Sep 9, 2026, 2:14 PMContext for interested non-answerers: 한글 is the name of the Korean alphabet. The _standard_ romanization, officially adopted in year 2000, is “hangeul”. However, the form “hangul” is better established and still in wide use outside of Korea.
(Also, probably easier for anglophones to intuit.)
Sep 9, 2026, 2:23 PMThe vowel in question here is not standard in English. I had to learn it through careful imitation, but one day I realized it's not hard to explain. It's the same vowel as in "boot", except you don't round your lips. I wish I had been given this explanation!
(Note that this is not at all the same vowel as in "book".)
Bonus: If you've ever wondered about the mysterious Turkish dotless i (ı), this is also what that represents.
@mjd "Hangul" always comes to my mind first because it's the way it's spelled in the official names of Unicode characters.
Apparently that block of Unicode has been there since the beginning, in 1991, so if the official change of spelling happened in 2000 then Unicode predates it.
Then again, I would have thought it ought to be possible to change the official names in a later version. (Surely there must be cases where that's _definitely_ needed, like someone made a straight-up typo that needs correcting.) But as of Unicode 17.0 last year, it's still "Hangul" everywhere – website, PDF code charts, machine-readable Unicode Character Database, everything.
Perhaps there's some policy about when a rename is permissible and this doesn't meet it?
Sep 9, 2026, 6:27 PM@simontatham Do you happen to know why they have “lamda”?