Talk:Hangul/Archive 2

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Archive 1 Archive 2 Archive 3 Archive 4

Hangul and unsourced material on it

Why is there so much unsourced information on this page?

Before I edited it, there were 11 paragraphs in the history section. 4 of them have citations. 3 of them have citations that either 1. dont go anywhere, 2. some unreliable source.

In the orthography section,

that entire section has zero sources, most of the stuff i've never heard of it.

This section needs alot of improvements as there are too much Japanese and Chinese propaganda.Inincognito (talk) 04:29, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

For the record, Inincognito (talk · contribs) has been infinitely blocked for his abusive sockpuppetry.--Appletrees (talk) 13:46, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
You can add {{fact}} tags to things you believe need referencing. However, the fact that you've never heard of something doesn't mean much. There have been dozens of editors of this article who have heard of them. If you believe something is propaganda, then point it out. Deleting material you don't agree with or have never heard of without discussion will only get you blocked. kwami (talk) 06:30, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

Without citations that means nothing. Everyone has heard one thing or another. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.129.142.154 (talk) 17:22, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Popularization of hangeul

I think that the section on the history of hangeul might be improved if information on the influence of Christian missionaries were added. The Western missionaries needed a written language that both they and the Koreans could learn quickly, and of course it takes less time to learn an alphabet than it does to develop an adequate reading vocabulary in Chinese. So, hangeul became the biblical language of Korea, which must have raised its prestige. One missionary even claimed that hangeul was created by divine providence for this very purpose. The evangelists' mission was highly successful in Korea, and they founded many schools in which hangeul must have been taught. Furthermore, many prominent leaders of the nationalist movements that promoted use of hangeul were Christian.

A condensed version of the above information--two or three sentences, perhaps--would contribute to a fuller picture of hangeul's jump from low to high prestige. I have sources for all of the information, as well. Would anyone mind if I added this to the article? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ling150 (talk • contribs) 08:11, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Orthography section

I've deleted it mainly because its all made up nonsense. Its also littered with stuff about the Japanese which have zero to do with anything Korean. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Inincognito (talk • contribs) 04:20, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

Okay, so this orthagraphy section's example has been around since before wikipedia, and I gather while here it has been challenged many times based on the comment in the code. Nonetheless, the negative connotations (which inject a defeatist attitude subconsciously to those trying to learn Hangul) of the sample make it non NPOV, in my opinion. I welcome discussion on and don't want to go by myself here especially since I just came across this article/it isn't my topic per se, but unless someone objects I am going to request an not-NPOV warning on the article until the example text can be changed. — robbiemuffin page talk 15:36, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Misleading unsourced paragraph

Since regaining independence from Japan in 1945, the Koreas have used Hangul or mixed Hangul as their sole official writing system, with ever-decreasing use of hanja. Since the 1950s, it has become uncommon to find hanja in commercial or unofficial writing in the South, with some South Korean newspaper only using hanja as abbreviations or disambiguation of homonyms. There has been widespread debate as to the future of Hanja in South Korea. North Korea reinstated Hangul as its exclusive writing system in 1949, and banned the use of Hanja completely.

This paragraph implies Hangul was never used. It has been used since the migration of mongols into modern day Korea. Spoken Hangul has existed for a long time, while written Hangul has been around since the 15th century.

There has been no widespread debate and there is no citation to support this claim. Hanja is still used for the same purposes as it always was. It has become obsolete because of the influx of western science and tech.

Contrary to popular belief there are not that many Hanja words. You could not form a coherent language based on Hanja and nearly impossible to write a sentence in. Hanja has been historically been used for buddhist and confucius texts written in Chinese as well as science that was transmitted through China. Some words for example computer does not exist in Korean. This is where hanja steps in.

North Korea did not exist prior to the Korean war, this is not a reinstated language, its a declaration of the official language like any other nation. The way it is worded is misleading to viewers of this article. Furthermore Hanja has not been banned in North Korea and there are no citations to proof this claim. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.238.13.18 (talk) 01:14, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

I suspect that English is not your native language and that you have read a faulty translation of that paragraph. (Please forgive me if I'm wrong about that. I mean no offense.) That paragraph only describes events beginning in 1945. It does not describe events before 1945. So, it does not deny that Hangul was used since the 15th century. In English, "Hangul" denotes the written script (한글). "Hangul" does not denote the spoken Korean language (한국어). The last sentence of the paragraph does not say that North Korea existed before the Korean war. It does not say that North Korea changed its spoken language in 1949. You are correct that it needs a citation, but its claim (that Kim Il-sung declared Hangul as the official script of North Korea in 1949) does not seems controversial. Do you disagree with that claim? Do you have any suggestions about how to reword the paragraph so that it's easier to understand? Rod (A. Smith) 22:38, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

No you're right its not but I did not misread the paragraph.

"North Korea reinstated Hangul as its exclusive writing system in 1949"

It's biased and slightly anti-Korean with injections of pro-Chinese propaganda(lack of a better word). The word reinstated implies something different was there before. North Korea never existed previously, so there is no such thing as a reinstatement. Hangul has always been the exclusive writing system of Korea.

There is too much unsourced biased material in this paragraph among other things in this section.

"Since the 1950s, it has become uncommon to find hanja in commercial or unofficial writing in the South, with some South Korean newspaper only using hanja as abbreviations or disambiguation of homonyms"

Its hard to prove when and to what degree that something was not used but I'll use these two examples, Hanseong sunbo & Dongnip Sinmun. One was published in the 1880's and the other in the 1890's. None of the newspapers have any sort of hanja. Those two were one of the first "modern newspapers" in Korea. Above the mentioned paragraph, there is also a reference to Korean poetry and books. 1950's was not the end of Hanja, its use has never been big unlike Japanese counterparts where Kanji is used heavily. This little excerpt has no citations. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.238.13.18 (talk) 07:56, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

WRONG, it was reinstated because the japs ruled you and banned it.... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.155.145.7 (talk) 04:41, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Public domain?

We have a clause "Hangul was promulgated in public domain by the fourth king of the Joseon Dynasty, Sejong the Great," with the reasoning (on a different page history, when reverting a [clarification needed] template) that "If King Sejong held a copyright, people couldn't use Hangul at all; that's why Hangul was on public domain when it was first announced."

