Origin of hangul
Encyclopedia
Hangul
Hangul,Pronounced or ; Korean: 한글 Hangeul/Han'gŭl or 조선글 Chosŏn'gŭl/Joseongeul the Korean alphabet, is the native alphabet of the Korean language. It is a separate script from Hanja, the logographic Chinese characters which are also sometimes used to write Korean...
is the native script of Korea
Korea
Korea ) is an East Asian geographic region that is currently divided into two separate sovereign states — North Korea and South Korea. Located on the Korean Peninsula, Korea is bordered by the People's Republic of China to the northwest, Russia to the northeast, and is separated from Japan to the...
, created in the mid fifteenth century under King Sejong, as both a complement and an alternative to the logographic
Logogram
A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.Logograms are often commonly known also as "ideograms"...
Sino-Korean hanja
Hanja
Hanja is the Korean name for the Chinese characters hanzi. More specifically, it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation...
. Initially denounced by the educated class as eonmun (vernacular writing), it only became the primary Korean script following independence from Japan
Korea under Japanese rule
Korea was under Japanese rule as part of Japan's 35-year imperialist expansion . Japanese rule ended in 1945 shortly after the Japanese defeat in World War II....
in the mid-20th century.
Hangul is a featural alphabet
Featural alphabet
A featural alphabet is an alphabet wherein the shapes of the letters are not arbitrary, but encode phonological features of the phonemes they represent. The term featural was introduced by Geoffrey Sampson to describe Hangul and Pitman Shorthand...
written in morpho-syllabic
Morphophonology
Morphophonology is a branch of linguistics which studies, in general, the interaction between morphological and phonetic processes. When a morpheme is attached to a word, it can alter the phonetic environments of other morphemes in that word. Morphophonemics attempts to describe this process...
blocks, and was designed for both the Korean
Korean phonology
This article is a technical description of the phonetics and phonology of Korean.Korean has many allophones, so it is important here to distinguish morphophonemics from corresponding phonemes and allophones .-Consonants:The following are phonemic transcriptions of Korean consonants.# are voiced ...
and Chinese
Historical Chinese phonology
Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. As Chinese is written with logographic characters, not alphabetic or syllabary, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those employed in, for example, Indo-European...
languages, though the letters specific to Chinese are now obsolete. Each block consists of at least one consonant letter and one vowel letter. When promulgated, the blocks reflected the morphology of Korean, but for most of the fifteenth century they were organized into syllables. In the twentieth century the morpho-syllabic tradition was revived. The blocks were traditionally written in vertical columns from top to bottom, although they are now commonly written in horizontal rows from left to right as well. Spacing has been introduced to separate words in the Western
Western culture
Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...
fashion, and punctuation to indicate clauses and sentences, so that hangul now transcribes Korean at the levels
Phonological hierarchy
Phonological hierarchy describes a series of increasingly smaller regions of a phonological utterance. From larger to smaller units, it is as follows:#Utterance#Prosodic declination unit / intonational phrase...
of feature, segment
Segment (linguistics)
In linguistics , the term segment may be defined as "any discrete unit that can be identified, either physically or auditorily, in the stream of speech."- Classifying speech units :...
, syllable, morpheme, word, clause, and sentence. However, the suprasegmental features of tone
Tone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...
and vowel length
Vowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in...
, seen as single and double tick marks to the left of the syllabic blocks in the image at right, have been dropped. Six new letters
New Orthography for the Korean Language
The New Korean Orthography was a spelling reform used in North Korea from 1948–1954. It added five consonants and one vowel letter to the hangul alphabet, making it what is believed to be a more morphophonologically "clear" approach to the Korean language.The reason for the reform is that some...
, including two of Sejong's which had become obsolete, were introduced in North Korea in 1948 in order to make hangul a perfect morphophonological fit to the Korean language, but they were soon discarded.
While hangul contains a large component of iconic invention, it may also have a core that is historically related to the alphabets of Central Asia
Central Asia
Central Asia is a core region of the Asian continent from the Caspian Sea in the west, China in the east, Afghanistan in the south, and Russia in the north...
, and therefore cognate with the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
, with the letters ㅂ b, ㄱ g, ㄷ d, and ㄹ l distantly related to Latin B
B
B is the second letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is used to represent a variety of bilabial sounds , most commonly a voiced bilabial plosive.-History:...
