>I recently attended a Korean typographer's lecture where he mentioned
>that pictographic symbols would be altered based on where the tongue
>was placed when it made the sound.
>
>Am I reading your response wrong?
I'm not questioning the view that different hangul consonant jamo correspond to points of articulation -- the same would be true, for that matter, of the Latin letters "p", "t", "k"; that's not particularly surprising. But these structural units (both the jamo and Latin letters) are representing phonological objects comparable to phonemes.
It is not the case that a single jamo identifies just point of particulation (e.g. velar) and must be combined with a different jamo that identifies manner of articulation (e.g. oral stop vs. nasal stop), as well as other jamo for other similar things. (Imagine a Spanish writing system in which the phoneme /k/, which is a voiceless velar oral stop, was represented by a sequence of characters, "^o|" where "^" represents velar tongue position, "o" represents oral stop and "|" represents a lack of voicing.) But that's what it would have to be like to say that the writing system had structural units that corresponded to phonological *features*.
- Peter
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Peter Constable
Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA
Tel: +1 972 708 7485
E-mail: <peter_constable@...>