Saturday, October 20, 2007

difference between English and Korean

English and Korean language have completely different structure.
Enlish have 24 alphabets and they make word vertically, but Korean have seperate alphabets for consonants and vowels. To make one Korean phoneme, at least one consonant and one vowel alphabet are necessary.
e.g.) 아 /a/ (ㅇ : consonant with zero sound value, ㅏ : vowel same as /a/)
카/ka/ ( ㅋ : consonant sounds like /k/)

If you want to write 'a dam' in korean, (I think it is a good example, because we adopted english word 'dam.') here's Korean word for 'dam'

We can seperate this word into '대' and a coda 'ㅁ'.
This lower 'ㅁ' makes the syllable "closed"

Here's other interesting story about korean characters. About 2 or 3 decades ago, when computer is not developed yet, and people were using type writer, there was a calling for changing the entire character system to vertical system. For instance, now and since forever we write "I'm sleepy" as "졸려" but these people said that we should unpack this phrase into "ㅈ
ㅗㄹㄹㅕ." Just because it's easier to use type writer. How confusing it is! I should thank smart people who didn't change our character system. I also heard that Enlish Qwerty keyboard is quite inefficient, in order to make less mistakes. Dvorak keyboard is faster than Qwerty but some people thought that if people type words too fast, they probably make more mistakes.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hmmm... I'm so interested now to learn about these different keyboards. I'm also glad they didn't "unpack" the Korean spelling system since it represents the syllables' structure so accurately. King SeJong put forth such a considerate alphabet.