1.
South Korea
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South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea, is a sovereign state in East Asia, constituting the southern part of the Korean Peninsula. The earliest Korean pottery dates to 8000 BC, with three kingdoms flourishing in the 1st century BC and its rich and vibrant culture left 19 UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritages of Humanity, the third largest in the world, along with 12 World Heritage Sites. Annexed into Imperial Japan in 1910, Korea was divided after its surrender in 1945, peace has since mostly continued with the two agreeing to work peacefully for reunification and the South solidifying peace as a regional power with the worlds 10th largest defence budget. South Koreas tiger economy soared at an average of 10% for over 30 years in a period of rapid transformation called the Miracle on the Han River. A long legacy of openness and focus on innovation made it successful, today, it is the worlds fifth largest exporter with the G20s largest budget surplus and highest credit rating of any country in East Asia. It has free trade agreements with 75% of the economy and is the only G20 nation trading freely with China, the US. Since 1988, its constitution guarantees a liberal democracy with high government transparency, high personal freedoms led to the rise of a globally influential pop culture such as K-pop and K-drama, a phenomenon called the Korean Wave, known for its distinctive fashionable and trendy style. Home of the UN Green Climate Fund and GGGI, South Korea is a leader in low carbon growth, committed to helping developing countries as a major DAC. It is the third least ignorant country in the Index of Ignorance, ranking eighth highest for peaceful tolerance. It is the worlds largest spender on R&D per GDP, leading the OECD in graduates in science, the name Korea derives from the name Goryeo. The name Goryeo itself was first used by the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo in the 5th century as a form of its name. The 10th-century kingdom of Goryeo succeeded Goguryeo, and thus inherited its name, the modern spelling of Korea first appeared in the late 17th century in the travel writings of the Dutch East India Companys Hendrick Hamel. After Goryeo was replaced by Joseon in 1392, Joseon became the name for the entire territory. The new official name has its origin in the ancient country of Gojoseon, in 1897, the Joseon dynasty changed the official name of the country from Joseon to Daehan Jeguk. The name Daehan, which means great Han literally, derives from Samhan, however, the name Joseon was still widely used by Koreans to refer to their country, though it was no longer the official name. Under Japanese rule, the two names Han and Joseon coexisted, there were several groups who fought for independence, the most notable being the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea. Following the surrender of Japan, in 1945, the Republic of Korea was adopted as the name for the new country. Since the government only controlled the part of the Korean Peninsula
2.
North Korea
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North Korea, officially the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, is a country in East Asia, constituting the northern part of the Korean Peninsula. Pyongyang is both the capital as well as its largest city. To the north and northwest the country is bordered by China and by Russia along the Amnok, the country is bordered to the south by South Korea, with the heavily fortified Korean Demilitarized Zone separating the two. Negotiations on reunification failed, and in 1948 two separate governments were formed, the communist Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea in the north, an invasion initiated by North Korea led to the Korean War. The Korean Armistice Agreement brought about a ceasefire, and no peace treaty was ever signed. North Korea officially describes itself as a self-reliant socialist state and formally holds elections, critics regard it as a totalitarian dictatorship. Various outlets have called it Stalinist, particularly noting the elaborate cult of personality around Kim Il-sung, International organizations have assessed human rights violations in North Korea as belonging to a category of their own, with no parallel in the contemporary world. Over time, North Korea has gradually distanced itself from the world communist movement, Juche, an ideology of national self-reliance, was introduced into the constitution as a creative application of Marxism–Leninism in 1972. The means of production are owned by the state through state-run enterprises, most services such as healthcare, education, housing and food production are subsidized or state-funded. From 1994 to 1998, North Korea suffered from a famine that resulted in the deaths of between 0.24 and 3.5 million people, and the continues to struggle with food production. North Korea follows Songun, or military-first policy and it is the country with the highest number of military and paramilitary personnel, with a total of 9,495,000 active, reserve, and paramilitary personnel. Its active duty army of 1.21 million is the fourth largest in the world, after China, North Korea is an atheist state with no official religion and where public religion is discouraged. The name Korea derives from the name Goryeo, the name Goryeo itself was first used by the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo in the 5th century as a shortened form of its name. The 10th-century kingdom of Goryeo succeeded Goguryeo, and thus inherited its name, the modern spelling of Korea first appeared in the late 17th century in the travel writings of the Dutch East India Companys Hendrick Hamel. After the division of the country into North and South Korea, the two sides used different terms to refer to Korea, Chosun or Joseon in North Korea, in 1948, North Korea adopted Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea as its new legal name. After the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War, Korea was occupied by Japan, Japan tried to suppress Korean traditions and culture and ran the economy primarily for its own benefit. Korean resistance groups known as Dongnipgun operated along the Sino-Korean border, some of them took part in allied action in China and parts of South East Asia. One of the leaders was the communist Kim Il-sung, who later became the leader of North Korea
3.
