5 ms·

History of Hangul

103 points by teleforce 2y ago

eleveriven 2y ago
As someone who’s been trying to learn Korean, I have to admit that while Hangul is undeniably impressive in its design, I still found it challenging to fully grasp at first. Learning to recognize the shapes and sounds of the letters was relatively straightforward but putting it all together into readable syllables and understanding pronunciation rules took me longer than I expected.
rickcarlino 2y ago
I did not realize this site was still in operation- I used to use it quite a bit in college over a decade ago. Sidenote that if you are a tech minded person who has a strong interest in Korean, feel free to reach out. I am pretty easy to find online and I’m working on some Korean language related projects.
natdempk 2y ago
Anyone know if there is a particularly great app/website out there for learning Korean? Ideally opinionated, low/no "figure out what to learn yourself", Anki + AI-powered for maximum gain/seamless review/ease of getting more reading + writing variety, and easy to use on-the-go/on-mobile.
- Nadya 2y ago
  Anki for vocabulary building, Ryan Estrada's comic for learning to read Hangul (https://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/ https://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/) as it sticks true to its promise. Over 8 years ago I spent 15 minutes learning how to 'read' Hangul. To this day I can still slowly sound things out and, at the least, read people's names. It truly is a fantastic writing system although I do sometimes struggle with which vowel is which that's 100% an issue of only having spent 15 minutes learning. Unfortunately I can't help much with learning grammar as I never dove into actually learning Korean due to a dislike of how it sounds. There's the "Tae Kim Japanese Grammar"-like approach for a Korean grammar guide at: https://www.howtostudykorean.com/ https://www.howtostudykorean.com/ although I'm not a big fan of how overly simplified (and sometimes wrong due to the simplification) Tae Kim's approach for Japanese was. So I can't attest as to whether How To Study Korean makes the same mistakes or not. As for writing - Korean is simple enough to read/write that you can simply find any Korean news source and practice writing the sentences as you read them. You could also try checking the Korean-learning subreddit out as they have a lot of resources in one of their pinned threads: https://www.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/hw4gy0/the_ultimate_beginners_resource_thread/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/hw4gy0/the_ultimate...
  - qingcharles 2y ago
    It's amazing that something that can look so alien to Western eyes is actually pretty straightforward once you try to learn it. I did the same and learned Hangul so I can at least sound things out and do some basic Internet searches etc. You can do exactly the same with other scripts, e.g. Japanese hirigana and katakana, which are fairly easy to learn, and also Arabic, which looks difficult, but is definitely learnable in an hour.
    - mabster 2y ago
      I started learning Korean but never really got the far. But, straight after learning Hangul you get into sound mixing (https://www.missellykorean.com/korean-sound-change-rules-pdf/ https://www.missellykorean.com/korean-sound-change-rules-pdf...). Trust humans to invent something simple and then make it complicated over time! Japanese has similar stuff with their u-dropping, but not as complicated as Korean.
      - soraminazuki 2y ago
        So this is why some words sound nothing like the romanized spelling. This has been confusing me to no end when learning Hangul with Duolingo.
        Nadya 2y ago
        It's such a common aspect of languages too that many people don't even realize when they're doing it in their native language! People get lazy - especially natives who don't get confused because it's how most natives will talk. For example, every word ending in "ing" in your comment could drop the "g" sound when spoken. Plenty of English speakers do that when speakin' and not many people would think anythin' of it until a frustrated person learnin' English asks why nobody is pronouncin' the endin' "g". Droppin', changin', and blendin' sounds is why learning a language by listenin' to natives speakin' is so important instead of crammin' textbooks all day. Some might consider this a regional thing/accent and I'd argue that it both is and isn't. To the extent I tried to illustrate it would likely get seen as an accent but the occasional droppin' of it is somethin' I've heard across so many different English accents that I'd argue it isn't only an accent thing. In the US it's mostly associated with a Southern accent and in England it would be the English Midlands like Brummie or Mancunian.
- n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
  I think LingoDeer is generally considerrd a very good app to learn CJK. You can start with no prerequisites at all.
- bryanhogan 2y ago
  I'm building https://tolearnkorean.com/ https://tolearnkorean.com/ , but it's far from finished currently, only meaningful content is an introduction to Hangul so far. Making it because I believe there's lots of opportunity for high quality Korean learning content. Also found it annoying that the majority of content out there does not mention other quality resources since they want to keep you in their own (lacking) ecosystem to sell you on their books, coaching sessions, Anki vocabulary cards or whatever it is. Want to improve my own Korean by teaching it to others. Also making a site currently that aims to gamify the learning with flashcards, similar to some(!) questions you might see on Duolingo but with your flashcards as a base. Making learning with flashcards more fun and efficient. I liked BillyGo's videos as a resource in the beginning. The apps I have on my phone to learn are Naver Dictionary, Anki and Migii. Didn't like any other apps I found.
