Yep, having collected the majority of those assignments from my writing class students, it turns out that more than one group decided to write about how Hangeul is superior to English. When you ask people to compare and contrast something, it’s interesting how some immediately feel the need to prove that whatever they feel is theirs is absolutely superior.
The claims made are that Hangeul is easier to learn. Well, yes, I have to give it that. It’s generally pretty easy to learn to spell Korean words by ear. There are a few difficult liasons, and some of those double consonants take a while to start hearing, and the a-e/eo-e vowel is basically indistinguishable by hearing, but yeah, all in all, spelling in Korean is easier than spelling in English. Why? Well, English language words tend to contain (or hint at) their etymology. You have words and roots borrowed from French, Latin, Greek, German, Spanish, and many more languages. While learning to spell in English can therefore be a big pain, it may help somewhat with advanced learners, who start to catch the etymological links between words. Of course, this exists in Korean, too, but it’s not a facet of the spelling per se. The tradeoff here is that spelling is a royal pain in English, but that etymology presents itself a little more clearly. On the other hand, in Korean, since everything’s spelled using a more semi-phonetical system, it’s much easier to learn how to spell in Korean, but a foreign learner might need to learn Hanja (Chinese characters) in order to figure out which words are Korean and which are Chinese-rooted.
Notice how I’m contrasting the two languages? Some of my students seem to have missed that this was the point of the exercise. When I see essay titles like, “The Superiority of Hangeul”, I have to shake my head. It’s like a knee-jerk response, this, “Mine is better, mine is the best!”
Other “interesting” arguments: It will be easier to create a voice-recognition system because there are no homonyms in Korean. (So, then, does
One thing I noticed you didn’t mention (maybe because it was obvious) is how Koreans often confuse Hangeul with the Korean language. Hangeul is a writing system, Korean is a language. For the most part it is a harmless confusion, even though it does betray the speaker’s linguistic ignorance. But then you get people talking about how Korean is such a scientificaly designed language. Wrong: Hangeul is a well-designed writing system, but the Korean language is just as organic as every other language–with foreign-language influences and all.
So, in effect, comparing Hangeul with English is like comparing the works of Monet with acrylic paint.
I only mention this because it drives me completely insane. People in my department, obviously, don’t confuse Hangeul and Korean, but pretty much everyone else does.
Ooops… Charles, I started the post with the intention of pointing that very fact out. I’ve corrected students on this many times, and they all seem to go, “Oh, yeah.” It’s not really harmless confusion, actually. People say “King Sejong invented Hangeul” and as you point out, then you get this crap about it being a scientific language. Which is nonsense.
The killer is that people who are that slack about it then go on to explain how their language is superior in precision (because, they claim, there are no homophones in Korean, for example) and so on. If it’s so precise, how come people can’t even sort the writing system from the more general language in common speech?
Then again, I even catch myself saying, “No, write it in English letters” and then stop and say, “In Roman letters, I mean.” I probably picked that up from students, but still… why facilitate a misconception?
yah, no kidding! i once wrote about how maybe parts of hangeul were derived from the hebrew alphabet (conceivable that it was studied with the korean alphabeet in mind, since hangeul was “invented” in the 1400s, and hebrew is an older language–and there are some letters that look VERY similar and very similar names)…and i got a bunch of very indignant posts from very indignant Koreans who confused hangeul with the Korean language.
I had made claims about the written language, but they had thought I’d made claims about the language itself.