Yi Sun-sin
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His title of Samdo Sugun Tongjesa, literally meaning Naval Commander of the Three Provinces, was the title for the commander of the Korean navy until 1896. Perhaps his most remarkable military achievement occurred at the Battle of Myeongnyang, Yi died at the Battle of Noryang on December 16,1598. With the Japanese army on the verge of being expelled from the Korean Peninsula. His famous dying words were, The battle is at its height. beat my war drums. do not announce my death, Yi remains a venerated hero among Koreans today. His family was part of the Korean Deoksu Yi clan and his grandfather Yi Baeg-nok retired from politics when neo-Confucian reformer Jo Gwang-jo was executed in the Third Literati Purge of 1519 and moved to a village near where Jo was buried. Yi Sun-sins father Yi Jeong was likewise disillusioned with politics and did not enter government service as expected of a yangban family, however, popular belief that Yi Sun-sin had difficult childhood because of his familys connection with Jo Gwang-jo is not true. During the war, Yus support of Admiral Yi was critical to Yis achievements, as a young boy, Yi played war games with other local boys, showing excellent leadership talent at an early age and constructed his own bow and fletched his own arrows as a teenager. Yi also became proficient in reading and writing Hanmun, in 1576, Yi passed the military examination. Yi is said to have impressed the judges with his archery, after he re-entered and passed the examination, Yi was posted to the Bukbyeong military district in Hamgyeong province. However, he was the oldest junior officer at the age of thirty-two, there, Yi experienced battles defending the border settlements against the Jurchen marauders and quickly became known for his strategic skills and leadership. In 1583, he lured the Jurchen into battle, defeated the marauders, according to a contemporary tradition, Yi then spent three years out of the army upon hearing of his fathers death. After his return to the front line, Yi led a string of successful campaigns against the Jurchen, however, his brilliance and accomplishments so soon in his career made his superiors jealous, and they falsely accused him of desertion during battle. The conspiracy was led by General Yi Il, who would fail to repel the Japanese invasion at the Battle of Sangju. This tendency to sabotage and frame professional adversaries was very common in the years of the Joseon military. Yi was stripped of his rank, imprisoned, and tortured, after his release, Yi was allowed to fight as an enlisted soldier. After a short period of time, however, he was appointed as the commander of the Seoul Hunryeonwon and was transferred to a small county. Yis efforts in northern Korea was rewarded when Yi was assigned as Commander of the Left Jeolla Province Naval District, nurhacis descendants would become masters of China as founders of the Qing Dynasty in a few decades time, after invading Korea in 1627 and 1637. Yi assumed his new post at Yeosu on the 13th day of the 2nd lunar month of 1591, from there, he was able to undertake a buildup of the regional navy, which was later used to confront the Japanese invasion force
4.
