Modern Korean uses the Hangul script, which was invented in 1445 by King Sejong to replace the Chinese characters that scholars had used until then. Having just 10 vowels and 14 consonants, Hangul is so easy to learn that detractors referred to it as “Achimgeul” (morning letters), angered that common folk could master it in a single morning.
Despite the ease of use, it was not until the 1950s that Hangul replaced Chinese characters as the primary script in published works. Though it is near China and Japan, the Korean language has few similarities with Chinese and Japanese. Korean is a member of the Altaic family of languages, which includes Manchu and Mongolian. There is, however, a significant trait the three languages have in common – as with Chinese and Japanese, translating Korean to and from English is a singular challenge. When compared with the European languages, all three of these Asian tongues pose greater difficulties linguistically and culturally, and accurate Korean translation is a challenge even for those who have been bilingual for their entire lives.
Hangul characters are double-bytes on computer systems, despite the overall simplicity of the alphabet, because each character is treated as a syllable formed by a combination of a consonant and a vowel. Therefore, producing texts for print or publication online involves a regime similar to that applied for Chinese and Japanese, and double-byte enabled software is needed for most output choices.
