From: verdy_p (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Jan 08 2010 - 12:47:02 CST
> Message du 08/01/10 10:30
> De : "Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven"
> A : "Curtis Clark"
> Copie à : "Unicode Mailing List"
> Objet : Re: Quick Question About Korean Input Methods
>
>
> -On [20100108 06:58], Curtis Clark (jcclark-lists@earthlink.net) wrote:
> >She could not think of one (Korean is her first language, but she has
> >lived in the US since she was a teenager), but if you can think of an
> >example, I'll pass it on.
>
> Could also be because us 'Westerners' look at IME use a bit differently than
> natives.
>
> I remembered on which mailinglist I asked about this (how to enter in a
> specific IME) and dug up the example:
>
> gae-ul: 개울 (stream; brook)
> ga-eul: 가을 (autumn; fall)
>
> In normal transliteration and IME entry you'd write gaeul in both cases, but
> you really need the syllable marker to specify which you mean.
For this example you don't need to type any syllable separation marker if you type Hangul vowels directly without
"decomposing" them into their Latin transliteration. A and AE are distinct vowels in Hangul, typed differently. The
same is true for U and EU.
So you'll type really: G, AE, U, L for the first example, and as soon as you type the second vowel (U) the empty
consonnant IEUNG is implied before it. Of course you may also type the IEUNG consonnant between them (because it has
its own key on Hangul keyboards).
The real complexity does not seem to be within the separation of groups of vowels (unless Hangul is also used to
write foreign diphtongs, without inserting any IEUNG between them), but in the separation of groups of consonnants
like STR when they occur between vowels: it is not clear where the syllable break occurs, even if this does not
change the rendering when using linear Hangul instead of presenting syllables in squares.
I asked to the list how Korean transliterates the foreign diphtongs and leading multiple consonnants into Hangul:
How would Korean would write names like Maastricht ? Either as "M A S T - R I S T" with always a single leading
consonnant in the second syllable but two final consonnants on the first one, or as "M A S - T R I S T" ?
For proper names (including famous political personnalities, or artists, or foreign cities cited in the press, or
trademarks) that are unbreakable this may be a non-issue as both could be equally valid in Hangul, but when multiple
consonnants occr at the position of a generative morpheme break, this may not be so simple as there would be no rule
based just on typed letters. Without an explicit syllable break, only a dictionnary lookup (in IME) or an explicitly
typed syllable break (using the knowledge of the Korean typist) could reveal what is needed.
The translitteration of the frequent English diphtongs will also cause problems in Hangul: the automatic insertion
of IEUNG between vowel pairs may produce incorrect phonology and spelling, even for Korean natives.
And may be, for most of these foreign names, Koreans already know how to read Latin, and don't attempt to
translitterate them, so they really type "IBM" without attempting to transliterate it into non meaningful syllabic
clusters by adding "extra" vowels (those they use when they spell the Latin letters).
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