Kim Il-sung
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Kim Il-sung was the supreme leader of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, commonly referred to as North Korea, for 46 years, from its establishment in 1948 until his death in 1994. He held the posts of Prime Minister from 1948 to 1972 and he was also the leader of the Workers Party of Korea from 1949 to 1994. Coming to power after the overthrow of Japanese rule in 1945, he authorized the invasion of South Korea in 1950, a cease-fire in the Korean War was signed on 27 July 1953. Under his leadership, North Korea became a workers state with a publicly owned planned economy. It had close political and economic relations with the Soviet Union, by the 1960s and 1970s, North Korea enjoyed a relatively high standard of living, outperforming the South, which was riddled with political instability and economic crises. Despite this, the country still received massive funds, subsidies, during this period, the DPRK also remained critical of capitalism and the United States, seizing the American ship USS Pueblo in 1968. A cult of personality around Kim Il-sung came to domestic politics. His birthday is a holiday in North Korea and is called the Day of the Sun. Controversy surrounds Kims life before the founding of North Korea, with some sources labeling him an impostor, several sources indicate that the name Kim Il-sung had previously been used by a prominent early leader of the Korean resistance, Kim Kyung-cheon. The Soviet officer Grigory Mekler, who worked with Kim during the Soviet occupation, however, historian Andrei Lankov has argued that this is unlikely to be true. Several witnesses knew Kim before and after his time in the Soviet Union, including his superior, Zhou Baozhong, historian Bruce Cumings pointed out that Japanese officers from the Kwantung Army have attested to his fame as a resistance figure. Historians generally accept that, while Kims exploits were exaggerated by the personality cult that was built around him, Kims family is said to have originated from Jeonju, North Jeolla Province. His great-grandfather, Kim Ung-u, settled in Mangyong-dae in 1860, Kim is reported to have been born in the small village of Mangyungbong near Pyongyang on 15 April 1912. Born to Kim Hyŏng-jik and Kang Pan-sŏk, who gave him the name Kim Sŏng-ju, according to Kim, his family was not very poor, but was always a step away from poverty. According to the version, Kim’s family participated in anti-Japanese activities. Like most Korean families, they resented the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula, another view seems to be that his family settled in Manchuria, as many Koreans had at the time to escape famine. Nonetheless, Kims parents, especially Kims mother Kang Ban Suk and their exact involvement — whether their cause was missionary, nationalist, or both — is unclear nevertheless. Still, Japanese repression of opposition was brutal, resulting in the arrest and this repression forced many Korean families to flee Korea and settle in Manchuria
5.
Hangul
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The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul in South Korea and as Chosŏngŭl/Chosŏn Muntcha in North Korea is the alphabet that has been used to write the Korean language since the 15th century. It was created during the Joseon Dynasty in 1443 by King Sejong the Great, in South Korea, Hangul is used primarily to write the Korean language as using Hanja in typical Korean writing had fallen out of common usage during the late 1990s. In its classical and modern forms, the alphabet has 19 consonant and 21 vowel letters, however, instead of being written sequentially like the letters of the Latin alphabet, Hangul letters are grouped into blocks, such as 한 han, each of which transcribes a syllable. That is, although the syllable 한 han may look like a single character, each syllabic block consists of two to six letters, including at least one consonant and one vowel. These blocks are arranged horizontally from left to right or vertically from top to bottom. Each Korean word consists of one or more syllables, hence one or more blocks, of the 11,172 possible Hangul syllables, the most frequent 256 have a cumulative frequency of 88. 2%, with the top 512, it reaches 99. 