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Hangul (Korean: , han-geul or han'gŭl, ), or Chosongul (Korean: , chosŏn'gŭl) is the native alphabet of the Korean language, as opposed to the non-alphabetic hanja system borrowed from China. While Chosongul / Hangul may look like logographic Chinese writing to some, it is actually a phonemic alphabet organized into syllabic blocks. Each block consists of at least two of the 24 Hangul letters (jamo): at least one each of the 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Historically, the alphabet had several additional letters (see obsolete jamo). For a phonological description of the letters, see Korean phonology.
Names Official names Other names Until the early twentieth century, Hangul was denigrated as vulgar by the literate elite who preferred the traditional Hanja writing system. They gave it such names as: However, these names are now archaic, as the use of hanja in writing has become very rare in South Korea and completely phased out in North Korea. Today, the name Urigeul / Uri kŭl (우리 글) or "our script" is used in both North and South Korea. History
Jamo Jamo (자모; 字母) or nassori (낱소리) are the units that make up the Hangul alphabet. Ja means letter or character, and mo means mother, so the name suggests that the jamo are the building-blocks of the script. There are 51 jamo, of which 24 are equivalent to letters of the Latin alphabet. The other 27 jamo are clusters of two or sometimes three of these letters. Of the 24 simple jamo, fourteen are consonants (ja-eum 자음, 子音 "child sounds") and ten are vowels (mo-eum 모음, 母音 "mother sounds"). Five of the simple consonant letters are doubled to form the five tense consonants (see below), while another eleven clusters are formed of two different consonant letters. The ten vowel jamo can be combined to form eleven diphthongs. Here is a summary: Four of the simple vowel jamo are derived by means of a short stroke to signify iotation (a preceding i sound): ㅑ ya, ㅕ yeo, ㅛ yo, and ㅠ yu. These four are counted as part of the 24 simple jamo because the iotating stroke taken out of context does not represent y. In fact, there is no separate jamo for y. Of the simple consonants, ㅊ chieut, ㅋ kieuk, ㅌ tieut, and ㅍ pieup are aspirated derivatives of ㅈ jieut, ㄱ giyeok, ㄷ digeut, and ㅂ bieup, respectively, formed by combining the unaspirated letters with an extra stroke. The doubled letters are ㄲ ssang-giyeok (kk: ssang- 쌍 "double"), ㄸ ssang-digeut (tt), ㅃ ssang-bieup (pp), ㅆ ssang-siot (ss), and ㅉ ssang-jieut (jj). Double jamo do not represent geminate consonants, but rather a "tense" phonation. Jamo design Hangul is a "featural" script. Scripts may transcribe languages at the level of morphemes (logographic scripts like hanja), of syllables (syllabic scripts like kana), or of segments (alphabetic scripts like the one you're reading here). Hangul goes one step further, using distinct strokes to indicate distinctive features such as place of articulation (labial, coronal, velar, or glottal) and manner of articulation (plosive, nasal, sibilant, aspiration) for consonants, and iotation (a preceding i- sound), harmonic class, and umlaut for vowels. For instance, the consonant jamo ㅌ t is composed of three strokes, each one meaningful: the top stroke indicates ㅌ is a plosive, like ㆆ ’, ㄱ g, ㄷ d, ㅂ b, ㅈ j, which have the same stroke (the last is an affricate, a plosive-fricative sequence); the middle stroke indicates that ㅌ is aspirated, like ㅎ h, ㅋ k, ㅍ p, ㅊ ch, which also have this stroke; and the curved bottom stroke indicates that ㅌ is coronal, like ㄴ n, ㄷ d, and ㄹ l. Two consonants, ᇰ and ᇢ, have dual pronunciations, and appear to be composed of two elements, stacked one over the other, to represent these two pronunciations: /silence for ᇰ and / for obsolete ᇢ. With vowel jamo, a short stroke connected to the main line of the letter indicates that this is one of the vowels which can be iotated; this stroke is then doubled when the vowel is iotated. The position of the stroke indicates which harmonic class the vowel belongs to, "light" (top or right) or "dark" (bottom or left). In the modern jamo, an additional vertical stroke indicates umlaut, deriving ㅐ , ㅔ , ㅚ , ㅟ from ㅏ , ㅓ , ㅗ , ㅜ . However, this is not part of the intentional design