Unicode Explained

Encodings for Korean

Korean was previously written using characters of Chinese origin; hence the abbrevi-

ation “CJK,” which refers to Chinese characters in a broad sense, with Chinese, Japa-

nese, and Korean versions. The abbreviation “CJKV” adds the old Vietnamese versions

to these.

Nowadays, Korean is mostly written using hangul characters, which were specifically

developed for Korean. They constitute a very logical and regular system for writing

words phonetically. Hangul has been called an “alphabetic syllabary,” since it can be

regarded as a system of syllable symbols that consist of letters of an alphabet. The

number of letters is comparable in size to the English alphabet, whereas the syllable

symbols, as precomposed sequences of letters, constitute a very large set.

If Korean is represented in a form that encodes the letters separately, a program for

rendering text needs to recognize how adjacent letters constitute syllables and to show

them accordingly. The construction of the written text needs to combine glyphs in

specific ways. It is much easier to render Korean text encoded using syllable characters.

Encodings for Korean include EUC-KR, ISO-2022-KR, JOHAB, and UHC.

Converters and Transcoding

As the preceding discussion of some encodings has shown, there are many character

codes and encodings in use now and in the future. Unicode is a tool that helps to deal

with this complexity,