9%. The modern name Hangul was coined by Ju Sigyeong in 1912, han meant great in archaic Korean, and geul is the native Korean word for script. Taken together, then, the meaning is great script, as the word han had also become one way of indicating Korea as a whole the name could also potentially be interpreted as Korean script. Korean 한글 is pronounced, and in English as /ˈhɑːn. ɡʊl/ or /ˈhɑːŋɡʊl/, when used as an English word, it is often rendered without the diacritics, hangul, and it is often capitalized as Hangul, as it appears in many English dictionaries. Hankul in the Yale romanization, a system recommended for technical linguistic studies, North Koreans call it Chosŏngŭl, after Chosŏn, the North Korean name for Korea. Because of objections to the names Hangeul, Chosŏngŭl, and urigeul by Koreans in China, until the early 20th century, Hangul was denigrated as vulgar by the literate elite, who preferred the traditional hanja writing system. They gave it such names as these, Achimgeul, in the original Hanja, it is rendered as 故智者不終朝而會，愚者可浹旬而學。 Gugmun Eonmun Amgeul. Am is a prefix that signifies a noun is feminine Ahaetgeul or Ahaegeul Hangul was promulgated by Sejong the Great, the Hall of Worthies, a group of scholars who worked with Sejong to develop and refine the new alphabet, is often credited for the work. The project was completed in late December 1443 or January 1444, the publication date of the Hunmin Jeong-eum, October 9, became Hangul Day in South Korea. Its North Korean equivalent, Chosongul Day, is on January 15, various speculations about the creation process were put to rest by the discovery in 1940 of the 1446 Hunmin Jeong-eum Haerye. This document explains the design of the consonant letters according to articulatory phonetics, to assuage this problem, King Sejong created the unique alphabet known as Hangul to promote literacy among the common people. However, it entered popular culture as Sejong had intended, being used especially by women, the late 16th century, however, saw a revival of Hangul, with gasa literature and later sijo flourishing. In the 17th century, Hangul novels became a major genre, by this point spelling had become quite irregular
6.
Balhae
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Balhae, called Bóhǎi in Chinese, was a kingdom in present-day northern Korea, areas of Chinas Northeast, and Russias Maritime Province. Balhae was established under the name Jin by former Goguryeo general Dae Jo-yeong in 698 after his defeat of the Tang China at Tianmenling, Balhaes original capital was at Dongmo Mountain in modern Dunhua, Jilin Province. In 742 it was moved to the Central Capital in Helong and it was moved to the Northern Capital in Ningan, Heilongjiang in 755, to the Eastern Capital in Hunchun, Jilin in 785, and back to the Northern Capital in 794. According to a Chinese source, the kingdom had 100,000 households, archaeological evidence suggests that the Balhae culture was an amalgamation of Chinese, Korean, and indigenous cultures. Korean scholars consider Balhae as the part of the North–South States Period of Korean history, Balhae was founded in 698 under the name Jin or Zhen. Jin is the modern Revised Romanization of Korean 진, the same as the earlier Jin state, the former states character referred to the 5th earthly branch of the Chinese and Korean zodiacs, a division of the orbit of Jupiter identified with the dragon. This was associated with a bearing of 120° but also with the period between 7 and 9 am, leading it to be associated with dawn and the direction east. The latter states name may have simply been a variant transcription of this or may have intended the characters meaning of thunderclap, shock, tremor. In 713, the Tang dynasty bestowed the title Head of Bohai Commandery to the ruler of Jin, in 762 the Tang dynasty of China recognized it a kingdom and renamed it Bohai. The earliest extant recorded mention of Balhae comes from the Old Book of Tang, southern Manchuria and northern Korea were previously the territory of Goguryeo, one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea. Goguryeo fell to the forces of Silla and the Tang dynasty in 668. The Tang annexed much of western Manchuria, while Silla unified the Korean peninsula south of the Taedong River, after Dae Jungsang’s death, his son, Dae Jo-yeong, a former Goguryeo general succeeded his father. Geolsa Biu died in battle against the Tang army led by the general Li Kaigu, Dae jo Yeong managed to escape outside of the Tang controlled territory with the remaining Goguryeo and Mohe soldiers. He successfully defeated an army sent by Wu Zetian at the Battle of Tianmenling. Which enabled him to establish the state of Balhae in the region of Yilou as King Go. The second King Mu, who felt encircled by Tang, Silla and Black Water Mohe along the Amur River, attacked Tang with his navy in 732 and killed a Tang prefect based on the Shandong Peninsula. In the same time, the king led troops taking land routes to Madushan in the vincity of the Shanhai Pass and he also sent a mission to Japan in 728 to threaten Silla from the southeast. Balhae kept diplomatic and commercial contacts with Japan until the end of the kingdom, Balhae dispatched envoys to Japan 34 times, while Japan sent envoys to Balhae 13 times
7.
