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| Indonesian tribe to adopt Korean alphabet | |||
| 2009-08-07 | |||
| A small Indonesian tribe which has no written version of its language has decided to adopt the Korean alphabet known as Hangeul, a scholar involved in the project said on Thursday. That makes sense. Of a sort. I guess.
Lee told AFP the Cia-Cia tribe in Bau-Bau city on Buton island in southeast Sulawesi has adopted the script to transcribe its aboriginal language. He said the city on July 21 began teaching students the alphabet based on textbooks created by the Hunminjeongeum Research Institute, a linguistic society in Seoul. 'The Cia-Cia are now able to preserve their native language,' said Lee, an institute member who played a key role in creating the textbooks, describing the case as 'historic.'
The decision 'reflects our efforts for years to spread Hangeul abroad. The tribe also wanted to promote economic and cultural exchanges with our country,' he added. The institute has promised to start work in November on a cultural centre for the tribe, to train language teachers and to support cultural exchanges. It has been trying for years to spread the Korean alphabet to minority tribes across Asia who lack their own writing system. Indonesia uses the Roman alphabet for its national language Bahasa Indonesia. "Bahasa" means "language" in Indonesian (and Malay). In the language game we usually refer to bahasa Indonesia as "Indonesian." Koreans are intensely proud of their 24-character Hangeul alphabet, which was introduced by King Sejong the Great around 1443 to supersede the use of Chinese characters. Presumably it's sufficiently better suited to representing the sounds of the Cia Cia language than is the Latin alphabet to make up for the difficulties engendered by having to abruptly switch alphabets when traveling to Bau Bau city in Cia Cia land on the Isle of Button...
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| Posted by:Fred |
| #9 Being literate in a language understood by only a few thousand people isn't much of an advantage in this crowded world. Wind-Talkers. |
| Posted by: Pappy 2009-08-07 21:52 |
| #8 --- Phonetic writing has an inherent advantage over pictographic writing, when a couple dozen characters can be used to generate every possible utterance, vs. needing to memorize several thousand pictographs for basic written communication. English started out phonetic, but as it evolved & sucked in elements from other languages, written English became less & less phonetic in character. So, dyslexics have a really hard time with literacy in English. Written Italian puts great emphasis on matching characters to pronunciation, so there are far fewer dyslexic Italian children. --- Some of the old Grecian alphabetical characters were actually shaped to picture the way they were pronounced: the character for "O-mega" is a pictograph of the shape of your mouth as you are saying the sound, and the character for "theta" looks like your tongue placed below your incisors to make the sound of the "th" sound signified. If you use your imagination, a wide open mouth saying "Aaah" resembles a capital "A". --- China has been literate for so long, and the country is so large, that by now different spoken languages have evolved and are not mutually intelligible, so a pictographic language has the advantage of being useful when Chinese speaking different languages want to communicate. Plays on words and musical language usages like poetry may not work too well in those cases. --- There are only so many sounds human beings can produce with their vocal tract. Matching any alphabet to any verbal utterance is just arbitrary, there is no reason the Latin alphabet couldn't have been used for the Cia-Cia tribe, just as long as a given combination of characters is consistently used to match the sounds of their language. --- In the US, some missionaries to the Indians found they were able to teach adult Indians to read in their tribal languages rather easily using the Latin alphabet to more or less match the sounds of the native language. There were other instances of natives in the USA(besides Cherokees) devising their own alphabets and creating their own written languages. Unfortunately the problem for the tribes was not illiteracy, but inability to communicate in English. Teaching spoken English to natives was always difficult. Being literate in a language understood by only a few thousand people isn't much of an advantage in this crowded world. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2009-08-07 17:01 |
| #7 Indonesian tribe to adopt Korean alphabet ... Probably Hyundai gave them fleet prices on vehicle purchases. |
| Posted by: BigEd 2009-08-07 16:37 |
| #6 I hear their native dances are spectacular. |
| Posted by: Grunter 2009-08-07 16:20 |
| #5 CIA-CIA tribe? doubly incompetent |
| Posted by: Slomoter Sproing9775 2009-08-07 13:02 |
| #4 Meant unique in Asia, Parabellum - where Chinese pictograms usually rule. I wasn't forgetting the Cherokee. Just that they weren't living in Asia when a very clever member of the tribe worked out an alphabet for their language. |
| Posted by: Sgt. Mom 2009-08-07 10:56 |
| #3 IIRC, being phonetic (a relatively small number of symbols signifying a particular sound) is unique in Asia Sorry Mom, you forgot about my neighbors, the Cherokee. |
| Posted by: Parabellum 2009-08-07 08:57 |
| #2 IIRC, being phonetic (a relatively small number of symbols signifying a particular sound) is unique in Asia, being credited as the creation of one of their early kings. Vietnamese also has an alphabet, derived from the western alphabet and created by a French scholar-priest early in the Colonial period. Although widely used, Chinese and Japanese are pictographic - and so there are thousands of specific symbols - which makes it very difficult to learn, and costly to typeset! |
| Posted by: Sgt. Mom 2009-08-07 08:47 |
| #1 When working in Korea, I found the need to learn to read the language. I was surprised at how quickly I was able to learn to read signs, etc. Plus I had a whole country that was delighted to help, and I have not found Koreans otherwise overly well endowed in the helping out of others category. The next step, character group comprehension and cross-linking to English took longer, but the basic structure of the language was sound. Much easier than Japanese, and much much easier than Chinese. Might also be easier than English. My 2 cents. |
| Posted by: Whiskey Mike 2009-08-07 04:12 |