Talk:Hangul

IPA values?

Does anyone know where/why we use the IPA values for Hangul in the Letters section that we use? They seem to differ from what's done in Help:IPA/Korean, the National Institute of Korean Language's guide, as well as several books I'm looking at (e.g. Jae Jung Song's The Korean Language and Ho-min Sohn's The Korean Language). In fact all of these works do different things.

(Moreover, why does Help:IPA/Korean use the values it does? That also seems strange).

My gut is telling me a bunch of WP:OR has been rampant in this area for a long time with nobody trying to stop it. Feel like we need to draw back and ground it all to sources. grapesurgeon (seefooddiet) (talk) 18:59, 23 September 2025 (UTC)

I'm similarly curious. E.g. A (hangul), which provided the pronunciation [ɐ] while the linked sources gave [a]. 71.229.185.228 (talk) 14:16, 16 October 2025 (UTC)

For an update on my thinking, see Help talk:IPA/Korean#Derived from?. I think we should, across Wikipedia, switch to the IPA notation used by Jiyoung Shin. Of all the books I've looked at (like 10+), Shin's is the closest to what we currently do, so would be least disruptive to switch over to that. But getting this proposal to stick is a lot of effort, currently busy with other stuff. grapesurgeon (talk) 05:47, 2 November 2025 (UTC)

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Begun rewrite

Per above talk post, I've begun dropping in my writing into this article. I've also been creating/rewriting a number of other related articles.

Other articles I wrote: Origin of Hangul, ʼPhags-pa inspiration for Hangul hypothesis, Hunminjeongeum Haerye, Hangul orthography, Korean punctuation, Hangul alphabetical order, Hangul letter names, Hangul Day, List of early Hangul works.

Soon to create: History of Hangul, Obsolete Hangul letters, Hunminjeongeum (complete article replacement),

I'm going to be making huge additions/deletions to this article (Hangul). Please keep in mind this is a work in progress, and you may need to be a little patient before I readd information back in. I'm making big deletions right now to make the article more tractable to work with, also because some of its information overlaps with content in my other articles and I'm trying to keep this article high-level in WP:SUMMARY style. grapesurgeon (seefooddiet) (talk) 00:22, 27 October 2025 (UTC)

More related articles: Names of the Korean alphabet, Araea (letter), Yeorinhieut, Bansiot, Yennieung. grapesurgeon (talk) 05:48, 2 November 2025 (UTC)

Ok I'm calling it for now, I'm done with the article for now. There are some loose ends (tagged citation issues, namely IPA stuff) that could be improved, but lot of work for little gain. Some of the coverage in the article is mediocre too; stuff about fonts needs a lot more work, and stroke order is unsourced. Also, probably missing some topics that probably deserve coverage, maybe stuff like dictionaries or use on mobile phones.

Compare to how this article used to be. I think the rewrite is an improvement, but I'm still not happy with good chunks of it. Still, it'll be more than enough for most people and is plenty useful as is. grapesurgeon (talk) 18:10, 8 November 2025 (UTC)

writing direction

The section says that "over the course of the 20th century, horizontal writing (right to left, top to bottom) became dominant in both Koreas." But Horizontal_and_vertical_writing_in_East_Asian_scripts says that "today, the left-to-right direction is dominant in all three languages for horizontal writing: this is due partly to the influence of English and other Western languages". I know that Japanese and Chinese are written left to right when written horizontally, and I suspect the same is true of Korean, but I leave it to someone who reads Korean to fix this article. Grubbiv (talk) 17:32, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

Oops good catch, that was a typo on my part grapesurgeon (talk) 19:43, 6 November 2025 (UTC)

What unicode things to include

@~2025-33260-32 On Unicode values to include, I'm willing to exclude the punct ranges I had previously included. My rationale for including them was that they are punctuation used for Hangul, similar to the tone marks. However, if my rationale were to be applied, we'd also have to include things like the space, exclamation point, etc. Seems like too much.

Still, characters used for orthography is arguably within the scope of "Hangul-related ranges" in the table title. But question is whether showing that kind of basic punctuation is helpful for most people grapesurgeon (talk) 14:56, 13 November 2025 (UTC)

Well, punctuation marks are usually language-specific. See Quotation mark#Summary table for an example.

So if the Unicode code points for those punctuation marks should be included, I would say that they should be included in a page such as Korean punctuation, as those punctuation marks are tied to the Korean language (and not to the hangul writing system itself and not necessarily to other languages that use hangul). ~2025-33347-84 (talk) 15:34, 13 November 2025 (UTC)

I disagree; punctuation used for Hangul and Hanja differ. Also if you look at orthography, it includes punctuation, even spaces. Orthography is not really necessarily tied to language, it's tied to scripts.

Also doesn't unicode often use the same code points for shared punctuation (with some exceptions)? grapesurgeon (talk) 16:51, 13 November 2025 (UTC)

No, an orthography is tied to a language. An orthography is about how to correctly write a certain language (including punctuation marks).

1. Even in languages that use the same writing system, orthographies can significantly differ. For example,
   1. the consonant sound [tʃ] is represented as ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ç⟩, ⟨č⟩, ⟨cs⟩, ⟨tch⟩, ⟨tsch⟩, ⟨tx⟩, etc. depending on the language; the letter ⟨j⟩ is used to represent [dʒ], [j], [x], etc. depending on the language.
   2. “ and ‘ are opening quotation marks in English (“a” & ‘a’), but closing quotation marks in German („a“ & ‚a‘).
2. Languages that do not use the same writing system can use the same punctuation marks. For example, « and » are used in French, Greek, and Russian.

punctuation used for Hangul and Hanja differ – Those punctuation marks just happen to be used together with hangul or hanja; that fact does not make those punctuation marks hangul or hanja. Also, the Cia-Cia language may not use 〈 〉 《 》 「 」 『 』 (U+3008–U+300F) in its hangul orthography.

doesn't unicode often use the same code points for shared punctuation – Yes. ~2025-33369-54 (talk) 18:16, 13 November 2025 (UTC)

Oh hm. Yeah you're right. grapesurgeon (talk) 18:28, 13 November 2025 (UTC)

Being more precise, it's tied to both language and script. I think it's still valid to discuss Hangul orthography that largely applies to Korean in this article; it's what people would expect to see and it's useful for them. However, I can see an argument for not including Unicode stuff for that punctuation, and keeping Unicode limited to specifically universal Hangul stuff. Modern Korean Hangul orthographies use a lot of shared punctuation so listing all of them is cumbersome and not helpful. grapesurgeon (talk) 20:16, 13 November 2025 (UTC)