I guessed so, like when I had asked in class whether the "kukkiwan" name is related to the words we say when bowing to the flags which to me sound like"kukki daiyo".
First one is "하세요," which means "do it." Second one doesn't mean anything. The interchangeable hello and goodbye is "안녕," which is informal, and the formal is "안녕하세요" for hello and "안녕히가세요" for a goodbye.
'Samjang(삼장)' and 'ssamjang(쌈장)' aren't homophones at all by the way. That pun doesn't work.I guessed so, like when I had asked in class whether the "kukkiwan" name is related to the words we say when bowing to the flags which to me sound like"kukki daiyo".
In terms of the taste, I can't comment. My wife wanted to go to the Korean grocery store, and I noticed all the boxes with paste said "sammjang" or similar spelling. Maybe for fun one day in class I will refer to the soybean paste pattern.
I can't read Korean letters tbh
I didn't know that about Hangul. What's the history on that?
So, the individual sounds essentially stack into a single syllable? That should make for compact writing, but I can see the complication with computing.
That's very cool. Maybe I'll add it to my "someday, maybe" list of languages to learn a bit of. I used to have quite a facility for languages, and picked up bits easily. I don't seem to do so as readily now.Yes exactly. In Hangul, each syllable is written as a single block of letters. In a nutshell, if the vowel in the syllable is horizontal in shape, the letters stack like pancakes into the syllable block. If the vowel has a vertical shape, the vowel sits on the right side of the syllable block. Here's an example:
The word tae-kwon-do has three syllables, so there are three blocks. In the first syllable, the "ae" sound has a vertical shape, so it's written to the right of the "t" sound. In the last syllable, the "o" sound has a horizontal shape, so it's written under the "d" sound.
The middle syllable of this word is more complicated: it's got two vowels glommed-together in the middle of the syllable (the two vowels are "oo-ah" -- which sound like "wah" when you say them together quickly). In that case, the combined double-vowel just kinda wraps itself around the initial consonant...like big spoon cuddling with little spoon.
- Aside: in English, the letters D and T sound similar, and you'll notice that in Hangul they look alike as well -- letters that sound similar also look similar -- that's what's meant by "featural". It's really very clever.
The upshot is that there aren't actually that many letters in the Korean alphabet, and yet it still takes 11,000+ different characters to depict them in a computer, because on a computer you have to treat each possible block as a letter. Oy vey!
Here are good summaries that explain it better than I can: All Things Linguistic and In Praise Of: The World's Best Writing System
It looks like it was a tribe in Indonesia (your memory for detail appears to work like mine!
): The Hangeul Alphabet Moves beyond the Korean Peninsula.
