Korean (draft)

Hangul

Letters

Vowel sounds

Consonant sounds

	labial	dental	alveolar	post- alveolar	palatal	velar	glottal
stops	p	t				k
tense	p͈	t͈				k͈
aspirated	pʰ	tʰ				kʰ
affricates		t͡s		t͡ɕ
tense		t͈͡s		t͈͡ɕ
aspirated		t͡sʰ		t͡ɕʰ
fricatives			s				h
tense			s͈
nasal	m		n			ŋ
approximant	w		l		j	ɰ
trill/flap			r

Syllables and jamos

One of the peculiarities of hangul characters is that discreet phonetic symbols, called jamo (자모), are combined within a standard square space to represent a syllable. This means that it is only necessary to learn a small number of symbols to be able to read any of the approximately 11,000 syllablic characters supported by Unicode.

It is possible to store hangul text as either jamos or syllabic characters in Unicode, although the latter is more common. Unicode enables both approaches. If the underlying characters are jamos, the text is still displayed as square syllabic characters – the application has to compose the syllables during the rendering process. It is partly because of the occasional difficulty in guessing syllable boundaries that it is more common to store the text in syllabic characters, which have a one-to-one mapping with what is displayed.

Keyboards, however, are normally organised on the basis of jamos, so the process of creating syllabic characters still has to take place, but between keyboard and storage there are better opportunities for the writer to correct potential errors in syllable boundaries.

The following is from [Unicode]:

Modern Hangul syllable blocks can be expressed with either two or three jamo, either in the form consonant + vowel or in the form consonant + vowel + consonant. There are 19 possible leading (initial) consonants ( choseong ), 21 vowels ( jungseong ), and 27 trailing (final) consonants ( jongseong ). Thus there are 399 possible two-jamo syllable blocks and 10,773 possible three-jamo syllable blocks, giving a total of 11,172 modern Hangul syllable blocks. This collection of 11,172 modern Hangul syllables encoded in this block is known as the Johab set.

Consonants & vowels

There are 19 consonant jamo, which typically have different pronunciations when syllable initial and final.³

Wikipedia lists 21 jamo vowel sounds, however there is disagreement among experts about the number of phonemes vs. diphthongs.³

Obsolete features

There are a number of obsolete consonants, vowels, and diphthongs: see [Wikipedia] for details.

The figure below shows two such obsolete features⁵:

• the vowel arae-a, represented by dots below a consonant, and
• tone marks (used in 15. century Korean).

Wikipedia describes the vowel arae-a as follows:

ㆍ [U+318D HANGUL LETTER ARAEA] ə (arae-a 아래아 "lower a"): Presumably pronounced [ʌ], similar to modern ㅓ (eo). It is written as a dot, positioned beneath the consonant. The arae-a is not entirely obsolete, as it can be found in various brand names, and in the Jeju language, where it is pronounced [ɒ]. The ə formed a medial of its own, or was found in the diphthong ㆎ arae-ae, written with the dot under the consonant and ㅣ (transcribed i) to its right, in the same fashion as ㅚ or ㅢ.

Dates

The date 22 July 2018 can be written 2018년 7월 22일. It can also be written as a numeric date, 2018. 7. 22. – note the spaces following the periods in the latter example.

Context-based shaping & positioning

Shaping

Fullwidth and halfwidth characters.Hangul syllables are normally displayed in the same sized square spaces, much like Han and Kana characters.

Embedded Latin text, numbers, or punctuation, however, can be represented using fullwidth, halfwidth, or proportionally-spaced glyphs.

When Latin characters run down the line in vertical text they are likely to be proportionally-spaced or halfwidth.

However, acronyms are likely to be upright and set using fullwidth glyphs.

In theory, the Unicode Standard expects ASCII letters to be used for both fullwidth and non-fullwidth rendered characters. The fullwidth characters are intended only for roundtrip character conversions. The expectation is that an appropriate font or fullwidth transform would be used to obtain the desired glyph, however, in practice it is common to find the fullwidth characters available in Unicode being used. Note, however, that if you wanted to use a character outside the basic ASCII set, such as é, you would have a problem with this approach since there would not be a corresponding fullwidth character available in Unicode.

Positioning

Kerning.It is possible to kern Hangul syllabic glyphs, as demonstrated in this figure.

For more information about how this works, see [klreq]. (This is not something that is common in Chinese or Japanese text.)

Font styling & weight

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Grapheme clusters

Word boundaries

Unlike Japanese and Chinese, Korean separates 'words' with spaces.

Phrase & section boundaries

Korean uses Latin punctuation, however many of the punctuation used have additional fullwidth forms.

For separators at the sentence level and below, the following are used, where the leftmost column indicates approximate equivalences to Latin script.^{1, 6}

ㆍ [U+318D HANGUL LETTER ARAEA] is a fullwidth glyph used to link items in a list or in contraposition,h eg. 한(韓)ㆍ이(伊) 양국 간의 무역량이 늘고 있다. The trade volume between Korea and the United States is increasing. or 빨강ㆍ초록ㆍ파랑이 빛의 삼원색이다. Red, green, and blue are the three primary colours of light.It can, however, also be replaced with a space.

Hyphens.In addition to - [U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS], the following characters are used as hyphens.

Bracketed text

The same brackets and parentheses are used in horizontal and vertical text, although they are rotated 90 degrees to the right in vertical text.

〔 [U+3014 LEFT TORTOISE SHELL BRACKET] and  [ [U+005B LEFT SQUARE BRACKET] are described in Hangul Spellingh as equivalent, but both are rendered as different-looking and non-fullwidth glyphs. The font used on my system (Mac OS X) makes one fullwidth and one not, but uses the same glyph shape for both.

