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Xiao'erjing is unusual among Arabic script-based writing systems in that all vowels, long and short, are explicitly notated with diacritics, making it an abugida. Some other Arabic-based writing systems in China, such as the Uyghur Arabic alphabet, use letters and not diacritics to mark short vowels.
Many East Asian scripts can be written horizontally or vertically. Chinese characters, Korean hangul, and Japanese kana may be oriented along either axis, as they consist mainly of disconnected logographic or syllabic units, each occupying a square block of space, thus allowing for flexibility for which direction texts can be written, be it horizontally from left-to-right, horizontally from ...
The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul [a] or Hangeul [b] in South Korea (English: / ˈ h ɑː n ɡ uː l / HAHN-gool; [1] Korean: 한글; Korean pronunciation: [ha(ː)n.ɡɯɭ]) and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea (조선글; North Korean pronunciation [tsʰo.sʰɔn.ɡɯɭ]), is the modern writing system for the Korean language.
The Korean alphabet was designed not just to write Korean, but to accurately represent Chinese. Many Chinese words historically began with [ŋ], but by Sejong's day this had been lost in many regions of China, and was silent when these words were borrowed into Korean, so that [ŋ] only remained at the middle and end of Korean words.
Hanja were once used to write native Korean words, in a variety of systems collectively known as idu, but by the 20th century Koreans used hanja only for writing Sino-Korean words, while writing native vocabulary and loanwords from other languages in Hangul, a system known as mixed script. By the 21st century, even Sino-Korean words are usually ...
The Hangul alphabet introduced in the 15th century was much simpler, and specifically designed for the sounds of Korean. The alphabet makes systematic use of modifiers corresponding to features of Korean sounds. Although Hangul is unrelated to Chinese characters, its letters are written in syllabic blocks that can be interspersed with Hanja.
Written Chinese is a writing system that uses Chinese characters and other symbols to represent the Chinese languages. Chinese characters do not directly represent pronunciation, unlike letters in an alphabet or syllabograms in a syllabary .
Idu (Korean: 이두; Hanja: 吏讀 "official's reading") is an archaic writing system that represents the Korean language using Chinese characters ("hanja"). The script, which was developed by Buddhist monks, made it possible to record Korean words through their equivalent meaning or sound in Chinese.