Has the writing system changed over time? Is there an alphabet? If yes, how many letters? What do they represent? Are there significant differences between manuscript and print? If there is no alphabet, what is the relationship between oral and written language? How does the system work?
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King Sejong invented Korean alphabet in 1444, with a purpose to allow Korean citizens to learn the written language easily. Korean has 24 alphabets, including 14 consonants and 10 vowels. All syllables are combined together with 24 alphabets into syllable blocks, such as 법(bab)=ㅂ(b) +ㅓ(eo) +ㅂ(b). Korean consonants consist of ㅂ(b), ㅈ(j), ㄷ(d), ㄱ(k), ㅅ(s), ㅁ(m), ㄴ(n), ㅎ(h), ㄹ(r/l). Korean vowels consist ofㅣ(i), ㅏ(a) ㅓ (“uh”), ㅡ (eu), ㅜ (u), andㅗ (o). Korean vowels are structured based on three elements, man (a vertical line), earth (a horizontal line), and heaven (a dot). ㅗ(o) represents when the sun goes up andㅜ (u) represents when the sun goes down. Once one mastered 24 alphabets, one will be able to speak Korean words. Overall, seventy percent of Korean vocabulary comes from Chinese, and Korean is similar to Japanese grammatically.
Urdu has an alphabet with 38 letters, and there is no distinction between capital and lower-case like in English. The script comes from Persian script (which is derived from Arabic) and each letter indicates a phonetic sound, rather than a symbol for a word like some language scripts, and is written from right to left. Urdu is often written with Roman letters (because keyboards are generally and most accessibly with Roman characters) but special rules have been made to signify sounds that are unattainable with Roman script (eg. the guttural sounds.) When Urdu is printed it is difficult to read if one has only learnt the manuscript form. However this is simply because of the font used in most printed Urdu (like in newspapers.) My friends from Pakistan have said that just knowing how to proficiently read handwritten Urdu does not transfer into reading printed Urdu proficiently, one can become proficient in reading the print also but requires recognizing the stylistic differences between print and hand-written.
Urdu is an Indo-Aryan language that has around 104 million speakers. It is the national language of Pakistan and is closely related to Hindi-- although a lot of its vocabulary comes from Persian and Arabic, while Hindi has more Sanskrit vocabulary. Urdu has been written with Perso-Arabic scripts since the 12th century and is normally written in Nastaliq style. The Urdu alphabet is a right to left alphabet, and as stated before it is a modification of the Persian alphabet. It has 38 letters and no distinct letter cases. If you were to try and translate the Urdu alphabet int o the Roman letters, many phonemic elements would be omitted because they have no English equivalent. What is most interesting about the writing system is that some of these letters also represent vowel sounds.