[KS] Indonesian tribe picks Korean alphabet as official writing system

[gkl1 at columbia.edu]

I certainly agree with Kevin that this is very interesting, and I  
share his curiosity over how Hangul works with the linguistics of this  
language. It would be nice also to know the name of the tribe and the  
language (not just its location--which is really what you might call  
remote) so that people could check it out in the  
anthropological/linguistic literature.

Beyond that I hope this leads some journalist, preferably of  
Indoneasian background, to check this situation out on the ground in  
Indonesia. So far we have news only from a Korean news agency,  
informed by a Korean cultural organization with a strong nationalist  
agenda, and featuring a book written in the Hangulized  
language/dialect that could only have been printed and published in  
Korea.

In such circumstances one thinks of many more questions to ask.

Gari Ledyard

kevin parks <kevin at macosx.com> wrote:

>
> http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/national/2009/08/06/56/0302000000AEN20090806001200315F.HTML
>
>
> That is pretty interesting. But I could have swore there were other
> instances in the past where other cultures attempted to adopt Han'gu(l
> / Choso(n'gu(l as their written language only to have it be rejected,
> no? I don't recall as it has been a long time since I read Kim-Renaud,
> Y-K. (ed) 1997. The Korean Alphabet: Its History and Structure.
>
> Anyway, this is a very interesting language development that *gasp* for
> once doesn't involve romanizations.
>
> I wonder what the fit will be like or if their language, like modern
> South Korean will be filled with lots of "eu" and such to try to
> account for combinations and phonemes not availble in Han'gu(l. I think
> of what happens with such loans words such as stress ???? which is hard
> to spell and sounds bad. I am quite curious to know what their language
> sounds like and how this will work.
>
>
> cheers,
>
> kevin