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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.
Before the 19th century, woodblock printing was favored over movable type to print East Asian text, because movable type required reusable types for thousands of Chinese characters. [3] During the Ming dynasty, Ming typefaces were developed with straight and angular strokes, which made them easier to carve from woodblocks than calligraphic ...
[23] [24] Unlike Korean hanja, however, kanji can be used to write both Sino-Japanese words and native Japanese words. Historically, both Korean and Japanese were written solely with Chinese characters, with the writing experiencing a gradual mutation through centuries into its modern form. [25]
Example: Japanese 仮名; 仮 is a simplified form of Chinese 假 used in Korea and Japan, and 假借 is the Chinese name for this type of characters. The most productive method of Chinese writing, the radical-phonetic, was made possible by ignoring certain distinctions in the phonetic system of syllables.
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. By the 21st century, even Sino-Korean words are usually written in the Hangul alphabet ...
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Korean is spoken by the Korean people in both South Korea and North Korea, and by the Korean diaspora in many countries including the People's Republic of China, the United States, Japan, and Russia. In 2001, Korean was the fourth most popular foreign language in China, following English, Japanese, and Russian. [ 67 ]