Indonesian tribe picks Korean alphabet as official writing system

via Korean Studies Discussion List <http://us.mc580.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=koreanstudies@koreaweb.ws> http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/national/2009/08/06/56/0302000000AEN20090806001200315F.HTML [compare to] ...other instances in the past where other cultures attempted to adopt Han'gu(l / Choso(n'gu(l as their written language only to have it be rejected, no? I don't recall as it has been a long time since I read Kim-Renaud, Y-K. (ed) 1997. The Korean Alphabet: Its History and Structure. Anyway, this is a very interesting language development that *gasp* for once doesn't involve romanizations. =-=-=-= follow up: The case of using hangeul by one of Indonesian tribes as a practical systemof writing is funny. It is one more ?success? of local nationalists in theera of globalization, when the state sponsors such "experiments"! Koreanalphabet is excellent only for the Korean language, but is almost unsuitablefor the transmission of sounds, which are absent in the Korean language. Inthe Soviet Union in 1920-30?s attempts were made to create scripts fornationalities, which had no their own script on the basis of the Latinalphabet. This letter alphabet, as well as Cyrillic, is much more suitablethan Korean letter-syllabic alphabet, for transcription of all kinds ofsounds through a combination of letters or diacritics. But the grandioseexperiment failed. It is difficult to believe that the Korean experimentwill last for long. ---Lev Kontsevich [Moscow]