The Beauty of Korean Language
Currently, English is the only language that you can type in the iPhone, though it seems like people don’t have any problem with navigating through multi-language websites. One of Korean iPhone user came up with an iPhone app. that let you type Korean language. After typing some letters, it will send the string to the Google and Naver (Korean search engine) search page or to the Mail app. It is really amazing that he was able to create a screen keyboard on a webpage, so that he may able to expand it and implement different shapes of screen keyboard easily.
Moreover, I also amazed that how small number of keys were needed to represent any letters in Korean. Here only needed 13 buttons. Korean letters were designed to have a small basis, and those basis are added up together to represent a letter. For example, ‘ㅏ’ (sounds like ‘a’) is made by adding two basis, ‘l’ (sounds like ‘i’) and ‘⋄’ (pronunciation depends on where it comes. If it comes later than the other component, it sounds like ‘a’, or if it comes before the other components, it sounds like ‘er’), and ‘가’ (sounds like ‘ga’) is made by adding two letter, ‘ㄱ’ and ‘ㅏ’. In other words, we can split a letter ‘가’ into three pieces of ‘ㄱ’ + ‘ㅣ’ + ‘⋄’. The two horizontal and vertical bars and the dot in the middle row is the very basic basis. Those basis represents the ground (ㅡ), men (ㅣ), and the sun (⋄), respectively. You may noticed that the first and the third row is same. So he may able to reduce the last row, and that would make the buttons even smaller!
Having own language system is something very proud of. And having a beautiful language system is something more than that.