 The research I'll be sharing with you today stems from my thesis research as a master's student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I just completed my first year, so I have one more year left, and with that I want to acknowledge and thank the faculty and my classmates in particular. I want to thank Sharon Oiga for her encouragement and for her support. Last fall, during my first semester, we were asked to decide on a thesis topic to research and develop for the remaining year. There were a few that I considered, but the one I settled on was the one I'll be sharing with you today, and it started with the words literacy and power. When I was younger, I visited my father in South Korea, and he took me to the center of Seoul where a large statue of King's Hejong stands. He said that Hejong was the great king who made the Korean alphabet in 1446, helping Koreans free themselves from the influence of China. I didn't fully understand what he meant by this, but it was something that I remember and something that I wanted to investigate. Before the Korean alphabet, many were illiterate because a difficult Chinese pictographic system was used. There are many dots to connect from an alphabet to freedom, and my research has involved the historical context and linguistic analysis surrounding the alphabet to better understand the relationship between literacy and culture. When I use the term culture, I'm referring in a general way to a cohesive and distinct group with common traditions, language, and values. My research has also included an investigation into disappearing languages, and specifically the efforts to preserve a once-dying Native American language to Loa. To summarize quickly, in the Chinese writing system, the characters are pictographic in that the characters illustrate what they represent. They are also logographic in that different sounds are attached to different characters. The Chinese writing system is made up of over 30,000 characters, which requires a lot of memorization, but a working knowledge of about 3,000 would suffice for everyday use. So here I'm showing 1,500, so add another 1,500 to your memorization in order to be able to use it. Another issue is that the Chinese and Korean spoken languages are very, very different. The difference between the Korean and Chinese is no less than that between English and Chinese. Chinese is an isolating language, meaning that words or characters remain unchanged no matter what function they play in the sentence. Their function is signified by their position in the sentence, but Korean is highly inflective in the matter somewhat analogous to Latin, Greek, or German. The added fact that the Korean language was so different than Chinese made the writing and reading of the Korean language in the Chinese system that much more difficult and unclear, and it resulted in literacy being limited to those who could afford the education. To be proficient in Chinese writing typically required about 10 years of elaborate education. Chinese Hejong established a notion of the people of the heavens, while at the same time in China they referred to their king as son of the heavens, and the Japanese referred to theirs as ruler of the heavens. Hejong believed that if everyone was literate they would be able to read and learn the appropriate way to act in society and within the law, which would in turn produce a society that was harmonious and strong. Moreover, if the Korean people had more access to literacy they could, for example, more readily document productive farming methods, and these methods could be shared and read and learned by more people, resulting in larger harvests and less starvation. If the Koreans had their own writing system that better matched their spoken language, it would foster more literature, poetry, and communication, and therefore a stronger cultural identity independent of China's. By elevating his common people, Hejong, the fourth king of the Chosun dynasty, built a strong foundation upon which his dynasty continued to rule for another 500 years. This looks familiar, right, Erin? He created a phonetic writing system comprised of 28 but now 24 basic sounds represented by letters that could be combined to form all the words within the Korean language. Because it's an alphabetic system, the Korean system is much easier to learn than the Chinese system. King Hejong created an alphabet that is one of the most scientific writing systems ever invented. For clarification, it's more widely understood that Hejong appointed a group of scholars to develop the alphabet, but more recent research indicates that Hejong himself was the likely inventor of the alphabet. Other characteristics of the alphabet include visual balance. A unit of letters is representing a single syllable. This reads Hangul. The letters' shapes inspire by the shapes of the mouth when making it sounds, creating a strong visual connection between the sound and its symbol. Despite these truly innovative design features, it's easy to learn and use. The powerful ruling class protested the new alphabet, an alphabet that would be easy to learn and therefore provide literacy to all, threatened their elevated status in society. High-level officials protested the alphabet, saying that it was barbaric. One particular official argued Koreans recognized China as the height of civilization and fashioned themselves after China and the structure of government, the learning, the rituals, manners, and so on. Therefore, Koreans should not deviate from Chinese ways. An example of this is that the Korean alphabet was popularly called Unmun, which means vulgar, until Hangul, which means Great Script, was coined in 1912. This is a picture of my dad in his high school uniform in 1962 in South Korea. And you'll notice that his name badge is written in Chinese. A demonstration of the pervasive attitude of China representing elevated culture, while native Korean representing something lesser, even after the Korean alphabet became the official writing system of the country. In later years, the Korean alphabet replaced more and more of the Chinese script as nationalistic pride grew. The type below shows my father's name in Hangul. The protests of the country's powerful elite prevented the Korean alphabet from being the official writing system until the Japanese were defeated in World War II. There were roughly 500 years between the promulgation of the Korean alphabet and it finally becoming the official