Hangul Syllables is a
Unicode block
A Unicode block is one of several contiguous ranges of numeric character codes (code points) of the Unicode character set that are defined by the Unicode Consortium for administrative and documentation purposes. Typically, proposals such as the ad ...
containing precomposed
Hangul
The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, . Hangul may also be written as following South Korea's standard Romanization. ( ) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The let ...
syllable blocks for modern Korean. The syllables
can be directly mapped by algorithm to sequences of two or three characters in the
Hangul Jamo
This is the list of Hangul ''jamo'' (Korean alphabet letters which represent consonants and vowels in Korean) including obsolete ones. This list contains Unicode code points.
In the lists below,
* code points in were added in Unicode 5.2. Unicode block:
* one of U+1100–U+1112: the 19 modern Hangul leading consonant jamos;
* one of U+1161–U+1175: the 21 modern Hangul vowel jamos;
* none, or one of U+11A8–U+11C2: the 27 modern Hangul trailing consonant jamos.
This block is encoded according to the canonically equivalent order of these (two or three) jamos (one in each subrange of jamos above) composing each syllable.
Note that a full Hangul syllable may include one of these characters but may be preceded by one or more leading consonant jamos, and followed by one or more trailing jamos (possibly preceded by one or more vowel jamos if the encoded syllable is composed by two jamos does not include any trailing consonant jamos). As well some Hangul syllables may not include any one of these precomposed character. But such extension of the Hangul script (which allows creating more complex syllables composed in the same square) is not very common in modern Korean.
Block
History
Encoding hangul syllables in Unicode was complicated by a reorganization of the code points:
* Unicode version 1.0.0 encoded 2,350 modern Korean hangul syllables from
KS C 5601-1987 at U+3400–U+3D2D. This range is now part of
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A.
* Version 1.1 added 1,930 additional modern syllables from
KS C 5657-1991 at U+3D2E–U+44B7, six modern syllables from
GB 12052 GB 12052-89, entitled ''Korean character coded character set for information interchange'' ( zh, s=信息交换用朝鲜文字编码字符集), is a Korean-language character set standard established by China. It consists of a total of 5,979 charact ...
-89 at U+44B8–U+44BD, and the first 2,370 syllables that are not in the aforementioned three sets at U+44BE–U+4DFF. These collectively cover the remainder of what is now
CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A and all of what is now
Yijing Hexagram Symbols
Yijing Hexagram Symbols is a Unicode block containing the 64 hexagrams from the ''I Ching''.
History
The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Yijing Hexagram Symbols block:
...
.
** In addition, there were three errors in Unicode 1.1:
*** U+384E: 삤 in the Unicode Character Database, but 삣 in the Unicode 1.0 and ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 code charts and per the source standard mappings
*** U+40BC: 삣 in the Unicode Character Database, but 삤 in the ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 code charts and per the source standard mappings
*** U+436C: 콫 in the Unicode Character Database, but 콪 in the ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 code charts and per the source standard mappings
* Version 2.0 added the 4,516 remaining possible syllables from KS C 5601-1992 and rearranged all of the encoded syllables into the current U+AC00–U+D7AF range which allows algorithmic decomposition into individual jamo.
explains that this significant incompatible change was made on the assumption that no data or software using Unicode for Korean existed:
Subsequently, Unicode adopted an encoding stability policy which states that "Once a character is encoded, it will not be moved or removed".
The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Hangul Syllables block:
References
See also
{{Hangul Jamo
Unicode blocks
Hangul