Korean mixed script
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Korean mixed script is a form of writing that uses both Hangul and hanja. The script has never used for languages other than Korean. In North Korea, writing in mixed script was replaced by writing only in Hangul in the middle of the 20th century and has not been used since, in South Korea, the use of mixed script has slowly declined. The script uses hanja to write Sino-Korean vocabulary, but never to write native Korean vocabulary, from the 15th to the 20th century, the Korean mixed script usually used hanja whenever possible, and Hangul to write only grammatical suffixes and native Korean words. Using Hangul to write Sino-Korean words became common in the 20th century, up to the 1970s, many books and newspapers were written in mixed Hangul and hanja characters. Since then, the majority of print publications are written in Hangul only. Modern texts – whether or not they contain a significant amount of native Korean vocabulary – rarely use hanja for all, or even most, of the Sino-Korean words in the text. Hanja still appear in many headlines, where they serve to both disambiguate and abbreviate, and to a lesser degree in some newspapers texts, but not in magazines. They can also sometimes be found in academic literature, Mixed script making use of hanja wherever possible is still used for judicial texts such as the constitution. When writing in Korean mixed script, semantic or content words were written in hanja. It also enables pure Chinese readers to get some faint gist of the meaning in a given Korean mixed script text from reading the Hanja alone, the text below is the preamble to the constitution of the Republic of Korea. The first text is written in Hangul, the second is its mixed script version, examples Hanja and Sino-Korean vocabulary Kanji and Sino-Japanese vocabulary New Korean Orthography Lukoff, Fred. A First Reader in Korean Writing in Mixed Script
8.
Apostrophe
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The apostrophe character is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English it is used for several purposes, The marking of the omission of one or more letters, the marking of plurals of individual characters. Apostrophe comes ultimately from Greek ἡ ἀπόστροφος, through Latin and French, the apostrophe looks the same as a closing single quotation mark, although they have different meanings. Such incorrect substitutes as ´ and are common in unprofessional texts, the apostrophe was first used by Pietro Bembo in his edition of De Aetna. It was introduced into English in the 16th century in imitation of French practice, introduced by Geoffroy Tory, the apostrophe was used in place of a vowel letter to indicate elision. It was also used in place of a final e when it was elided before a vowel. Modern French orthography has restored the spelling une heure, from the 16th century, following French practice, the apostrophe was used when a vowel letter was omitted either because of incidental elision or because the letter no longer represented a sound. English spelling retained many inflections that were not pronounced as syllables, notably verb endings and the noun ending -es, so apostrophe followed by s was often used to mark a plural, especially when the noun was a loan word. The use of elision has continued to the present day, but significant changes have made to the possessive. By the 18th century, apostrophe + s was used for all possessive singular forms. This was regarded as representing the Old English genitive singular inflection -es, the plural use was greatly reduced, but a need was felt to mark possessive plural. The solution was to use an apostrophe after the plural s, however, this was not universally accepted until the mid-19th century. The apostrophe is used to indicate possession and this convention distinguishes possessive singular forms from simple plural forms, and both of those from possessive plural forms. For singulars, the possessive or genitive inflection is a survival from certain genitive inflections in Old English. Summary of rules for most situations Possessive personal pronouns, serving as either noun-equivalents or adjective-equivalents, do not use an apostrophe, even when they end in s. The complete list of those ending in the s or the corresponding sound /s/ or /z/ but not taking an apostrophe is ours, yours, his, hers, its, theirs. Other pronouns, singular nouns not ending in s, and plural nouns not ending in s all take ’s in the possessive, e. g. someone’s, a cat’s toys, women’s. Plural nouns already ending in s take only an apostrophe after the s when the possessive is formed
9.
