Re: Neosyllabaries

suzmccarth wrote:

>
> For a Hangul syllable chart it is best to google images for Korean
> Alphabet and there are quite a few, some are coloured for teaching
> children.

But the question was as to which particular chart Taylor was espousing.
If it shows only CV and not CVC(C) syllables, it omits most of the
language's syllables _and_ doesn't prepare the child for the conditioned
allographic changes of the letters as they get squished into smaller
areas.

> I also came across this article which is worth reading entirely, on
> the classification of Hangul as an alphabetic or featural script.
> However, it ends this way.
>
> "Stillï*Œ in attempting to evaluate a writing systemï*Œ one very
> important factor must be taken into consideration firstï** Most
> criticsï*Œ either Eastern or Westernï*Œ have assumed the point of view
> of the writer when evaluating writing and orthographyï** Howeverï*Œ
> this is a mistakeï** It is not fromm the point of view of the writerï*Œ
> but of the readerï*Œ that a writing system must be judgedï** A work is
> written by oneï*Œor at mostï*Œ three or four peopleï*ð but when printedï*Œ
> that same work can be read by many thousandsï**
>
> For this reasonï*Œ I think the syllabic system (모아ì"°ê¸°) used in 한ê¸*
> orthography is marvelously well adapted to the Korean languageï**
> Because Korean is an agglutinative language in which particles and
> suffixes are added one after the other to a stemï*Œ there are a very
> large number of inflected formsï*Œ and in on-line writing (í'*어ì"°ê¸°) it
> can often be difficult even to distinguish where one inflectional
> form ends and another beginsï** Grouping the letters into syllables is
> an effective solution to this problem."

Be that as it may, it overlooks the fact that Hangul has a highly
morphophonemic orthography (and it's deliberately been made more so over
the centuries) -- while the morphemes are largely identifiable from the
spelling, the pronunciations largely aren't -- see the relevant chapters
of Sohn's Cambridge Green book *The Korean Language*. Korean spelling
may be more distant from its surface phonology than English spelling.

But the criterion in the first paragraph is the one under which I just
criticized Syllabics.

> http://www.koreandb.net/sejong600/sejong03_231.htm

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...