[thaumasiotes]

> One interesting thing I learned while researching this comment was that a big reason Hanja disappeared was because Koreans gained literacy during the typewriting era, but before computer auto-suggested keyboards, and it was just substantially easier to make and use a letter-based typewriter.

If you look in the right places, you can find people complaining about how it's impossible to dynamically render hangul blocks, which means that a Korean font needs to define glyphs for every possible Korean syllable as opposed to just defining the elements of the system and letting a word processor assemble them as appropriate.

If that's true, I don't see how hangul could have had any typewriter-based advantage over hanja. From the typewriter's perspective, there's no difference.

The Chinese used typewriters by defining a typewriter code. Assuming that that was necessary for hanja, and also for hangul, why would it promote the disappearance of hanja?

If a typewriter code wasn't necessary for hangul, how did we forget how to lay out the blocks in between then and now? Hangul have been in continuous use for all that period.

[coffeeling]

> If that's true, I don't see how hangul could have had any typewriter-based advantage over hanja. From the typewriter's perspective, there's no difference.

There are mechanical hangeul typewriters that, while more complicated than Latin or katakana typewriters, are still completely usable for normal writing. The reason hangeul fonts are hard is that a hangeul syllable occupies a standard-sized block, and in eg. careful handwriting the writer would adjust the sizes and positions of the characters to be aesthetically nice. For example, in 해 he the ㅎ andㅐ letters are both the same size. When you write 핸 hen, see how the h especially becomes smaller? In typewritten hangeul, that first consonant is always that small, so you can use only one size of initial h and so on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UenaIex_ZXY

You can see from the output in this video how the sizes of letters are very standard and somewhat disproportionate, eg. in CV type syllables the vowel lines are somewhat giant compared to the quarter-of-the-block sizeish consonants, etc.

That way you can still write by pressing alphabet buttons, with some controls as to where you want the letter to go in the block. It's a bit more complicated, but nothing compared to the nightmare that are proper Chinese character typewriters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDkR87zHdXk

[thaumasiotes]

> For example, in 해 he the ㅎ andㅐ letters are both the same size. When you write 핸 hen, see how the h especially becomes smaller? In typewritten hangeul, that first consonant is always that small, so you can use only one size of initial h and so on.

I see the opposite. As those characters render in whatever font my browser picked, the ㅎ in 해 occupies much less vertical space than the ㅐ does.

In the 핸, it still occupies less vertical space, but the difference is smaller. It's about as tall as the left-hand bar of the ㅐ instead of being significantly less tall than that.

[coffeeling]

Okay. The point is, the typewriter writes 핸-style ㅎ always. Even if it could be a bit taller, but tends to leave the vowel lines bigger.

[bobthepanda]

There are around theoretical 11,000 possible Korean blocks, which is a lot. But Unicode has ~98,000 Chinese characters.

Nine times the characters is a quaint problem for computers but a very difficult problem for a physical typewriter.

[thaumasiotes]

No, it is a problem exactly equal to the other one. No typewriter can produce 98,000 different characters. And no typewriter can produce 11,000 different characters.

With zero difference between hangul and hanja, how can the typewriter favor one over the other?

[bobthepanda]

There were Chinese typewriters but they were very large and a lot more annoying to use. Japan also used typewriting. They just look a lot different, with a giant cylinder of tiny keys to facilitate thousands of characters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ-SHOsbH4Y

Hangul ones were a lot smaller. I misspoke earlier; they had letter-based keyboards and mostly just did compromises on the shape of the syllabic blocks; a keyset for an initial character, a keyset for medial characters and a keyset for terminal characters. If you just assume the initial character set can be tiny to fit both the characters with and without bottom terminals, then you wind up with slightly odd-looking but perfectly serviceable typed Korean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8lfgxBj440&list=PL7HFg4f79l...

[thaumasiotes]

Thanks!

For reference, I talked about a typewriter code before, but I suspect that I was thinking of the telegraph code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_telegraph_code