writing system of the country for both South and North Korea. Chinese was the official system until the Japanese brutally took over Korea in 1910. During the occupation, the Japanese colonial government adopted the policy of obliterating Korean identity by forcing Koreans to adopt Japanese names and to speak Japanese only. The Japanese also suppressed the education of Koreans. What little education the colonial government provided was conducted in Japanese. Hangul gave the Koreans something uniquely Korean to embrace and learn easily and private when the Japanese tried to eliminate their language and culture. Furthermore, it is the only uniquely Asian alphabet and its ease of use is set to contribute to a near 100% literacy rate. And this statistic is cited as contributing to the rapid economic development of South Korea after World War II. An alphabet designed specifically for the Korean language, accessible to all, was critical to the development of the country after the devastations of the world and the Korean wars. It gave the Korean people a communication tool uniquely Korean to embrace, if only in private, during the times of Chinese cultural imperialism and Japanese colonization. This reinforced their cultural legitimacy. Sejong studied the sounds and structure of the Korean spoken language and broke down the syllables into three distinct subparts, initial, medial, and final. He realized that the initial and the final were made up of the consonant sounds and the medial are the vowels. Thus was born the alphabetic system. The alphabet structure, organization, and graphic forms reflect the Korean neo-confucian understanding of the world. Yen and Yang are the primal opposite forces, and their activity produces natural phenomena in groups of five. For example, five elements, five directions, and five seasons. Similarly, studying the spoken language, Sejong grouped the consonants of the Korean alphabet into five basic sounds associated with the speech organ from which their sounds originate. The ma sound depicts the outline of the mouth. Ne depicts the outline of the tongue touching the upper palate. Se depicts the outline of the incisor or the tooth. The ke or the ge sound depicts the root of the tongue blocking the throat. And the zero terminal depicts the outline of the throat. And you can try this by trying to make an H sound. Looking at the different speech organs and the shapes they visually make in the articulation of different consonant sounds, Sejong connected the speech organ to a corresponding natural element, a non-seat direction, and season. For example, the zero terminal signifies the shape of the throat, the laryngeal aperture. The throat is seen as deep and moist and is analogous to water, which being fluid and transparent flows through its container. Similarly, the laryngeal sounds are produced by air passing through an unconstrained throat. So again, you can try that with an H sound. This relationship between the sounds and their corresponding speech organs is indicative of Sejong's neo-confusion ideology that emphasizes the understanding of nature and humans connection with it. As language spoken and written is largely the way people interact with one another, connecting his new alphabet to the body's physiology, and then to the world's basic elements, it mirrored these fundamental cosmic patterns of interaction. Finding these relationships between the Korean language and nature may have also been a way to assert the legitimacy of the Korean culture. Furthermore, the vowel sounds were constructed from three symbols of heaven, earth, and man. Heaven was seen as round, earth as flat, and man connecting both heaven and earth was shown standing. These eight symbols, the five consonants and three basic vowels, were the basis from which the remaining 20 letters were composed by adding one or more strokes to the basic shapes. The stronger the sound, the more visually complex the characters become. The table shows the five consonant groups and related consonants and columns below the basic letter. For example, the meh is the basic sound and beh, which is also formed by using the lips, is composed with the top line being pulled down closer to the center. The de uses the same tongue to the mouth palette as the ne sound, and so it's drawn with an additional top line. From de to te, there is yet another stroke added. Like the consonants, the vowels are divided into two groups related to yin and yang. Yin represents dark and yang represents bright. When the dot, which is now a short horizontal stroke, is placed above the earth, it is bright. When it is placed below, it is dark. When it's placed to the right of man, it is bright. And when it is placed to the left of man, it is dark. As additional strokes were used for related sounds in the consonants, additional horizontal strokes are used as modifications to relate to vowel sounds. For example, the first one in pink is pronounced as a, like when the doctor is looking at your tonsils. And that's an example of a bright sound. The one below it has an additional horizontal stroke, and you add a y to it, so it's ya. And both vowels have the a as the same, but the one with the two horizontal strokes has the additional y sound. Similarly, this one in pink is a, and that is an example of a dark sound. And you add the additional horizontal stroke, and it is ya, so a and ya. Continuing the logic of stronger sounds, making more complexity in their symbol, there are consonant sounds that are represented by repeating consonants within a syllable block. These from the left to the right in the second row are b, z, d, g, and sh. Here are one syllable word examples using these. Bang, jin, and dok. The double syllable, the double B syllable, is like, is similar to the b sound, but it's tensor. So rather than bang, it is bang. Maybe see the difference there. Let's see, OK. The direct relationships to develop between the sounds and the language and their visual representation is an example of a system and its graphic components, abstractly representing aspects of an ideology. A clear phonetic system that followed the principles of neo-confucian ideology prevalent in the Korean culture made it easier for the people to learn and embrace it. It's a great visual communication and design study. I think it's pretty cool. So switching gears, here's a brief description of disappearing language, languages in the struggle of Native American cultures, to continue their cultural traditions