Quotations & citations

The characters used to delimit quotations also depend on the orientation of the text. Horizontal text normally uses:

Vertical text generally uses:

In the following example it appears to be significant that there is no space following the closing quote mark: 사회자가 “이쪽부터 차례로 자기소개를 합시다.”라고 말했다. The moderator said, "Let's take turns to introduce ourselves".

Quoted text within quoted text appears to start with double quotes first, then single,h eg. 그때 누군가가 큰 소리로 말했다. “침착해야 합니다! ‘하늘이 무너져도 솟아날 구멍이 있다.’라고 하지 않습니까?”.

Emphasis

Emphasis can be expressed using special marks alongside a character. Modern text typically places a dot above each syllable in horizontal text, or to the right of the syllable in vertical text. An infrequently used alternative is a small open circle.h

Older text uses various other symbols, and may place the symbol to the side or below the syllabic character in horizontal text.⁴

Emphasis can also be expressed using underlines (see Text decoration). Sometimes the emphasised text is surrounded by single quotes, however this has the disadvantage that it can be confused with quotation marks, eg. 지금 필요한 것은 ‘지식’이 아니라 ‘실천’입니다.

Abbreviation, ellipsis & repetition

Ellipsis. The following characters are used to indicate continuation.

Ellipsis in Korean usually uses 6 dots. This is typically achieved using a pair of … [U+2026 HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS] characters together, which may put the dots at the vertical centre of the character space, eg. 그는 최선을 다했다. 그러나 성공할지는…… . He did his best. But if he succeeds...Note that the Korean text also has a sentence-final period, preceded by a space. (It is also possible to use 6 full stops, in which case the dots will be near the bottom of the character space.)h

There is also a double dot character, but it isn't as widely used as the triple dot.

Repetition.〃 [U+3003 DITTO MARK] can be used to indicate repetition.

Inline notes & annotations

This figure shows phonetic annotations of hanja characters (often called ruby), using hangul syllables. The annotations are small in size and are placed below the hanja character, to the right side of the vertical line.⁵

In horizontal text, ruby appears below the hanja characters.⁵

Since it is only needed for hanja characters, ruby is rarely seen on the Web and is only used for publishing text which uses hanja extensively, which is not common either.⁵

Other punctuation

Korean uses a large number of punctuation marks, and that number is increased by the duplication of normal vs. fullwidth variants.

CLDR36 lists 84 punctuation characters, grouped here by Unicode block.

CJK Symbols & Punctuation:

(Halfwidth &) Fullwidth Forms:

Basic & General punctuation:

Katakana:

Other inline text decoration

Text decoration.Underlines appear below horizontally set text, and to the right of vertically set text.h

Note how the underline in the figure above doesn't include the syllables at the end of the word.

Less commonly, a wavy underline is used.

Line breaking & hyphenation

Korean can be wrapped on a word-by-word basis, but it is more common in modern Korean to simply wrap at syllable boundaries. It's a question of preference. This includes embedded Latin script text.

Line breaking has to also take into account line-breaking rules (geumchik) which dictate what characters cannot appear at the end or start of a line. Although lines are typically broken after the character that reaches the end of the line, certain characters, such as 」, should not appear at the start of a line, and others, such as 「, should not appear at the end. Some character pairs, such as …… or numbers, should not be broken either. For more information, see [klreq].

To test how your browser wraps Korean text, change the width of the browser window and watch how the sample text behaves.

모든 사람은 법 앞에 평등하며 어떠한 차별도 없이 법의 동등한 보호를 받을 권리를 가진다. 모든 사람은 이 선언에 위반되는 어떠한 차별과 그러한 차별의 선동으로부터 동등한 보호를 받을 권리를 가진다.

Text alignment & justification

It is normal for Korean text to be aligned at the line head and line end (ie. not ragged edge).

If text is only composed on Hangul syllables, there is no need for justification, since each character has the same width. However, things such as proportionally-based text and punctuation break the alignment and necessitate small adjustments across a line in order to make the last character flush with the line end. The same occurs when the geumchick rules disallow punctuation or other characters at line start or end.

Justification is done principally by adjusting inter-word spacing.

The visible part of the glyph for opening parentheses is typically placed close to the right edge of the square space allocated to a fullwidth character. The remaining blank space is then available for adjustments, where needed, for justification, etc. The opposite is true for closing paired characters, and fullwidth full stop and comma work similarly.

In the case of vertical text, the ink appears at the top or bottom of the square character space.

Use the control below to see how your browser justifies the text sample here.

모든 사람은 법 앞에 평등하며 어떠한 차별도 없이 법의 동등한 보호를 받을 권리를 가진다. 모든 사람은 이 선언에 위반되는 어떠한 차별과 그러한 차별의 선동으로부터 동등한 보호를 받을 권리를 가진다.

   Justify   

Line alignment

The most common way of starting a new paragraph is to indent the first line of the paragraph by one character space. No paragraph leading is used.¹

There are, however, alternatives such as no indentation on all lines, or no indentation on the first paragraph after a heading.

Text on a line may be left-aligned, right-aligned, or centred, but in some cases may also be justified so that there is equal space across all characters. See [klreq].

Text spacing

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This section looks at ways in which spacing is applied between characters over and above that which is introduced during justification.

Baselines, line height, etc.

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Counters, lists, etc.

Korean text uses a number of different counter styles. Some of the more common include full-width European numbers, which in vertical text stand upright. Unicode has various sets of numbers that can be useful here.

For the dotted-decimal numeric style Unicode provides precomposed characters from 1 to 20.

For the circled-decimal numeric style Unicode provides characters from 1 to 50.

Ready-made Counter Styles lists 9 counter styles that use Chinese or Korean characters. You can experiment with these styles using the Counter styles converter.

Styling initials

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