, C
C
Ĉ or ĉ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing the sound .Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for all four of its postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets...
, D
D
D is the fourth letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.- History :The Semitic letter Dâlet may have developed from the logogram for a fish or a door. There are various Egyptian hieroglyphs that might have inspired this. In Semitic, Ancient Greek, and Latin, the letter represented ; in the...
, and L
L
Ł or ł, described in English as L with stroke, is a letter of the Polish, Kashubian, Sorbian, Łacinka , Łatynka , Wilamowicean, Navajo, Dene Suline, Inupiaq, Zuni, Hupa, and Dogrib alphabets, several proposed alphabets for the Venetian language, and the ISO 11940 romanization of the Thai alphabet...
.
Historical record
Joseon Dynasty
Joseon , was a Korean state founded by Taejo Yi Seong-gye that lasted for approximately five centuries. It was founded in the aftermath of the overthrow of the Goryeo at what is today the city of Kaesong. Early on, Korea was retitled and the capital was relocated to modern-day Seoul...
, Sejong the Great. Sejong's scholarly institute, the Hall of Worthies
Hall of Worthies
The Hall of Worthies or Jiphyeonjeon ' was set up by Sejong the Great of the Korean Joseon Dynasty in 1420. It consisted of scholars selected by the king....
, is often credited with the work, and at least one of its scholars was heavily involved in its creation, but it appears to have also been a personal project of Sejong.
The project was completed in late 1443 or early 1444 and published in 1446 in a document titled Hunmin jeong-eum
Hunmin Jeongeum
Hunminjeongeum is a document describing an entirely new and native script for the Korean language. The script was initially named after the publication, but later came to be known as hangul...
"The Proper Sounds for the Education of the People", after which the alphabet itself was named. Sejong explained that he created the new script because the existing idu system, based on Chinese characters, was not a good fit for the Korean language and were so difficult that only privileged male aristocrats (yangban
Yangban
The yangban were part of the traditional ruling class or nobles of dynastic Korea during the Joseon Dynasty. The yangban were either landed or unlanded aristocracy who comprised the Korean Confucian idea of a "scholarly official." In reality, they were basically administrators and bureaucrats who...
) could afford the time and education to learn to read and write fluently. The vast majority of Koreans were left effectively illiterate. Hangul, on the other hand, was designed so that even a commoner with little education could learn to read and write: "A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days."
Except for the obsolete palatal stops, all 36 initials in the Chinese inventory had hangul equivalents:
| Clear Tenuis consonant In linguistics, a tenuis consonant is a stop or affricate which is unvoiced, unaspirated, and unglottalized. That is, it has a "plain" phonation like , with a voice onset time close to zero, as in Spanish p, t, ch, k, or as in English p, t, k after s .In transcription, tenuis consonants are not... |
Aspirate Aspiration (phonetics) In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say pin ... |
Muddy Slack voice The term slack voice describes the pronunciation of consonant or vowels with a glottal opening slightly wider than that occurring in modal voice. Such sounds are often referred to informally as lenis or half-voiced in the case of consonants... |
Sonorant Sonorant In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant is a speech sound that is produced without turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; fricatives and plosives are not sonorants. Vowels are sonorants, as are consonants like and . Other consonants, like or , restrict the airflow enough to cause turbulence, and... |
Clear | Muddy | ||
| Labials | Bilabials | 幫 *[p] ㅂ | 滂 *[pʰ] ㅍ | 並 *[b̥] ㅃ | 明 *[m] ㅁ | ||
| Labio-dentals | 非 *[f] ㅸ | (敷 *[fʰ] ㆄ) | (奉 *[v̥] ㅹ) | 微 *[w̃] ㅱ | |||