Lee (Korean surname)
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Lee is the typical romanization of the common South Korean surname I, North Korean surname Ri. The name is written identically to the Chinese name Li 李 in Hanja characters and it is the second-most-common surname in Korea, behind only Kim. However, the NIKL still hoped to promote systemic transcriptions for use in passports, the overwhelming majority of South Koreans with this surname ignored this recommendation and continue to spell it as Lee. A few people with this surname historically spelled it Ye, as in Ye Wanyong of the Korean Empire, most such clans trace their lineage back to a specific founder, and are generally not related to one another. This system was at its height under the yangban aristocracy of the Joseon Dynasty, there are approximately 241 such clans claimed by South Koreans. Most people with surname Yi in Korea belong to either the Jeonju or Gyeongju clans, also surname Yi and Yi each have a different clans. This clan has direct imperial roots to the founding of the Joseon Dynasty, the founder of this clan was Yi Han, a native of Baekje who later married a Silla princess and became a high official of Silla. His 22nd-generation descendant, Taejo of Joseon, went on to found the Joseon Dynasty, the House of Yi ruled Joseon for 518 years between 1392 and 1910, and established many of the cultural, artistic and linguistic foundations for modern-day Korea. As of 2014, the pretender to the Korean throne was Haewon, members of the different branches of Jeonju Yi family dominated Korean history until the formation of the current Republic of Korea. Many families claim membership in the House of Yi, but few actually descend from the royal lineage, the House of Yi, in conjunction to its royal status, has produced innumerable figures of extraordinary influences in politics, the sciences, the arts, finance and academia. Many of these descendants play key roles in politics, the sciences, the arts, finances. The founder of this clan was Alpyeong, one of the village headmen of Silla. According to the Samguk Sagi, the Yi name was bestowed on the family by King Yuri around 9 CE. Notable present-day members of this include, Lee Byung-chull, the founder of Samsung Group, Lee Kun-hee, the former Samsung CEO. The Gyeongju Yi clan, according to the 2000 South Korean census, numbered over 1.4 million individuals, the founder of this clan was Yi Gwang, an official of the Goryeo period. Yi Seung-Hun, who was the first person that brought Catholicism to Korea, was in Pyeongchang clan, Yi Seung- Hun descendant Namgang Lee Seung- Hun was one of the most important figures in helping Korea gain its independence from Japan. Namgang Lee Seung- Hun was also one of the most financially successful people during his time, in his forties, Seunghun Lee devoted himself to social work and tried to support talented young people by founding the Kangmyung uisook and the Osan School. He participated in the New People’s Association, and became a Christian in 1910. Seunghun Lee was sentenced to 10 years in 1911 due to ‘105 Persons Incident’
10.
Phonology
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Phonology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the systematic organization of sounds in languages. Phonology also includes the study of equivalent organizational systems in sign languages, the word phonology can also refer to the phonological system of a given language. This is one of the systems which a language is considered to comprise, like its syntax. Phonology is often distinguished from phonetics, note that this distinction was not always made, particularly before the development of the modern concept of the phoneme in the mid 20th century. The word phonology comes from Ancient Greek φωνή, phōnḗ, voice, sound, according to Clark et al. it means the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. The history of phonology may be traced back to the Ashtadhyayi, Baudouin de Courtenays work, though often unacknowledged, is considered to be the starting point of modern phonology. He also worked on the theory of alternations, and may have had an influence on the work of Saussure according to E. F. K. Koerner. An influential school of phonology in the period was the Prague school. One of its members was Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, whose Grundzüge der Phonologie. Directly influenced by Baudouin de Courtenay, Trubetzkoy is considered the founder of morphophonology, Trubetzkoy also developed the concept of the archiphoneme. Another important figure in the Prague school was Roman Jakobson, who was one of the most prominent linguists of the 20th century, in 1968 Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle published The Sound Pattern of English, the basis for generative phonology. In this view, phonological representations are sequences of segments made up of distinctive features and these features were an expansion of earlier work by Roman Jakobson, Gunnar Fant, and Morris Halle. The features describe aspects of articulation and perception, are from a fixed set. There are at least two levels of representation, underlying representation and surface phonetic representation, ordered phonological rules govern how underlying representation is transformed into the actual pronunciation. An important consequence of the influence SPE had on phonological theory was the downplaying of the syllable, furthermore, the generativists folded morphophonology into phonology, which both solved and created problems. Natural phonology is a based on the publications of its proponent David Stampe in 1969. In this view, phonology is based on a set of phonological processes that interact with one another, which ones are active. Rather than acting on segments, phonological processes act on distinctive features within prosodic groups, prosodic groups can be as small as a part of a syllable or as large as an entire utterance
11.
