Hangul & hokey

I just finished reading a couple of books on the English language: Alphabetical: How Every Letter Tells a Story, by Michael Rosen, and The Story of English in 100 Words, by David Crystal.

And I know I don’t have to tell you why I’d be reading a couple of books on language, do I?

The latter picks out words that have appeared in our language over time and discusses various aspects of each one. It starts with “roe” in the 5^th Century, which is related to an archaeological find of the ankle bone of a roe deer with some runic letters carved into it. Transformed into Latin letters, they spelled RAIHAN, which linguists concluded was most likely to refer to the animal on whose bone the letters were etched.

The entry on “Doublespeak” (originating in George Orwell’s novel 1984) was interesting to me not so much because of its beginnings. It’s pretty much standard I should think and doesn’t require much of a discussion.

But it turns out that there’s an organization called the National Council of Teachers of English, which gives out an annual award for doublespeak. “Winners” include individuals, organizations and just general words. For example, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel announcing his plan to close 54 elementary schools in the city on account of their “underutilization” or space. Or the term “aspirational goal”, the concatenation of two words that mean the same thing (aspirations/goals). But when you combine them you produce “a phrase that means, in effect, ‘a goal to which one does not aspire all that much’.”

Immediately following Doublespeak is “Doobry”, which is a variant of dewberry, meaning something-or-other. My preferred version of this term is “duflunkio”, which I picked up from one of my classmates in the seventh grade.

(If you’re interested, but not enough to actually check out the book, numbers 99 and 100 are “Unfriend” and “Twittersphere”. Duh.)

Rosen’s book takes a different approach, using the building block of words, the 26-letter alphabet, to examine a number of elements of our language. One in particular I enjoyed was the letter K, in which he discussed the alphabet that was created by (or under the auspices of) King Sejong in the 15^th Century for the Korean people. A couple of interesting things to me:

There are actually two (very similar) alphabets in use today—“Hangul” in South Korea, “Chosun” gul in North Korea. I’ve always thought of it as the Hangul alphabet, but then I learned it in Seoul, so…

But here’s why Sejong either invented the alphabet or caused it to be invented. The only alphabet in use came from China, but spoken Korean didn’t match up with Chinese letters. Sejong saw this as a barrier to illiterate people ever learning to write. “[E]ven if illiterate people want to communicate in writing, many of them in the end cannot state their concerns. Saddened by this, I have had 28 letters newly made. It is my wish that all the people may easily learn these letters and that this will turn out to be convenient for daily use.”

In other words—everyone in the country basically had the right to communicate their concerns in writing, and it was his duty as the king to create the means for them to do this.

As I understand it, the Hangul alphabet (now comprising 24 vowels and consonants) is a highly efficient method of building words through syllables and sounds. It runs rings around English in this regard. (Think “thought”, “through” and “though”, just for starters.) What an amazing gift for a ruler to give his people.

On the whole, Rosen really entertains with his approach. But I had to take issue with one of his statements.

“In Britain people do the ‘hokey-cokey’ but in the US they do the ‘cokey-cokey.’”

I don’t know where he got that last part, but I have never heard of a “cokey-cokey”. Surely he meant “hokey-pokey”?