ㅏㅑㅓㅕㅗㅛㅜㅠㅡㅣ

The first four vowels in this illustration, with the vertical lines, were incompatible with the second four vowels, the ones with the horizontal lines. The last two vowels were neutral, as was another one, not shown here, which was written as a single dot and which has since fallen out of use. [some dude]

Nononono. There are two things wrong here. The first one is that the [in]compatibility stated above, in regard of syllable composition, is plain wrong. ㅗ and ㅏ could and still can combine — that’s how we write /wa/. ㅜ and ㅓ, ditto for /we/. Moreover, ㅛ and ㅑ, and ㅠ and ㅕ combined in Middle Korean, at least in the “漢字正音” [correct pronunciation of sinograms] usage to produce diphtongs that are not possible anymore today — and that could probably be reconstructed as */ywa/ and */ywe/.
The second one is that vowel harmony in Middle Korean, like in Mongolian or Turkish — and the main link, on that matter and others, with Korean is Mongolian, not Turkish — is based on two exclusive sets of vowels, {ㅏ, ㅗ, ㆍ} [a, o, ʌ] vs {ㅓ, ㅜ, ㅡ} [e, u, ɯ]. Neither Neither ㆍ nor ㅡ were neutral. ㅣ /i/ was indeed neutral and combined in different ways with both sets of vowels: ㅏ+ㅣ -> ㅐ, ㅜ+ㅣ -> ㅟ, ㅣ+ㅗ -> ㅛ, etc… I don’t have my Middle Korean dictionaries with me in HK, but I can remember at least one example: /kasʌy/ thorn vs /kusɯl/. The harmony rule extended to the grammatical particles that are suffixed to nouns, adjectives and verbs: /mʌl + ʌn/ [the] horse [as subject] vs /mɯl + ɯn/ [the] water [as subject].

What I like in pat’s writings is that his view on things are always off-centre and interesting. He’s a fellow linguist, with the same curiosity and eagerness about languages as I think I have. And with this post on LOL, he provoked amusing, if slightly off-topic – as far as teh Internets is concerned.

item:

There’s something about this usage that seems “wordy” to me: for one thing, I find it difficult to avoid a comparison to Cantonese’s famous “tag” word, la

…which led me to dig into sino-XXX to see if I could find a funky sinogram equivalent… Cantonese doesn’t have final -L, but -T, direct from Middle Chinese, like Viêtnamese, so no love. [Sino-]Korean does have final -L, evolved from Middle Chinese -T, but there’s no [lol], the closest being [lal]: 剌 [clash, contradict] and 辣 [spicy].

So I went the Idu route, find a character that has the meaning of loud laughter, and found 3:

• 㘌 kek6/ju4
• 㰤 kaa3/ke3
• 䐖 zi4/yi2

The first one is – in a “I really am off my rocker” way – a perfect candidate. 㘌’s Cantonese reading, kek, looks almost like a typo, and sounds like something having a derisive laugh, and it is based on 劇 kek6/ju4 – theatrical plays, drama, opera– and 口 hau2/kou3, the mouth, which is fitting… So there you go, LOL = 㘌.

㘌!

> How can I write a regexp to match CJK characters?
> Thanks in advance:)

print “Yes!” if varname =~ /^CJK$/

Needless to say the helpful(?) dude providing the unhelpful regex/ruby code was a proud citizen of ASCII-land… Mwahahaha!

Paid a visit to the 韓國學 用語/用例 辭典, and entered a simple query. And clicked search. Woops…

1. Don’t use IIS / ASP. They suck goat’s teats
2. Hitting the enter/return key is supposed to submit the form. Not reloading the page.
3. Don’t use EUC-KR. That encoding suxxors big time. And ‘English’ looks crappy in that encoding – not really the encoding’s fault, since euc-kr makes the browser default to Korean fonts, and Latin characters *do* suck in Korean fonts. Use Unicode, dudes. Which is exactly what you are using – sans charset declaration, wherever there is M-R, like here
4. M-R is nice, but be consistant, if you please. shi or si? oe or oi? Pick one each. Oh, and check both transcriptions. 二軍六衛 doesn’t transcribe to either yigunyugi or Yikunyuki. Really…
5. Making the HTML standards-compliant would be nice – and lose the tables, the <font> and other stylistic bits. After all, you seem to use CSS, too. <td class="font12" bgcolor=white align="center"><font face="굴림"> could be replaced with a better ‘font12′ class – or possibly forks of this class…

This looks like an ad-hoc effort handled the good ole Korean way I have learned to recognize, sometimes admire, but usually despise. Act first, plan later [and order lots of green tape and silicon]. Ah well, I still ould have liked something like that when I was a student…

Hat tip to The Marmot.