scriptacular #1

a rambling meditation on hangul, yin/yang & cosmic death

This is one of those times when I feel inclined to begin with a disclaimer. I'm about to ramble on the topic of 'beautiful scripts', with extremely lengthy tangents about taoism, entropy, phonology and the End of The World. I want to preface this by saying that I definitely don't consider myself an expert on any of these subjects. I just have the urge to go blah about a bunch of cool stuff I've learned, purely for the pleasure of it.

The original idea was just to tell you about hangul (Korean writing), but the more I wrote, the more my thoughts wandered in a dozen other directions. Hope that at least a few of you will be entertained by it.

So, hangul. It had to be top of my list of cool scripts, because it has consistently blown not only my mind, but also the minds of linguists and scholars. Frankly, I'd be quite surprised to learn of another writing system that makes me go "That's awesome!" as much as this one does.

The first thing you need to know about hangul is that, before it was devised, Korea was basically an illiterate country. There had been an indigenous language there for centuries, but it was written using the nightmarishly complex Chinese alphabet.

This was a problem.

Chinese writing has some odd characteristics, one of which is that it doesn't aim to match one character to one sound. Instead the focus is on matching symbols to sets of related concepts. So the symbol for "moon" might also appear in the word for "Monday", though the two words may not sound alike. (I actually don't know whether they sound alike or not; it's just a convenient example.)

The fabulously confusing flipside of this is that a completely unrelated symbol – or indeed lots of completely unrelated symbols – can represent the same sound in different environments. One instance of, say, the sound "wa" won't be conceptually related to another instance, so the two "wa"s will be written differently.

If you're confused at this point, believe me I can empathise! I had to learn a bunch of these symbols when I studied Japanese (which also uses them, much to my annoyance), and it was a huge distraction from actually learning how to use the language. But anyway, what I said above very roughly explains why there are so incredibly many Chinese characters. It's also why, if you jumped into a time machine and set it for "Korean Peninsula, mid-15th Century", then rounded up the entire literate population there, you'd find yourself hanging out with a few members of the nobility (all male) and pretty much no-one else.

A ruler called King Sejong stepped in around that time and did something that proved to be a massive turning point for his people. He basically said "Look, this is just insane! We've gotta have an alphabet that people can f!#$%ing read!"

(Note: historical accounts suggest that Sejong may have used slightly more restrained and statesmanlike terms in his original speech than in this dramatised recreation.)

Assembling a team of scholars, Sejong tasked them with developing a simple alphabet that represented all the sounds in the Korean language. "It'll be f!#$%ing brilliant!", he predicted (again slightly paraphrased). And I probably don't need to tell you the result: a revolution in literacy, dragging Korean culture and industry into the modern age. It was a masterstroke, for which the South Koreans now honour their former leader by putting his face on their money and by celebrating the 'birthday' of his alphabet every November.

So yeah ... rock on, Sejong.

But the thing I like most about hangul is that, when these eminent scholars put their brains together and started trying to suck a new writing system out of the combined grey mass, the result was more than just a logical and functional sytem. It was, if you ask me (and many others), a thing of true elegance and beauty.

The creators of Hangul were all more or less down with the tenets of Confucianism and Taoism, and at some point, they had the bright idea of threading the Taoist yin-yang concept into their brand new sexy alphabet. In fact they used it as the main tool to map the contrast between different vowel sounds.

I personally think this is just about the coolest thing ever in the history of alphabets. Why? Well, because yin/yang is an awesome idea. In its simplest form, it basically goes like this: if you want insight into the nature of the world we live in (and beyond it), you should think about the 'interplay of opposites'. Taoists see it in just about everything, from the movements of the heavens to the contrast between sounds in a language.

Granted, you may be thinking that this 'opposites attract' view of the universe sounds about as deep as a Paula Abdul song (ie. horribly, depressingly twee and simplistic). And taking it at a surface, New-Age-bumper-sticker level, I kind of agree with you. At a deeper level, though, I actually think it's a fairly profound observation. To get a feel for how it all works, you can try ploughing through the impenetrable words of mystics ... or, if you prefer, you can do a Fritjof Capra* and look at the physical world instead. Depending on my mood, I generally opt for the second one.