and languages, and particularly the taloa. In order for a language to thrive, new generations of speakers need to learn and use the language. Even if a large percentage of adults speak a language, if their children do not, the language dies with their parents. Similar to the situation of endangered or threatened plant and animal species, the rate of extinction of languages has sharply increased in the past couple of centuries, with linguists predicting that half of the 6,000 world languages will be dead or dying by 2050. Pressures to use the dominating culture's language, in order to prosper, can lead to the loss of native languages. More aggressive tactics are forbidding the education and use of languages, like the ban of Korean during the Japanese colonization, and tend to erase cultural identity by wiping out their language to force assimilation. The death of a language is an irretrievable cultural loss for the world. Language embodies the culture's worldview, encapsulating the amazing choices humans have in organizing and talking about the world around them. On North America, the many California Native communities composed of landscape rich with cultural and linguistic diversity for thousands of years, more than 100 languages were spoken, occupying different areas of the diverse terrain of California, ways of living varied among the different communities. The Tuloa, a northern California tribe of fishers, hunters, and gatherers, lived along the Smith River drainage and nearby coastal plain in the northwest tip of the current state of California. The gold rush of the mid-1800s brought fortune-seeking Euro-Americans, and they overtook the Tuloa and other Native groups in bloody battles that involved military internment, massive land loss, and much dying. An estimated population of 2,000 Tuloa before the Euro-Americans was reduced to just 126 by 1906. In the early part of the 21st century, schools taught English but also forced the eradication of native languages backed up by severe corporal punishment. I recently spoke with a friend's father, a Native American from Minnesota, and he recounted his experience growing up in the 1950s and 60s, describing how he was lucky that he could mostly pass for Caucasian. His father encouraged his family to assimilate as much as possible, telling them his childhood stories of being beaten by teachers and bullied by peers when speaking his native language or exhibiting any dress of his native culture. There was an overall policy against foreign languages in the United States adopted during World War I, creating a fearsome impact on the children whose first language was not English. I show these photos that I found from the University of California because of the names attributed to the subjects. I'm guessing that Lopez is not a Tuloa name, so it demonstrates a level of assimilation in the 1930s. Leanne Haman states in her book, Flutes of Fire, essays on California Indian languages. People who have not learned their language of heritage often come to feel a great sense of loss as adults, believing that their ability to express their cultural identity has been denied them. My friend's father told me that when he reflects back on his childhood, he doesn't feel lucky, but he feels anger and resentment for not having to deny his heritage. He wishes that he knew how to speak his father's tribal language and didn't grow up in an environment hostile to his native American culture. By the late 1960s, Tuloa and other native Indian languages of the area were endangered. The Tuloa began projects of language maintenance as the last of their native speakers were dying off. Documenting genealogy and folklore, they compiled a collection of written materials, including a dictionary entitled Tuloa Language. That functioned as an application for official recognition from the US government, and as teaching materials to teach new generations about the Tuloa language and culture. In the process, they developed a writing system based on the Uniphon alphabet. Uniphon is a phonetic alphabet developed in the 1950s by University of Chicago economist John Malone. It is based on the English alphabet but expands the symbols to 40 to more closely match the number of distinctive sounds. English has more than 200 spellings for 40 sounds. Malone developed the Uniphon alphabet so that each sound in the English language would be represented by one symbol and saw the value in the alphabet when he used it to teach his young son to read. Based on the English alphabet, sounds that are typically spelled with an A, for example, use symbols that are based off of the A symbol. The local Tuloa organized a group that collected stories of folklore genealogy from the elders and began a language program which they have conducted since 1973. The Uniphon choice was controversial for several reasons. Analysis of the Tuloa language shows that Uniphon is somewhat unsuitable for Tuloa. It gives considerable attention to vowel differences, but the vowels used in the Tuloa language are fewer than those in English. And Tuloa utilizes many consonant sounds that English or Uniphon does not employ. For example, the Glottisized series shown here, and these the Uniphon script could not provide for without a lot of gerry-rigging. As a representation of language, those familiar with English found the Uniphon alphabet confusing. An academic linguist criticized Uniphon for not adequately representing the structure of the Tuloa language. Others thought the difference in the symbols between Uniphon and English gave the Tuloa Uniphon alphabet a more Native American look and represented their unique culture better. While not a unique design perfectly matched the language like the Korean alphabet, the Tuloa alphabet was successful in giving the Tuloas an alphabet to document and record the sounds of their language and stories of their ways of life in order to teach new generations. It also succeeded as a unifying communication tool to distinguish some sounds from the overpowering American English-speaking culture surrounding them. Both the Korean and the Tuloa alphabet functioned to give their spoken languages a written system and also acted as a unifying communication tool. In both cases, the alphabets helped define their respective cultures as distinct and legitimate. And I will conclude by quoting Krista Radoeva, the Catalyst Award winner from her presentation yesterday. She said, cultural identity is preserved in a writing system. Thank you.