Mergi la conținut
Răspunde

Hangulo alphabet

de Miland, 4 februarie 2009

Contribuții/Mesaje: 13

Limbă: English

Miland (Arată profil) 4 februarie 2009, 14:23:26

I've read an interesting piece by a Korean Esperantistino who claims that Hangul, a script that evolved in Korea, is the most recent phonetic alphabet and the most suitable for propagating Esperanto in Asia. Granted that the Esperanto alphabet is part of the netuŝebla fundamento, does anyone who is acquainted with the Hangul script have an opinion on this?
Perhaps hangul could offer a solution to the problem of learning a huge number of Chinese or Japanese characters - any Chinese or Japanese speakers have an opinion on this?

erinja (Arată profil) 5 februarie 2009, 01:15:13

This sounds like a terrible idea. Hangul is a wonderful writing system, and perfect for writing Korean. Its sounds are chosen to be specific to Korean; it would need substantial changes to represent the sounds of another language.

You would need to add characters to make it suitable even for writing another Asian language in Hangul - let alone Esperanto. It doesn't distinguish between r and l, for example. It doesn't distinguish between t and d, or between b and p.

As for writing Esperanto, I think most Asians learn the Latin alphabet. It seems needlessly complex to make them learn yet another alphabet, and I doubt that learning Hangul is easier than learning the Latin alphabet anyway.

ceigered (Arată profil) 5 februarie 2009, 09:09:51

Hangul is too limited in sounds to be of use learning Esperanto. Of course, that could lead to the discussion of the possible fact that Esperanto has too many sounds, but thats a gray area I don't think anyone should step into without proper protection.

Out of all the alphabets I know, only the Latin, Cyrillic could ever be suitable for Esperanto right from the word go. And only one of them is well known world wide (cyrillic should be known world wide, but for early medieval political reasons it seems to have been treated with a 3-meter long stick in European education).

Miland (Arată profil) 5 februarie 2009, 13:18:08

Apparently the Korean professor Hyun-Bok Lee developed the IKPA (international Korean phonetic alphabet) to solve this problem. It appears to be based on hangul.

Rogir (Arată profil) 5 februarie 2009, 13:21:04

Actually Cyrillic is more suitable for esperanto with its Slavic consonants, but I think Zamenhof chose wise to use the latin alphabet.

eikored85 (Arată profil) 11 februarie 2009, 04:03:36

Miland:Apparently the Korean professor Hyun-Bok Lee developed the IKPA (international Korean phonetic alphabet) to solve this problem. It appears to be based on hangul.
Hmm do you have the paper that the professor wrote? I clicked on your link, but I couldn't access the paper because it is password-protected.

I agree that unless you make severe modifications to the Hangul alphabet, it would be a poor choice for writing esperanto. Part of the reason is the tendency for Hangul to be written in one-syllable blocks, which is wonderful for writing the Korean language, but which is not very suitable for esperanto.

I'm still curious to see what other alphabets have been devised for writing esperanto. There have been rumors of different alphabets that have been proposed over the years to give esperanto its own distinct visual appeal, even of many of those ideas weren't meant to be taken seriously.

eikored85 (Arată profil) 11 februarie 2009, 04:10:22

ceigered:Hangul is too limited in sounds to be of use learning Esperanto. Of course, that could lead to the discussion of the possible fact that Esperanto has too many sounds, but thats a gray area I don't think anyone should step into without proper protection.

Out of all the alphabets I know, only the Latin, Cyrillic could ever be suitable for Esperanto right from the word go. And only one of them is well known world wide (cyrillic should be known world wide, but for early medieval political reasons it seems to have been treated with a 3-meter long stick in European education).
Actually, I think the Greek alphabet could also work, since it's a close cousin of both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets.

I could also envision Esperanto being written with the Arabic script, though that could be awkward due to the fact that the Arabic alphabet only has 3 written vowels (which also serve as semi-vowels, and thus create ambiguity), and all other vowels are omitted in normal writing. It's another case of an alphabet that works very well to write the language that it is meant for, but does not work well in writing other languages.

Miland (Arată profil) 11 februarie 2009, 09:15:43

eikored85:Hmm do you have the paper that the professor wrote? I clicked on your link, but I couldn't access the paper because it is password-protected..
I'm afraid not. But I managed to write to one of his colleagues with a message in Esperanto to forward, if he were willing, so with a bit of luck I might hear something useful eventually. I understand from a phonetics expert in the UK that Koreans find the system a useful learning aid.

RLHotchkiss (Arată profil) 14 iulie 2016, 18:26:00

This seems to be the article. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.7282.pdf

With the advent of smart watches it may be necessary to use word characters to conserve space. In such a system thee would be between a few hundred to a couple of thousand Chinese characters that would represent the most common Esperanto roots and affixes. Hangul letters would then be used for roots not represented by Chinese Characters. This should greatly reduce the amount of screen space needed for written esperanto. If it was done correctly an Esperanto speaker who hadn't learned the Chinese characters could press a button and the text would either be converted to Hangul or roman characters. This would also allow Esperanto to look more natural in Korean texts and texts that use Chinese characters primarily.

Vestitor (Arată profil) 14 iulie 2016, 20:04:12

Sometimes I think I'm dreaming when I read stuff on here. What is this? What is the point of separate alphabets for a world language? It completely contradicts the aim. Go down this route and you're on your way back to the situation Esperanto is supposed to solve!

Înapoi mai sus