I have a love/hate relationship with the I-shape forms

Therein lies another important never question (Never to be answered with an answer accepted by all. ) "What is / is not a "Martial Art? How about Boxing? Tae Bo? Cardio Kickboxing?

I’ve found there isn’t much agreed on in Martial Arts. In my opinion, this one’s easy.
Boxing, yes, a specialized and limited Martial Art, but quite effective.

Tae-Bo definitely not, nor was it designed to be.

Cardio kickboxing, no. A fun workout for some, but not a Martial Art.
 
I'm going to be "that guy":

Poom only means "technique"/"movement".

Sae means "shape"/"appearance".

It's a compound word of two characters: 품새.

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If you bifurcate a compound word, you can certainly arrive at a different meanings than what the accepted meaning of that word. Take "Airplane " as an example . I expect the same might apply to other languages.
 
If you bifurcate a compound word, you can certainly arrive at a different meanings than what the accepted meaning of that word. Take "Airplane " as an example . I expect the same might apply to other languages.

Sort of...

Airplane requires even a native English speaker to intuit idiomatic shifts of the words "air" and "plane" to specifically mean a vehicle that flies. Plane refers to a dimension (and not even one related to traversal)... a non native speaker could equally assume it to mean "the sky" or a place to do with "air", and not objects of travel. It could mean a mathematical graph that plots data on a plane about air quality.

Whereas in Korean, Chinese, and Japanese characters, a lot of that meaning is built into the orthography which makes inferencing meaning of the word a lot easier. Single characters convey entire concepts, unlike the English alphabet.
 
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All forms are poomsae. That's literally what the word means.
I wonder why the Koreans felt the need to use different terms while describing the same thing? Hyung, Tul, Poomsae. Do these Korean terms have nuances that differentiate them, or is it just the need of one organization trying to be new and innovative over another?
 

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