Idu script
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Idu is an archaic writing system that represents the Korean language using hanja. The term idu is used in two senses and it may refer to various systems of representing Korean phonology through Chinese characters called hanja, which were used from the early Three Kingdoms to Joseon periods. In this sense, it includes hyangchal and gugyeol writing, as well as the sense of idu. The narrower sense refers solely to the system developed in the Goryeo period, the idu script used hanja, along with special symbols to indicate Korean verb endings and other grammatical markers that were different in Korean from Chinese. This made both the meaning and pronunciation difficult to parse, and was one reason the system was abandoned, to be replaced with hangul. In this respect, it faced problems analogous to those that confronted early efforts to represent the Japanese language with kanji, in Japan the early use of Chinese characters for Japanese grammar was in manyōgana, which was replaced by kana, the Japanese syllabic script. Characters were selected for idu based on their Korean sound, their adapted Korean sound, or their meaning, at the same time,150 new Korean characters were invented, mainly for names of people and places. Idu system was used mainly by members of the Jungin class, Korean language Hunmin Jeongeum Kanbun Manyōgana Peter H. Lee, A History of Korean Literature, Cambridge University Press Nam Pung-hyeon, Idu Study, Taehak Publishing, Seoul, Korea
12.
Korean Braille
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Korean Braille is the braille alphabet of the Korean language. It is not graphically-related to other braille scripts found around the world, instead, it reflects the patterns found in hangul, and differentiates initial consonants, vowels, and final consonants. It features characters for grammatical devices and punctuation, numerals are similar to those of other braille systems. Consonants have different syllable-initial and -final variants, capturing some of the feel of hangul, the initial and final variants have the same shapes, but are shifted across the braille block. There are two patterns, The consonants that span the width of the block are shifted one space downward when final and those that dont span the width of the block are on the right side of the block when initial, but on the left side when final. No consonant occupies more than two rows, *There is no initial version of ng. Initial ieung in hangul is not written in Korean Braille, however, the expected form is reserved and may not serve other uses, such as punctuation. The heavy consonants are written by prefixing an s, an old hangul convention, in initial position, they are, ⠠⠠ ㅆ ss ⠠⠈ ㄲ kk ⠠⠊ ㄸ tt ⠠⠘ ㅃ pp ⠠⠨ ㅉ jj All vowels span the width and height of the block. Because the consonants are specifically syllable-initial or syllable-final, a syllable that begins with a vowel causes no confusion when written without ieung. The simpler vowels reflect the symmetries of hangul, the yin–yang pairs a, eo and o, u are related through inversion and this creates a different pattern of symmetry than in hangul. The graphically-similar hangul letters i and eu are also related by reflection, the w in wa, wo is indicated by making the left side of the block solid, while the i in ui, oe is shown by making the right side solid. However, the e, ae and their yotized variants show no such patterns. Four diphthongs are represented with two blocks, by adding ⠗ to the appropriate vowel for the final element -i. Korean Braille contains several single cell syllable defined, many are the braille cell for an initial consonant, with an assumed vowel a added. Some make use of unused cell definitions, while others utilize multi-cell abbreviations, as in most braille scripts, ⠼ is prefixed to digits, which are the same as in English Braille. ⠴ is prefixed to the 26 basic roman letters in the same way. The first tactile encoding of hangul was developed by Rosetta Sherwood Hall in 1894 and it used a cell 4 dots wide by 2 dots high, like New York Point. 6-dot braille was adapted to Korean by Park Du-seong in 1926, there have since been a number of revisions. The current form was announced in 1994, Korean Braille library, chart is here
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