of the script, but rather a natural development from what were originally diphthongs ending in the vowel ㅣ . Indeed, in many Korean dialects, including the standard dialect of Seoul, some of these may still be diphthongs. Although the design of the script may be featural, for all practical purposes it behaves as an alphabet. The jamo ㅌ isn't read as three letters coronal plosive aspirated, for instance, but as a single consonant t. Likewise, the former diphthong ㅔ is read as a single vowel e. Beside the jamo, Hangul originally employed diacritic marks to indicate pitch accent. A syllable with a high pitch was marked with a dot (·) to the left of it (when writing vertically); a syllable with a rising pitch was marked with a double dot, like a colon (:). These are no longer used. Although vowel length was and still is phonemic in Korean, it was never indicated in Hangul, except that syllables with rising pitch (:) necessarily had long vowels. Although some aspects of Hangul reflect a shared history with the Phagspa alphabet, and thus Indic phonology, such as the relationships among the jamo and the alphabetic principle itself, other aspects such as organization of jamo into syllablic blocks, and which Phagspa letters were chosen to be basic to the system, reflect the influence of Chinese writing and phonology. Consonant jamo design The letters for the consonants fall into five groups, each with a basic shape, and one or more letters derived from this shape by means of additional strokes. In the Hunmin Jeong-eum Haerye account, the basic shapes iconically represent the articulations the tongue, palate, teeth, and throat take when making these sounds. The Korean names for the groups are taken from Chinese phonetics: The phonetic theory inherent in the derivation of glottal stop ㆆ and aspirate ㅎ from the null ㅇ may be more accurate than Chinese phonetics or modern IPA usage. In Chinese theory and in the IPA, the glottal consonants are posited as having a specific "glottal" place of articulation. However, recent phonetic theory has come to view the glottal stop and h to be isolated features of 'stop' and 'aspiration' without an inherent place of articulation, just as their Hangul representations based on the null symbol assume. Vowel jamo design Vowel letters are based on three elements: Short strokes (dots in the earliest documents) were added to these three basic elements to derive the simple vowel jamo: The compound jamo ending in ㅣ i were originally diphthongs. However, several have since evolved into pure vowels: The simple iotated vowels are, The Korean language of the 15th century had vowel harmony to a greater extent than it does today. Vowels in grammatical morphemes changed according to their environment, falling into groups which "harmonized" with each other. This affected the morphology of the language, and Korean phonology described it in terms of yin and yang: If a root word had yang ('bright') vowels, then most suffixes attached to it also had to have yang vowels; conversely, if the root had yin ('dark') vowels, the suffixes needed to be yin as well. There was a third harmonic group called "mediating" ('neutral' in Western terminology) that could coexist with either yin or yang vowels. The Korean neutral vowel was ㅣ i. The yin vowels were ㅡㅜㅓ eu, u, eo; the dots are in the yin directions of 'down' and 'left'. The yang vowels were ㆍㅗㅏ ə, o, a, with the dots in the yang directions of 'up' and 'right'. The Hunmin Jeong-eum Haerye states that the shapes of the non-dotted jamo ㅡㆍㅣ were chosen to represent the concepts of yin, yang, and mediation: Earth, Heaven, and Human. (The letter ㆍ ə is now obsolete.) There was yet a third parameter in designing the vowel jamo, namely, choosing ㅡ as the graphic base of ㅜ and ㅗ, and ㅣ as the graphic base of ㅓ and ㅏ. A full understanding of what these horizontal and vertical groups had in common would require knowing the exact sound values these vowels had in the 15th century. Our uncertainty is primarily with the three jamo ㆍㅓㅏ. Some linguists reconstruct these as , respectively; others as . However, the horizontal jamo ㅡㅜㅗ eu, u, o do all appear to have been mid to high back vowels, , and thus to have formed a coherent group phonetically. Ledyards theory of consonant jamo design Although the