Is there an alphabet? If yes, how many letters? What do they represent? Are there significant differences between manuscript and print? If there is no alphabet, how does the language convey information in written form? Are there related writing systems?
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From practicing the Korean alphabet I have learned that Korean has both hangul as well as hanja as part of their writing system. Hangul is more popular than hanja, which is characters taken from China.In North Korea it has been abolished all together decades ago. Korean is almost exclusively written in hangul in modern day Korea. There are 19 consonants and 22 vowels making it a very large alphabet. Each symbol represents one letter or vowel sound like our standard alphabet and there is not significant difference between print and manuscript.
I would say the closest related writing system to Korean would naturally be both Chinese and Japanese because they share the Chinese characters firstly. The only significant difference between Korean and Japanese would be that Japanese associates more than one "letter" to each symbol. Korean on the other hand has one 'letter' per symbol.
Kannada does have an alphabet, although as Aarti said when she read it aloud, it is more of a spoken language than a written one, and the words you will find written are much more formal than the modern usage. The alphabet as 50 letters, which represent consonant and vowel forms. The Kannada alphabet developed first from Brahmi scripts - the Kadamba and Cālukya scripts, used between the 5th and 7th centuries AD. It then became Old Kannada script around 1500. What is interesting is that in Kannada script, every consonant is attached to a vowel: "all consonants have an inherent vowel. Other vowels are indicated with diacritics, which can appear above, below, before or after the consonants." (http://www.omniglot.com/writing/kannada.htm). I had never heard of a language where vowels were inherently attached to consonants, and it is interesting to note when you speak it, that vowels are quite prevalent! Finally, Kannada was heavily influenced by Sanskrit, and one can find some Greek, Portuguese, and Persian words in the modern language.
The Punjabi writing system is called Gurmukhi, this was developed by the first and second guru of Sikhism (Guru Nanak and Guru Angad). Gurmukhi means "from the mouth of the guru." There are forty-one letters thirty eight of which are consonants with three basic vowel bearers. Generally the print and manuscript are very similar with slight differences in style. All of the letters with the exception of five are connected with a line. The Pakistani version of Gurmukhi is very similar in structure however the writing style is closer to that of Arabic. Punjabi is very tonal and has three basic tones (gh, dh, bh). There is no capitalization in Punjabi.
Swedish is a northern Germanic language that has English's standard alphabet with the addition of three vowels: å, ä, och ö, creating a 29 letter alphabet. Swedish grammar is similar to English in that verbs only have one conjugation in the present tense and only change to indicate past and future tenses. This makes Swedish easier to learn than language such as Spanish and French that require several conjugations for each verb in the present tense. Swedish is spoken by approximately 10 million people in Sweden and by the Swedish minority in Finland. Swedish is recognized as the official language of Sweden, but also protects the status of five minority languages: Finnish, all Sami dialects, Torne Valley Finnish (Meänkieli), Romani and Yiddish.
The Persian language uses an abjad writing system consisting of 32 letters only for consonants. Vowels are written with diacritics or a combination of consonant letters. The Farsi writing system is very similar to the Arabic writing system and the alphabet is similar to the Cyrillic alphabet. Farsi is written from right to left with the exception of numerals which are written from left to right.
Korean has a very unique alphabet in context of Asiatic languages. It has "characters" that also serve as an alphabet, with 24 letters that can be broken up into primary sounds and assisting sounds (similar to consonants and vowels, but slightly different in their application). It is more intuitive than the Chinese character system because of its simplistic method of combining sounds. It is similar to the alphabet because of its combination of consonants and vowels, but when certain letters are doubled or used in conjunction with other vowels, there is a completely different sound that is generally pronounced sharper and more distinctly. Each letter correlates with a sound besides for the "o" which is more of a placeholder.
The difficulty of Hangeul is the tendency for it to be somewhat arbitrarily combined. A word can have 3 parts to it but combine the first two so that if a word was like "cupcake" in English, it could be written as "cupc ake" in Korean, but still sound the same. This is the biggest hurdle for me as a Korean language learner because of the experience needed to successfully read and write.
