wrote:
> >>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.
> >
> >Oh well. I guess you never heard about all the liaisons
> >and things that go on with final consonants and consonant
> >clusters. Hangul was order-made for Korean, but Korean has
> >changed.
It's probably true that phonological changes has played a significant
role in Hangul orthography becoming more abstract over the time. However,
I wouldn't say that the primary reason the Korean orthography
in Hangul has drifted away from pronunciation is that Hangul was
taylor-made for 15c Korean and Korean has changed since, though. To a
large degree, I believe we can still use Hangul in place of IPA for
modern Korean pronunciation and many young Koreans use Hangul that way
(reflecting liasons and others in their spelling) in internet chatting
rooms, email messages and so forth. A lot of them also make frequent
mistakes in spelling Sino-Korean words with diphtongs or 'vowel-clusters'
because some of those 'complex vowels' are not pronounced any more by the
majority of modern Korean speakers and they don't know the etymology of
Sino-Korean words not being familiar with Hanjas (Chinese characters)
and rarely, if ever, having seen those words written in Hanjas. ( I
regard this phenomenon as similar to change in English spelling of Latin
and Greek originated words.) The 'new' orthographic standard issued by
Min. of Education of Rep. of Korea in 1998 (it's still largely based
on the draft standard of Hangul Hakhoe published in 1933) made some
'consessions' to this trend (of 'vowel simplification'). It even gave up
'deep/abstract' spelling of some words to make spelling more faithfully
represent pronunciation. These 'consessions' are not against the 'spirit'
of the 1933 draft but rather in line with it. (see below).
> several hundred years of significant phonological changes. It shouldn't
> surpise us that Hangul has become more abstract over several hundred years
> -- what is surprising is that it hasn't become more so. I think there's no
> question that jamos represent things on the phonemic level, and that they
> still do so in a relatively concrete way, though as Martin points out
> something more concrete than English but less concrete than Italian.
It also has to be noted that it was a *deliberate* decision made between
'deep spelling' and 'shallow spelling' by Korean Language Society
(Hangul Hakhoe) in early 1930's that decisively pushed Korean orthography
to become 'more abstract'. In early 20th century, Choo Shi-Gyung (the
father-figure of modern Korean linguistics) came up with something similar
to the argument of generative phonologists for deep spelling. [1] On the
other hand, King Sejong and his scholars preferred 'shallow' spelling to
'deep' spelling and they thought only 7 or 8 consonants were necessary at
the final consonant position. However, modern Korean linguists didn't go
all the way to 'deep spelling' and they tried to take a *balance* between
'deep' and 'shallow' spelling. For instance, they abolished 'Arae-Ah'
in their draft standard because it's not 'pronouncable' by modern Korean
speakers any more (except by people in Chejoo island at the southern
end of the country). 'Deep spelling' was adopted to make 'functional
words' (e.g. postposition - Chosa - to signify what grammatical role is
played by a preceeding word in a sentence) or important 'word-stems'
spelled consistently. 'Within' individual (non-compound) words, the
faithfulness to then-present pronunciation was given a great weight.
Therefore, a large part of the revision of this draft standard in 1988
(in South Korea) consisted of 'endorsing' changes in pronunciation during
the intervening 50years (Some people including me think that they
went too far and too ahead of time in this respect. )
> > In many ways, it's similar to the current state
> >of French. It's definitely not as nice as Finish or Italian,
> >but not as bad as English.
I definitely have to show your email to my (ignorant) Korean friends
who **falsely** believe that Latin alphabet is to blame for the great
gap bet. English spelling and pronunciation without looking any further
than English. I always tell them to look at Spanish, Italian, Finish or
even German.
[1]. Geoffrey Sampson, 'A featural System: Korean Hangul',
Writing Systems, Stanford University Press, 1985.
Jungshik Shin
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