4 ms·
> Almost 95% (or even more) of characters have never been used and no one know how to pronounce it. This is absolutely false. KS X 1001, the primary character
by lifthrasiir 6y ago
> Almost 95% (or even more) of characters have never been used and no one know how to pronounce it.
This is absolutely false. KS X 1001, the primary character set for Hangul, contains 2,350 out of 11,172 (modern) syllables, which is definitely much larger than 5%. And that's not enough (KS X 1001 itself was heavily criticized for this), there are multiple secondary character sets got into Unicode; Unicode 1.1 had 6,656 arbitrarily ordered characters that were finally replaced by 11,172 neatly ordered characters by 2.0. They are real characters people use, my very old personal research [1] indicates that at least a half of them has legitimately appeared in the chat log for example.
Pronunciation-wise, multiple consonant clusters in the final position indicate conditional pronunciation. "갅", for example, comprises of ㄱ g + ㅏ ah + ㄴ n + ㅈ j which is normally pronounced "gahn" by its own but "gahn-j" when followed by a vowel (e.g. "갅이" is pronounced "간지" gahn-ji). Phonetically Korean only has 7 possible codas and other final consonants exist because Korean orthography is a compromise between phoneticism and ideographicism and some words had to be adjusted to show their morphological roots.
[1] https://j.mearie.org/post/24348147729/hangeul-usage-in-irc-chatting https://j.mearie.org/post/24348147729/hangeul-usage-in-irc-c... (in Korean)