- joshdavham 2y ago
  > Anyone know if there is a particularly great app/website out there for learning Korean? It’s extremely unfortunate but in the year 2024, there are still close to no language learning apps that will actually help you acquire a foreign language. I’ve been in this space for about 6 years and the only I can recommend are Anki (which isn’t even a LL app) and some more obscure ‘comprehensible input’ sites. Outside of that, there’s Netflix, Spotify, Audible and real life human interaction (but none of those are LL apps!)
  - PrismCrystal 2y ago
    What is sad, is that there are already whole generations who think one must learn with an app, and are completely unaware of self-teaching textbooks from traditional publishers like Routledge, Assimil, Teach Yourself, etc. These books don’t work for everyone because learning styles are different, but they do work well for some segment of learners, yet with the decline of the physical bookshop, many young people may have never seen them. (Hardcore linguaphiles are aware of these books, and have been one of the major demographics in the ebook filesharing scene that led to LibGen and Anna’s Archive. But I’m talking about the ordinary people you constantly see on e.g. Reddit who are just moving to another country, have to learn the language, and assume that one uses an app for that.)
  - Nadya 2y ago
    Every now and again a site exists that has a massive community, tons of resources, ways to speak with other learners, ways to meet language exchange partners, and are greatly successful. Then all of that gets gutted for what is essentially a worse version of Anki but for the web when the company runs out of funding and has to start turning a profit somehow. This burns the community and the people providing most of the value move elsewhere. It's happened to italki (now iKnow), Memrise, DuoLingo, and a few sites that were so short-lived I no longer remember what they were called. My takeaway is that language learning apps are a lot like dating apps. They profit less if people actually learn a language and so can't be too good at their job because they'll bleed users faster than they can gain them - similar to dating apps. It needs to work just well enough that users are tricked into believing it is working but not so well that it actually works for most people. It seems like the ETA before enshittification begins is about 2~3 years. If you're an early enough adopter you might actually benefit from it but you have to be willing to jump ship and not fall for the engagement/gamification tactics that keep you sticking around after it has stopped providing any value. I spent way too long 'watering my garden' on Memrise before I looked around and noticed all of the once useful community-providing mnemonics were gone, you couldn't correct bad definitions anymore, it was difficult to actually speak to anyone else in the community (unless you could find them on the forums), and eventually I stopped using it altogether. The community I had signed up for and was a huge part of Memrise's success no longer existed.
- thinkingofthing 2y ago
  Self-promo: I'm working on www.flashka.ai , the Anki + AI that you might be looking for :) It shines mainly if you have PDFs of the content you are learning from which to write flashcards. The best part for language learning is that, while doing reviews, you have some options to generate mnemonics and examples, it was super-helpful to me while learning Georgian!
- glenngillen 2y ago
  http://letslearnhangul.com/ http://letslearnhangul.com/
  - iluvcommunism 2y ago
    감사합니다!
kijin 2y ago
For those wondering why OP linked to the first part of the history page instead of the main page, the history is indeed one of the distinguishing features of Hangul. It's one of the few writing systems currently in use that was deliberately designed, instead of occurring naturally over time. This means that any similarities and relationships between symbols that you might find are probably intended, not accidental. Noticing these similarities is key to quickly learning Hangul, as it greatly reduces the number of distinct patterns you need to memorize. It's also fun for programmers who like puzzles. :)
- senkora 2y ago
  > This means that any similarities and relationships between symbols that you might find are probably intended Specifically, the symbols reflect phonological features like place-of-articulation. In general, such a writing system is called featural: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Featural_writing_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Featural_writing_system
- corimaith 2y ago
  Kind of amazing too that it was personally created by King Sejong himself. Even today there aren't many people who can do such thing, let alone a monarch whose handd would have been filled by other duties.
  - hyeonwho4 2y ago
    There are ... speculations that King Sejong was not fully independent in the creation of Hangeul. He may have delegated parts of the task to courtly scholars. (But all the evidence either way has been lost to history, and so speculation it remains.) There are a few "historical" dramas which make this their premise.
    - kijin 2y ago
      In many ancient and medieval monarchies, any major project that occurred with the king's approval was attributed to the king personally, regardless of his level of participation. Kings built plenty of castles, but they probably didn't move a single stone with their own hands. The academic consensus seems to be that Sejong had a lot of personal involvement in the creation of Hangul, though. He was a quintessential nerd, after all, who didn't have much patience with the conservative officials who got in the way of his nerdy projects.