Hunmin Jeong-eum Haerye explains the design of the consonantal jamo in terms of articulatory phonetics, as a purely innovative creation, there are several theories as to which external sources may have inspired or influenced King Sejong's creation. Professor Gari Ledyard of Columbia University believes that five consonant letters were derived from the Mongol Phagspa alphabet of the Yuan dynasty, while the rest of the jamo were derived internally from these five, essentially as described in the Hunmin Jeong-eum Haerye. However, these five basic consonants were not the graphically simplest letters that were considered basic by the Hunmin Jeong-eum Haerye, but instead the consonants basic to Chinese phonology. The Hunmin Jeong-eum states that King Sejong adapted 古篆 (Gǔ seal script) in creating hangul. The primary meaning of 古 is old, frustrating philologists because hangul bears no functional similarity to Chinese 篆字 seal scripts. However, 古 may also have been a pun on Mongol (蒙古 Měnggǔ), and 古篆 may have been an abbreviation of 蒙古篆字 "Mongol Seal Script", that is, a formal variant of the Phagspa alphabet written to look like the Chinese seal script. There were certainly Phagspa manuscripts in the Korean palace library, 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 Korea's relationship with Ming China after the fall of the Yuan dynasty, and of the literati's contempt for the Mongols as "barbarians". According to Ledyard, the five borrowed letters were graphically simplified, which allowed for jamo clusters and left room to derive the aspirate plosives, ㅋㅌㅍㅊ. But in contrast to the traditional account, the non-plosives (ng ㄴㅁ and ㅅ) were derived by removing the top of these letters. While it's easy to derive ㅁ from ㅂ by removing the top, it's not clear how to derive ㅂ from ㅁ, since ㅂ is not analogous to the other plosives. The explanation of ng also differs from the traditional account. Many Chinese words began with ng, but by King Sejong's day, ng was either silent or pronounced in China, and was silent when these words were borrowed into Korean. Also, the expected shape of ng (vertical line left by removing the top stroke of ㄱ) would have looked the same as the vowel ㅣ . Sejong's solution solved both problems: the vertical stroke from ㄱ was added to the null symbol ㅇ to create ᇰ (a circle with a vertical line on top), iconically capturing both in the middle or end of a word, and silence at the beginning. (The distinction between ㅇ and ᇰ was eventually lost.) Additionally, the composition of obsolete ᇢᇦᇴ w, v, f (for Chinese initials 微非敷), by adding a small circle under ㅁㅂㅍ (m, b, p), is parallel to the Phagspa addition of a small loop under three variants of h. In Phagspa, this loop also represented w after vowels. The Chinese initial 微 represented either m or w in various dialects, and this may be reflected in the choice of ㅁ m plus ㅇ (from Phagspa w) as the elements of hangul ᇢ, for another letter composed of two elements to represent two regional pronunciations. Finally, most of the borrowed hangul letters were simple geometric shapes, at least originally, but ㄷ d t always had a small lip protruding from the upper left corner, just as the Phagspa d t did. This can be traced back to the Tibetan letter d, ད. See Gari Ledyard for details. Jamo order The alphabetical order of Hangul does not mix consonants and vowels as Western alphabets do. Rather, the order is that of the Indic type, first velar consonants, then coronals, labials, sibilants, etc. However, the vowels come after the consonants rather than before them as in the Indic systems. The modern alphabetic order was set by Choi Sejin in 1527. This was before the development of the Korean tense consonants and the double jamo that represent them, and before the conflation of the letters ㅇ (null) and ㆁ (ng). Thus when the South Korean and North Korean governments implemented full use of Hangul, they ordered these letters differently, with South Korea grouping similar letters together, and North Korea placing new letters at the end of the alphabet. South Korean order The Southern order of the consonantal jamo is, ㄱ ㄲ ㄴ ㄷ ㄸ ㄹ ㅁ ㅂ ㅃ ㅅ ㅆ ㅇ ㅈ ㅉ ㅊ ㅋ ㅌ ㅍ ㅎ Double jamo are placed immediately after their single counterparts. No distinction is made between silent and nasal ㅇ. The order