Am I the only one who finds this problematic? Could we say essentially the same thing without invoking modern concepts of copyright? (Not that those would apply to hangul anyway.) Was there a possibility that Sejong could have promulgated hangul in the private domain? kwami (talk) 20:08, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Please see Talk:Origin of Hangul#Copyright of Hangul?. --­ (talk) 21:47, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Now it's "copyleft"! I'm removing this as unhistorical. kwami (talk) 06:24, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

(And it's not just anachronistic, but technically wrong: you cannot copyright a writing system. kwami (talk) 06:50, 4 August 2008 (UTC))

mixed script

"But unlike in Japanese, hanja was used only for nouns."

Were they only used for nouns, or only for Sino-Korean, all of which were nouns? That is, were hanja used for native Korean nouns? kwami (talk) 20:22, 1 June 2008 (UTC)

I know this is a quite late response. Anyway, the answer is "not exactly."
  1. Many native Korean nouns don't have hanja.
  2. Some adjectives and some verbs have hanja.
Therefore, we need to delete that sentence. --­ (talk) 18:26, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
Deleted. --­ (talk) 18:29, 1 August 2008 (UTC)
According to one of my sources, hanja are/were not restricted to verbs, but in general the content words in a sentence would be written in hanja, while the function words would be in hangul: “An optimal text for efficient visual and semantic processing may be one that uses mixed scripts to enhance visual distinction of semantically important and unimportant words” (75). This is the source: Taylor, Insup. “The Korean writing system: An alphabet? A syllabary? A logography?” Processing of Visible Language 2. Eds. Paul A. Kolers, Merald E. Wrolstad, and Herman Bouma. New York: Plenum Press, pp. 65-82. 1980. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Politizer (talk • contribs) 00:28, 27 August 2008 (UTC)
Most texts these days don't use hanja at all, and even conservative ones would likely only use hanja for some of the content words. Also, the article seems to say the mixed style was imported relatively late from Japanese.
Supposedly hanja were restricted to Sino-Korean quite early, but don't have the reference at hand right now. --JWB (talk) 01:09, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Parent Systems

Wikipedia is not a place for original research and controversial theories. There are no hard evidences that Hangul's 'ancestors' are all those other alphabet systems.

Agnistus, the article Phoenician_alphabet does NOT say hangul is derived from phagspa script. Please do not lie. It currently says: "Many historians believe that the Brahmi script and the subsequent Indic alphabets are derived from this script as well, which would make it and ultimately Egyptian the ancestor of most writing systems in use today, possibly including even Hangul, which may have been influenced by Brahmic Phagspa. This would mean that of all the national scripts in use in the world today, only the Chinese script and its derivatives have an independent origin."

"... POSSIBLY including even Hanul, which MAY have been INFLUENCED..." I have highlighted the key words for you.

kwami, you left a note on my page saying: "Agnistus didn't mean that "Korean is based on all those alphabets", but that that is its genealogy. Controversial, but there is substantial evidence."

Genealogy is just a scientific word used to say "based on". You said yourself that it is controversial, so why include it in wikipedia?

If you guys feel intent on including something in the article about the REMOTE POSSIBILITY that Hangul is based on some other alphabets, then please do so as a separate section in the article, not in the table where only hard facts should appear. Wookie919 (talk) 22:07, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm not pushing for it to be included in the table, and the idea is already covered adequately in the body of the article. The evidence actually is very good, though a minority opinion. The Phoenician alphabet article is too full of weasel words. When you said "based on all those alphabets", I thought you'd misunderstood, and thought that Agnistus meant that each of those alphabets was a separate ancestor of hangul, whereas it's only Phagspa that's claimed to be directly ancestral. — kwami (talk) 23:46, 2 April 2008 (UTC)
It is true that the connection between Hangul and Phagspa is uncertain, although the evidence is very good. If the genealogical information was completely removed from the table, then it would say artificial script, which is not true; since there certainly is connection between Hangul and Phaspa (quoting kwami: "The evidence actually is very good, though a minority opinion."). It is best to list the entire genealogical information, with an additional notice that says the connection is uncertain. I have done this by including the word "(uncertain)" next to Phaspa in the table. - Agnistus (talk) 09:23, 17 May 2008 (UTC)
I would just like to add that I have created a new article on the origin of Hangul called Origin of Hangul. I also removed the (uncertain) word since it affected the neatness of the table. (The 2 citations with regard to the controversial status of the Hangul-Phaspa connection were not removed). If any of you want to add it back, feel free to do so. - Agnistus (talk) 09:43, 17 May 2008 (UTC)


