Nicholas Bodley wrote:

>
> Perhaps the question is not easy to answer.
>
> Korean (hangul) seems to me to be a[n] "hybrid", in
> a way, between logographic (correct term?) and phonetic
> scripts. Jamo are quite close to an alphabet/syllabary, it
> seems to me, yet each Hangul glyph is probably perceived
> as a whole.

There's (almost) nothing logographic about Korean writing. Officially,
neither Korea has taught the Chinese characters for more than fifty
years (and most Korean-readers only know the character(s) found in their
own names), though it has been argued that there is covert knowledge of
the characters in the way the language is read.

Korean simply organizes the letters for all the morphophonemes in each
syllable into a square (reading top to bottom and left to right),
probably in imitation of the esthetic of Chinese characters.

> A comment in passing sometime back, was that Japanese children
> who have problems learning to read fall into two categories --
> some have problems with the kanji, other with the phonetic
> [scripts]. Assuming this to be true, there must be two different
> perceptual paths most of us are born with.
>
> My query is, which of those, or is it both, is used to read Korean?

It is said that Korean children aren't taught the individual letters,
but are taught to recognize syllable blocks individually (as if they are
unanalyzed syllabograms), but that after a few months (still in First
Grade, that is) they discover the subparts that are the letters, on
their own.

> As they say in Finnish,
>
> Ystävällisin terveisin,

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...