There are some differences between what is used in print and what is used in conversation. Certain words stay on manuscript and translate to something similar but slightly different when spoken. I know that French also has a similar system. However, the line is blurred in modern day Korean, as far as I know, for whether non-conversational words must be used in print. This will also be difficult to remember and correctly represent, with no other method of learning but repetition and memorization.
Norwegian is a Northern Germanic language, which with Swedish and Danish, form a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional dialects (Scandinavian languages).
Officially there are two versions of written Norwegian: Bokmål and Nynorsk--the former is used most commonly. Though other variations of both forms exist, most Norwegians use their local dialect exclusively. Bokmål is most heavily used for writing.
29 letters exist within the Norwegian alphabet including the standard 26 letters in the English language and additionally æ, ø, and å. Some letters may also be accented such as, é, è, ê, ó, ò, and ô to differentiate the sound.
What surprised me about the Korean writing system was that it is really different from the Japanese writing system. Hangeul, the Korean writing system, doesn't use characters like Japanese hiragana, katakana and kanji (I've studied Japanese before and am familiar with its writing system). Hangeul includes a set of 'symbols' that represents a specific sound. These symbols are combined to make a syllable or character. In Japanese, each symbol represents a syllable, so I thought Hangeul was unique in that aspect. For me, Hangeul is harder to read and write because figuring out how to combine the pieces to make a part of the word is a huge extra step that slows me down. Still, I prefer Hangeul more than Japanese because I absolutely hated learning kanji.
One thing I've heard several times about learning Hangeul (and other writing systems as well) is to not translate the written Korean words into romanized letters. People might feel that this is helpful when learning, but I think it actually isn't the proper way of learning another written language. Since I'm learning Korean, a language that is completely different from English, it's natural to want to learn this way, but it doesn't help you to understand the written language if you're only translating back and forth.
I would like to write about a related writing topic for Hebrew as I already know the alphabet. There is a phenomenon in the written language for words that are shortened, called a blend. This is similar to the do not --> don't situation in English, however the Hebrew language implements this symbol: " known as gershayim in Hebrew. One I was previously familiar with is a word used for "out of the country." Such acronyms are very common in spoken Hebrew, however I have run into them online in articles and have found that they are difficult for me to decipher. I have made a list of blends that I am not familiar with to practice using and recognize within my readings.
An interesting thing to note about written Hebrew is that while articles, books, advertisements, the Bible, etc. all implement what is known as "upper case" alphabet, most hand written Hebrew uses completely different letters known as "lower case." Neither of these are displayed with the "vowels," which are signs below the letters indicating how they are meant to be pronounced. While I know the sounds that these vowels indicate, one of my goals is to learn the names of these vowels, since I have never had to learn to use them as a beginner language learner.
I'd like to end on a cultural note - I found it interesting that Hebrew, one of the oldest known languages, is similar to the historic Assyrian scripts. It is also used in Ladino and Yiddish. Israeli Hebrew, also known as Modern Hebrew, is relatively new and is taught in Israeli elementary schools as part of the Israeli history curriculum.
The Korean alphabet is known as Hangul. It is native to North Korea and South Korea with a few differences in more common vocabulary words. Some historians viewed the vocabulary similar to Japanese, but there is no definite proof of this connection and many other historians deny it. There are a total of 24 letters which are made up of 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Each represents a sound and sometimes the sound changes based on the location of the letters. I find the writing system difficult because the consonants and vowels are combined into what looks like one character. Sometimes there is even a pattern of a consonant, vowel, and another consonant all in "one" character. I'm still working on memorizing all the sounds in the correct placement. I think this will be beneficial before learning the rest of the Korean vocabulary and phrases.
When studying the greetings, I learned that the simple "hello" phrases I thought I knew, were actually incorrect. I mispronounced a few characters which actually makes a larger difference that I thought. I believe after thoroughly studying the alphabet and pronouncing the letters, the phrases will be easier for me to pronounce. My goal in studying the vocabulary will not only be able to say the word, but also to pronounce the word by looking at the Hangul, not English letters of the pronounciation.
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