"It is true that the connection between Hangul and Phagspa is uncertain..." - Enough said. Again, removed from the info box. Wookie919 (talk) 04:51, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
"The evidence actually is very good, though a minority opinion." - Enough evidence to include parent systems in Infobox. - Agnistus (talk) 18:15, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
Wookie919 (talk), please stop pushing lopsided POV - prove the hangul-phagspa connection to be false, before removing it from the infobox. - Agnistus (talk) 18:29, 19 May 2008 (UTC)
The above comment has a serious logical flaw in it. I don't have to prove that hangul is not based on phagspa. It is up to you guys to prove that phagspa is infact the parental system of hangul to include it in the infobox. "lopsided POV"? I could have used the exact same phrase in response to your post above - please try to stay objective. Now, let me say this again. Info box is a place for HARD FACTS, not THEORIES. If the evidence is enough, majority of the world would believe that phagspa is the parental system of hangul. I am not stating that there is NO possibility that a connection between phagspa and hangul exists. All I am saying is that this theory (while the evidence might seem good to both you, Agnistus, and Kwamikagami) is still only a minority opinion (as stated by Kwamikagami) and hence MUST NOT belong in the info box. Why is this so difficult for you to understand? The article already deals in depth with the possible connection between phagspa and Hangul. Wookie919 (talk) 03:23, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
It's also not a direct connection, as such a table would imply. Any comment in the infobox should reflect that. kwami (talk) 03:30, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
Let me make this clear to you now Wookie919, the aim is to make the infobox as close to the truth as possible. You could either say in the infobox that hangul is an artifcial script OR show all the information along with the word "(controversial)" next to Phagspa. Which one is closer to the TRUTH ??? To any sensible person the former is without question. And most readers will understand the uncertain nature of the connection the moment they see the word "(controversial)" next to Phaspa. I hope this clears any misunderstanding you may have, Wookie919. It would be in the best interests of everyone to close the discussion here, and leave the infobox with full genealogical information along with the word "(controversial)" next to Phagspa. Thank you - Agnistus (talk) 17:31, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
OK, I don't edit this article, but I've been watching this for a while, Agnistus, and I guess I'll put my 2-cents in now. The theories you are putting forward at this page are all very interesting, but far, far from the standard, accepted history of hangul. I think you can see this, right? Wikipedia's standards are Wikipedia:Verifiability not truth. So if you believe with all your heart that these theories are the truth, it still does not make it the standard, scholarly, verifiable version of the history of hangul. Rather than engage in an edit-war to push this marginal theory as "truth" at the page, I would suggest discussing with the other editors here whether the theory deserves mention as an "alternate theory" section of the article. Keep up the path you are following though, and you'll probably wind up blocked eventually... Regards. Dekkappai (talk) 17:51, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
The connection between hangul and phagspa are completely verifiable (see Origin of Hangul). I thought placing the "(controversial)" tag wouldmake things clear for the reader, but it seems some editors still have a problem. Owing to the fact that the connection is indeed verifiable an closer to the truth, could those editors against showing full genealogical formatting provide a better explanation for doing so. - Agnistus (talk) 15:56, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
Agnistus, Ledyard is a very respected scholar in the field, both in the US and in Korea. However, I don't know how many Korean scholars accept his conclusions on this point. I imagine that many maintain the traditional view that hangul is an artificial script. I don't know either way, but this could be checked in to.
The rest of you, the fact that a connection is disputed does not mean that it is not included in the info table. For example, the derivation from Brahmi from Aramaic is probably accepted by a majority of scholars, but is hotly disputed by some, especially in India. Such connections have normally been included with a warning. This is similar to the situation with languages, where few old families have been established beyond reasonable doubt. I can think of only Indo-european, Uralic, Austronesian, and Afrasiatic which have been demonstrated. Yet in our info boxes we include families like Sino-Tibetan, Tibeto-Burman, Niger-Congo, and Nilo-Saharan, none of which are particularly well supported, as if they were fact. kwami (talk) 23:35, 22 May 2008 (UTC)
Agnistus, you are the one who wrote the whole article Origin of Hangul which is currently badly mis-titled (will get to that later) because it is merely a theory and it is basically a summary of the Ledyard's studies. Referring to Origin of Hangul only emphasizes that your argument is solely based on the thoughts of Ledyard, and nothing else. "The connection between hangul and phagspa are completely verifiable" - wow. Just wow. Now you have completed re-worded yourself as if to say that the connection is a HARD FACT! Wookie919 (talk) 03:36, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
One more thing, I am anxious to find out what your responses would be to the discussions of the article Origin of Hangul. It seems that you have taken only the bits that support your argument from Ledyard's and failed to see the whole picture of Ledyard's studies. Wookie919 (talk) 04:00, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
Agnistus did not write the article. He just moved it. kwami (talk) 05:50, 23 May 2008 (UTC)
I believe I heard that Korean was related to Altaic Language, rather than Tibetian Language, which derived from the west. I raise some questions that: 1. the table that shows the roots of the Korean Language is too far-flung and mostly unrelated, and 2. the table contradicts the generally accepted theory by linguistics that, many Altaic-Language-Mongols migrated into the Korean Peninsula. My main point is, Korean is ABSOLUTELY NOT included in Egyptian hieroglyphics nor the Brahmin Language, and that concludes that this dubious listing of roots of the Korean Language should be deleted.

In addition to that, I would greatly thank anyone who could add citation[s] that verify that Korean is related to Altaic roots.

Benhpark (talk) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 211.204.49.221 (talk) 10:30, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

Please note: this article is NOT about the Korean language. It is about the Hangul writing system, which was constructed rather recently and rather rapidly (as writing systems go) when King Sejong basically asked a bunch of people in his court to go out and research neighboring writing systems and then make up a good one for Korean. The infobox in this article is not listing "roots of Korean languag" but is listing the roots of the writing systems on which Hangul is based See Lee, Peter H., and Wm. Theodore de Bary, eds. Sources of Korean Traditon (Volume 1). Columbia University Press, 1997; this is a good collection of primary sources. Thank you, --Politizer (talk) 14:07, 14 September 2008 (UTC)


The 'Phagspa connection in the infobox is back, courtesty of Special:Contributions/219.111.79.204 219.111.79.204. I didn't want to get involved in the debate, so for now I just wikified it (so it looks pretty and a reader can check out the relevant articles) and added a footnote so that readers know it's a controversial topic. You guys can decide whether or not to delete it. --Politizer (talk) 04:10, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Block shape and unchanging jamo

Regarding the 2nd ¶ of the Block shape section:

However, some recent fonts (for example Eun, HY깊은샘물M, UnJamo) move towards the Western practice of letters whose relative size is fixed, and the use of whitespace to fill letter positions not used in a particular block, and away from the East Asian tradition of square block characters (方块字).

I would just like to comment that the style exemplified by the UnJamo fonts is that of a Korean typewriter, with only one glyph available for each letter. These had to combine to produce readable syllable blocks; the results are clear but uneven in terms of type color. Like our Latin monospace fonts, it’s not the best typography, but it comes to be recognized as a certain style in its own right. MJ (t • c) 03:38, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Japanese and Korean

Are the symbols shown in the top two rows at Image:Origin of Korean.jpg equivalent phonetically, or just simply coincidentally similar in shape? As the diagram doesn't give the pronunciations, it's not a very useful diagram. Badagnani (talk) 05:54, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

one comment by User:Politizer moved down during refactoring

Even better, answer the actual question I asked. Badagnani (talk) 06:15, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Hey, I didn't create the images and I'm not the person responsible for explaining them. I was just trying to bring people's attention to the problems with them. The question you asked was not mine to answer; I was just adding another question next to yours. —Politizer talk/contribs 06:18, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
They are not phonetically equivalent. The shape similarities are coincidental. —Dominus 06:37, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
(comment moved up from bottom during refactoring) It would be even better to actually answer the (very specific) question I asked. Badagnani (talk) 06:52, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
Your question was answered in this edit. The answer was no, the similarity between symbols is a coincidence. —Politizer talk/contribs 06:54, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
If that is the case, there is dishonesty behind both the creator of that chart as well as possibly the editor who added it. Badagnani (talk) 06:55, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
I agree, and given what's come up during this discussion I'm going to IfD all three images. —Politizer talk/contribs 07:01, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

