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Comment by programmer_dude | Hacker News Reader

It appears the Koreans were the smart bunch among east Asians. They ditched the tiresome Chinese writing system and moved on to something much more elegant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul.

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There is certain advantages certainly of being able to design and impose a new writing system as opposed to one that developed organically. Hangul is an elegantly designed writing system for sure.

But to suggest that makes them the "smart bunch" of east Asians comes off as pretty derisive. Hangul has had its own unique issues with regards to typewriter design which has also been alleviated thanks to IME.

The Japanese also have a phonetic writing system, kana, which is at least as old as Hangul. But so much useful context is lost when writing in pure kana rather than the standard writing system (a mix of kana, Chinese characters and, occasionally, Latin text) that it's not really used exclusively unless context requires it (children's books, old video games, etc).

Ignoring the fact that Koreans still have to use Chinese characters in technical snd academic contexts and the fact that the unstoppable change of language means that certain spellings are already becoming non-phonetic, from a technical point of view it's the same issue. If you look at Unicode Korean still has to use thousands of characters for precomposed Hangul blocks. Koreans also have to use input methods to convert from keystrokes representing individual Hangul letters to one of the thousands of precomposed Hangul codepoints. In fact the fact that Korean input methods like to change the precomposed characters in the text field as you type makes it more likely to break than Chinese and Japanese input methods.

It appears the Koreans did not go far enough / did not try hard enough. The better course of action would have been to replace the incompatible bits of their language with things more manageable with IME-less hangul.

I'd suggest you really reflect on what you're saying here. Plenty of languages present unique challenges when it comes to a typing system that was designed essentially to only work with block letters, not just east Asian ones. Suggesting that they simply "fix" their language to make it easier to type is straight up offensive and ignorant.

Arabic script, for example, is always cursive script, which requires a computer to link the characters when typed, which is a similar problem that hangul has, where the character blocks are broken down syllabically. You could create a phonetic alphabet keyboard covering every single possibility, but the issue here is that you have over 11,000 possibilities, which in the end puts you in the same predicament that Hanzi and Kanji are in, where you end up with these amusingly difficult to use typewriters.

Nothing to reflect here, I speak one such language. And I am telling you it would have been more practical to have a simpler writing system.

Practical how? It's literally an order of magnitude easier to implement Korean or Chinese TTS than English. A Korean block or Chinese character only has one pronounciation, with the number exceptions few enough to list. The mapping from symbol to sound is near deterministic. English TTS has been under development for decades and it usually still doesn't pronounce half the words right. They also don't require the convoluted kerning and line breaking algorithm that English text needs. Unlike for latin, Monospace spacing is canonical, so you don't have to do the weird dance where code has to use one font and prose another font. Literally the only argument you can make is that if you mutilate English spelling enough you can get do a 8 bit per character encoding, but that's a dumb point because a 16bit Korean or Chinese character usually represents more information than 5 English letters.

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