Hangul

Do not stretch initial consonant vertically, but leave white space below it if no lower vowel and/or no final consonant.

Do not stretch right-hand vowel vertically, but leave white space below it if no final consonant. (Often the right-hand vowel extends farther down than the left-hand consonant, like a descender in Western typography)

Do not stretch final consonant horizontally, but leave white space to left of it.

Do not stretch or pad each block to be a fixed width, but allow variable width (kerning) where syllable blocks with no right-hand vowel and no double final consonant can be narrower than blocks that do have a right-hand vowel or double final consonant.

So far, these fonts have been used as design accents on signs or headings, rather than for typesetting large volumes of body text.

5.3 Linear Hangul

There was a minor and unsuccessful movement in the early twentieth century to abolish syllabic blocks and write the jamo individually and in a row, in the fashion of the Western alphabets: e.g. ?????? for ?? hangeul. [22]

Avant-garde typographer Ahn Sang-Soo made a font for the "Hangul Dada" exposition that exploded the syllable blocks; but while it strings out the jamo horizontally, it retains the distinctive vertical position each letter would normally have within a block, unlike the century-old linear writing proposals.[23]

While Koreans have largely accepted the Western-derived conventions of writing successive syllables left-to-right in horizontal lines instead of in vertical columns, adding spaces between words, and Western-style punctuation, they have completely resisted getting rid of syllabic blocks[citation needed], the most distinctive feature of this writing system.

6 Orthography

Until the 20th century, no official orthography of Hangul had been established. Due to liaison, heavy consonant assimilation, dialectical variants and other reasons, a Korean word can potentially be spelled in various ways. King Sejong seemed to prefer morphophonemic spelling (representing the underlying root forms) rather than a phonemic one (representing the actual sounds). However, early in its history, Hangul was dominated by phonemic spelling. Over the centuries the orthography became partially morphophonemic, first in nouns, and later in verbs. Today it is as morphophonemic as is practical. The difference between phonetic Romanization, phonemic orthography, and morpho-phonemic orthography can be illustrated with the phrase motaneun sarami:

Phonetic transcription and translation:

motaneun sarami

[mo.t?a.n?n.sa.?a.mi]

a person who cannot do it

Phonemic transcription:

??????

/mo.t?a.n?n.sa.la.mi/

Morphophonemic transcription:

??????

|mos-ha-n?n-sa.lam-i|

Morpheme-by-morpheme gloss:

?-?-? ??=?

mos-ha-neun saram=i

cannot-do-[attributive] person=[subject]

Modern orthography:

??? ???

After the Gabo Reform in 1894, the Joseon Dynasty and later the Korean Empire started to write all official documents in Hangul. Under the government's management, proper usage of Hangul, including orthography, was discussed, until Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910.

The Japanese Government-General of Chosen established the writing style of a mixture of hanja and Hangul, as in the Japanese writing system. The government revised the spelling rules in 1912, 1921 and 1930, which were relatively phonemic.

The Hangul Society, originally founded by Ju Si-gyeong, announced a proposal for a new, strongly morphophonemic orthography in 1933, which became the prototype of the contemporary orthographies in both North and South Korea. After Korea was divided, the North and South revised orthographies separately. The guiding text for Hangul orthography is called Hangeul Machumbeop, whose last South Korean revision was published in 1988 by the Ministry of Education.

6.1 Mixed scripts

Since the Late Joseon dynasty period, various Hanja-Hangul mixed systems were used. In these systems, hanja was used for lexical roots, and Hangul for grammatical words and inflections, much as kanji and kana are used in Japanese. Today however, hanja have been almost entirely phased out of daily use in North Korea, and in South Korea they are now mostly restricted to parenthetical glosses for proper names and for disambiguating homonyms.

Arabic numerals can also be mixed in with Hangul, as in 2007? 3? 22? (22 March 2007).

The Roman alphabet, and occasionally other alphabets, may be sprinkled within Korean texts for illustrative purposes, or for unassimilated loanwords.

7 Readability

The organization of Hangul syllables--with individual phonemes clustered into a syllable, rather than organized in a horizontal line as in English--is thought by some observers to be a powerful reading aid. Because of the clustering of syllables, words are shorter on the page than their linear counterparts would be, and the boundaries between syllables are easily visible (which may aid reading, if segmenting words into syllables is more natural for the reader than dividing them up into phonemes).[24] Because the component parts of the syllable are relatively simple phonemic characters, the number of strokes per character on average is lower than in Chinese characters. Unlike syllabaries, such as Japanese kana, or Chinese logographs, none of which encode the constituent phonemes within a syllable, the graphic complexity of Korean syllabic blocks varies in direct proportion with the phonemic complexity of the syllable.[25] Unlike linear alphabets such as English, the Korean orthography allows the reader to "utilize both the horizontal and vertical visual fields;"[26] finally, since Hangul syllables are represented both as collections of phonemes and as unique-looking graphs, they may allow for both visual and aural retrieval of words from the lexicon.

8 Style

Hangul may be written either vertically or horizontally. The traditional direction is from top to bottom, right to left. Horizontal writing in the style of the Roman alphabet was promoted by Ju Sigyeong, and has become overwhelmingly prevalent.

In Hunmin Jeongeum, Hangul was printed in sans-serif angular lines of even thickness. This style is found in books published before about 1900, and can be found today in stone carvings (on statues, for example).

Over the centuries, an ink-brush style of calligraphy developed, employing the same style of lines and angles as Chinese calligraphy. This brush style is called gungche (?? ‹{й“), which means "Palace Style" because the style was mostly developed and used by the maidservants (gungnyeo, ?? ‹{Џ—) of the court in Joseon dynasty.

Modern styles that are more suited for printed media were developed in the 20th century. In 1993, new names for both Myeongjo and Gothic styles were introduced when Ministry of Culture initiated an effort to standardize typographic terms, and the names Batang (??, meaning "background") and Dotum (??, meaning "stand out") replaced Myeongjo and Gothic respectively. These names are also used in Microsoft Windows.

A sans-serif style with lines of equal width is popular with pencil and pen writing, and is often the default typeface of Web browsers. A minor advantage of this style is that it makes it easier to distinguish -eung from -ung even in small or untidy print, as the jongseong ieung (?) of such fonts usually lacks a serif that could be mistaken for the ? (u) jamo's short vertical line.

Figure. 7. Three Korean type styles (gungche, batang, dotum) next to analogous Latin type styles

9 References

1. Chang, Suk-jin (1996). "Scripts and Sounds". Korean. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. ISBN 1556197284. (Volume 4 of the London Oriental and African Language Library).

2. Hannas, William C (1997). Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 082481892X. http://books.google.com/books?id=aJfv8Iyd2m4C.

3. Kim-Renaud, Y-K. (ed) 1997. The Korean Alphabet: Its History and Structure. University of Hawai`i Press.

4. Lee, Iksop. (2000). The Korean Language. (transl. Robert Ramsey) Albany, NJ: State University of New York Press. ISBN 0-7914-4831-2

5. The Ministry of Education of South Korea. (1988) Hangeul Matchumbeop.

6. Silva, David J. (2003). Western attitudes toward the Korean language: An Overview of Late NineteenthandEarly Twentieth-Century Mission Literature. Korean Studies. 2008, vol 26(2), pp270-286

7. Silva, David J. (2008). Missionary contributions toward the revaluation of Hangeul in late nineteenth-century Korea. Int'l J. Soc. Lang. 2008, vol 192, pp57-74

8. Sohn, H.-M. (1999). The Korean Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

9. Song, J,J. (2005). The Korean Language: Structure, Use and Context. London: Routledge.