That image and two similar versions of it by the same uploader have no source information and are of questionable value (one has already been challenged at its talk page by myself and another user). Does anyone have any opinion about whether to IfD them, or just make sure they're not used in any articles, or anything else?　 Here are the three images in question:

(the last two appear to be duplicates of one another, the only difference being the left-justification vs center-justification of the kana). —Politizer talk/contribs 06:09, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
->Answer
Source:(www.encyclopedia.com), (www.nationsencyclopedia.com)<- It says that Hangeul was copied by Chinese characters. And, (www.state.gov)<- It says that Korean was influenced by Japanese. So I just made it easier to see how Hangul had been influenced by Chinese and Japanese based on these websites.talk
Those "sources" are insufficient; Wikipedia requires a direct link to the exact article where you found that information, just a general domain name like encyclopedia.com and state.gov is not enough. And even if those articles do claim that Hangul was influenced by Chinese and Japanese characters, your images are still original research unless those articles specifically point out similarities between the same graphemes that you have in your images. —Politizer talk/contribs 06:33, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
My Korean friend told me that the shapes of the consonantal jamo are mostly based on the shapes of the lips and tongue when making those sounds (ㄱ is the tongue with the tongue back raised towards the velum, and ㄷ is the tongue blade raised towards the alveolar ridge, for example), and vowel jamo based on the tongue height and frontness/backness. At least two of the books given in the Bibliography section have that in their introductory chapters. So, unless you can produce a real source, I will assume that the shapes are based more on that than on Chinese and Japanese characters. (Furthermore, your image ignores Mongolic, Tungusic, and other nearby scripts, which Sejong supposedly sent scholars out to research just before developing Hangul.) —Politizer talk/contribs 06:48, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
->Answer
"Unlike Chinese, Korean does not use tones to make semantic distinctions. Its syntax, however, is similar to that of Chinese, while its morphology resembles that of Japanese. "
(http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1E1-Korean.html)
"The Korean language is related to Japanese and Mongolian. Although it differs grammatically from Chinese and does not use tones, a large number of Chinese cognates exist in Korean. Chinese ideograms are believed to have been brought into Korea sometime before the second century BC."
(http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2800.htm)
The two quotations you gave say nothing about Hangul. Really, absolutely nothing.
The first is not even about writing. It's about typology. Irrelevant.
The second is about Hanja, not Hangul. —Politizer talk/contribs 06:49, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
As an aside, I don't know if encyclopedia.com is a good source to use anyway. The text in the link you gave is just a replica of text from another encyclopedia, and apparently a bad one: the only sources it uses for its explanation are two introductory language-learning textbooks that are nearly 40 years old. —Politizer talk/contribs 06:53, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
But, I just read an article today in Korean that Hangul was copied from Chinese characters. ->(http://news.naver.com/main/read.nhn?mode=LS2D&mid=sec&sid1=105&sid2=226&oid=001&aid=0002390941)

'인사이클로피디아(www.encyclopedia.com)'와 '내이션스인사이클로피디아(www.nationsencyclopedia.com)' 등은 "한글은 중국 한자를 모방해 만들었다"고 왜곡했다. Even though it's not clear either, and I sent an e-mail to the auther, I still have no idea. And I don't think it'd be just a coincidence.  talk/contribs 08:09, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Please don't make any more images while you still "have no idea"; wait until you are clear on something before creating and uploading an image about it.
As for that naver.com source, I don't speak Korean so I can't read it, but I doubt it is academically rigorous like the sources already in the article. —Politizer talk/contribs 07:23, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
Not only is the naver.com "source" just a blog, but it never even mentions kana! Really, this whole thing is a load of BS. I'd guess that our author heard there are some similarities between Japanese and Korean, and—not being clear on the difference between language and writing—set out to fill in the gaps. AFAIK, there is no known historical connection between hangul and kana, except perhaps very indirectly if (as seems likely) Koreans introduced an idu type system to Japan along with Chinese characters. The comparisons themselves don't even bother with the sound values, so even as OR they're worthless. (I mean, Korean m with Japanese ro—if we're comparing squares, we might as well throw in Hebrew s and we can claim the Koreans are the Lost Tribe of Israel.) All three images should be deleted ASAP. kwami (talk) 07:50, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
The master has spoken. For the record, I have IfDed the second two of the images in my little bullet list above (you can find the IfD entries by going to those images pages); the first image is a Commons image and I have gone over there and done the Commons equivalent of IfD to it. —Politizer talk/contribs 07:54, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
Do I detect a note of sarcasm? :)
For the record, s.o. commented above that this sounds dishonest. I think that's uncalled for. (Though that may be hypocritical of me, since I was rather harsh right now.) I imagine this is someone who's used to chat rooms, and hasn't been around wikipedia long enough to know that wikipedia is supposed to be different. There's nothing dishonest in that. kwami (talk) 08:10, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Latest addition

I'm not an expert, so I didn't feel comfortable just blindly reverting, but this addition looks pretty questionable to me. First of all, the source is a blog, which leads me to believe it's mostly OR and is the ref was just whatever the editor could find. Secondly, it suggests that ㆍ, ㅡ, and ㅣ stand for "heaven, earth, and human," and bases this assertion on the order in which they appeared in some early dictionary... as far as I knew, ㅡ and ㅣ had more to do with the backness/frontness of the vowels they represent?

Anyway, I won't revert by myself because I don't totally know what I'm talking about, but I'm just wondering if anyone else finds this questionable. Politizer talk/contribs 00:46, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

That is the traditional etymology. See origin of hangul. kwami (talk) 01:58, 24 January 2009 (UTC)
Ah. No problem, then. But could we get some better sources for it (perhaps from Origin of Hangul article)? Politizer talk/contribs 02:19, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Style

While it's true that books etc. have gone over to left-to-right, store signs, especially listings of menu itmes on walls of restaurants have not. I am about as likely to see top-to-bottom as left-to-right. It could also be noted that on such signs, the space is often block, so that you can get huge gaps between words and even syllables.Kdammers (talk) 07:54, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Is that notable, though? We do the same thing on store signs in English (and, as far as I know, just about every language that has been written for a long time). The use of vertical writing in restaurants, though, may be worth mention. --Politizer (talk) 13:10, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Another thing I notice in the Style section...the image is nice, but unfortunately the examples it gives for different fonts are all different characters! It's not a big deal, but could someone who has Photoshop (or some other software that would allow you to make a pretty image like that) make a new image in which the same characters are used to demonstrate each font? --Politizer (talk) 13:10, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

