is what i do

Bill Poser, over at Language Log, tells us that October 9 is Hangul Day (한글날) in Korea, celebrating the creation and promulgation of the Hangul alphabet by King Sejong the Great in 1446. Hangul is not an ideographic language like Chinese, in which every concept has its own ideograph, and pronounciation of a word is almost completely disassociated from the ideographs that represent the written form of the word; in Chinese, a given ideograph may have one pronounciation in Cantonese, a completely different pronounciation in Mandarin, and even be used, with the same meaning but with, again, totally different pronounciations, in classical Korean or Japanese—languages as different from Chinese as English is from Nepali.

Hangul, on the other hand, is an alphabetic writing system, in which just 28 letters represent, quite faithfully, logically and unambiguously, the spoken sounds of the Korean language. Prior to its invention by King Sejong, the very few literate Koreans—all members of the ruling elite—used Chinese ideographs to represent the written form of ideas. Hangul made it easy for any Korean to read and write the language.

Here is a translation of King Sejong’s opening paragraph of the document in which he introduced Hangul (that document, itself, was written in Chinese ideographs);

And here is Bill Poser’s comment on King Sejong’s document:

Not surprisingly, there was strong opposition from the nobles in King Sejong’s court, who presented him with a memorial of opposition to his new alphabet and who debated him about the wisdom of introducing it. Poser makes it clear that King Sejong’s accomplishment here was not simply a linguistic one:

Poser’s article is extremely well written and well organized, full of all sorts of interesting things, without every getting too detailed or too technical. Read it and enjoy.

I wish you all a belated Happy Hangul Day!

Wired Magazine reports on a fascinating study by a couple of vision researchers, who measured eye movements in American, Japanese and Chinese college students while looking at photographs. The Americans latched onto the foreground object in the scene and focused on that, while the Asian students spent much more time scanning the background, taking in the whole scene. The researchers believe they are seeing cultural differences:

I think that these folks are definitely onto something—something that may explain a lot of different things, including the fiasco of the Vietnamese war, the miraculous recovery of Japan after the Second World War, the current rapid decline in US technological superiority, and the likelihood that China will emerge as the dominant nation in the world much more quickly than anyone here expects.

The fact is, that we have lost sight completely of the many virtues inherent in harmony; all we see when we look at a nation working in harmony is a coercive force at the top enforcing conformity. If we look for that in any harmonious society, of course, we will see it. But that’s not all there is to it. And our focus on the foreground prevents us from seeing the equally dangerous and dehumanizing dynamics enforcing conformity in our own society; we think of ourselves as rugged individualists, and of the Chinese and Japanese as herd-mentality communitarians, but that’s a false picture.

I hope that this research continues and extends to other cultures. I’d love to see, for example, how those photos are viewed by people raised in a tribal culture, or by people who have grown up in a traditional Islamic society.

Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.

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Ursula LeGuin says this cannot be translated. Of course not. But is there anything more worth trying? Or any more delightful choice for the first post to a new blog?