So here's something interesting I've found out recently: the word for notebook in Korean is 공책, a word I have forgotten on occasion. But looking at the hanja for this word we find 空冊 and this makes the word much more recognizable if you know the Chinese characters: 空 (read as kōng in Mandarin and くう in Japanese) means empty, or sometimes sky, air. 冊 is used as a counter for books or volumes in Japanese and Chinese. So 空冊 basically means "empty book", and an empty book is a notebook, 공책.
Hangul is the Korean writing system and its primary unit is the syllable. In contrast with other syllabaries like the hiragana and katakana systems used to write Japanese, each syllable can be decomposed into simpler parts that specify the sounds that make up the syllable. Every syllable must have an initial consonant and a vowel; some syllables may contain a final consonant ( patchim ) or even two final consonants (double patchim ). In a string, each syllable block occupies a single character, but when typing each symbol (jamo) is inputted individually and must be composed into a syllable block. If we think about this composition of symbols to form syllable blocks, it could be very hard to do if the codepoints of the symbols and the syllables were not related. That is, if the codes for ㅁ, 마 and 만 were not related, you'd need a table to know the code of 마 when adding ㅏ to ㅁ, and the code of 만 when typing ㄴ after 마, and so on. The number of combinations...
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