Interesting. Before Hangul Koreans used Idu which was the use of Chinese characters to represent either the meaning of the word or the pronunciation of the word, and you had to know which was which. You really had be a scholar to read texts in Idu. I took a class on it in college and I can understand Sejong's desire for a new script.

Seems like Latin script would be a better choice because more people would be able to read it. Hangul probably is better suited for phonetics. I guess by adopting an existing script they can leverage existing fonts and encoding. I guess the Korean tourism to Indonesia might pick up a little

It's <한글>.


The Cia-Cia are just 1 tiny minority of the 300+ ethnic groups of Indonesian. Their language is the only 1 which will use Hangul. The sole official language of the nation will still be Indonesian. So, it's not like if you go to Indonesia there will be Hangul everywhere. The only place you'd possibly see it is in a city called Bau-Bau in South East Sulawesi.

Hangul's just as flexible as any other script, and would work - or at least could work - as well as Latin. I imagine there's a certain amount of ethnic pride in having one's own script: "We speak a real language, not just another dialect" kind of thing. The problem is that Cia-Cia hangul is not fully Unicode compatible--the word 'television' in the newspaper articles, for example, uses an archaic letter for /v/, which is not supported in any precomposed blocks, so that /vi/ has to be written with isolated glyphs for /v/ and /i/. (But then I never understood why Unicode sacrificed 11,500 of its 68,000 codings for an alphabet of 24 letters in the first place--this was done before there were separate planes, and the extra planes were only required because the Commission screwed up unicodifying Chinese and IMO hangul.)

Does anyone have access to an account of the Cia-Cia phonemic inventory at their local university library? It would be nice to be able to figure out how hangul was adapted to Cia-Cia, pending communication from the Hangul Society in Seoul. For example, it's apparent that the doubled consonants are voiceless/tenuis in Cia-Cia. The single consonants might be implosive, as implosive b and d are more common in Cia-Cia than the plain voiced consonants (there is no implosive g), which would suggest that the hangul aspirates are plain voiced /b, d/ in Cia-Cia - a rather unexpected situation. Or maybe voiced is not distinguished from implosive, in which case I wonder what the uncommon aspirate letters are for? Rieul for /r/, and - as someone noted here - double rieul for /l/, except finally, when single rieul is /l/, and /r/ is spelled as a separate syllable reu. Similarly, /sC/ clusters are written with a separate syllable seu before the C, despite the fact that hangul is perfectly capable of handling consonant clusters, if we weren't concerned about Unicode support. But how are /l/ and /r/ distinguished word initially, since double rieul doesn't appear as an onset? How is glottal stop written, or is it not distinguished from hiatus? (There's an old hangul letter for that too, but evidently the only obsolete letter that was resurrected was /v/.) Does ng never occur initially in Cia-Cia, or is that a problem too?

Is anyone in contact with the Hangul Society, so they can address this directly? I've written the university, but they haven't responded.

Actually, the Society is trying to get the other ethnoi on Buton island to adopt hangul as well. I wonder how much of the motivation is the script, and how much is receiving favours.

*Slaps forehead* I got it mixed up! XD



300?! Damn! I never knew there were that many until now. So all the rest of the 300 minority groups just use the Latin Alphabet for their languages?

Lord help them please! English needs a prettier writing system.

I disagree. How could one use Hangul to write sounds which don't occur in Korean, such as radical consonants? What about vowels other than those of Korean like [ʉ] or [ɒ]? With Latin there's already a myriad of letters & diacritics encoded in Unicode to write any sounds of any language.



Not all 300 of them are considered minorities, although there is no ethnic majority. Even the Javanese, the largest ethnic group, comprise less than 45% of Indonesia's population.
Although many of the ethnic languages, including Javanese, Sundanese, Batak, Buginese, Makassarese, & Balinese, were originally written with brahmic abugidas they all adopted Latin after Dutch colonization.

The same way Latin does, through modification, diacritics, and digraphs. After all, Cia-Cia has a /v/, which is not found in Korean. Remember, Latin originally had only 20 letters. It was expanded over time--G is just C with a cross-bar diacritic. Korean originally had 48 letters (many that were used only for Chinese are now obsolete, like the one resurrected for Cia-Cia /v/), plus at least 55 vowel digraphs and trigraphs like modern ae and we. You could do a lot with a system like that. And that's not even counting consonant digraphs - I count 78 hangul CC digraphs and 16 trigraphs, but there's no reason you couldn't create as many as you like: I mean, look at German dtsch. You'd have to create new OpenType fonts for all those new syllabic blocks, but it's certainly workable. On the other hand, I have a suspicion that the Hangul Society may be interested in keeping the system as much like Modern Standard Korean as possible, which would definitely limit things in the ways you said. But still, hangul started off with more vowel letters and more consonant letters than Latin or Greek.


At least Javanese and Balinese are still written that way. Children still learn it in school, though they don't get much practice using it, even though it's still found all over the palaces and temples. Batak and several other languages still use their scripts as well, though in many cases they may be no more robust than Arabic is in Hausa and Turkish. But the choice is there: if, say, the Toba wanted to assert their cultural independence, they could move to switch from Latin to batak full time. And remember, Malay (and maybe Acehnese?) was once written in jawi. I'm not sure it's just pressure from the national culture for Latin, because for small cultures, a technologically established script like Latin just more practical: all the technology and infrastructure is already in place. You can't use batak for email, and it would be a pain to even get a newspaper published. But if the desire is there, they could get it done, and the tech is getting easier and more inclusive all the time.

Sure, the kids learn those scripts in schools but nobody actually uses them in standard writing. There are no newspapers, magazines, books, or anything printed using those scripts. Latin has supplanted them.
Interestingly enough, however, Unicode support for Javanese is pending. Maybe if it gets added people will start using it. It's a beautiful script.


Doesn't Brunei still use Jawi? I think it's all over their banknotes.

Actually some words were probably borrowed and corrupted into those languages before the mass importation of words. Out of Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese - I'd say Vietnamese is the most suited due to tonality, monosyllablism, relatively similar sounds etc. In fact, whereas the other two had to develop new systems of writing (albeit from Chinese), Vietnamese's system mimicked that of Chinese (certain Vietnamese characters look very Chinese).

Anyway back to the topic, I agree that Hangul is quite suited to Korean, but not very suitable to a lot of languages. I think using the Latin alphabet (or a modified version) has been so successful because of the sheer number of languages using it, and because different languages can assign different sounds to a letter.

Amen. I have based numerous conscripts on it. It's a shame that it's not the official writing system. That's just wrong. Although have seen it used in signs.

I wonder if it's making a really really slow come back?