니 어미!

[muckefuck]

Today, I spent some time trying to get the hang of the Korean IME by typing in obscenities.

Yesterday, someone posted some incomprehensible goobledygook and claimed it meant "Your mother has a bald pussy" in Korean. I tried to figure out what that would actually be to see if what he presented was simply some horribly mangled version of it or something else entirely. (I can honestly say it's not an insult I've ever heard anyone use.) After a reasonable amount of time spent searching various permutations of "yo' momma" in Korean, I've seen a lot of nasty things said about your mother's pussy, but none of them relating to baldness.

I'm slowly getting the hang of the IME. Unfortunately, I can't see any logic at all in the assignment of Hankul letters to the keys of the Qwerty keyboard. They're not in dictionary order or associated by pronunciation (the Qwerty row, for instance, is /piup/ /ciuc/ /tikut/ /kiuk/ /sios/). Similar vowels are near each other, except when they're not. I would assume the order was based somehow on frequency if not for the suspicious fact that all consonants are on the left and all vowels on the right.

There are probably other keyboard arrangements I could try, but the documentation says this is the most common, so I figure I should probably just suck it up. So far, the only real problem has been the double letters; I can get two consonants in the same syllable block, but only if they're different--which makes no sense, because geminates are far more common.

Comments

mita koto ga nakatta

[niemandsrose.livejournal.com]

Googling "hangul keyboard map" got me this:

http://www.ukstudentlife.com/Life/Computer/Oriental.htm#KoreanLettershttp://www.ukstudentlife.com/Life/Computer/Oriental.htm#KoreanLetters

찾았구나!

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I did some Googling myself and discovered that I'm supposed to use the Shift key. Why the hell isn't this in the online help that comes with the IME? (Oh, right, for a second there I forgot who wrote it...)

건반 설계

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

It always seemed a bit odd to me that ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅊ, and ㅍ are in a different order on the bottom key row when compared to ㅂ, ㅈ, ㄷ, and ㄱ on the top ... I mean, if you're gonna go through the trouble of seperating vowels and consonants, why not go for order, too?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

To be fair, the dictionary order is out of synch, too (although not as much--ㅊ is first among the aspirates whereas ㅈ is last among the regular consonants). Still, if you're going to line up all the consonants to one side, why not order them according to place of articulation? Especially when their forms encode it! If it had been given to me to do, I would've had plain consonants in the middle, aspirates above, and nasals below.

wha?

[niemandsrose.livejournal.com]

'Cause the keyboard is such an analogue for the interior of the mouth?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

So you suggest starting with the labials and working over to the velars?

[niemandsrose.livejournal.com]

No, I don't. I don't recommend trying to force-reason any kind of direct correspondence between the two.

Now, a straight-up IPA keyboard, and no more of this silly "native orthography" nonsense, now that's a pointless manifesto I could enjoy getting behind!

Speaking of, do you know anyone who owns an IPA Scrabble set I could borrow? I'd like to try it sometime.

[danbearnyc.livejournal.com]

If all else fails, start Happy Hour early.

[pne.livejournal.com]

I taught myself to type Korean by trial and error as well, and had similar problems to you (e.g. figuring out how to get double letters).

This was back in high school, on a bootleg copy of a word processor called, unpretentiously enough, "Korean Word Processor".

I was a bit surprised to find that after several years, when I tried typing Korean on NJStar's IME, my finger memory still knew where most of the letters were.