[KS] Mr. Hannas and Overspecified and Underspecified Orthography

Lee JooBai jblee6952 at hotmail.com
Fri May 16 17:22:08 EDT 2003


Hello,

Mr. Hannas actually faults hangul orthography for being overly bound
to syllables.  His position is quite confusing: while finding fault with
the underspecification of consonantal writing of Hebrew and Arabic,
almost on the same breath he finds fault with the full-specification of
the syllable boundaries as found in hangul orthography, taking further
pains to point out that while Tibetan orthography can be likewise syllabic,
that Tibetans can also have non-syllable-specified writing when transcribing
Sanskrit.

So if your orthography underspecify, this is bad; if it overspecifies, this 
is
bad too.  I suppose English is not specific as to syllabic boundary; but I
don't think that most people do not agree on exactly where the syllable
boundaries are for the most common words.

He takes some pains to praise the effort by Choi Hyun Bae to popularize
fully analytic writing( ga.ro.sseu.gi), arguing that this would have spared
Koreans much headache in typesetting and computerization of the
language.  I am not even sure that Choi Hyun Bae was such a committed
advocate of ga.ro.sseu.gi.  Is there such advocacy group in Korea today?

I suppose the transliteration via Yale and McCune-Reischauer would qualify
as ga.ro.sseu.gi.

His positing of merit and demerit of low or high degree of specification
is also disturbing on some historical and technical grounds.

First, on historical grounds, my understanding was that the great advance
made in European linguistics in 19th century can be looked at as the
application of observation about semitic languages to the languages of
Europe: namely the observations by Hebrew and Arabic speakers about
the significant role of consonants in determining meaning, with vowels
and even syllabic junctures being not necessarily significant and 
observation
of consonantal gradation as evidenced between sister languages Hebrew and
Arabic.

And I don't think that this structural fact would have been so clear were it
not for the various dictionaries which were organized with major sorting 
oder
first on consonants and with minor sorting on the vowels.

Admittedly, there was no one-to-one correspondence between the Semitic
consonants and the Indo-European consonants.  However, once the relationship
between consonants as determinants was abstracted and re-applied to the
European languages, the modern applied linguistics can be said to have been
born.

And in many ways, the developments in linguistics seem to have been
a simple process of applying statements about Hebrew or Arabic and
seeing whether this is true or not.

So to fault the underspecification of Arabic and Hebrew orthography seem
rather an expression of failure to appreciate the important contribution 
that
the so called "less than perfect" writing system made to the modern
understanding of language.

Now, as to why overspecification should be a cause for trouble, I can see no
cause for it unless it is because we find "mud.da"(bury) on page 60 and
"mu.dum"(grave) on page 98, separated by 38 pages of Sino-Korean
and English-Korean.  Although under Yale or some other transliteration with
alphabetic ordering they may appear only 4 pages apart.


Regards,

JooBai Lee

5/16/03

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