"suzmccarth" <suzmccarth at yahoo dot com> wrote:

> My only opinion relating to Korean is that it is easier to keyboard
> than Tamil because it has syllable-level representation
> Do you think this is fair?

Actually, Korean is a bit more difficult to type because of the
syllable-level representation.

Korean syllables are generally of the form (C)VC, where certain
consonants and vowels may be doubled or omitted (I don't care to quibble
right now about which ones; I'm in a hurry). Because there are
"leading" and "trailing" consonants within a syllable, they need to be
distinguished in the underlying encoding so they can be associated with
the correct syllable.

Korean keyboards basically come in two flavors: "three-set," where there
are separate keys for leading and trailing consonants, and "two-set,"
where there is only one set of consonants and the software must
determine from context whether a consonant is leading or trailing.
Two-set keyboards can be difficult to use, despite the reduced number of
keys, because characters already entered tend to jump around on the
screen as subsequent consonants or vowels are entered.

In a conventional alphabet that is not organized into syllables, every B
is the same as every other B, and there is no need to differentiate on
the basis of their position within the syllable.

None of this is intended as a value judgement for or against the Hangul
structure, BTW.

-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/