From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed May 12 2004 - 11:16:31 CDT
From: "Kent Karlsson" <kentk@cs.chalmers.se>
> > > Featural Syllabaries: Ethiopic, Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics,
> Hangul
>
> Que? Hangul is an alphabetic script with (orthographic and
> typographic) syllabic grouping of the letters (into squares).
> There have been experiments writing Hangul "linearly", and
> then it is a plain alphabet.
I agree with this but Kent's meaning of "featural" is probably refering to this
feature of Hangul of grouping letters into square syllables. There's not much
feature here as the composition rules (horizontal/vertical layout of clusters)
for Hangul are wellknown. What is meant here is probably the concept of
"grapheme clusters", with which Hangul acts as a true syllabary (for rendering),
even if it is easily decomposable into letters.
THe square layout of Hangul is not more arbitrary than the horizontal
left-to-right layout of Latin, or the horizontal right-to-left layout of Latin.
What is missing in Unicode with Hangul is a joining type for each composed L, V
or T letter (jamo) that demonstrate how to compose letters into compound
squares. This data is informative only in TUS which also forgets that some
encoded jamos are themselves composed. When you see that, the Hangul script
becomes easy to learn for readers and writers. The Hangul script is much simpler
than what you could figure out by just looking at the normative charts of
representative glyphs.
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