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?