--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
wrote:

> suzmccarth wrote:
>
> > Insup Taylor wrote about the importance of the Hangul design in
> > literacy practise. I will check her article tonight.
>
> Please consult any review of any book Insup Taylor has been involved

in.

Yes, I read one and I see what you mean. However, allow me this quote
which does give some historical background. It is difficult to get
this kind of perpsective from anyone else. I do read that Hangul is
now taught as a syllabary so I think she is accurate on that. Since
Hangul has been discussed and Taylor mentioned by her compatriot last
year, I think we owe her this much.

"Han'gul, being an alphabetic syllabary, can be taught as an alphabet
or as a syllabary. Let us survey how it has been taught throughout its
500-year history.

In the 16th century, some years after its creation, Han'gul was seldom
taught directly but was indirectly acquired while learning Hancha, as
it was used to give the sounds and meanings of Hancha. In the 19th
century, women, children, and laborers picked up Han'gul, or acquired
it without much teaching, from a Han'gul syllable chart (table 13-4)
that might be hung on a wall. ...

Right after the end of World War II and of the Japanese rule, when
Han'gul began to be taught once more in schools, it was taught more as
an alphabet than as a syllabary, no doubt emulating the teaching of
the Roman alphabet in the West: Children learned individual alphabet
letters and their phonemes, and then learned to package them into
syllable blocks. The alphabetic method does not appeal to young
children, as it deals with small meaningless sound units, phonemes. It
also requires some ability to analyze and synthesize sounds, which
young children find difficult. In 1948 the teaching unit jumped from
phoneme­letters to sentences, bypassing syllables, syllable blocks, and
words. Both methods produced a few primary school graduates who failed
to master Han'gul (Ch'oe 1986). In the 1960s the noted educator Yi Ung-
baek (1988) advocated the use of syllables and syllable blocks as
teaching units. He proposed displaying the Han'gul syllable chart
prominently at the beginning of a textbook, in front of a classroom,
and over a desk at home.

Lately the syllable block has been the primary teaching unit, which
has many advantages over an alphabetic letter. A Korean syllable is
far more likely to be meaningful than is a phoneme, in that a syllable
often by itself represents a morpheme or a word. ...

... studies, besides showing that syllables are easier to manipulate
than phonemes, show that people can proficiently manipulate phonemes
usually after, but not before, they become literate in an alphabet.
(Some educators in the West believe that phoneme awareness is a
prerequisite to learning to read in an alphabet.) Further, they tend
not to become aware of phonemes, if they become literate in logographs
or syllabaries. Finally, because a syllable is easier to isolate as a
unit than a phoneme, in the development of writing systems a syllabary
begat an alphabet, not the other way around (chap. 1).

The beauty and ingenuity of Han'gul is that people do not have to
learn 2,000 unrelated graphs for 2,000 syllables; they merely have to
learn the 24 letters and the systematic way they package into syllable
blocks. They learn easily through deduction, instruction, and practice
all the syllable blocks in the basic chart. Once people learn these
systematically constructed syllable blocks, they should have little
trouble pronouncing any syllable string, whether familiar, unfamiliar,
or nonsense. There is no need to consult a dictionary for either
pronouncing or spelling.


I think this is pertinent and furthers the discussion as an historical
overview.

Regards,

Suzanne