Hangul jamo issues - are jamo sequences legitimate?

Soobok Lee lsb at lsb.org
Tue Jan 9 14:29:16 CET 2007


On Tue, Jan 09, 2007 at 05:14:02PM +0900, Yangwoo Ko wrote:
> 
> Soobok Lee wrote:
> >On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 07:28:40AM -0500, John C Klensin wrote:
> >  
> >>To repeat what has been said in other areas, the fact that a
> >>sequence is legitimate in some present or past use of the
> >>language, or that it would be comprehensible if used in a name,
> >>does not imply a "right" to have it included in the DNS.  We
> >>should be careful about excluding it.   But we should also not
> >>assume that, because it is possible and sources of conflicts
> >>cannot easily be identified, permitting it is a good idea.
> >>    
> >
> >Hangul jamo sequences has been legitimate _by definition_ 
> >and by tradition _.  No room for debate!
> >  
> Wrong. As its original name ('Hun Min Jeong Eum' meaning correct sound 
> to teach people) implies, hangul was introduced as a way to spell sounds 
> correctly. There is no way to read consonant jamos by themselves. Thus, 
> jamo sequences are not legitimate by definition.
> >Some confusible combinations of jamo sequences - as described
> >below - should be managed by registration policies.

You are pointing that stand-alone jamo chars are not hangul syllables.
I know and agree on that.

But see  http://www.hangul.or.kr/4-b23.htm  
(This is a scanned image of old HUN-MIN-JEONG-EUM HAE-RYAE texts
written by JUNG IN-JI (one of hangul inventors) in 15th century.

You can see KI-YEOK and other jamos and even _jamo sequences_ are 
used in korean sentences as independent words. 

KI-YEOK without vowel jamos should be pronunciated
according to the context,  mostly as "KI-YEOK", but in some 
cases pronunciated as having hidden vowel EU.

vowel jamo O-AE without preceding consonant should be pronunciated
according to the context,  mostly as "O-AE",
as having hidden preceding consonant I-EUNG.

Jamo sequences or single-jamo word is not a hangul syllable, but
had, ___ by definition ____, been legitimate from 15th century.

And, that is why we can see  jamo-containing words in dictionaries
and business names and book names etc.


>mo  >  
> Not that frequent but still we can find some names (e.g. business names 
> and book titles) including jamo sequences.

Yes. If you review _any_ korean dictionary, 
it is not difficult to find jamo-containing words, even in the first page.
Such use had been legitimated from 15th century by the hangul inventors 
themselves.

> The principle that I can 
> agree with is jamo sequences should be allowed as long as we are 
> confident that harmful sequences can be clearly identified and hence 
> effectively excluded. 

Surely, fillers and u+11xx/u+31xx glyph conflicts and others should be 
managed well.

>Since NIDA started to follow up this discussion I 
> hope that more discussions within Korean community could result in some 
> conclusions quite soon.

I don't know how "quite soon" we can have  list up  confusibility problems
around jamos, but we should do, anyway.

Regards,

Soobok


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