Living with complexity ->
The tension between power and ease of learning is not easily
overcome. In some languages, the relationship between the character and the sound is direct and straightforward. In others, the
relationship seems bizarre and arbitrary, with English being probably the worst example of arbitrary spelling and pronunciation.
Some languages have a carefully designed alphabet. For example, the Hangul alphabet of Korea was carefully designed in
the fifteenth century by the Emperor and a committee of linguists 24 Chapter 1
(but continually refined even during the mid-twentieth century) to
have fourteen symbols for the consonants of the language plus ten
symbols for the vowels. Words are formed by arranging the characters into blocks, each comprised of three or four consonantvowel-consonant groupings. Although the result looks a bit like
a Chinese character, it is composed of alphabetic symbols, which
means that the pronunciation of new words can be figured out,
something that is not true with Chinese characters. Native Korean
speakers perceive this to be so easy and elegant that they claim
the alphabet can be mastered in fifteen minutes. One authoritative
book by a linguist is entitled “You can learn the Korean alphabet in
one morning.” These claims are highly exaggerated.
Example: The sounds corresponding to the six English letters
of the word “Hangul” are represented by the six Hangul characters
“ㅎ,” “ㅏ,” “ㄴ,” “ㄱ,” “ㅡ,” and “ㄹ.” These characters are written in
two blocks of three characters each as “한글.”
I write this paragraph while I am in Daejeon, South Korea,
where I have been struggling for weeks to learn Hangul, the Korean alphabet. Other non-Koreans confirm that this is how long
it took them. Why is it so difficult? Yes, the alphabet is designed
elegantly. But all languages have their subtleties of pronunciation
and it is difficult for a writing system to capture all of the spoken
sounds. English has twenty-six letters in its alphabet, but the rules
of English spelling and pronunciation are incredibly complex: even
native speakers make mistakes. The Korean alphabet, in addition
to its ten vowels and fourteen consonants, has eleven additional
vowel symbols derived from combinations of the basic vowels, five
double consonants, which have their own rules, and then eleven
more combined consonant rules.Living with Complexity 25
In all, there are fifty-one different symbols to be learned, and
although scholars insist the shapes are not arbitrary because the
letter shapes are said to indicate the proper shape of the mouth
and tongue in creating the sounds or phonemes, in practice this
relationship is so subtle and abstract that for me at least, it plays
no role in learning. Hard to learn? Complex? Yup.
Don’t blame Korea for this complexity: it really does have one
of the most logical and elegant of all alphabets. Blame the world.
Languages have evolved over thousands of years and all have developed shortcuts, borrowed forms, special cases of grammar and
pronunciation. No simple alphabet or syllabary can completely
capture its inherent complexity.
This is the way of all human languages. Wonderfully expressive, wonderfully powerful. The invention of writing has enhanced
our lives immensely. Writing allows knowledge, thoughts, stories,
and poetry to be saved for others. It allows the dissemination of
knowledge across space and time. It is the invention of artifacts
such as writing that makes us smart: it is things that make us
smart, things including inventions such as writing and reading.
But the written marks on paper are so very different from the
spoken sounds of a language that the apparent contradictions and
complexities are inevitable. The spoken language is natural, learnable by anyone. The written language is arbitrary and capricious,
difficult to learn, with a surprisin
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