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Jackie Offline OP
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I just realized, having watched two M*A*S*H episodes fairly close together, that the same word is used in each, and both conversations involved a prisoner. The word sounds remarkably like "polio". Does that mean prisoner?

I did not try to look this up on-line because of my experience trying to look up the sounds of Japanese words: all I got were sites offering Japanese characters.

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I looked at an English-Korean-English dictionary online, and the result for prisoner included 포로 (polo. Seems close.

Korean has one of the best orthographies in Asia IMHO.


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Originally Posted By: zmjezhd


Korean has one of the best orthographies in Asia IMHO.


In the whole world, as far as that goes.

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Originally Posted By: zmjezhd

Korean has one of the best orthographies in Asia IMHO.


what makes it so?

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It's pretty much one to one in its correspondence of symbol to sound and the characters themselves were designed rather than just happening and they bear at least some correspondence to what is going on in the mouth when the sound is spoken. I'm sure Nuncle Z can explicate in greater detail, complete with examples.

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Originally Posted By: Faldage
they bear at least some correspondence to what is going on in the mouth when the sound is spoken.


devanagari is 'pretty much one to one in its correspondence of symbol to sound' but this idea is fascinating. a symbol that is somehow related to the mechanics of producing the sound it represents? truly interesting.

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Devanagari, and other Brahmi-based scripts come close, though there are little ad hoc kludges and some inconsistencies. Another script which tried to tie the manner and place of articulation in which the phone shape was the conscript Tengwar by JRR Tolkien (link). Hangul was designed by a royal committee of scholars solely for use with the Korean language. Devanagari evolved from Brahmi script and was adapted to different languages with different phonoligcal inventories (like most writing systems in the world).


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Originally Posted By: zmjezhd
Devanagari, and other Brahmi-based scripts come close, though there are little ad hoc kludges and some inconsistencies.


like the way that pronouncing the name of the most famous building in all india the way it is spelled would give you away as a non-native speaker? smile

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zmjezhd, i forgot to ask if you could expand on faldage's comment about the korean characters having something to do with what goes on in mouth when making them?

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could [you] expand on faldage's comment about the korean characters having something to do with what goes on in mouth when making them?

Here's a better explanation than I can do: link. Basically, different parts of the composite glyphs map to manner and place of articulation (link) and other features such as aspiration. Besides Tengwar and hangul, there are some other featural alphabets (link), such as Shavian and Visible Speech.


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