| Coronal Coronal consonant Coronal consonants are consonants articulated with the flexible front part of the tongue. Only the coronal consonants can be divided into apical , laminal , domed , or subapical , as well as a few rarer orientations, because only the front of the tongue has such... s |
Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth... stops |
端 *[t] ㄷ | 透 *[tʰ] ㅌ | 定 *[d̥] ㄸ | 泥 *[n] ㄴ | ||
| Palatals | 知 *[tʲ] – | 徹 *[tʲʰ] – | 澄 *[d̥ʲ] – | 娘 *[nʲ] – | |||
| Sibilants | Alveolar | 精 *[ts] ㅈ (ᅎ) | 清 *[tsʰ] ㅊ (ᅔ) | 從 *[d̥z̥] ㅉ (ᅏ) | 心 *[s] ㅅ (ᄼ) | 邪 *[z̥] ㅆ (ᄽ) | |
| Palatal/Retroflex | 照 *[tɕ, tʂ] (ᅐ) | 穿 *[tɕʰ, tʂʰ] (ᅕ) | 牀 *[d̥ʑ̊, d̥ʐ̊] (ᅑ) | 審 *[ɕ, ʂ] (ᄾ) | 禪 *[ʑ̊, ʐ̊] (ᄿ) | ||
| Velars | 見 *[k] ㄱ | 谿 *[kʰ] ㅋ | 羣 *[ɡ̊] ㄲ | 疑 *[ŋ] ㆁ | |||
| Gutturals | 影 *[ʔ] ㆆ | 喻 *(ero initial ㅇ | 曉 *[x] ㅎ | 匣 *[ɣ̊] ㆅ | |||
| "Semi-coronal" | 來 *[l] ㄹ | ||||||
| "Semi-sibilant" | 日 *[ȷ̃] ㅿ | ||||||
During the second half of the fifteenth century, hangul was used primarily by women and the undereducated. It faced heavy opposition from Confucian scholars educated in Chinese, notably Choe Manri
Choe Manri
Choe Manri was a deputy minister for education in the Hall of Worthies who spoke against the creation of hangul together with other Confucian scholars in 1444. He made the following submission that year to King Sejong against hangul:-His protest against Hangul:-References:...
, who believed hanja to be the only legitimate writing system. Later kings too were hostile. King Yeonsangun
Yeonsangun of Joseon
Yeonsan-gun , born Yi Yung, was the 10th king of Korea's Joseon Dynasty. He was the eldest son of Seongjong by his second wife, Lady Yoon. He is often considered the worst tyrant in Joseon Dynasty, notorious for launching two bloody purges of the seonbi elite...
forbade use of hangul in 1504, during a series of palace purges, after commoners made hangul posters mocking him, and King Jungjong
Jungjong of Joseon
Jungjong of Joseon , born Yi Yeok, ruled during the 16th century in what is now Korea. He succeeded his half-brother, Yeonsangun, because of the latter's tyranical misrule, which culminated in a coup placing Jungjong on the throne.-Jo Gwang-jo's reforms:On the day Yeonsangun was deposed, soldiers...
abolished the Hangul Ministry in 1506. The account of the design of hangul was lost, and hangul would not return to common use until the independence of Korea after World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
.
Consonant letters as outlines of speech organs
.jpg)
Hunmin Jeongeum Haerye
Hunminjeongeum Haerye , also called the Haerye Edition of Hunminjeongeum or simply The Haerye, is a commentary on the Hunminjeongeum, the original promulgation of hangul.It was written by scholars from the Jiphyeonjeon , commissioned by King Sejong the...
"Explanation of the Hunmin Jeong-eum with Examples". This document explains the design of the consonant letters according to articulatory phonetics
Articulatory phonetics
The field of articulatory phonetics is a subfield of phonetics. In studying articulation, phoneticians explain how humans produce speech sounds via the interaction of different physiological structures....
and the vowel letters according to Confucian
Confucianism
Confucianism is a Chinese ethical and philosophical system developed from the teachings of the Chinese philosopher Confucius . Confucianism originated as an "ethical-sociopolitical teaching" during the Spring and Autumn Period, but later developed metaphysical and cosmological elements in the Han...
principles such as the yin and yang
Yin and yang
In Asian philosophy, the concept of yin yang , which is often referred to in the West as "yin and yang", is used to describe how polar opposites or seemingly contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other in turn. Opposites thus only...
of vowel harmony
Vowel harmony
Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels that occurs in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on which vowels may be found near each other....
(see below).
Following the Indic tradition
Brahmic family of scripts
The Brahmic or Indic scripts are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout South Asia , Southeast Asia, and parts of Central and East Asia, and are descended from the Brāhmī script of the ancient Indian subcontinent...