senkora 2y ago
Hangul is great for computer-entry, but the data representation is a little tricky, because syllables are treated as a single glyph and there are many syllables. I found this old comment that explains it better than I can: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28287811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28287811
- kijin 2y ago
  The data representation is fairly straightforward once you're familiar with the composition rules, at least for modern Korean. Unicode simply lists all possible combinations in dictionary order starting from U+AC00. So you can take any code point and split out the 초성, 중성 and 종성 using simple arithmetic, just like you can figure out Latin alphabets from their ASCII codes.
  - hyeonwho4 2y ago
    초성 = initial sound (consonant) 중성 = middle sound (vowel) 종성 = final sound (consonant) My understanding is that there are two possible unicode encodings of Korean, one of which (MacOS) is sound by sound instead of syllable by syllable (Windows). This is why Korean UTF-8 filenames from MacOS appear broken on modern Windows machines.
    - kijin 2y ago
      Yeah, it's stupid that Windows can't normalize the two completely valid ways of expressing Hangul in Unicode. If they can process e + acute accent = é, they should be able to do ㄱ + ㅏ = 가. Having said that, MacOS also made the strange choice of expressing Hangul using the Hangul Jamo (by sound) Unicode block even when there are equivalent precomposed symbols in the Hangul Syllables block. Encoding each sound individually takes up 2-3 times more storage, just like with accented characters in Latin. Besides, if you just list sounds and rely on them to be combined automatically, what do you do when you legitimately want to write a sequence of uncombined sounds, like ㄱㅏㅁ instead of 감?
- lgessler 2y ago
  This has led to work showing that models can do better sometimes if you decompose these into their constituent characters, e.g.: https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.472.pdf https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.472.pdf
rvba 2y ago
This article is so poor. Could be 2 sentences. Language designed by a king. Also its sad that they put the years 1393-1897 first. As if it took 500 years. On page 3 we learn that 4 characters are not used anymore. We dont learn which characters, or why just uslesss knowledge. Was this written by AI?
Scene_Cast2 2y ago
Some interesting niche bits: there was an attempt at Linear Hangul; there is an Indonesian language (Cia-Cia) that has nothing to do with Korean that uses Hangul; the original script had many more letters (such as a triple dot or triangle) than are currently common.
- tokinonagare 2y ago
  Looks like it was more a political stun than anything really wanted or useful to the population: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jrca/15/0/15_KJ00009911884/_pdf https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jrca/15/0/15_KJ00009911... (when reading the conclusion)
  - yongjik 2y ago
    As a Korean, I second this assessment. The "Cia-cia" project is widely viewed as a misguided attempt to sell an unusual writing system to a tribe living in a sea of other tribes, all using Latin alphabets. Just imagine how much technical issues these poor people would face, should they actually adopt Hangul, when the entire remainder of Indonesia uses Latin alphabets.
  - t3rra 2y ago
    Surely, Japanese article must be trustworthy when it comes to things related to Kotea! lol
    - tokinonagare 2y ago
      I expected that kind of remarks. Contrary to Western and Korean beliefs, Japanese researchers aren't obsessed with shitting on South Korea 24/7. There's a lot of individuals genuinely interested other languages and cultures, studying things like the Korean speakers in China's Yanbei province. In the article I linked, there are more references to research articles on the topic written by Japanese than what exists in English.
      - soraminazuki 2y ago
djaouen 2y ago
In my opinion, hangul is the most logical and rational of all the writing systems. Very few surprises when reading something unfamiliar.
- int_19h 2y ago
  It would be nice if the original design (with dots etc) was preserved, rather than trying to make it look more like Chinese. It's also unfortunate that what was originally a purely phonemic script was gradually transformed into a morphophonemic system. The changes that happened to the language post Sejong were also accommodated in a much more ad-hoc manner than the original elegant design. (To be fair, the original took years of research to get that final design! But, all the more reason to keep it up to date, no?)
  - zzo38computer 2y ago
    What is the original design with dots etc?
    - int_19h 2y ago
      Here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul#/media/File:King_Sejong_statue_inscription.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul#/media/File:K... Here's another one that shows standalone jamo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul#/media/File:Hunminjeongeumhaerye_(cropped).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul#/media/File:H... So, basically, all the consonant jamo were simple geometric shapes, with more straight lines and fewer curves. For vowels, what is today treated as a line with a stroke was actually a combination of a line and a dot (the dot itself being a glyph for a vowel that has since disappeared from the language).
- eleveriven 2y ago
  Hangul’s logic and rationality are what make it stand out among writing systems

