Hangul Syllables

Hangul Syllables is a Unicode block containing precomposed Hangul syllable blocks for modern Korean. The syllables can be directly mapped by algorithm to sequences of two or three characters in the Hangul Jamo Unicode block:

This block is encoded according to the canonically equivalent order of these (two or three) jamos (one in each subrange of jamos above) composing each syllable.

Note that a full Hangul syllable may include one of these characters but may be preceded by one or more leading consonant jamos, and followed by one or more trailing jamos (possibly preceded by one or more vowel jamos if the encoded syllable is composed by two jamos does not include any trailing consonant jamos). As well some Hangul syllables may not include any one of these precomposed character. But such extension of the Hangul script (which allows creating more complex syllables composed in the same square) is not very common in modern Korean.

Encoding hangul syllables in Unicode was complicated by a reorganization of the code points:

RFC 2279 explains that this significant incompatible change was made on the assumption that no data or software using Unicode for Korean existed:

"The official justification for allowing such an incompatible change was that no implementations and no data containing Hangul existed, a statement that is likely to be true but remains unprovable. The incident has been dubbed the "Korean mess", and the relevant committees have pledged to never, ever again make such an incompatible change." — RFC 2279

Subsequently, Unicode adopted an encoding stability policy which states that "Once a character is encoded, it will not be moved or removed".

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Hangul Syllables block: