OT:RE: Hangul script type

From: Jungshik Shin (jshin@mailaps.org)
Date: Wed Oct 17 2001 - 04:10:52 EDT


On Mon, 15 Oct 2001, Karlsson Kent - keka wrote:

> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Jungshik Shin [mailto:jshin@mailaps.org]
> ...
> > Yes, it's my principal point that Hangul is an alphabetic script
> > because Jamo is an alphabet. When it was invented by King Sejong and
> > scholars in his court and officially announced on October 9th, 1446,
> > Hangul was described as consisting of 28 characters (17 consonants and
> > 11 vowels. 3 consonants and 1 vowel are not used in modern Korean so
>
> Do you have any reference to a web page giving a translation into
> English of this original description?

  Not a full translation but enough to give you the point
is available at

   http://myhome.shinbiro.com/~geston/hangul/english/eng5.html

BTW, it's not Hun-min-jong-um but Hun-min-jong-um-hae-rye (I made
a mistake.). Some books on writing systems have details.
For instance, 'The Writing Systems of the World' by Florian Coulmas
(1989, Basil Blackwell) has a nice description. So does 'Writing Systesm'
by Geoffrey Sampson (1985, Stanford Univ. Press. figure 19 and 20 of
chap. 7 nicely summarize this. ) If you want gory details, you may refer
to 'The Korean Alphabet' edited by Young-Key Kim-Renaud (1997, Univ. of
Hawai Press) The book has chapters such as :

 - The principles underlying the invention of the Korean Alphabet
 - Graphical ingenuity in the Korean writing system: With new
    reference to calligraphy
 - The vowel system of the Korean alphabet and Korean readings of
   Chinese characters.
 - The structure of phonological units in Hangul

Appendix 1 of the book (a brief description of the Korean alphabet)
has a very nice description of the shapes of Hangul along with figures
and tables.

Unicode Hangul Jamo block has about 220 Hangul Jamos used in modern Korean
and middle Korean. Why are there so many? Because instead of encoding only
17 consonants and 11 vowels (one can go further down the 'reductionist'
road and say that only several base consonants and a few base vowels
along with 'diacritical' elements are all necessary to represent/encode
Hangul. See p. 143 of Sampson), Unicode encodes all forms of 'composite
Jamos' (consonant clusters, 'double' consonants to represent tense
consonants, complex diphtongs, etc). However, this is not sufficient
and Microsoft Word 2002/Windows XP/MS IE 6.0 comes with truetype fonts
that can be used by 'Uniscribe' to combine dynamically Hangul Jamos
beyond a simple I.C + M. V. (+ F.C.) model (I.C. = initial consonant,
M.V. = medial vowel, F.C= final consonant) as described in Unicode 3.0
..........

  Jungshik Shin



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