Far Eastern Writing Systems

Glossary

• Phoneme: A unique individual sound used in a language.
• Morpheme: The smallest meaningful element of a word. The word dog is one morpheme. The word dogs is two morphemes: dog plus the plural marker s. Many ideographs are based on morphemes.
• Syllabary: A set of written characters in which each character represents a syllable—for example, a consonant sound followed by a vowel sound.
• Radical: A group of strokes in a Chinese character that are treated as a unit for the purposes of sorting, indexing, and classification. A character can contain more than one element that is recognized as a radical, but each character contains only one element, called the main radical, that is used as the indexing radical. The main radical often gives a hint as to the general meaning of the character, and other radicals in the character might indicate how the character is pronounced.
• Jamos: The 24 basic elements of the Korean script.
• Wansung: The Korean standard character set (KS C-5601-1987), which corresponds to Windows code page 949. It covers the most common hangul character combinations. Extended Wansung covers all possible hangul combinations.
• Johab: The Korean standard character set (KS C-5601-1992), which corresponds to Windows code page 1361. It includes all possible hangul character combinations.

When you are developing software for Far Eastern languages, you'll benefit from a basic understanding of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean writing systems, as well as from an understanding of how an Input Method Editor works. If you need more detail than this chapter provides, consider purchasing a language textbook.

Both the Japanese and the Korean languages consist of ideographic characters that were originally borrowed from Chinese. These characters are represented using two bytes in DBCS code pages and have no case distinction. In Chinese and Japanese, ideographic characters are traditionally read from top to bottom in columns that run from right to left. In Korean, ideographic characters are traditionally read from top to bottom in columns that run from left to right. These days, however, many documents are read horizontally from left to right.

Ideographic characters consist of up to 36 strokes that are grouped into one or more elements. Characters with only one element are generally called radicals or root radicals. Radicals represent common morphemes that in themselves give a character meaning. Examples of radicals include fire, water, sun, vision, and hearing. In most characters that consist of two or more elements, one element is a radical and the other elements determine the character's phonetic value. Figure 7-2 provides examples of some simple ideographic characters.

Character	Meaning	Chinese	Japanese	Korean
	Earth	Tu	Do (Tsuchi)	Huk
	Fire	Huo	Ka (Hi)	Bool
	Gold	Jin	Kin	Goom
	Left	Tsuoh	Hidari	Jua
	Right	Yu	Migi	Woo
	Water	Shui	Shui (Mizu)	Mool
	Wood	Mu	Moku (Ki)	Nahmoo

Figure 7-2 Simple ideographic characters with only one element. The terms in parentheses indicate alternative ways of reading the character.