Let me give you one example of why.

First of all, any half-decent analysis of the universe will note that one of its main characteristics is huge contrasts in temperature. Stars are unbelievably hot; space is pretty damn cold. Magma is frikkin' boiling (which makes it responsible for a lot of terrestrial landscapes); ice is freezing (which accounts for quite a few of the others).

Again, we may seem to be in "So freakin' what?" territory here, but in fact we're on the doorstep of "Ooooh, how bizarre!" (or at least I think so). It turns out that not only are these temperature differences an essential property of a cosmos with differentiation (i.e. with actual stuff in it), but that they're also among the main driving forces of creation. They allow solar systems and planetary features to form, which in turn allows life to develop. In other words, take away the hot-cold contrast and you wouldn't have anything in the universe.

The formation of stars, which happened very early in cosmic history, is a case in point. If there had been no such thing as 'hot' or 'cold', you could never have ended up with hot stars hanging in a cold void. And the implications of that are just stupefyingly huge, because stars are the sole source of most chemical elements, making them the number one prerequisite for pretty much any other thing you can think of. (Go on, try it out: No stars, no cheese! No stars, no Marquis de Sade! No stars, no irritating small dogs! No stars, no harmonicas! See, it's all good fun.)

So yeah ... this pair of opposites is clearly quite important.

It's even more important when you consider the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which underlies a lot of modern physics. In another of those "pretty damn obvious now that someone has pointed it out" moments, this law says that all things which are hotter than their surrounds release heat into those surrounds, and all things colder than their surrounds release cold. Over time, this means that temperature differences get smaller throughout the universe, as everything and everyone slides towards uniformity. This is the process of 'entropy' – a word which is now so famous** that it barely merits an inquisitive eyebrow-raise. But wait: there's a revelation in the fine print.

See, the astonishing prediction of this Second Law thingy is that the levelling out of temperatures can destroy objects. No, hold on a sec ... that's not quite right. I should've said that it will destroy objects. All objects, to be precise. As they lose their unique thermal signatures (their temperature), they'll just kind of merge with what's around them and become part of an indistinct mush. It's called "heat death", and it spells the end of the universe. I mean the real end – not some arbitrary date when Mayan calendar manufacturers ran out of paper and went "Bugger, what are we going to do with all the pictures of kittens we haven't used yet?", before deciding it would be funny just to print what they had and see whether movie producers and credulous folk would use it to try and scare the crap out of each other in centuries to come.

Short version: this is it, people. We're all gonna die.

Thankfully, though, it won't happen for a while. To see heat death with your own eyes, you'll need to hang around for another few billion years – and then, of course, you won't see it, because you'll be all mushy and formless as well, and hence rather lacking in the eye department.

(No heat, no eyes ... fun! ).

Oh well, never mind; you probably wouldn't enjoy it.

Once again, I realise that I've gone way, way off the point here. I just love all this wacky science stuff. I think my original intention was to say that, if you let the whole yin-yang / union of opposites thing roll around in your brain for a while, it begins to seem not so silly after all. And I've only mentioned only one pair of opposites. Imagine extrapolating this to try and calculate the importance of all the opposing qualities contained in the universe, and you get an idea of how yinnish and yangular (yinful and yangly? yintastic and yangalicious?) our existence really is.

But what exactly does all this have to do with writing systems?  

Well, heading back in vaguely the right direction: contrasts between opposing positions of the 'vocal apparatus' (your mouth, lips, throat and so on) are hugely important in forming the basic sounds of human languages. Vowels are essentially 'open' sounds, because when you produce one, you just let air come out of your mouth, without blocking or restricting it. Consonants are different (in fact they're the opposite), because they're 'closed' to various degrees. You form them by pushing air out of your lungs but then blocking it on the way out, either forcing it up through your nose or letting it go again after a fraction of a second. That's essentially what a consonant is: a puff of air trying to get out of you while you're saying "No!".

