On Mon, 15 Oct 2001, Karlsson Kent - keka wrote: > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Jungshik Shin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > ... > > 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
