LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Hangul: Korean Hangul
built 668 days ago
In the IME Configuration dialog box, Hangul is the first Korean input method listed. It conforms to the 2 beolshik input method. There are basically three components in a Korean character: chosung, jungsung, jongsung. The Hangul input method automatically deciphers how the characters should be formed as the user types the Korean alphabets.
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Hangul is the native alphabet of the Korean language, as distinguished from the logographic Sino-Korean hanja system. It is the official script of both North Korea and South Korea. Hangul is a phonemic alphabet organized into syllabic blocks. Each block consists of at least two of the 24 Hangul letters: at least one each of the 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Originally, the alphabet had several additional letters. For a phonological description of the letters, see Korean phonology.
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Before the invention of Hangul, the Korean people had no own script and Chinese characters, known as Hanja, were used. Lessons in Hanja were exclusively held for male members of the nobility, so most of the Koreans were effictively illiterate. Another problem was that there's no relation beteen the Korean and the Chinese language at all and both use completely different structures, which makes the Chinese characters all but unsuitable for writing Korean. They were used as a kind of semantical and phonetical symbols and there were two ways to do that. One way was to use Hanja that had roughly the same meaning in Korean as they had in the Chinese language. The administrative language Idu ... used a different approach.
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Instead, Hangul, once Korea's fastest-rising software company, accepted an offer of $10 million from a group of Korean investors to enable it to pay off some of its debts and invest in research and development needed to revive its fortunes. The announcement was a rebuff to the Microsoft chairman, Bill Gates, who visited Korea last month just two days after Microsoft Korea and Hangul & Computer said they had come to terms. Microsoft said it would withdraw its Hangul investment offer but would continue to invest in the Korean market.
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Structure – Hangul consists of 24 letters, including 14 consonant and 10 vowel symbols. The consonant symbols are formed with curved or angled lines; vowel symbols are composed of vertical or horizontal straight lines together with short lines on either side of the main line. This phonetic system for writing in the Korean language is considered one of the most scientific alphabets in use in any country.
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Until the 20th century, no official orthography of Hangul had been established. Due to liaison, heavy consonant assimilation, dialectical variants and other reasons, a Korean word can potentially be spelled in various ways. King Sejong seemed to prefer morphophonemic spelling (representing the underlying morphology) rather than a phonemic one (representing the actual sounds). However, early in its history, Hangul was dominated by phonemic spelling. Over the centuries the orthography became partially morphophonemic, first in nouns, and later in verbs. Today it is as morphophonemic as is practical.
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Korean Hangul