Abstract

Hangul’s mechanizations—both into analog script and digital code—are not only episodes in the history of technology but also a story of cultural techniques. Mechanized Hangul and its devices need to be seen alongside language-reform efforts across the twentieth century and an educational retooling of human populations to write and read in reformed scripts. Reconnecting those sundered histories reveals how changes in the technical means of writing and reading were intertwined with nationalist efforts to break from a long history of linguistic and graphic interconnectedness across East Asia. Mechanization involved the seeming disappearance of sinographs from Korean writing in what I call the age of global multilingual word processing. But the history I construct below is not about the Korean alphabet prevailing over ideographs, nor about a simple victory of nationalist phonocentrism in Korea. Although Hangul is usually referred to as an alphabet, it is more specifically defined as an alphabetic syllabary. This is because when consonants and vowels are combined to form syllables, the shapes of those consonants and vowels are often transformed, based on the signs around them; in addition, the very arrangement of consonants and vowels within visual blocks is syllable-specific. Hangul writing thus involves two-dimensional visual/graphic characteristics quite distinct from—for example—the horizontal strings of consonants and vowels in English. This complexity requires a radical reformulation of what writing becomes in a machinic, particularly digital, environment—a reformulation with implications extending well beyond the Korean language.