103 points by teleforce 2y ago

As someone who’s been trying to learn Korean, I have to admit that while Hangul is undeniably impressive in its design, I still found it challenging to fully grasp at first. Learning to recognize the shapes and sounds of the letters was relatively straightforward but putting it all together into readable syllables and understanding pronunciation rules took me longer than I expected.

rickcarlino 2y ago

I did not realize this site was still in operation- I used to use it quite a bit in college over a decade ago. Sidenote that if you are a tech minded person who has a strong interest in Korean, feel free to reach out. I am pretty easy to find online and I’m working on some Korean language related projects.

natdempk 2y ago

Anyone know if there is a particularly great app/website out there for learning Korean? Ideally opinionated, low/no "figure out what to learn yourself", Anki + AI-powered for maximum gain/seamless review/ease of getting more reading + writing variety, and easy to use on-the-go/on-mobile.

Nadya 2y ago
Anki for vocabulary building, Ryan Estrada's comic for learning to read Hangul (https://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/ https://www.ryanestrada.com/learntoreadkoreanin15minutes/) as it sticks true to its promise. Over 8 years ago I spent 15 minutes learning how to 'read' Hangul. To this day I can still slowly sound things out and, at the least, read people's names. It truly is a fantastic writing system although I do sometimes struggle with which vowel is which that's 100% an issue of only having spent 15 minutes learning. Unfortunately I can't help much with learning grammar as I never dove into actually learning Korean due to a dislike of how it sounds. There's the "Tae Kim Japanese Grammar"-like approach for a Korean grammar guide at: https://www.howtostudykorean.com/ https://www.howtostudykorean.com/ although I'm not a big fan of how overly simplified (and sometimes wrong due to the simplification) Tae Kim's approach for Japanese was. So I can't attest as to whether How To Study Korean makes the same mistakes or not. As for writing - Korean is simple enough to read/write that you can simply find any Korean news source and practice writing the sentences as you read them. You could also try checking the Korean-learning subreddit out as they have a lot of resources in one of their pinned threads: https://www.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/hw4gy0/the_ultimate_beginners_resource_thread/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/hw4gy0/the_ultimate...
- qingcharles 2y ago
  It's amazing that something that can look so alien to Western eyes is actually pretty straightforward once you try to learn it. I did the same and learned Hangul so I can at least sound things out and do some basic Internet searches etc. You can do exactly the same with other scripts, e.g. Japanese hirigana and katakana, which are fairly easy to learn, and also Arabic, which looks difficult, but is definitely learnable in an hour.
  - mabster 2y ago
    I started learning Korean but never really got the far. But, straight after learning Hangul you get into sound mixing (https://www.missellykorean.com/korean-sound-change-rules-pdf/ https://www.missellykorean.com/korean-sound-change-rules-pdf...). Trust humans to invent something simple and then make it complicated over time! Japanese has similar stuff with their u-dropping, but not as complicated as Korean.
    - soraminazuki 2y ago
      So this is why some words sound nothing like the romanized spelling. This has been confusing me to no end when learning Hangul with Duolingo.
      - Nadya 2y ago
        It's such a common aspect of languages too that many people don't even realize when they're doing it in their native language! People get lazy - especially natives who don't get confused because it's how most natives will talk. For example, every word ending in "ing" in your comment could drop the "g" sound when spoken. Plenty of English speakers do that when speakin' and not many people would think anythin' of it until a frustrated person learnin' English asks why nobody is pronouncin' the endin' "g". Droppin', changin', and blendin' sounds is why learning a language by listenin' to natives speakin' is so important instead of crammin' textbooks all day. Some might consider this a regional thing/accent and I'd argue that it both is and isn't. To the extent I tried to illustrate it would likely get seen as an accent but the occasional droppin' of it is somethin' I've heard across so many different English accents that I'd argue it isn't only an accent thing. In the US it's mostly associated with a Southern accent and in England it would be the English Midlands like Brummie or Mancunian.
