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

[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'?")