David's World

October 9, 2005

Today is 한글 day!

On October 9th, 1446, King Sejong the Great proposed to reform Korean writing, which had used complicated Chinese characters, which the common people could rarely read and write. Korean's Hangul (한글), widely used today, was a proper alphabet that is, even from today's phonological (slash, linguistic) perspective a pretty smart way of writing, as Bill Poser at the Language Log points out.

On a side-note for us computer geeks: Aquamacs Emacs, the friendly editor for OS X that I've been working on recently, now has support for Hangul characters thanks to 최만수.

Computing in general has come a long way in supporting different input methods and making a variety of languages available to users concurrently. For example, I could easily copy the above characters from a web page into Emacs in between English text, save and load them, copy & paste them into Movable Type, and they rendered perfectly in the resulting webpage (this one!). This all happened without specifying any encodings, without changing the system's general language (for input methods). It all works perfectly as expected, mainly thanks to Unicode and its consequent use on the Mac. A couple of years ago, these things were not natural. American English was the standard, and everything else just plain difficult, as you can see from E-mail addresses and URLs that -- even now -- rarely use diacritical characters such as ü or é.