n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
I think LingoDeer is generally considerrd a very good app to learn CJK. You can start with no prerequisites at all.
bryanhogan 2y ago
I'm building https://tolearnkorean.com/ https://tolearnkorean.com/ , but it's far from finished currently, only meaningful content is an introduction to Hangul so far. Making it because I believe there's lots of opportunity for high quality Korean learning content. Also found it annoying that the majority of content out there does not mention other quality resources since they want to keep you in their own (lacking) ecosystem to sell you on their books, coaching sessions, Anki vocabulary cards or whatever it is. Want to improve my own Korean by teaching it to others. Also making a site currently that aims to gamify the learning with flashcards, similar to some(!) questions you might see on Duolingo but with your flashcards as a base. Making learning with flashcards more fun and efficient. I liked BillyGo's videos as a resource in the beginning. The apps I have on my phone to learn are Naver Dictionary, Anki and Migii. Didn't like any other apps I found.
joshdavham 2y ago
> Anyone know if there is a particularly great app/website out there for learning Korean? It’s extremely unfortunate but in the year 2024, there are still close to no language learning apps that will actually help you acquire a foreign language. I’ve been in this space for about 6 years and the only I can recommend are Anki (which isn’t even a LL app) and some more obscure ‘comprehensible input’ sites. Outside of that, there’s Netflix, Spotify, Audible and real life human interaction (but none of those are LL apps!)
- PrismCrystal 2y ago
  What is sad, is that there are already whole generations who think one must learn with an app, and are completely unaware of self-teaching textbooks from traditional publishers like Routledge, Assimil, Teach Yourself, etc. These books don’t work for everyone because learning styles are different, but they do work well for some segment of learners, yet with the decline of the physical bookshop, many young people may have never seen them. (Hardcore linguaphiles are aware of these books, and have been one of the major demographics in the ebook filesharing scene that led to LibGen and Anna’s Archive. But I’m talking about the ordinary people you constantly see on e.g. Reddit who are just moving to another country, have to learn the language, and assume that one uses an app for that.)
- Nadya 2y ago
  Every now and again a site exists that has a massive community, tons of resources, ways to speak with other learners, ways to meet language exchange partners, and are greatly successful. Then all of that gets gutted for what is essentially a worse version of Anki but for the web when the company runs out of funding and has to start turning a profit somehow. This burns the community and the people providing most of the value move elsewhere. It's happened to italki (now iKnow), Memrise, DuoLingo, and a few sites that were so short-lived I no longer remember what they were called. My takeaway is that language learning apps are a lot like dating apps. They profit less if people actually learn a language and so can't be too good at their job because they'll bleed users faster than they can gain them - similar to dating apps. It needs to work just well enough that users are tricked into believing it is working but not so well that it actually works for most people. It seems like the ETA before enshittification begins is about 2~3 years. If you're an early enough adopter you might actually benefit from it but you have to be willing to jump ship and not fall for the engagement/gamification tactics that keep you sticking around after it has stopped providing any value. I spent way too long 'watering my garden' on Memrise before I looked around and noticed all of the once useful community-providing mnemonics were gone, you couldn't correct bad definitions anymore, it was difficult to actually speak to anyone else in the community (unless you could find them on the forums), and eventually I stopped using it altogether. The community I had signed up for and was a huge part of Memrise's success no longer existed.
thinkingofthing 2y ago
Self-promo: I'm working on www.flashka.ai , the Anki + AI that you might be looking for :) It shines mainly if you have PDFs of the content you are learning from which to write flashcards. The best part for language learning is that, while doing reviews, you have some options to generate mnemonics and examples, it was super-helpful to me while learning Georgian!
glenngillen 2y ago
http://letslearnhangul.com/ http://letslearnhangul.com/
- iluvcommunism 2y ago
  감사합니다!

