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diveintomark / diveintopython3

[Mirror] Dive Into Python 3 online book
diveintopython3.ep.io
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Korean refences - chapter 4 #6

Open mbubb opened 12 years ago

mbubb commented 12 years ago

Great book. A nit to pick:

"Then there are languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which have so many characters that they require multiple-byte character sets."

"On the other end of the spectrum, languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have thousands of characters..."

Wrong on both counts. Korean does not use characters. One of the great developments of Korean culture is one of the most 'phonemic' alphabets, hangul.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul

It may seem trivial in the context of the overall example but Koreans do not like to be confused with Japanese or Chinese culture. The spoken language is completely distinct from either (more closely related to Mongolian, Finnish and Hungarian actually).

all the best

Michael

ghpenguin commented 8 years ago

Thank you.

It's annonying so many westerns do not distinguish speaking language and writing one. Hangul is by far the most advanced writing system ever humans invented. The creator of Hangul, the Great King Sejong did five century ahead of modern linguistics. He understood the basic components of human sound - consonants, vowel - and implemented it Hangul both character design and composition of words.

But Korean elites have been blinded by cultural influence of powerful empires that Korea has depended on both economical and social. A good thousand years under China's control, later on for the last one hundred years under Japan, followed by USA.

Five hundred some years ago when Great King Sejong introduced Hangul to general public, the elites were the biggest obstacle he had to deal with. As soon as Great King Sejong passed away, Korean elites and ruling class ditched Hangul, favored stupid and absurd Chinese alphabets coming four centuries afteward. Sadly speaking Korean language has become mixture of Chinese, Japanese, and English vocabulary. Hangul has been served as medium to digital information age though.

To master Hangul takes around ten to twenty hours as a recording system of human sounds. Input method that supports Sebeol keyboard layout even offers self-spelling correction but Sebeol keyboard is not standard in Korean computer industry.

Regards, Hughe