{"id":426,"date":"2009-10-09T21:40:23","date_gmt":"2009-10-09T21:40:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/?p=426"},"modified":"2009-10-13T16:48:16","modified_gmt":"2009-10-13T16:48:16","slug":"hangul-and-native-languages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/09\/hangul-and-native-languages\/","title":{"rendered":"Hangul and native languages"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Following my earlier <a href=\"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/09\/happy-hangul-day\/\">post<\/a> about Hangul Day, or Korean Alphabet Day, I was reading further about the alphabet.<\/p>\n<p>The Koreans have immense pride in their alphabet, and are keen to share it. One woman also thinks Hangul\u2019s use can be extended outside of Korea. The <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hunminjeongeum_Society\">Hunminjeongeum Research Institute<\/a> was founded by Lee Ki-nam in 2007, and aims to apply Hangul to native languages which are becoming extinct due to a lack of their own writing system. Currently, the Institute has a memorandum of understanding with the city of Bau-Bau of southwestern Indonesia to use Hangul, and it is being used by the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.indonesiatraveling.com\/Indonesia%20traveling%20over%20Land\/pages_sulawesi\/tribes4.htm\">Cia-Cia tribe<\/a> to transcribe their language.<\/p>\n<p>There are some issues surrounding the project however:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In Indonesia, where the government is encouraging its 240 million people to learn a \u201clanguage of unity,\u201d Bahasa Indonesia, for effective communication among a vast array of ethnic groups, Ms. Lee\u2019s project raises delicate issues.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf this is a kind of hobby, that\u2019s fine,\u201d Nicholas T. Dammen, the Indonesian ambassador to South Korea, said recently, referring to the decision by the Cia-Cia ethnic minority to adopt Hangul. \u201cBut they don\u2019t need to import the Hangul characters. They can always write their local languages in the Roman characters.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Shin Eun-hyang, an official at the Korean language division of the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism in Seoul, said: \u201cThis is diplomatically sensitive. The government is limited in how much direct support it can provide to such projects.\u201d<br \/>\nThe government says it does not provide money to Ms. Lee\u2019s group, but she said it offered indirect support by giving linguists grants to pursue their work, which can include teaching Hangul abroad. (Source: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/09\/12\/world\/asia\/12script.html\">New York Times<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Read more about the <a href=\"http:\/\/english.chosun.com\/site\/data\/html_dir\/2009\/08\/07\/2009080700325.html \">Cia-Cia project<\/a>, and the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2009\/09\/12\/world\/asia\/12script.html\">full article<\/a> from the New York Times. What do you think? Is it appropriate to apply the Korean alphabet to completely different languages?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Following my earlier post about Hangul Day, or Korean Alphabet Day, I was reading further about the alphabet. The Koreans have immense pride in their alphabet, and are keen to share it. One woman also thinks Hangul\u2019s use can be extended outside of Korea. The Hunminjeongeum Research Institute was founded by Lee Ki-nam in 2007, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,100,99,295,40],"tags":[300,302,297,290,299,291,296,298,206,301],"class_list":["post-426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alphabet","category-culture","category-indigenous-languages","category-korean","category-language-acquisition","tag-cia-cia-tribe","tag-communication","tag-hangul","tag-hangul-day","tag-indonesia","tag-korean-alphabet-day","tag-koreans","tag-lee-ki-nam","tag-native-languages","tag-writing-system"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=426"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":427,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426\/revisions\/427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}