Comments on: Korean Hangul http://toasthaiku.net/2008/01/02/korean-hangul/ here's what i'm geeking out on Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:37:12 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Eric Nguyen http://toasthaiku.net/2008/01/02/korean-hangul/comment-page-1/#comment-11 Eric Nguyen Thu, 03 Jan 2008 00:52:13 +0000 http://toasthaiku.net/2008/01/02/korean-hangul/#comment-11 Written Vietnamese went through the same transition in the 16th century, compliments of French missionaries who were working there at the time. In the case of Vietnamese, actual roman characters were used, with various additional marks for variations on the vowel sounds and inflections (Vietnamese is tonal.) The reasons given were the same: phonetic spelling makes learning how to read/write easy. The mechanization of text would later benefit from the limited character set. Old Vietnamese using Chinese characters is still studied, but it's a niche area of study. It's sort of like Latin in the Western world. Those purists decry the loss of nuance that occurs when you convert a language to a phonetic representation. Chinese characters encode a lot of meaning in their forms; the etymology of a word or relationship between words is often seen in the strokes of the characters themselves. All of that is lost in modern Vietnamese and Korean. Written Vietnamese went through the same transition in the 16th century, compliments of French missionaries who were working there at the time. In the case of Vietnamese, actual roman characters were used, with various additional marks for variations on the vowel sounds and inflections (Vietnamese is tonal.) The reasons given were the same: phonetic spelling makes learning how to read/write easy. The mechanization of text would later benefit from the limited character set.

Old Vietnamese using Chinese characters is still studied, but it’s a niche area of study. It’s sort of like Latin in the Western world. Those purists decry the loss of nuance that occurs when you convert a language to a phonetic representation. Chinese characters encode a lot of meaning in their forms; the etymology of a word or relationship between words is often seen in the strokes of the characters themselves. All of that is lost in modern Vietnamese and Korean.

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