The Korean text is the Korean name of the font. --JWB (talk) 13:59, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
Here you go: a longer sample MJ (t • c) 01:23, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
I like that one. Would anyone be offended if I replaaced the current example with that? —Politizer talk/contribs 01:58, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
I’d rather leave the image in the article as is. The idea was to show analogous styles in the Latin script side by side. This new one I did just for your request. The fonts I used on Mac, btw, were #GungSeo, Apple Myungjo and Apple Gothic. MJ (t • c) 02:32, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
I was totally confused by the different words, not knowing korean. I would really prefer it to be replaced because the description doesn't make much sense as is. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 38.115.166.174 (talk) 21:51, 30 January 2009 (UTC)
I changed the caption to a fuller description. I hope that addresses the confusion. I can see how the original was too terse, and that the graphic actually presents a lot of information in a small space. I think this is a good thing as long as it’s not confusing. But I did illustrate exactly what reading this section of the article made me want to see. MJ (t • c) 18:42, 2 February 2009 (UTC)
Well, I still wish we had an example showing the same characters in different fonts (rather than different ones in different fonts), but I can also see the benefit of having analagous Latin script next to it. I guess it's a trade-off someone will have to deal with, and since I am not interested in making a huge deal over this one image (and, besides, I don't have the software necessary to do anything about it anyway), I'm fine with whatever you put up there. (as long as it's not a penis or something, of course.) Politizer talk/contribs 20:33, 2 February 2009 (UTC)

stroke order: E (tieut) is flawed

Unless I don't understand the flow of information, the graphic for E (tieut) is in error. All the other graphics show the completed Hangul at the beginning of the stroke sequence; that one shows a partial Hangul missing the center (second) stroke. I can't fix it because I'm at work and don't have access to a graphics editor that writes .png's so I'm noting it here for someone else to fix. I'll come back later and fix it if someone else doesn't do it first. 12.151.32.25 (talk) 20:34, 20 February 2009 (UTC)some anonymous person.

Offtopic but help needed

Can someone post me the characters depicted here? I would be very appriciated


3 Hangul chars


PS. Idk where I should post that :/... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.63.84.236 (talk) 07:38, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

It doesn't seem to mean anything.--119.149.135.35 (talk) 12:19, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

It's pronounced 'Tep-hik-luk' and it doesn't mean anything.--Younghyun0403 (talk) 13:19, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

Indonesian tribe using Hangul?

Here's a link: [1]
Is this credible enough to mention in this page? --Tk TommyKim (talk) 18:35, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

AFAIK, AFP is as reliable a press source as any. The story has been picked up in the Jakarta Globe,[2] the Singapore Straights Times,[3] and the 2ch Times[4] (Japanese). I'd say that's RS, though it would be nice to get Ho-Young's on word for it. kwami (talk) 19:03, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
Here is the Ethnologue entry for Cia-Cia, so at least we know it's somewhat legit (to whatever extent you choose to believe in Ethnologue's classifications). Personally, I think we can mention in the text somewhere that people doing Cia-Cia language revitalization have chosen to use Hangul, but I think we should hold out on making if "official"-sounding (by putting it in the infobox, etc.) until some time has passed so we can be sure this doesn't peter out into nothing. Unfortunately, language revitalization projects often do just that. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 19:16, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
As a side note: be careful how you mention it. I wouldn't be surprised to see Korean nationalist editors trying to add something along the lines of "Hangul was selected for transcribing Cia-Cia because Hangul is so great and so easy-to-learn". But based on the articles cited, I don't see any indication that Hangul was selected because of anything special about it. I was hoping to see something like 'the Korean phoneme inventory is similar to the Cia-Cia one, so this alphabet was seen as appropriate' or something like that, but it seems that the real reason is just that Korean linguists are the ones behind the Cia-Cia revitalization so they chose to use their own alphabet for it. rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 19:20, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Since it's a fairly recently initiated movement, I don't think Hangul yet qualifies as "the" writing system for Cia-Cia. I'd recommend changing the way that's stated in the overview paragraph to something more tentative. I also doubt that the Cia-Cia movement merits mention in the first paragraph, but that's not my call. For now, I'll just rephrase "It has also been adopted as the writing system of the Austronesian Cia-Cia language." Samboha (talk) 04:31, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

Patchim?

I noticed that this article had nothing about "patchim" in it. I am thinking about adding it in. Does anyone else agree, or is it unnecessary? Αδελφος (talk) 21:49, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Hanja for N. Korean word, why?

I noticed someone edited one hanja (語 for the last syllable of 조선글) in the info box under “North Korean name.” Aside from doubting that this is right (語 is 어 as in 한국어 as far as I know), my bigger question is: Why write a North Korean word with hanja at all? They certainly don’t. I’m removing that line from the box; feel free to revert if you have a reason. (Also, why does the infobox template spell it “hancha” while everywhere else here I find “hanja”?) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mark R Johnson (talk • contribs) 16:30, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

I agree: Koreans aren't using hanja to write their words. I think somebody who studied Chinese and Korean wrote that and wanted to put both here. I also think that it should be hanja, not hancha. Αδελφος (talk) 21:51, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

North Korean names are typically transcribed in Wade-Giles, which would be hancha. I would prefer that all Korean names use the same transcription, but that's a larger issue that should be brought up on the Korea project talk pages. kwami (talk) 23:15, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

Samson (1990)

