Well, no. the 11,172 syllables you mention are *not* letters. The fact that Korean combines letters by syllables [Syllabic blocks in Wikipedia] doesn't make these syllables "letters". The Korean Keyboard uses 26 keys for the 33 letters [19 consonants, counting geminated consonants as separate letters, and 14 vowels] used in Modern Korean.
OTOH, the fact that the Korean writing system is non-linear makes systems like that proposed by Jeremiah impractical, since the output is variable, and can't be mapped without ambiguities to an xml description file. There are two algorithms in the Unicode standard to convert between Korean syllables and a romanization system -- the romanization system itself doesn't matter and can be remapped to anything, really -- and this system appears to be the cleanest. I agree that a system of plugins/callbacks could do fine, if it can handle "resetting" output: eg typing gks <bkspc> f would output successively: ㅎ -> 하 -> 한 -> 하 -> 할 [Unicode 0x1112, 0xd558, 0xd55c, 0xd558, 0xd560]. Being able to "backtrack" is quite necessary in this case. Needless to say I'd be quite interested to contribute in such an effort. -- dda On Feb 7, 2008 4:13 PM, Sébastien Lorquet <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > (keeping [EMAIL PROTECTED] and communitylist in the loop) > > Hehe, > This is totally understandable. :) We will explain to you the best as we > can. > > If you want to make a korean keyboard with a key for each letter then you'll > need a keyboard with... > > (sit down before next line) > > ... 11,172 letters, ie from \uAC00 to \uD7A3 + 24 "single letters" or jamos
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