At the Seoul conference (blog, yesterday) the Koreans were very proud to be able to draw to our attention the first use of the Korean writing system for a language other than Korean itself: namely for the language Cia-cia.This is an Austronesian language spoken in and around the town of Bau-Bau on Buton island off the coast of Sulawesi in Indonesia.
My former PhD student Lee Ho-young (pictured), now professor of phonetics at Seoul National University, tells me that he was one of the main activists behind this achievement. He helped produce literacy materials including a textbook. Read more here. With one exception, the Cia-Cia phonemes can be mapped onto a subset of those of Korean and are therefore written the same way. The exception is the fricative /v/, which is not found in contemporary Korean, but for which Lee resurrected the obsolete hangul jamo (or Korean letter) ᄫ (U+112B). (ᄫ was used as a symbol for the voiced bilabial fricative.)
The Cia-Cia implosives /ɓ/ and /ɗ/ are written with standard hangul jamo, as ㅍ and ㅌ. So the series /t, d, ɗ/ are written with the jamo that in Korean stand for /t*, t~d, th/ respectively, namely ㄸ, ㄷ, ㅌ.
The Cia-Cia word for ‘television’ is borrowed from Indonesian televisi, and is now written 뗄레ᄫㅣ시. (Actually that’s not exactly how it's written: the β jamo ᄫ and its following vowel ㅣ ought to be written within a single character space, but I’m not sure how to achieve that on my computer.)
Note the Korean-style treatment of /l/, written as double ᄙ and straddling two character spaces.
Hangul is a fantastic alphabet and, as much as I enjoy the way it stacks, it isn't great for writing consonant clusters.
ReplyDeleteA CC cluster works, but that is limited to consonants that can appear next to each other in Korean (i.e. not many). A CCC cluster is not possible and would not be easy to read.
Nevertheless, for me, Hangul completely loses its appeal written as standalone characters. Urgh!
On my computer, if I type ᄫᅵ it gives the desired effect, I think. So that's U+112B U+1175. The two characters automatically merge so I can't select them separately. (But maybe it will be ruined when I click submit? I don't trust web browsers, especially not Firefox.)
ReplyDeleteA CC cluster works, but that is limited to consonants that can appear next to each other in Korean (i.e. not many). A CCC cluster is not possible and would not be easy to read.
ReplyDeleteThere are lots of Middle Korean CCC clusters in Unicode.
On my computer, if I type ᄫᅵ it gives the desired effect, I think.
Doesn't appear correctly on mine (IE8 for Windows XP).
It works for me. IE8 on Win7.
ReplyDelete