, hangul consonants are classified according to the speech organ
Speech organ
Speech organs produce the many sounds needed for language. Organs used include the lips, teeth, tongue, alveolar ridge, hard palate, velum , uvula and glottis....
s involved in their production. However, hangul goes a step further, in that the shapes of the letters iconicly represent the speech organs, so that all consonants of the same articulation are based on the same shape. That is, hangul is a featural alphabet
Featural alphabet
A featural alphabet is an alphabet wherein the shapes of the letters are not arbitrary, but encode phonological features of the phonemes they represent. The term featural was introduced by Geoffrey Sampson to describe Hangul and Pitman Shorthand...
, the only one in the world that is in common use. For example, the shape of the velar consonant
Velar consonant
Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....
(牙音 "molar sound") ㄱ [k] is said to represent the back of the tongue bunched up to block the back of the mouth near the molars. Aspirate ㅋ [kʰ] is derived from this by the addition of a stroke which represents aspiration. Chinese voiced/"muddy" ㄲ [ɡ] is created by doubling ㄱ. (The doubled letters were only used for Chinese, as Korean had not yet developed its series of emphatic consonants. In the twentieth century they were revived for the Korean emphatics.)
| Articulatory class | Non- stop |
Plain stop |
Aspirated stop |
"Muddy" voice |
Iconicity, according to the Hunmin jeong-eum haerye |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 牙音 "molar sounds" | (ㆁ) | ㄱ | ㅋ | ㄲ | 舌根閉喉 outline of the root of tongue blocking the throat |
| 舌音 "tongue sounds" | ㄴ | ㄷ | ㅌ | ㄸ | 舌附上腭 outline of the tongue touching the hard palate |
| 脣音 "lip sounds" | ㅁ | ㅂ | ㅍ | ㅃ | 口形 outline of the mouth (lips) |
| 齒音 "incisor sounds" | ㅅ | ㅈ | ㅊ | ㅉ, ㅆ | 齒形 outline of an incisor |
| 喉音 "throat sounds" | ㅇ | ㆆ | ㅎ | ᅇ, ㆅ | 喉形 outline of the open throat |
| 輕脣音 "light lip sounds" | ㅱ | ㅸ | ㆄ | ㅹ | (lip sounds plus circle) |
Similarly, the coronal consonant
Coronal consonant
Coronal consonants are consonants articulated with the flexible front part of the tongue. Only the coronal consonants can be divided into apical , laminal , domed , or subapical , as well as a few rarer orientations, because only the front of the tongue has such...
s (舌音 "tongue sounds") are said to show the (front of the) tongue bent up to touch the palate, the bilabial consonant
Bilabial consonant
In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:...
s (脣音 "lip sounds") represent the lips touching or parting, the sibilants (齒音 "incisor sounds") represent the teeth (in sibilants the airstream is directed against the teeth), and the guttural consonant
Guttural consonant
Guttural is a term used to describe any of several speech sounds whose primary place of articulation is near the back of the oral cavity. In some definitions this is restricted to pharyngeal consonants, but in others includes some but not all velar and uvular consonants...
s (喉音 "throat sounds"), including the null initial used when a syllable begins with a vowel, represent an open mouth and throat. The labiodental consonant
Labiodental consonant
In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants articulated with the lower lip and the upper teeth.-Labiodental consonant in IPA:The labiodental consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:...
s (輕脣音 "light lip sounds") are derived from the bilabial series. In all cases but the labials, the plain
Tenuis consonant
In linguistics, a tenuis consonant is a stop or affricate which is unvoiced, unaspirated, and unglottalized. That is, it has a "plain" phonation like , with a voice onset time close to zero, as in Spanish p, t, ch, k, or as in English p, t, k after s .In transcription, tenuis consonants are not...
(清 "clear") stops
Stop consonant
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &...
have a vertical top stroke, the non-stops lack that stroke, and the aspirate stops have an additional stroke. There were a few additional irregular consonants, such as the coronal lateral/flap ㄹ [l~ɾ], which the Haerye only explains as an altered outline of the tongue, and the velar nasal ㆁ [ŋ]. The irregularity of the labials has no explanation in the Haerye, but may be a remnant of the graphic origin of the basic letter shapes in the imperial ’Phagspa alphabet of Yuan Dynasty China.
Ledyard's theory of consonant letters
Articulatory phonetics
The field of articulatory phonetics is a subfield of phonetics. In studying articulation, phoneticians explain how humans produce speech sounds via the interaction of different physiological structures....