kijin 2y ago

For those wondering why OP linked to the first part of the history page instead of the main page, the history is indeed one of the distinguishing features of Hangul. It's one of the few writing systems currently in use that was deliberately designed, instead of occurring naturally over time. This means that any similarities and relationships between symbols that you might find are probably intended, not accidental. Noticing these similarities is key to quickly learning Hangul, as it greatly reduces the number of distinct patterns you need to memorize. It's also fun for programmers who like puzzles. :)

senkora 2y ago
> This means that any similarities and relationships between symbols that you might find are probably intended Specifically, the symbols reflect phonological features like place-of-articulation. In general, such a writing system is called featural: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Featural_writing_system https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Featural_writing_system
corimaith 2y ago
Kind of amazing too that it was personally created by King Sejong himself. Even today there aren't many people who can do such thing, let alone a monarch whose handd would have been filled by other duties.
- hyeonwho4 2y ago
  There are ... speculations that King Sejong was not fully independent in the creation of Hangeul. He may have delegated parts of the task to courtly scholars. (But all the evidence either way has been lost to history, and so speculation it remains.) There are a few "historical" dramas which make this their premise.
  - kijin 2y ago
    In many ancient and medieval monarchies, any major project that occurred with the king's approval was attributed to the king personally, regardless of his level of participation. Kings built plenty of castles, but they probably didn't move a single stone with their own hands. The academic consensus seems to be that Sejong had a lot of personal involvement in the creation of Hangul, though. He was a quintessential nerd, after all, who didn't have much patience with the conservative officials who got in the way of his nerdy projects.

