further to the messages from los dos pedros,

(1) the difference between daniels' "abugida" and my "alphasyllabary" is
discussed and (i hope) clarified in my article "a matter of typology:
alphasyllabaries and abugidas", in *written language & literacy*
2(1):45-56, 1999.

(2) as daniels says, present-day hangul is not only a historical
representation of korean, but a deep-level synchronic representation of the
language. it is of course a matter of controversy to what extent an optimum
orthography for a language should be morphophonemic vs. phonemic; probably
the answer is different for each language. this was an issue famously
raised by chomsky & halle, *sound pattern of english*, when they argued
that the supposedly anachronistic and irregular orthography of english
corresponds in many ways to a morphophonemic transcription of modern
english.

ciao; bill
--
William Bright
Professor Emeritus of Linguistics & Anthropology, UCLA
Professor Adjoint of Linguistics, University of Colorado, Boulder
Editor, Written Language and Literacy
Editor, Native American Placenames of the United States
1625 Mariposa Avenue, Boulder, CO 80302
Tel. 303-444-4274
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William Bright's website: http://www.ncidc.org/bright