, it also states that Sejong adapted them from the enigmatic 古篆字 "Gǔ Seal Script". The identity of this script has long been puzzling. The primary meaning of the character 古 gǔ is "old", so 古篆字 gǔ zhuānzì has traditionally been interpreted as "Old Seal Script", frustrating philologists because hangul bears no functional similarity to Chinese 篆字 zhuānzì seal script
Seal script
Seal script is an ancient style of Chinese calligraphy. It evolved organically out of the Zhōu dynasty script , arising in the Warring State of Qin...
s. However, Gari Ledyard
Gari Ledyard
Gari Keith Ledyard is Sejong Professor of Korean History Emeritus at Columbia University. He is best known for his work on the history of the hangul alphabet.-Biography:...
, Sejong Professor of Korean History Emeritus at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, notes that the character 古 gǔ also functions as a phonetic component of 蒙古 Měnggǔ "Mongol". Indeed, records from Sejong's day played with this ambiguity, joking that "no one is older (more 古 gǔ) than the 蒙古 Měng-gǔ". Ledyard deduces from palace records that 古篆字 gǔ zhuānzì was a veiled reference to the 蒙古篆字 měnggǔ zhuānzì "Mongol Seal Script
Seal script
Seal script is an ancient style of Chinese calligraphy. It evolved organically out of the Zhōu dynasty script , arising in the Warring State of Qin...
", that is, a formal variant of the Mongol ’Phagspa alphabet
Phagspa script
The Phags-pa script was an alphabet designed by the Tibetan Lama 'Gro-mgon Chos-rgyal 'Phags-pa for Yuan emperor Kublai Khan, as a unified script for the literary languages of the Yuan Dynasty....
of Yuan dynasty
Yuan Dynasty
The Yuan Dynasty , or Great Yuan Empire was a ruling dynasty founded by the Mongol leader Kublai Khan, who ruled most of present-day China, all of modern Mongolia and its surrounding areas, lasting officially from 1271 to 1368. It is considered both as a division of the Mongol Empire and as an...
that had been modified to look like the Chinese seal script, and which had been an official script of the empire. There were ’Phagspa manuscripts in the Korean palace library from the Yuan Dynasty government, including some in the seal-script form, and several of Sejong's ministers knew the script well. If this was the case, Sejong's evasion on the Mongol connection can be understood in light of the political situation in the current ethnically Chinese Ming Dynasty
Ming Dynasty
The Ming Dynasty, also Empire of the Great Ming, was the ruling dynasty of China from 1368 to 1644, following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty. The Ming, "one of the greatest eras of orderly government and social stability in human history", was the last dynasty in China ruled by ethnic...
. The topic of the recent Mongol domination of China, which had ended just 75 years earlier, was politically sensitive, and both the Chinese and Korean literati considered the Mongols to be barbarians with nothing to contribute to a civilized society.
Ledyard holds that five core consonant letters were adopted from ’Phagspa, ㄱ [k], ㄷ [t], ㅂ [p], ㅈ [ts], and ㄹ [l]. These were the consonants basic to Chinese phonology, rather than the graphically simplest letters (ㄱ [k], ㄴ [n], ㅁ [m], and ㅅ [s]) taken as the starting point by the Haerye. A sixth letter, the null initial ㅇ, was invented by Sejong. The rest of the consonants were created through featural
Distinctive feature
In linguistics, a distinctive feature is the most basic unit of phonological structure that may be analyzed in phonological theory.Distinctive features are grouped into categories according to the natural classes of segments they describe: major class features, laryngeal features, manner features,...
derivation of these six, essentially as described in the Haerye.
Although several of the basic concepts of hangul were inherited from Indic phonology
Brahmic family of scripts
The Brahmic or Indic scripts are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout South Asia , Southeast Asia, and parts of Central and East Asia, and are descended from the Brāhmī script of the ancient Indian subcontinent...
through the ’Phagspa script, such as the relationships among the homorganic consonants and, of course, the alphabetic principle
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
itself, Chinese phonology
Rime table
A rime table or rhyme table is a syllable chart of the Chinese language, a significant advance on the fǎnqiè analysis used in earlier rime dictionaries...
also played a major role. Besides the grouping of letters into syllables, in functional imitation of Chinese characters, according to Ledyard it was Chinese phonology, not Indic, that determined which five consonants were basic, and were therefore to be retained from ’Phagspa. These included the plain
Tenuis consonant
In linguistics, a tenuis consonant is a stop or affricate which is unvoiced, unaspirated, and unglottalized. That is, it has a "plain" phonation like , with a voice onset time close to zero, as in Spanish p, t, ch, k, or as in English p, t, k after s .In transcription, tenuis consonants are not...
