Happy Hangul Day!

The day may be nearly over for those of you who are reading this in South Korea but I wanted to wish all Korean readers (and learners) “Happy Hangul Day”. Hangul Day (한글날), which is celebrated on October 9 in South Korea and on January 15 in North Korea, is a national commemoration day which celebrates the invention of the hangul alphabet. The Korean alphabet is said to have been invented by King Sejong the Great (세종대왕; 世宗大王) in the fifteenth century and it is generally accepted that the alphabet made its debut in 1446 in the document Hunmin Jeongeum (훈민정음;訓民正音).

Hyunwoo Sun, author of the blog Send Me to Korea,  asked readers from around the world to send in short messages written in the hangul alphabet. The video below is a montage of the messages he received.

More information on Hangul Day and the origins of the hangul alphabet can be found below :

• Wikipedia : Hangul Day
• Language Log: Hangul Day
• The Korea Herald : Why We Celebrate Korean Alphabet Day

Indonesian Tribe Adopts Hangul Alphabet

Here’s an interesting piece of news I stumbled upon today.

A minority population in Indonesia officially adopted Hangul, the Korean written alphabet, to transcribe their spoken language of Cia-Cia. It is the first time that foreigners have adopted Hangul as their official writing system.

According to the Hunminjeongeum Research Institute, the Cia-Cia live in Bau-Bau, the main city on Buton Island located in the Sulawesi province of Indonesia. The city began distributing textbooks written in Hangul on July 22 to 400 elementary students in the Sorawolio district where many Cia-Cia people live.

The 60 thousand member Cia-Cia tribe has been on the verge of a crisis regarding the disappearance of their language. They do not have a writing system to complement their spoken language. Members of the Hunminjeongeum Research Institute persuaded them to adopt Hangul, and established a memorandum of understanding with city officials to use Hangul on July 2008.

The Hunminjeongeum Research Institute invited two persons from the Cia-Cia tribe to Seoul to create a textbook written in Hangul. The textbook includes traditional Cia-Cia and Korean stories.

The Hunminjeongeum Research Institute and Bau-Bau City will build a Hangul Culture Center and plan to train teachers in Hangul. Kim Ju-won, the president of the Hunminjeongeum Research Institute, says “It is significant that Hangul can be used to prevent a minority language from disappearing.”

It’ll be interesting to see how this develops. I’ve heard that the Korean alphabet is one of the most efficient writing systems in the world but I wonder if it can be used effectively for another, non-Korean, language.

Linear B and Other Ancient Scripts

I’ve been doing a bit of background reading on Linear B and other early writing systems for an essay for my Later Prehistory course. Long-time readers will probably have heard me mention that I’m taking a series of introductory archaeology courses offered by the University of Leicester. The current course, Later Prehistory, tackles a rather wide range of cultures, including the Minoans, the Bronze age cultures of Europe, the early urban civilisations of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley and China, and the early states of the Americas (e.g. Olmecs, Maya).

Although I am only 1 week into this 12-week course, I have already begun to do some background reading and research for my essay. Students are given a small selection of essay titles to choose from and I’ve decided to choose the title which I felt would be an excellent way for me to combine my love for languages with my passion for archaeology : How did early writing systems differ in their material form and use within society? Discuss in relation to at least three writing systems. I haven’t made any firm decisions on the writing systems I’m choosing to focus on for this essay but Linear B is one of them. Other candidates include the oracle bone script of Shang Dynasty China, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform.

I’m currently reading through John Chadwick’s Linear B and Related Scripts to get a better idea of how the Linear B script was used in Minoan society. One thing that becomes clear very early on in the book is that Linear B was used almost exclusively for administrative purposes. There is no evidence as yet to suggest that the script was ever used for historical or “recreational” purposes, which sets it apart from other ancient languages such as cuneiform and Ancient Greek, which were used for writing down their myths and were used for diplomatic affairs. The decipherment  of Linear B was quite a breakthrough in the understanding of the rise (and fall) of Minoan civilization. I found a copy of Andrew Robinson’s biography of Michael Ventris, The Man Who Deciphered Linear B, in the Amsterdam Public Library (Openbare Bibliotheek Amsterdam), which I will read as soon as I have finished reading Chadwick’s book. Once I have finished reading both of those books, I will move on to Steven Roger Fischer’s A History of Writing and Lesley Adkin’s book Empires of the Plain. Needless to say, I’m going to be quite busy for the next few weeks!

A to Z Challenge Update – I’m still working through Alan R. King’s The Basque Language. I’m trying to memorise some of the dialogues he’s used in the book using the sentence method and am trying to dissect each sentence in order to consolidate everything I’ve learnt so far. It’s good to see that I can finally understand basic sentences and am getting to grips with the case endings. If only the verbs were as straightforward…

Mystery Script

I took this photo during a recent trip to the Louvre but I forgot to make a note of what script is used on this tablet. I’ve tried comparing it with some of the scripts listed on AncientScripts.Com and it looks like it could be Nabatean or Avestan but it’s quite likely that it’s neither…

Does anyone know what language this is? If you do, please let me know.