senkora 2y ago

Hangul is great for computer-entry, but the data representation is a little tricky, because syllables are treated as a single glyph and there are many syllables. I found this old comment that explains it better than I can: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28287811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28287811

kijin 2y ago
The data representation is fairly straightforward once you're familiar with the composition rules, at least for modern Korean. Unicode simply lists all possible combinations in dictionary order starting from U+AC00. So you can take any code point and split out the 초성, 중성 and 종성 using simple arithmetic, just like you can figure out Latin alphabets from their ASCII codes.
- hyeonwho4 2y ago
  초성 = initial sound (consonant) 중성 = middle sound (vowel) 종성 = final sound (consonant) My understanding is that there are two possible unicode encodings of Korean, one of which (MacOS) is sound by sound instead of syllable by syllable (Windows). This is why Korean UTF-8 filenames from MacOS appear broken on modern Windows machines.
  - kijin 2y ago
    Yeah, it's stupid that Windows can't normalize the two completely valid ways of expressing Hangul in Unicode. If they can process e + acute accent = é, they should be able to do ㄱ + ㅏ = 가. Having said that, MacOS also made the strange choice of expressing Hangul using the Hangul Jamo (by sound) Unicode block even when there are equivalent precomposed symbols in the Hangul Syllables block. Encoding each sound individually takes up 2-3 times more storage, just like with accented characters in Latin. Besides, if you just list sounds and rely on them to be combined automatically, what do you do when you legitimately want to write a sequence of uncombined sounds, like ㄱㅏㅁ instead of 감?
lgessler 2y ago
This has led to work showing that models can do better sometimes if you decompose these into their constituent characters, e.g.: https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.472.pdf https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.472.pdf

rvba 2y ago

This article is so poor. Could be 2 sentences. Language designed by a king. Also its sad that they put the years 1393-1897 first. As if it took 500 years. On page 3 we learn that 4 characters are not used anymore. We dont learn which characters, or why just uslesss knowledge. Was this written by AI?

Scene_Cast2 2y ago

Some interesting niche bits: there was an attempt at Linear Hangul; there is an Indonesian language (Cia-Cia) that has nothing to do with Korean that uses Hangul; the original script had many more letters (such as a triple dot or triangle) than are currently common.

tokinonagare 2y ago
Looks like it was more a political stun than anything really wanted or useful to the population: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jrca/15/0/15_KJ00009911884/_pdf https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jrca/15/0/15_KJ00009911... (when reading the conclusion)
- yongjik 2y ago
  As a Korean, I second this assessment. The "Cia-cia" project is widely viewed as a misguided attempt to sell an unusual writing system to a tribe living in a sea of other tribes, all using Latin alphabets. Just imagine how much technical issues these poor people would face, should they actually adopt Hangul, when the entire remainder of Indonesia uses Latin alphabets.
- t3rra 2y ago
  Surely, Japanese article must be trustworthy when it comes to things related to Kotea! lol
  - tokinonagare 2y ago
    I expected that kind of remarks. Contrary to Western and Korean beliefs, Japanese researchers aren't obsessed with shitting on South Korea 24/7. There's a lot of individuals genuinely interested other languages and cultures, studying things like the Korean speakers in China's Yanbei province. In the article I linked, there are more references to research articles on the topic written by Japanese than what exists in English.
    - soraminazuki 2y ago

djaouen 2y ago

In my opinion, hangul is the most logical and rational of all the writing systems. Very few surprises when reading something unfamiliar.

int_19h 2y ago
It would be nice if the original design (with dots etc) was preserved, rather than trying to make it look more like Chinese. It's also unfortunate that what was originally a purely phonemic script was gradually transformed into a morphophonemic system. The changes that happened to the language post Sejong were also accommodated in a much more ad-hoc manner than the original elegant design. (To be fair, the original took years of research to get that final design! But, all the more reason to keep it up to date, no?)
- zzo38computer 2y ago
  What is the original design with dots etc?
  - int_19h 2y ago
    Here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul#/media/File:King_Sejong_statue_inscription.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul#/media/File:K... Here's another one that shows standalone jamo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul#/media/File:Hunminjeongeumhaerye_(cropped).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul#/media/File:H... So, basically, all the consonant jamo were simple geometric shapes, with more straight lines and fewer curves. For vowels, what is today treated as a line with a stroke was actually a combination of a line and a dot (the dot itself being a glyph for a vowel that has since disappeared from the language).
eleveriven 2y ago
Hangul’s logic and rationality are what make it stand out among writing systems