plosive letters, ꡂ g for ㄱ [k], ꡊ d for ㄷ [t], and ꡎ b for ㅂ [p], which were basic to Chinese theory, but which represented voiced consonants in the Indic languages and were not basic in the Indic tradition. The other two letters were the plain sibilant ꡛ s for ㅈ [ts] (ㅈ was pronounced [ts] in the fifteenth century, as it still is in North Korea) and the liquid ꡙ l for ㄹ [l].
The five adopted letters were graphically simplified, retaining the outline of the ’Phagspa letters but with a reduced number of strokes that recalled the shapes of the speech organs involved, as explained in the Haerye. For example, the box inside ’Phagspa ꡂ g is not found in hangul ㄱ [k]; only the outer stroke remains. In addition to being iconic for the shape of the "root" of the tongue, this more easily allowed for consonant cluster
Consonant cluster
In linguistics, a consonant cluster is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word splits....
s and left room for an added stroke to derive the aspirated consonant ㅋ [kʰ]. But in contrast to the Haerye account, the non-plosives ˈ [ŋ], ㄴ [n], ㅁ [m], and ㅅ [s] were derived by removing the top stroke or strokes of the basic letters. (No letter was derived from ㄹ [l].) This clears up a few points that had been problematic in the Haerye. For example, while it is straightforward to derive ㅁ from ㅂ by removing the top of ㅂ in Ledyard's account, it is not clear how one would derive ㅂ by adding something to ㅁ, since ㅂ is not analogous to the other plosives: If ㅂ were derived as in the Haerye account, it would be expected to have a horizontal top stroke similar to those of ㄱ [k], ㄷ [t], and ㅈ [ts].
In order to maintain the Chinese convention of initial and rime
Syllable rime
In the study of phonology in linguistics, the rime or rhyme of a syllable consists of a nucleus and an optional coda. It is the part of the syllable used in poetic rhyme, and the part that is lengthened or stressed when a person elongates or stresses a word in speech.The rime is usually the...
, Sejong and his ministers needed a null symbol to refer to the lack of a consonant with an initial vowel. He chose the circle, ㅇ, with the subsequent derivation of the glottal stop
Glottal stop
The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...
ㆆ [ʔ], by adding a vertical top stroke by analogy with the other plosives, and the aspirate ㅎ [h], parallel the account in the Haerye. (Perhaps the reason he created a new letter rather than adopting one from Phagspa was that it was awkward to write these Chinese initials in Phagspa, where ㅇ and ㆆ were both written as digraphs
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
beginning with y, ꡭꡝ and ꡗꡖ.) However, Ledyard's explanation of the letter ㆁ [ŋ] differs from the Haerye account; he sees it as a fusion of velar ㄱ and null ㅇ, reflecting its variable pronunciation. Hangul was designed not just to write Korean, but to accurately represent Chinese. Many Chinese words historically began with [ŋ], but by Sejong's day this had been lost in many regions of China, and was silent when these words were borrowed into Korean, so that [ŋ] only remained at the middle and end of Korean words. The expected shape of a velar nasal, the short vertical stroke that would be left by removing the top stroke of ㄱ, had the additional problem that it would have looked almost identical to the vowel ㅣ [i]. Sejong's solution solved both problems: The vertical stroke left from ㄱ was added to the null symbol ㅇ to create ㆁ, iconically capturing both regional pronunciations as well as being easily legible. Eventually the graphic distinction between the two silent initials ㅇ and ㆁ was lost, as they never contrasted in Korean words.
Another letter composed of two elements to represent two regional pronunciations, now obsolete, was ㅱ, which transcribed the Chinese initial 微. This represented either m or w in various Chinese dialects, and was composed of ㅁ [m] plus ㅇ. In ’Phagspa, a loop under a letter, ꡧ, represented [w] after vowels, and Ledyard proposes this rather than the null symbol was the source of the loop at the bottom, so that the two components of ㅱ reflected its two pronunciations just as the two components of ㆁ did. The reason for suspecting that this derives from ’Phagspa ꡧ is that the entire labio-dental series of both ’Phagspa and hangul, used to transcribe the Chinese initials 微非敷 w, v, f, have such composite forms, though in the case of ’Phagspa these are all based on the letter ꡜ h (ꡤ etc.), while in hangul, which does not have an h among its basic consonants, they are based on the labial series ㅁ m, ㅂ b, ㅍ p.
