Cell Phones and Broadband 'Net Win in S. Korea

McLuhanesque writes "The Globe and Mail has an interesting column on how text messaging and the use of effective broadband internet content helped propel an obscure lawyer, Mr. Roh Moo-hyun, from a perpetual also-ran to become South Korea's new president. 'With the world's highest penetration of high-speed and mobile Internet services, South Korea is at the cutting edge of technology that is transforming the political system, making it more open and democratic. It could be a preview of the shape of Western democracy,' the article says."

Comments

Re:Language is still a barrier

[Flakeloaf]

A two-finger typing system actually makes sense in Korean, where most phonemes are written as one-vowel-one-consonant digraphs. (or was that dipthongs...)

For the unitiated, Korean writing is (mostly) phonetic. A vowel is matched with a consonant to form a phoneme, and these sounds are arranged to form words in a very sensible manner.

Characters are usually pronounced exactly as they are written - the only exception my round eye has seen so far is that syllables that begin with vowels are instead preceded by the symbol that would otherwise be spoken as "ioong": O.

Although the language is read left-to-right, consonant or vowel sounds are sometimes written one on top of the other instead of side-by-each for aesthetic reasons. "Lee" would be initial vowel + | ("ee") for O|. "Boo" is simply B (|_|) and "oo" (T) linked together:

|_|
T

It's a dead easy alphabet to learn, and anyone with an hour and a pencil can learn to read (and more importantly, write) Korean phonetically.

blah, blah, blah...