The intro of the video is a bit silly, but the info on Hangul’s historical background is really cool. Specially regarding the “lost letters”; further info here, for those who want.
Relevant to note a writing system doesn’t need to be flexible to “spread out”. The Latin alphabet for example wasn’t designed like Hangul*, but it was still pretty much tailored to a single language, Latin. That’s why for example you have so few letters for fricatives and vowels. It’s more of a matter of power - the Latin alphabet piggybacked on Republican Rome, then the Imperial Rome, then the Catholic church.
In an alternate timeline, where English used Hangul instead… people wouldn’t be screaming “why does ⟨island⟩ have a mute ⟨s⟩???”. They’d be screaming why
has a mute ⟨ㅅ⟩ instead, or similar**.
The youtuber probably knows it because it pops up specially often when talking about Korean, but do note what’s transcribed as /ʌ/ for English is actually closer to [ɐ]. So when she talks about ⟨ㆍ⟩, note the letter was probably for something like [ɐ] or [ə]; a different sound than ⟨ㅓ⟩ eo that is also transcribed as /ʌ/ (this one is actually [ʌ] though).
*with a major exception: the letter ⟨G⟩. Originally Latin spelled both /k/ and /g/ with ⟨C⟩. Then some guy called Ruga was not amused people kept mispronouncing his name. The Roman emperor Claudius also designed three letters, ⟨Ↄ Ⅎ Ⱶ⟩, but they were short lived.
** inb4: yes, I know, ⟨ㅣㅏ⟩ are supposed to represent /i a/, not /aɪ̯ ə/… in Korean; my point is that English would make the same mess with Hangul it does with Latin. Also, I had to cheese the cluster there.
Hangul is great. I don’t speak korean except for a few words but I learned hangul when I lived in Uijeongbu just to read the signs to be able to get around and it is seriously easy. I wish all languages had letters like hangul.
honestly i’d say, more worth of international script status than latin
Agreed. Just do like the op in the video mentioned and use some of the other letters that King Sejong invented. Those and the diacritic dots and we might have a new lingua franca.
Instead of an “internation script” I wish people diversified scripts further. (And low-key wish English adopted the Shavian alphabet.)
For me the neatest aspect of Hangul is its block-building. Syllables are fully visible, as their own units, without masking the phonemes.
true, all the shitty languages like fr*nch could keep latin, german could adopt cyrillic, russian can adopt perso-arabic, turkish could use the tibetan script and kurdish can use hangul,
all the shitty languages like fr*nch
I know you that you are joking, and that the target is not a marginalised language. But please, linguistic prejudice is not healthy, not even for jokes.
With that out of the way… why not go the same way Sejong and Sequoyah went? Instead of adopting old scripts, creating new ones.
turkish could use the tibetan script
I feel like Turkish did a really good job “wrestling” the Latin alphabet, considering they aren’t even in the same family. It would be nice if it had a script better suited for languages with vowel harmony, though.