An additional letter, ㅿ z, now obsolete, has no explanation in either Ledyard or the Haerye. It also had two pronunciations in Chinese, approximately [ʑ] and [ɲ].
As a final piece of evidence, Ledyard notes that, with two exceptions, hangul letters have the simple geometric shapes expected of invention: ㄱ [k] was the corner of a square, ㅁ [m] a full square, ㅅ [s] a chevron, ㅇ a circle. In the Hunmin Jeong-eum, before the influence of the writing brush made them asymmetrical, these were purely geometric. The exceptions were ㄷ [t] and ㅂ [p], which had more complex geometries and were two of the forms adopted from ’Phagspa. For example, ㄷ [t] wasn't a simple half square, but even in the Hunmin Jeong-eum had a lip protruding from the upper left corner, just as ’Phagspa ꡊ d did, and as Tibetan ད d did before that.
| Hangul | ’Phagspa | Tibetan | Phoenician | Greek | Latin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ㅂ | ꡎ | བ | 𐤁 | Β | B |
| ㄱ | ꡂ | ག | 𐤂 | Γ | C, G |
| ㄷ | ꡊ | ད | 𐤃 | Δ | D |
| ㄹ | ꡙ | ལ | 𐤋 | Λ | L |
| ㅈ | ꡛ | ས | 𐤑 | Ϻ | — |
| ㅇ in ㅱ etc. | ꡧ in ꡤ etc. | ུ | 𐤅 ? | Ϝ, Υ | F, Y, U/V/W |
If Ledyard is correct, the graphic base of hangul is part of the great family of alphabets that spread from the Phoenician alphabet
Phoenician alphabet
The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, was a non-pictographic consonantal alphabet, or abjad. It was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia...
, through Aramaic
Aramaic alphabet
The Aramaic alphabet is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet and became distinctive from it by the 8th century BC. The letters all represent consonants, some of which are matres lectionis, which also indicate long vowels....
, Brāhmī
Brāhmī script
Brāhmī is the modern name given to the oldest members of the Brahmic family of scripts. The best-known Brāhmī inscriptions are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, dated to the 3rd century BCE. These are traditionally considered to be early known examples of Brāhmī writing...
, and Tibetan
Tibetan script
The Tibetan alphabet is an abugida of Indic origin used to write the Tibetan language as well as the Dzongkha language, Denzongkha, Ladakhi language and sometimes the Balti language. The printed form of the alphabet is called uchen script while the hand-written cursive form used in everyday...
. However, this is only one component of its derivation; hangul did not derive from ’phagspa in the gradual and unconscious way that Tibetan derived from Brāhmī. Ledyard wrote in his doctoral thesis:
- I have devoted much space and discussion to the role of the Mongol 'phags-pa alphabet in the origin of the Korean alphabet, but it should be clear to any reader that in the total picture, that role was quite limited. [...] Nothing would disturb me more, after this study is published, than to discover in a work on the history of writing a statement like the following: "According to recent investigations, the Korean alphabet was derived from the Mongol 'phags-pa script [...]"
Iconic design of vowel letters
| 陰 yin | 陽 yang | 乎 mediating | |
|---|---|---|---|
| non-iotizing | ㅡ eu | ㆍ ə | ㅣ i |
| iotizing | ㅓ eo | ㅏ a | |
| ㅜ u | ㅗ o |
The seven basic vowel letters were not adopted from an existing script. They were straight lines, dots, and lines with dots that appear to have been designed by Sejong or his ministers to represent the phonological principles of Korean. At least two parameters were used in their design, vowel harmony
Vowel harmony
Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels that occurs in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on which vowels may be found near each other....
and iotation
Iotation
Iotation is a linguistic phenomenon very characteristic of the Slavic languages. It should not be confused with palatalization, which is an entirely different process....
.