At a finer level of detail, vowels are described as being "high" or "low" and "front" or "back", because we make them by shaping our mouths differently to direct the airflow up, down, backward and forward, resulting in slightly different tones. And it's not an 'either/or' situation; some languages have huge vowel inventories, made possible by subtle degrees of balance between extreme opposite positions in the mouth.

Consonants, meanwhile, are partly distinguished by the degree of closure required to produce them. A 'stop' requires complete closure (try making an /m/ sound and you'll see what I mean), whereas a 'glide' (like the English /r/ sound) is almost open, and a 'fricative' requires partial but not complete closure to produce friction. (Try the /v/ sound and notice what's going on between your teeth and your bottom lip. This gives /v/ its slightly risqué-sounding technical name: the 'labio-dental fricative'.)

To sum up all that awful jargon: it's largely by choosing between opposite extremes of 'open' and 'closed', 'high' and 'low' etc. that we're able to make any sounds more distinctive and sophisticated than the one our dentist wants to hear before he starts invading our mouths with terrifying pieces of equipment.

The scholars who put the hangul system together knew all of this linguistic stuff of course. Being Taoists, they would've seen it as confirmation that language reflects other cosmic and natural processes governed by the yin and the yang. Hence their decision to represent a spiritual concept in a writing system.

So about these characters, then: all the vowels in hangul are based around three essential strokes. A horizontal line represents the Earth, the essence of yin. A dot much higher up represents the Sun in the sky, the essence of yang. (This usually becomes a short diagonal line, like a serif connected to the vertical, when the character is drawn using a brush.) Then there's the third stroke, a vertical line representing an upright human form, mediating between these two cosmic forces.

All of this was meant to reflect the idea that human language mirrors nature at a fundamental level, which at the time seemed to make it the perfect tool for gaining a better understanding of what the Hell is going on out there. (Btw, mathematicians now make a similar claim about their arcana of symbols, saying that they describe a 'language of nature'. You could see this, I think, as the modern equivalent of what the Korean scholars were getting at.)

And here's where the technical side of things starts to get a bit clever. If the vowel is iotated***, this is shown by throwing in a second vertical or horizontal stroke, parallel to the first. In this way, the written forms of the letters actually function as a guide to how they're pronounced: when you see the extra stroke, you know that you need to produce the /j/ sound which always begins an iotated vowel.

The consonants of hangul take this idea much further. Their shapes tell you which bits of your vocal apparatus you should use to stop the airflow when you form the sound. They also show how you should release the air, which is one of the main things that distinguishes different classes of consonants. For example, the symbol for /m/ shows two pursed lips, while the symbol for /p/ shows the same but with two squiggly lines repesenting the explosive nature of the release. If you make these two sounds, you'll notice that your mouth starts off in basically the same position, but with the /p/ sound, you let out a little 'plosion' of air.

What you're doing here – and what you do every time you make an /m/ or a /p/ in your own language – is clearly illustrated in Korean characters. Isn't that cool?

Btw, one of the reasons I love this is because it helps to achieve the main goal of hangul. Sejong's position was pretty clear: he wanted to take reading and writing – and hence education – out of the hands of affluent nobles, and put it into the hands of the 'common man'. And if you've got an alphabet that visually reminds you of how to read it, that goes a long way towards achieving this mission. In a sense, you might even argue that this was one of the great socialist projects of history. But to combine such a pragmatic socialist idea with the airy, abstract spiritual concepts of Taoism is just ... well, it's just weird and admirable and (if you ask me) pretty inspired.

One last thing before I finally stop ranting about hangul. In the last entry I mentioned the distinction between an alphabet and a syllabary. In an alphabet, one character is supposed to represent one sound (though if you consider English words like "thought", which contains only three sounds but seven letters, you'll see that it doesn't always work out quite so neatly). In a syllabary, one character represents one syllable. 

The Japanese hiragana system is a classic example of a syllabary. If you look at the word on the right, you'll immediately notice that it has one character per syllable. This is true of all Japanese words written with indigenous characters (though there's an anomaly with the character for /n/, which doesn't quite fit the western definition of what a 'syllable' actually is). In a nutshell, this is how syllabaries work.

