| This image features King Sejong the Great who invented Korean writing system, Hangeul. gettyimagesank |
This is the first in a two-part Hangeul Day article series revisiting the meaning of the Korean alphabet in the age of artificial intelligence._ ED
By Kang Hyun-kyung
| Yi In-hwa's science fiction thriller "2061" |
Humans and highly sophisticated humanoid robots coexist in a society powered by fully developed artificial intelligence (AI) four decades from now. Some humans and robots marry each other and give birth to hybrid half-human, half-robot children.
In this fictional future, self-conscious, self-aware robots are able to express themselves fully.
Speaking robots create a new problem in linguistics.
Each talking robot has their own vocal transmitting apparatus which is very different from that of humans, making the vast majority of existing scripts, including the English alphabet, useless as the scripts fail to represent some sounds.
The Korean alphabet, Hangeul, emerges as the most effective writing system due to its versatile functions as a tool for the highly phonetic language. Called "Ido Letters" in Yi's novel, Hangeul-based Korean becomes the only surviving language and is adopted by many countries, including the United States, while other languages are in decline and face extinction.
Yi's scientific thriller raises a key question: Will the AI-powered future turn out to be a blessing to Hangeul, just as the author imagined?
Expert are voicing mixed reactions.
Marion Eggert, a professor at the Korean Studies Department of Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, said some of the strengths of Hangeul are its efficiency and that it can be computerized. In the age of AI, Eggert said that the fates of scripts and languages will differ, noting it is inevitable that languages will suffer the direct impact of automation.
"Artificial intelligence may impact language learners, but since Hangeul is a script, not a language, it should suffer from this negative impact only indirectly," Eggert told The Korea Times. "In general, I think scripts are too efficient a medium to be pushed aside by the potentials of electronic voice communication."
The German Korean Studies scholar observed that AI-based translation devices may discourage people from learning foreign languages, or, to the contrary, translation machines can also be a great tool to assist in language learning.
Eggert stopped short of commenting on the future of Hangeul as a script in the age of artificial intelligence.
Kim Wook-dong, a professor emeritus of English literature at Sogang University, has remained negative about Hangeul becoming the only surviving writing system in the highly automated future.
"It's true that phonetic languages such as Korean are a better fit for artificial intelligence than ideographic languages such as Chinese," he said. "English is a phonetic language too. I think English is more phonetic than Korean, so the assumption that Korean fits best in the age of AI is flawed."
At the moment, he also said, AI-based translation devices have a long way to go to outperform human translators.
The fate of Hangeul in the age of AI seems to be a timely debate to explore, partly because Korean has been emerging as one of the most popular foreign languages to learn in recent years, thanks to the rising global interest in Korean pop music and dramas.
According to the National Institutes for International Education (NIIED), the number of people who took the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK) has continued to increase over the past decade. In 2016, some 250,000 people took the Korean proficiency test, which went up to 375, 871 in 2019 before the outbreak of COVID-19. Last year, the number of TOPIK test-takers fell sharply due to the pandemic.
Experts say the increase in TOPIK test-takers in recent years is related to the rise in popularity of K-pop and Korean dramas abroad, although it is difficult to gauge how many Korean language learners are inspired by hallyu.
The surge in interest in learning Korean seems to be a reflection of the international community's belated discovery of the Korean writing system.
Some international linguists have praised Hangeul as one of the most effective and rational writing systems.
"The history and theories of global writing systems have been raised to a new level with the advent of Hangeul," British linguist Geoffrey Sampson observed in his book, "Writing Systems: A Linguistic Introduction." "Whether or not it is ultimately the best of all conceivable scripts for Korean, Hangeul must unquestionably rank as one of the great intellectual achievements of humankind."
Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar Jared Diamond wrote in a 1994 article that Hangeul is an "ultra-rational system" and a "precise reflection of a people's speech."
Diamond's 1997 award-winning book "Guns, Germs and Steel" is the most-checked-out book among Seoul National University students.
Sean Lin Halbert, an award-winning literary translator who has been translating Korean novels into English, concurred with the international pundits about the merits of Hangeul.
"I've spent time learning both Japanese and Chinese, but Korean has a superior writing system," he said in an email interview with The Korea Times. "The fact that Hangeul is phonetic is really useful. It made learning Korean much easier as a foreign speaker. Also Hangeul is easier to read than Japanese's Hiragana and Katakana."
Halbert, who has a double major in physics and Korean Studies from the University of Washington in Seattle, studied Korean for eight years in the United States and Korea ― he earned a master's degree in Korean literature from Seoul National University after completing a Korean language course at Yonsei University.
"I still find certain things difficult, but these are mainly due to the fact that I'm not a native speaker. Just like all non-native speakers of English have trouble knowing when to use 'the' and 'a/an,' I still sometimes, but not very often, don't know when certain postpositions are more natural than others," he said.