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The Beauty Of Typography: Writing Systems And Calligraphy Of The World - Korean Squares

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The Beauty Of Typography: Writing Systems And Calligraphy Of The World
Chinese Characters
Japanese
Korean Squares
Vietnamese Rotation
Arabic
Bi-Directionnality
Sini
Indic Scripts (Brahmic)
Thai Stacking Diactritics
Tibetan Mantras
Summary
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Korean Squares

Korean is itself a very different writing system. It uses Hangul, a “featural” writing system. The shapes of the letters are not arbitrary but encode phonological features of the phonemes they represent.

Korean Squares

Hangul has existed since the middle of the 15th century (approximately 1440). But tradition prevailed, and scholars continued to use Classical Chinese as the literary language, and it was not until 1945 that Hangul became popular in Korea.

Korean Squares

Jamo (자모; 字母), or natsori (낱소리), are the units that make up the Hangul alphabet. “Ja” means letter or character, and “mo” means mother, suggesting that the jamo are the building blocks of the script. When writing out words, signs are grouped by syllables into squares. The layout of signs inside the square depends greatly on the syllable structure as well as which vowels are used.

initial medial
initial
medial
initial med.
2
med. 1
initial medial
final
initial
medial
final
initial med.
2
med.
final
initial medial
final 1 final 2
initial
medial
final 1 final 2
initial med.
2
med.

Korean Squares



Last Updated on Saturday, 14 August 2010 17:24