Thanks to James for reminding me that today is Hangul Day, the day Hangul was invented by Sejong-Daewang (King Sejong) in 1446.  Hangul is an awesome language from an engineer's point of view.  More on the history of Hangul can be found at the Sigma Instutude.

Thanks to the Internet, Hangul is changing today.  Young Koreans are morphing and evolving the language to fit the their needs and taste as they communicate in Hangul online.  Some say they are destroy the language, I think otherwise.  I believe some characters from English and other languages should be added to Hangul so one could write like this:

Otherwise, Hangul version of Very Much end up sounding like Berry Match.

Addition of the new characters to Hangul will start a chain reaction of exciting/frightening changes, starting with the spoken language (Korean), brain that uses the language to think and dream in (Korean mind), and the society that uses it (Korea).

Yes, I am saying that brains of people who speak different languages are wired differently.  What I think and feel in Korean is different from what I think and feel in English.  If this is not true in general, at least it is true with me.

Update #1 – 10/11/2003 10:25AM PST

What I like about Hangul is the neat design.  Each Hangul 'word' has exactly one vowel.  A word consists of starting consonant (), a vowel (), and optional ending/connecting consonants ().  To stress a consonant, double up (i.e. vs. ).   means Flesh and means Rice.  Vowels can also be combined to get the sound made with mouth shaped somewhere between the mouth shapes of the two vowels used in combination like this:.

Hangul keyboard has consonants grouped on the left side and vowels on the right side so that Hangul typing alternates between hands.  It's the end sound complicates things a bit.  End sound of a Hangul word can use up to two consonents to represent a wide variety of sounds.  Since the end sound is followed by the starting sound of the next word, one can get confused about how to divide up the consonants.  I often mess up this part.

Isn't Hangul neat?  King Sejong is my favorite geek.