There are loads of these in the world, as well as loads of alphabets of course. But there aren't many writing systems which can claim to be both at the same time. In fact, I suspect hangul may be the only one.

An individual hangul symbol is called a jamo, which means "letter mother". In other words, these symbols aren't meant to be letters in themselves; rather they're the means of creating letters. It's done like this:

Obviously there's one syllable here, made up of three jamo all fused together into a single über-character. You start by reading the jamo at the top left, which is the consonant sound /h/ . Then you read the vowel /a/ on the right. Finally you go to the bottom and read the concluding consonant /n/. All Korean letters look like this, with the relative size of each jamo adjusted to work as harmoniously as possible with its neighbours. (The final consonant is often vertically squished – an /n/ in top-left position would have a much longer upright stroke.)

All fine and good, but there's a problem. The syllable 'han' has all its possible slots filled – there's an onset (a consonant at the beginning), a nucleus (i.e. a vowel) and a coda (a consonant which rounds off the syllable). But what if one of these things is missing? If you look at the word "angel", you can see that the first syllable has no consonant at the start; in phonological terms, it lacks an onset. How do you stop that from wrecking your beautiful system?

Well, if you're one of Sejong's dream team, you've got a devilishly simple answer for this up your sleeve: just throw a circle into the top left position, to indicate 'empty slot'. Solved :-)

In final position, btw, a circle will have a different sound: you read it like the "-ng" in "sing", because that's the shape you form inside your mouth when you want to make an "-ng" sound at the end of a syllable. But if it's in first position, you get characters like the one on the right. It reads

top left consonant: --
vowel (right): a
final consonant: n

And that's how you get an alphabet and a syllabary rolled into one. Pretty clever, no?

To finish off, let me give you one more jamo: the vowel "yeo", which you can see here on the left. With this in your arsenal, you should now have enough information to be able to say "Hi" in Korean, using your newly-acquired reading skills.

Remember that:

- consonants in top left position are tall and thin
- consonants in final position are short and fat, as though
   someone has sat on them
- a circle in top left position is silent, whereas in final position
   it sounds like "-ng".

  

So .. how did you go?

I'm going to shut up now, but I'll continue this series of entries soon with some cool squiggly wiggly scripts and a little ramble (or possibly a very long one) about Cyrillic. After that, I'm planning to tell you about the eerie similarities between Macquarie University (in Sydney) and the militsia in Odessa. 

In the meantime ... Merry Western Christmas, and Praise be to Magic Woody Allen Komodo Dragon Zombie Jesus!****

Bye )))

* Capra was the guy who wrote the super-bestselling book 'The Tao of Physics', which meditates in detail on connections between the tenets of eastern spirituality and the theories of modern science.

** Just wanted to say that entropy is number #1 on the list of things regrettably made famous by annoying Americans, and thereby unfairly stripped of credibility. No #2 is Kabbalah. It's a shame, because in fact they're both quite serious, cool and profound. As it happens, Kabbalah actually represents my personal road into this kind of cosmic speculation, because it shares the Taoist pre-occupation with the 'union of opposites', and I discovered it at quite an early age. Such a pity that it became associated later on with Madonna, Queen of Tosspots :-( 

*** Iotated vowels are basically vowels preceded by a /j/ sound. (/j/ is the phonetic symbol for the first sound in the word "yes", usually written with a "y" in English but also present in words like "Europe".) Lots of languages have them, and they're very handy because they can double your stock of vowels by creating pairs of related but distinct sounds. Ukrainian, for example, has ten vowels, of which eight are 'pairs': a/ja, e/je, i/ji and u/ju. (You'll notice that in each pair, one sound has the /j/ and the other doesn't.) To English speakers, these iotated sounds are heard as a consonant followed by a vowel, rather than as a single sound, because we use a different system (short vs. long) to flesh out our vowel inventory. But speakers of languages with iotation hear the /j/ as part of one continuous sound, so they get a 'bonus vowel' in this way. There ... weren't you just dying to know that?

**** This is from a Tim Minchin song that made me laugh a lot when I heard it.