Samson (1990) misrepresents Ledyard, and would appear to not understand his argument. He says, "So remarkable an achievement was Han'gul that some Western scholars to this day argue that it must have been developed on the basis of an earlier model", and give Ledyard as an example. This is completely off base: L never claims that Hangul must be based on s.t. else because it's too remarkable to be Korean; in fact, he goes to pains to deny such an interpretation of his work, and he clearly has a great admiration for Korea and its culture. And indeed, what he ascribes to Phagspa is the least remarkable aspect of the script: the shapes of a few letters. It is patently not the model for hangul in L's treatment. To mischaracterize him as considering the featural system unimportant, as Samson does, is dishonest. It's like saying that Diringer claims the alphabet was not an invention because the shapes of the letters came from hieroglyphs, or that Braille was not an invention because someone else had already invented the dot. Or take Cherokee: no-one claims that anyone pointing out the Latin sources of the characters is denying Sequoya's achievement, or that the Latin alphabet could not have been the antecedent of Cherokee because it's not syllabic. The featural system of the script was innovative in L's account, though of course based on Chinese phonological theory. (The script was of course a product of its time, as any invention is.) If we have a ref that most scholars reject L, fine, but the Samson quote should be removed as misinformation. kwami (talk) 01:38, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

graphic complexity

"...the graphic complexity of Korean syllabic blocks varies in direct proportion with the phonemic complexity of the syllable." I can't buy this. What about the words with two-consonant padjims? What about words with 쯔 , ㅃ, ㄸ or ㅆ? I would say they all are graphically complex, but I don't think ㄸ is more complex phonemically than ㄷ is. Kdammers (talk) 09:27, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

There is of course not a perfect correlation. All this is really saying is that hangul is an alphabet: more phonemes mean more letters, with the exception of digraphs. I thought about just deleting it, but I'll leave that to others to decide. kwami (talk) 09:42, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
ㄸ is the faucalised version of ㄷ and occurs when two adjacent ㄷ are assimilated. For instance, '받다' and '바따' have the same pronunciation. So while ㄸ may be no more complex than ㄷ phonetically, it is possible that, within the framework of Korean phonology, ㄸ is perceived as a doubled ㄷ and thus has a greater complexity. The same argument holds for the other double consonants. As for two-consonant badchims, one of the badchims may be silent when their syllable occurs alone, but a sound following the syllable may force both badchims to be pronounced. For example, '삶' /sam/ => '삶이' /salmi/. This is due to the fact that the Korean orthographies are morphophonemic. I suppose better wording would be "...varies in direct proportion with the morphophonemic complexity of the syllable." 24.83.45.98 (talk) 04:05, 18 February 2010 (UTC)

ㅇ as a null initial and as a final

The text of “morpho-syllabic blocks” section, which apparently needs improvement:

When a syllable has no actual initial consonant, the null initial ㅇ ieung is used as a placeholder. … The sets of initial and final consonants are not the same. For instance, ㅇ ng only occurs in final position …

What means “consonants” in this context, letters-consonants or consonant sounds? As stated, ‹ ㅇ › may both initial and final, but it represents silent sound when be initial. BTW: is the silence a consonant or what? How to understand “ ㅇ ng ”: the ‹ ㅇ › jamo which English name is ng, or the [ŋ] (ng) sound written by the (final) jamo ‹ ㅇ ›? First interpretation is false, second leads to a tautology. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 12:11, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

ㅇ is a null consonant in initial position, ng in final position. These were originally two different letters. kwami (talk) 19:23, 20 February 2010 (UTC)
Perhaps (from the historical point of view) there were two different letters, but currently in the article section I see the same code point U+3147 for both null consonant and final [ŋ] jamo. Unicode code chart shows similarly looking character U+3181 ‹ ㆁ ›, may be one of these is the null consonant and another – the [ŋ]? But if somebody claims that codes are really U+3147 for both different jamo, then such bizarre thing should be explicitly stated, say: despite they are encoded in Unicode by the same code, these characters are actually not the same… I do not know Hangeul, I just check the consistency. Incnis Mrsi (talk) 00:04, 21 February 2010 (UTC)
There are four types of Unicode blocks allocated for Hangul--1100-11FF "Hangul Jamo" block, 3130-318F "Hangul Jamo Compatibility" block, AC00-D7FF "Hangul Syllable" block, and FFA0-FFDF "Hangul Halfwidth Form" block. The character 3147 you are looking at is in the Compatibility block, which does not differentiate onset consonants from coda consonants. Jamo block, on the other hand, does differentiate between the two. Onset ㅇ is at 110B while coda ㅇ is at 11BC. The Compatibility block seems to exist mainly to be backwards compatible with a legacy Hangul encoding scheme called KSX1001, which used a filler character (3164) in such a way that when you pass a string FILLER-CONSONANT-VOWEL-CONSONANT, a syllable is rendered where the first CONSONANT is converted to an onset while the second CONSONANT becomes a coda. New Hangul strings *should* be coded with Jamo or Syllable block instead of Compatibility block, but people and software are slow to adopt. I don't think anyone uses the Halfwidth Forms. 24.83.45.98 (talk) 13:23, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

New Readability Section

I added some information here. This isn't OR, but still it would be nice to get some more sources corroborating what I have there now (which mostly comes from a small number of sources), so if anyone has any other sources to add to that section or clarify things, they would be very welcome! Thanks. --Politizer (talk) 19:12, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

  1. The featural nature of the script is unique. You should probably mention the term "featural" used elsewhere in the article to describe it. Whether it actually speeds comprehension is an interesting question. My guess is that it matters less than visual distinctiveness of the letters from each other. Hangul does have a predominance of square forms which may reduce distinctiveness; only the s/j/ch and ng/zero jamos are exceptions.
  2. Hangul spelling has evolved from phonemic to more morphophonemic. Again, look at the material already in the article. It's still way more phonemic than English, but less than some languages. Morphophonemic spelling may actually be good for comprehension if it lets the reader recognize the word root more easily, and if transforming to actual pronunciation is easy for the reader.
  3. Avoiding really long linear strings of symbols, and using the vertical visual field instead of just the horizontal, I think is a real benefit, and perhaps a reason for (syllable-blocked) Hangul's continued popularity.
  4. Syllabicity may help in many cases but the syllable is not always the perfect unit for Korean, which does have many polysyllabic words. And often in actual pronunciation, the sound (or modified sound) of a jamo will be pronounced in an adjacent syllable, not in the syllable of the morphophonemic block where the jamo is written.
  5. The practice of squeezing or stretching the jamo to make a syllable fit a square block may reduce distinctiveness of written syllable shapes. There are some fonts ("talnemo") that don't do this and keep jamo size more constant, while allowing syllables to be irregular, similar to Roman-alphabet typography features like descenders and ascenders that are supposed to improve reading speed. I added a discussion of this to the article recently, please look at it.
  6. Is stroke count lower than in Chinese characters? It is over the set of all characters, but less complex characters are used more frequently. And when there are many homonyms, the hanja may have more strokes but also better comprehensibility. A stroke/complexity comparison to Japanese kana would also be interesting - kana seem stroke-efficient at least for the open syllables typical in Japanese. Any of these comparisons should cite studies in order to be at all meaningful.

