character sets and names

[alexr_rwx]

I just had an interesting conversation with one of my colleagues, who's Korean. When working with English, he likes to write his first name in BiCaps, because he wants to emphasize that it's a compound word. Korean names apparently usually correspond to Hanzi, and on some official documents, you're supposed to write your name with the Chinese characters (or maybe, more accurately, Hanja). They disambiguate more than the phonetic Korean characters, he explains, and have the meaning of your name written down right there.

So, his means like East + Patience/Endurance. (now you know which of my colleagues it is?) Also there's some meaning encoded in the number of strokes used to write your name with the Hanzi Hanja.

He was pretty surprised that I knew there was such a thing as Hangul, the Korean phonetic character set. ... maybe that's the sort of thing that people should learn in school, that there exists a native Korean character set, and it's called Hangul, and basically what it looks like?

What do you think?

Comments

CJK, FTW!

[winterkoninkje.livejournal.com]

FWIW, Hanja (Korean) /= Hanzi (Chinese) /= Kanji (Japanese). Originally, Hanja and Kanji were borrowed from Hanzi, but they each underwent different forms of simplification, so they contain different characters (though there's a lot of etymological overlap). Of course, these days Hanzi /= Hanzi too, since mainland China decided to simplify Chinese script as well. Though SImplified Chinese is, by far, the most different of the four.

Anyone who's taken general/intro linguistics (or intro NLP) should be aware of Hangeul as well as Arabic, Dravidic, and other common non-Roman scripts. And I'm certainly a fan of adding general linguistics to the K-12 curriculum >;)

Re: CJK, FTW!

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

Hanja isn't Hanzi for sure, but apparently there's enough overlap where DongInn can write things down for Chinese people, when he finds himself having a language barrier and he wants to clarify something -- I wonder if it's common to learn a lot of Hanja characters, for Koreans? He said he knows about a thousand.

That would be extremely awesome to get some linguistics in the K-12 curriculum. Or even a social studies class like "here are some of the world's languages and what they sound and look like". How do we do that?

[markluffel.livejournal.com]

Writing systems are awesome! Do you think that a child growing up in NYC would learn what Hangul, Arabic, Hanzi, etc look like? Maybe only students who grow up in "culturally deprived areas" would need formal foreign-script-identification training.

My little brother watches sci-fi themed cartoons that include signage written in made-up alien languages. Maybe we can petition the creators of those shows to replace the alien script with Hangul. It would still be inscrutable to the average elementary-school-aged American, and they'd be learning. Maybe.

Also "The Routledge Handbook of Scripts and Alphabets" is a nice compact survey of important scripts. (It's expensive for such a tiny book $150+ for the hardcover, but you can find a used paperback version for < $10)

[oniugnip.livejournal.com]

Yeah! I guess you would see a bunch of different scripts growing up in New York -- or near Buford Highway, for that matter.

It's an interesting idea, showing kids different character sets on TV, although I think it'd be likely to offend people who use that character set, if it's in a sci-fi context...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quechua#In_popular_culture

"Your language is so weird, it could only be used by aliens!"

Maybe something like a Sesame Street context? ("Can you say 'katakana'?")

[lindseykuper]

You asked me why I thought this post was hard to understand, so here goes. Warning: hair splitting ahead!

"Korean names apparently usually correspond to Hanzi"

What does it mean to say that a name corresponds to a writing system?

"and on some official documents, you're supposed to write your name with the Chinese characters"

You say "the" Chinese characters as if we're supposed to know which ones you're talking about, but this is the first time you've mentioned Chinese characters, unless we happen to have followed the link for Hanzi.

"Also there's apparently some meaning encoded in the number of strokes used to write your name with the Hanzi. And his means like East + Patience/Endurance."

So are you saying that "East + Patience/Endurance" is the meaning encoded in the number of strokes? Or is that the meaning of his name regardless of the number of strokes used? If so, why'd you bring it up right after talking about number of strokes?