The Korean language of this period had vowel harmony to a greater extent than it does today. Vowels alternated in pairs according to their environment. Vowel harmony affected the morphology
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
of the language, and Korean phonology described it in terms of yin and yang: If a root had yang ("deep") vowels, then most suffixes also had to have yang vowels; conversely, if the root had yin ("shallow") vowels, the suffixes needed to be yin as well. The seven vowel sounds of Korean thus fell into two harmonic groups of three vowels each, with the seventh vowel, ㅣ i, falling outside this system. ㅣ i was harmonically neutral and could coexist with either yin or yang vowels, and for this reason was called "mediating". The letters for the yin vowels were ㅡ eu, ㅜ u, ㅓ eo; dots, if present, were placed in the yin directions of down and left. The yang vowel letters were ㆍ ə, ㅗ o, and ㅏ a, with the dots in the yang directions of up and right.
Of these seven vowel sounds, three could not be "iotized" (preceded by a y- sound). These were written with a single stroke: ㅡ eu, ㆍ ə, ㅣ i. (The letter ㆍ ə is now obsolete.) The Hunmin Jeong-eum states that the shapes of the strokes were chosen to represent the Confucian 三才 sāncái "three realms
Sancai Tuhui
The Sancai Tuhui, compiled by Shanghai natives Wang Qi and Wang Siyi , is a Chinese encyclopedia known at the time as a type of Book by category , completed in 1607 and published in 1609 during the Ming dynasty, featuring illustrations of subjects in the three worlds of heaven, earth, and...
" of 天 heaven, a yang concept, represented with a dot for the sun, ⟨ㆍ⟩; 地 earth, a yin concept, represented with a flat line, ⟨ㅡ⟩; and 人 man, represented with an upright line, ⟨ㅣ⟩, who mediates between the two. The other four vowels, which could be iotized, were written as a dot next to a line: ㅓ eo, ㅏ a, ㅜ u, ㅗ o. Iotation was then indicated by doubling this dot: ㅕ yeo, ㅑ ya, ㅠ yu, ㅛ yo.
| front? | central? | back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| non-iotizing | ㅣ i | ㆍ ə | ㅡ eu |
| high iotizing | ㅓ eo | ㅜ u | |
| low iotizing | ㅏ a | ㅗ o |
There was presumably a third parameter in designing the vowel letters, not mentioned in the Haerye, namely choosing horizontal ㅡ eu as the graphic base of "closed" (rounded
Roundedness
In phonetics, vowel roundedness refers to the amount of rounding in the lips during the articulation of a vowel. That is, it is vocalic labialization. When pronouncing a rounded vowel, the lips form a circular opening, while unrounded vowels are pronounced with the lips relaxed...
) ㅜ u and ㅗ o, and vertical ㅣ i as the base of "open" (unrounded) ㅓ eo and ㅏ a. The horizontal letters ㅡㅜㅗ eu u o represented back vowel
Back vowel
A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark...
s *[ɯ], *[u], *[o] in the fifteenth century, as they do today, whereas the fifteenth-century sound values of ㅣㅓㅏ i eo a are uncertain. Some linguists reconstruct them as *[i], *[ɤ], *[e], respectively (and reconstruct obsolete ㆍ ə as *[a]); others as *[i], *[e], *[a] (with ㆍ ə as *[ə]). In the latter case, the vertical letters would have represented front vowel
Front vowel
A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also...
s, the dot the sole central vowel
Central vowel
A central vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a central vowel is that the tongue is positioned halfway between a front vowel and a back vowel...
, and the vowel harmony, described as "shallow" vs "deep", would have been one of vowel height, with the yang vowels lower
Open vowel
An open vowel is defined as a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels in reference to the low position of the tongue...
than their yin counterparts.
A resemblance of 'Phag-spa ꡠ e to Hangul ㅡ eu (both horizontal lines), and of 'Phag-spa ꡡ o to Hangul ㅗ o (both horizontal lines with an upper point in the middle), which would back up Ledyard's theory if a connection were proven.
Diacritics for suprasegmentals
Korean has a simple tone system often characterized by the poorly defined term "pitch accentPitch accent
Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words...
". Hangul originally had two diacritic
Diacritic
A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...
s to represent this system, a single tick, as in 성〮, for high tone
Tone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...
, and a double tick, as in 성〯, for a long vowel
Vowel length
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in...
. When transcribing Chinese, these had been used for the 'going' (去聲) and 'rising' (上聲) tones, respectively. Although the pitch and length distinctions are still made in speech by many Koreans, the diacritics are obsolete.