--JWB (talk) 20:24, 6 September 2008 (UTC)

First of all, hanja isn't an alphabet. That needs to be changed immediately.

Second, whereas JWB expressed doubts that the featural aspect of hangul improves legibility, I believe it actually reduces it. That's because it forces many of the letters to have similar shapes and therefore to be less distinct. The only benefit of the featural aspect, besides aesthetics and national pride, is that it makes the script easier to learn by foreigners who know something of phonetics. It has no benefit for Koreans, or for foreigners either once letter recognition is automatic.

Since AFAIK the mixed script was introduced by the Japanese in imitation of Japanese, and never actually used very much (and certainly never used now), that paragraph is irrelevant to the section and should be removed. I believe it would indeed help legibility, as it does for Japanese, but that's a hypothetical question.

Per JWB, the morphophonemic aspect really does help with legibility. That's one reason irregular spellings in English are sometimes beneficial, and why for example Turkish seems to be evolving in that direction.

"graphs for consonants show whether the phoneme is voiced". False. The only voiced consonants are m, n, ng, and l, and there is nothing to show that they are voiced.

"there is nearly a one-to-one phoneme-graph correspondence". False. This is not a phonemic script. All consonants have more that one pronunciation, except for the three like ㅃ that do not occur at the end of a syllable. The the letter ㅅ, for example, is pronounced /s/, /t/, and /n/, and phoneme /n/ is variously written ㄴ, ㄹ, ㄷ, ㅅ, and ㅈ (and I believe even more, but I'd need to double check).

kwami (talk) 22:18, 6 September 2008 (UTC)


kwami -- As for the issues of voicing and the phoneme-graph correspondence, you can change those if you like; I am not a Korean speaker and so those two statements are just things I came across in secondary sources during research I did in the past, so I personally have no way of knowing whether or not those sources are correct.
As for whether the featural nature of Hangul helps or hinders reading, I personally agree with you guys that most of the things mentioned in certain papers (stuff like the shapes of phonemes reflecting the point of articulation, yada yada) shouldn't make a big difference once you've acquired the language to the point that you can read without thinking about it, and that they may even cause more errors since similar-sounding words will have similar-spellings (whereas in English, for example, "tuck" and "duck" start with almost the exact same sound, but no one confuses them in writing because t and d look nothing alike). The problem is, all of our speculation and gut feelings about those things (mine included) would count as original research, so until we can dig up some more recent sources that better evaluate these questions, I guess we're stuck with just writing the article in such a way that it's clear that these are just speculations which may not be true. (I tried to write it in that way my first time around, but I admit it might give a little too much weight to the view that Hangul are awesome, and not enough to the opposing view, for which I don't have any credible sources that aren't OR...I guess one thing we can work on is whittling down what I have written there now, so it's a little more compact and doesn't undue weight to one viewpoint).
As for the mixed script...do you have a source you could show me saying that mixed script was never used much? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just wondering, because my understanding had been that before the 20th century (or maybe earlier than that) Hangul was considered kind of lowbrow and barbaric and Hanja were mixed in as much as possible (the only source for that I have on hand is Anderson, Paul S. “Korean Language Reform.” The Modern Language Journal 32.7 (November 1948): 508-11. , which is very old). In any case, now that you mention it, I agree that it isn't relevant to hangul per se, and I will remove it after I finish writing this.
Finally, JWB, regarding the stroke counts...I have done some minor statistical comparison of Chinese and Hangul stroke counts, but not with a super-representative sample...and, besides, it's OR. I believe I have a source somewhere saying that the stroke count is lower (the reason I counted on my own in the past was to check that source) but I will have to dig it up; in the meantime, I'll add a [citation needed] tag.
Thanks for your comments, guys. --Politizer (talk) 22:54, 6 September 2008 (UTC)
kwami -- Hangul is a phonemic script, and each jamo has one pronunciation. It's that Korean orthographies are morphophonemic that sound changes due to assimilation, sandhi, etc. are not reflected in writing. 24.83.45.98 (talk) 13:39, 13 March 2010 (UTC)

I don't have a source handy, but I wouldn't say mixed script was never used much. If it was used for a good part of the 20th century, that's still quite a lot.

The traditional scholarly attitude would have been to write Literary Chinese rather than Korean at all. Hangul was apparently initially intended for all-Hangul texts; for that matter, Japanese kana were initially used for all-kana texts. But it's quite possible mixed script got significant usage before the 20th century; I don't have evidence either for or against.

Our opinions are our own and not citeable, but on the other hand if none of us believe a claim (e.g. that the featural nature of the script aids reading) and it's not so widespread as to be notable, what reason is there to include it in the article?

The claims that seem most credible are the ones around nonlinearity / using both dimensions / visual variation / syllabicity. You might consider working these into the existing section on syllable blocking, which already mentions readability issues.

The stuff about stroke-count is less about Hangul in particular than about Chinese characters vs. alphabets in general, so perhaps treatment of this would make more sense in the Chinese character articles. --JWB (talk) 01:08, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Ok, I'll go look into the syllable blocking section. Also, on a slightly unrelated note...the end of the first paragraph on syllable blocking says, "with the exception that single-consonant morphemes may not be written alone." Should that be single-vowel morphemes? It caught my attention, but as I'm not a native speaker, I wanted to check in with the rest of you first. --Politizer (talk) 01:21, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

No, it's consonant. For example, there is a politeness morpheme |p| that surfaces as /m/ in verbs such as hamnida. That's written syllabically as hap-ni-da, not morphemically as ha-p-ni-da. Or usually is, anyway. There are historical exceptions. kwami (talk) 01:30, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Ah, thanks. Single vowels don't really get written alone either, do they? (by which I mean, they get an extra circle, as in 이.) It could just be that I'm thinking of something different than what was being discussed at that point in the article. --Politizer (talk) 01:33, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

