[KS] Hangul in Indonesia

[Ross King]

I read this with great interest, and am wondering if anybody knows the identity of the woman's linguist father? 

I find this all rather pathetic. As soon as you divorce hangul from Korean, the language it was brilliantly designed to write, it becomes just another script -- we could write Jia-Jia with the Armenian script, if we wanted. 

Only worse, because if I were an Indonesian bureaucrat or political leader concerned with how to integrate -- linguistically and graphologically -- ethnic and linguistic minorities in a country with a few hundred of these and in a country noted for the success with which it has promoted Bahasa Indonesia, written with the Roman script, I'd be really annoyed at the Koreans doing this (especially if they were somehow allied with evangelical Christian proselytizing, which is never far from the scene with much of this). 

Sometimes it seems Korean scriptophiles are more eager to export their alphabet than they are to export what is a much more sensible package: their language, written with such a superbly designed script (superbly designed, that is, for Korean -- not Jia-Jia or whatever).

All very impractical and unrealistic: the author of the article hit it on the head with 'quixotic'. 

Sure, hangul was adapted to write Manchu, Mongol, Japanese and Mandarin during Chosŏn (darn those pesky breves), but always for speakers (and readers) of Korean.

RK

> People who recall the discussion of the use of Hangul among the  
> Jia-Jia people in Indonesia might be interested in the reporting of  
> Choe Sang-Hun in this morning's NY Times. See the link below.
> 
> Gari Ledyard
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/12/world/asia/12script.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Korean%20alphabet%20/%20Indonesia&st=cse
> 
>



--
Ross King
Professor of Korean and Head,
Department of Asian Studies, 
University of British Columbia, 

and 

Dean, Korean Language Village, 
Concordia Language Villages

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