Ask Me Anything Korean Language Related

Hahaha, you know they're different Korean spellings though, right?
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. :)
 
all i can remember is 'opun sonkut tulgi' 'dolimyo makgi', 'charyut' and 'kun ye' - is the Korean for 'hello' and 'goodbye' 'hasayo' and an 'anyehasayo' ?
 
"차렷" means basically the same thing as the sergeant calling "ATTE-NTION."


is the Korean for 'hello' and 'goodbye' 'hasayo' and an 'anyehasayo' ?
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.
 
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. :)
'Samjang(삼장)' and 'ssamjang(쌈장)' aren't homophones at all by the way. That pun doesn't work.
 
I can't read Korean letters tbh :eek:

(1) It's super easy to learn the Hangul alphabet. That's because Hangul is a relatively recent "designed" alphabet, rather than one that "evolved" over millennia. This quick-guide is a good way to get started: Learn to Read Korean in 15 Minutes

(2) Failing that, you can also copy-and-paste Hangul into Google Translate (translate.google.com). In a small font, on the left side of the page, under the Hangul letters that you've just entered, it'll show you a romanization of the Hangul letters. Even better, there's a little "speaker" icon there that you can click to hear the phrase pronounced!
 
(1) It's super easy to learn the Hangul alphabet. That's because Hangul is a relatively recent "designed" alphabet, rather than one that "evolved" over millennia. This quick-guide is a good way to get started: Learn to Read Korean in 15 Minutes

(2) Failing that, you can also copy-and-paste Hangul into Google Translate (translate.google.com). In a small font, on the left side of the page, under the Hangul letters that you've just entered, it'll show you a romanization of the Hangul letters. Even better, there's a little "speaker" icon there that you can click to hear the phrase pronounced!
I didn't know that about Hangul. What's the history on that?
 
I didn't know that about Hangul. What's the history on that?

Before Hangul, Koreans would write using their own variation (Hanja) of Chinese script -- essentially, scholars needed to learn to speak Chinese before they could learn how to write. That's why literacy was super-low in ancient Korea. That's one of the reasons there are so few written records from ancient Korea. (The other reason being that the Mongols burned what few written records there were when they invaded the Korean peninsula in 1231.)

In the year 1443, King Sejong the Great commissioned his scholars to develop a Korean alphabet. They designed Hangul. Hangul is considered a "featural" alphabet in that the shapes of the letters tells you something about how they're pronounced. For example, all "plosive" sounds have a horizontal bar along the top of the letter. People who study alphabets consider Hangul to be exceptionally well designed. When it was first invented, Hangul's use was kept on the down-low for fear of angering the Chinese...Korea was still a vassal state of China at the time. The upshot is: Korea has had an alphabet for not quite 600 years, and that alphabet was designed intentionally, rather than evolving over time like most other alphabets around the world. And of course, Hanja is still used today when you wanna get "fancy". (I would compare this to writing in an elaborate Gothic script in English -- i.e., trying to look "fancy" in your writing.)

In modern times, Hangul is a bit problematic for implementation on computers. Every possible syllable block has to be implemented as a single computer character, meaning the character-set on a computer for Hangul has to be exceptionally large...about 11,000 computer characters! This is a consequence of writing letters as syllable blocks, rather than writing letters in a single direction.
 
Before Hangul, Koreans would write using their own variation (Hanja) of Chinese script -- essentially, scholars needed to learn to speak Chinese before they could learn how to write. That's why literacy was super-low in ancient Korea. That's one of the reasons there are so few written records from ancient Korea. (The other reason being that the Mongols burned what few written records there were when they invaded the Korean peninsula in 1231.)

In the year 1443, King Sejong the Great commissioned his scholars to develop a Korean alphabet. They designed Hangul. Hangul is considered a "featural" alphabet in that the shapes of the letters tells you something about how they're pronounced. For example, all "plosive" sounds have a horizontal bar along the top of the letter. People who study alphabets consider Hangul to be exceptionally well designed. When it was first invented, Hangul's use was kept on the down-low for fear of angering the Chinese...Korea was still a vassal state of China at the time. The upshot is: Korea has had an alphabet for not quite 600 years, and that alphabet was designed intentionally, rather than evolving over time like most other alphabets around the world. And of course, Hanja is still used today when you wanna get "fancy". (I would compare this to writing in an elaborate Gothic script in English -- i.e., trying to look "fancy" in your writing.)

In modern times, Hangul is a bit problematic for implementation on computers. Every possible syllable block has to be implemented as a single computer character, meaning the character-set on a computer for Hangul has to be exceptionally large...about 11,000 computer characters! This is a consequence of writing letters as syllable blocks, rather than writing letters in a single direction.
So, the individual sounds essentially stack into a single syllable? That should make for compact writing, but I can see the complication with computing.
 
So, the individual sounds essentially stack into a single syllable? That should make for compact writing, but I can see the complication with computing.

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:

248


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.
  • 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 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.

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!
 
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:

248


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.
  • 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 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.

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!
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.

Looking specifically at the difference between the "t" and "d" sounds, is there a common identifier for voiced vs. unvoiced consonants? Is there a commonality among the fricatives (s, f, etc.)?
 
An interesting fact that we were told on the Kukkiwon World Taekwondo Leaders Forum in 2012 was that Hangul is also used by a reasonably small tribe in Africa. Some scholars went there and found they couldn't write their language at all. So they considered all the alphabets and found that Korean sounds matched their sounds completely, so learnt and then taught them Hangul. So they write their own language using Hangul characters. I bet it would be funny to have them meet a Korean :-D

Anyway, not sure if that is common knowledge or not so thought I would share it. At the time (during an hour lecture on the history of Korean language) I thought it was a cool fact, but didn't think to write down the name of the tribe... Oh well, you live and learn.
 
An interesting fact that we were told on the Kukkiwon World Taekwondo Leaders Forum in 2012 was that Hangul is also used by a reasonably small tribe in Africa. Some scholars went there and found they couldn't write their language at all. So they considered all the alphabets and found that Korean sounds matched their sounds completely, so learnt and then taught them Hangul. So they write their own language using Hangul characters. I bet it would be funny to have them meet a Korean :-D

Anyway, not sure if that is common knowledge or not so thought I would share it. At the time (during an hour lecture on the history of Korean language) I thought it was a cool fact, but didn't think to write down the name of the tribe... Oh well, you live and learn.
It looks like it was a tribe in Indonesia (your memory for detail appears to work like mine! :p): The Hangeul Alphabet Moves beyond the Korean Peninsula.
 
Thanks guys. My memory is actually shockingly terrible, so the fact I remembered it all is success to me. Right, Indonesia for next time this snippet comes up! Thanks again.
 
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