I was thinking of saying something about that, but a vocalic morpheme such as 이 is still written as a separate block. The ieung is just a placeholder. There was a time when it was not: jib-i was written ji-bi, but that's no longer the case. There are a few vocalic morphemes that are written as part of the preceding block (usually something like o-a being written oa / wa), but I'll have to look them up. The point is that the lack of independent consonants is an orthographic rule similar to the requirement of ieung before an initial vowel. kwami (talk) 01:45, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

letter variants

Maybe it's there and I just didn't see it, but I can't find any mention of the custom of printing (ㅇ)ㅏ as a squiggle below a consonant, as in 한, where there is a squiggle between the ㅎ and the ㄴ and nothing to the right of it . Kdammers (talk) 07:54, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Not quite sure what you are referring to, but maybe you are talking about the obsolete vowel ㆍ? Although it merged with ㅏ in many cases and ㅡ in others, it is a vowel in its own right and not a variant of ㅏ. However, as mentioned in the article in Korean Wikipedia, there are at least a couple of cases of contemporary use where it serves essentially as a variant of ㅏ meant to evoke archaic spellings, even when there is no etymological justification. This is equivalent to faux-archaic "ye olde inne" type spellings in English, and doesn't really rate mention in an encyclopedic article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.111.53.190 (talk) 18:16, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
Why don't you think it rates mentioning? It can be seen occasionally to the total consternation of some-one using standard text-books or sources that don't elucidate it.Kdammers (talk) 07:52, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

No consensus to move. Vegaswikian (talk) 21:10, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

Hangul → Hangeul — Hangeul is a Korea Government's official spelling.

Hangeul(O) Hankeul(X) Han-gŭl(X)


http://www.korean.go.kr/09_new/dic/rule/rule_roman.jsp

There are two search boxes. In the below box, search a word "한글." --Gnulinux (talk) 02:52, 22 May 2010 (UTC)

  • Comment the poll above, from 2007 shows no consensus . 70.29.210.155 (talk) 04:31, 22 May 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose Hangul is more commonly used in the English-language literature, and this is English Wikipedia. rʨanaɢ (talk) 05:47, 22 May 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose - the Korean Government do not dictate spelling on en.wiki. We have our own conventions and reasons for naming articles outlined at WP:AT. According to those, the article is already at the correct title. Knepflerle (talk) 11:32, 22 May 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose. A quick Google search suggests that "Hangul" is far more widely used in English. --DAJF (talk) 15:43, 22 May 2010 (UTC)
  • Oppose as above; with the addition: this is claimed to be "a Korean government's official spelling". Which Korean government? (there are two) and why should the spelling in Korean (however phonetic that alphabet is) influence spelling in English? Septentrionalis PMAnderson
    • Neither of these is the spelling "in Korean" (that would be 한글). They are spellings in the Latin alphabet, and are just two different ways of trying to represent a sound that doesn't have a consistent spelling in languages that use the Latin alphabet. rʨanaɢ (talk) 00:58, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
      • Then why is a link to a web page in Korean evidence at all? Septentrionalis PMAnderson 01:22, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
        • He was trying to illustrate that if you use the search box on that page to search for 한글, it brings back some results spelled Hangeul. But you are right that it's still not a reason for us to change our spelling. rʨanaɢ (talk) 01:41, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
  • Comments: There are a lot of claims above, but no evidence is given. The very first English citation given in the OED is for hangŭl (McCune-Reischauer). Martin's many works use hankul (Yale); this is fairly common in linguistics. Recent general books seem to mostly be hangeul (Revised Romanization). There does not seem to be a consistent English spelling. Not my preference, but there is a preference for Revised Romanization on Wikipedia, so perhaps it would be ideal to use hangeul as neutral and consistent. 114.162.44.129 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 02:17, 24 May 2010 (UTC).
There are plenty of problems with web searches. However, your results for hangul/hangeul for Books is surprisingly closer than I would have thought. That said, I looked at a few dozen of the results for Hangul. Many of them are actually matching hangŭl as hangul, which invalidates the dataset. For example, take the very first book: "The Korean Language" by Iksop Lee and S. Robert Ramsey. (I own this book.) It is actually hangŭl, which can be verified online as well. There are numerous other similar results in the other books. 114.162.44.129 (talk) 05:11, 24 May 2010 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Error, need help fixing

"In addition, there are 10 obsolete double letters: ㅥ, ᄙ, ㅹ, ᄽ, ᄿ, ᅇ, ᇮ, ᅏ, ᅑ, ㆅ."
ᅇ appears twice. What was the original 10th? ㆀ? — MK (t/c) 05:52, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Those are two different characters. The first is choseong ssangieung and the second is jongseong ssangieung. Bendono (talk) 07:57, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
Ah, they look identical in my font and when I checked their unicode character number that day, I accidentally used ascii to check and they both threw the same number. Thank you for clearing that up. — MK (t/c) 12:15, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

audio pronunciation says hanzi not hangeul

audio pronunciation says hanzi not hangeul —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.22.114.69 (talk) 22:44, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

removed vandalism, comment posted

I removed the comment [Have these logically impossible ones ever been used?] from directly after the 41 obsolete vowel diphthongs section, but the point still stands - have those vowel diphthongs ever been used?Vanisaac (talk) 04:53, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

AFAIK they were never used for Korean, but then hangul was not devised for Korean: it was meant to transcribe both Korean and Chinese. When hangul was revived, it was not part of Chinese scholarship in Korea and so was only used for Korean. All Chinese-only letters are therefore obsolete. I suspect (but don't know) that they were only ever used in Sejong's day, due to the general opposition to hangul among Chinese scholars. — kwami (talk) 10:02, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Contradiction re aspiration stroke

Early in describing the jamo, the article says that it's the top stroke of ㅌ t [tʰ] that denotes aspiration. But later we find that d [t] is ㄷ, so that apparently isn't true. If anything, it would be the middle stroke that denotes aspiration—which is consistent with the case of ㄱ g [k] and ㅋ k [kʰ]. I'd fix it but I don't know any details beyond the obviousness of the contradiction. Can someone else please fix it? —Largo Plazo (talk) 13:38, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Fixed. — kwami (talk) 10:05, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Different examples for Stroke order section?

Currently in that section, 6 base vowels and 2 dipthongs (ㅐ (ae) and ㅔ (e)) are shown. I suggest re-ording to show the six base vowels, then only one of the dipthong vowel and also add one iotized vowel, or have the two non-base vowels be a combination of the dipthong and iotized vowels where one is based upon either ㅏ (a) or ㅓ (eo), and the other based upon either ㅗ (o) or ㅜ (u). (I would have made a replacement graphic(s) but don't have the appropriate image editing program at the moment.) CJLippert (talk) 18:41, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

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