of the vocalic jamo is, ㅏ ㅐ ㅑ ㅒ ㅓ ㅔ ㅕ ㅖ ㅗ ㅘ ㅙ ㅚ ㅛ ㅜ ㅝ ㅞ ㅟ ㅠ ㅡ ㅢ ㅣ The modern monophthongal vowels come first, with the derived forms interspersed according to their form: first added i, then iotized, then iotized with added i. Diphthongs beginning with w are ordered according to their spelling, as ㅏ or ㅓ plus a second vowel, not as separate digraphs. North Korean order North Korea maintains a more traditional order. The Northern order of the consonantal jamo is: ㄱ ㄴ ㄷ ㄹ ㅁ ㅂ ㅅ ㅇ (ng) ㅈ ㅊ ㅋ ㅌ ㅍ ㅎ ㄲ ㄸ ㅃ ㅆ ㅉ ㅇ (null) The first ㅇ is the nasal ㅇ ng, which occurs only as a final in the modern language. ㅇ used as an initial, on the other hand, goes at the very end, as it is a placeholder for the vowels which follow. (A syllable with no final is ordered before all syllables with finals, however, not with null ㅇ.) The new letters, the double jamo, are placed at the end of the consonants, just before the null ㅇ, so as not to alter the traditional order of the rest of the alphabet. The order of the vocalic jamo is, ㅏ ㅑ ㅓ ㅕ ㅗ ㅛ ㅜ ㅠ ㅡ ㅣ ㅐ ㅒ ㅔ ㅖ ㅚ ㅟ ㅢ ㅘ ㅝ ㅙ ㅞ All digraphs and trigraphs, including the old diphthongs ㅐ and ㅔ, are placed after all basic vowels, again maintaining Choi's alphabetic order. Jamo names The Hangul arrangement is called the ganada order (가나다 순), after the first three jamo (g, n, d) affixed to the first vowel (a). The jamo were named by Choi Sejin in 1527. North Korea regularized the names when it made Hangul its official orthography. Consonantal jamo names The modern consonants have two-syllable names, with the consonant coming both at the beginning and end of the name, as follows: All jamo in North Korea, and all but three in the more traditional nomenclature used in South Korea, have names of the format of letter + i + eu + letter. For example, Choi wrote bieup with the hanja 非 bi 邑 eup. The names of g, d, and s are exceptions because there were no hanja for euk, eut, and eus. 役 yeok is used in place of euk. Since there is no hanja that ends in t or s, Choi chose two hanja to be read in their Korean gloss, 末 kkeut "end" and 衣 os "clothes". Originally, Choi gave j, ch, k, t, p, and h the irregular one-syllable names of ji, chi, ki, ti, pi, and hi, because they should not be used as final consonants, as specified in Hunmin jeong-eum. But after the establishment of the new orthography in 1933, which allowed all consonsants to be used as finals, the names were changed to the present forms. The double jamo precede the parent consonant's name with the word 쌍 ssang, meaning "twin" or "double", or with 된 doen in North Korea, meaning "strong". Thus: In North Korea, an alternate way to refer to the jamo is by the name letter + eu (ㅡ), for example, 그 geu for the jamo ㄱ, 쓰 sseu for the jamo ㅆ, etc. Vocalic jamo names The vocalic jamo names are simply the vowel itself, written with the null initial ㅇ ieung and the vowel being named. Thus: Obsolete jamo Several jamo are obsolete. These include several that represent Korean sounds that have since disappeared from the standard language, as well as a larger number used to represent the sounds of the Chinese rime tables. The most frequently encountered of these archaic letters are: There were two other now-obsolete double jamo, In the original Hangul system, double jamo were used to represent Chinese voiced (濁音) consonants, which survive in the Shanghainese slack consonants, and were not used for Korean words. It was only later that a similar convention was used to represent the modern "tense" (faucalized) consonants of Korean. The sibilant ("dental") consonants were modified to represent the two series of Chinese sibilants, alveolar and retroflex, a "round" vs. "sharp" distinction which was never made in Korean, and which was even being lost from northern Chinese. The alveolar jamo had longer left stems, while retroflexes had longer right stems: There were also consonant clusters that have since dropped out of the language, such as ㅴ bsg and ㅵ bsd, as well as diphthongs that were used to represent Chinese medials, such as ㆇ, ㆈ, ㆊ, ㆋ. Some of the Korean sounds represented by these obsolete jamo still exist in some dialects. Syllabic blocks Except for a few grammatical morphemes in archaic texts, no letter may stand alone to represent elements of the Korean language. Instead, jamo are grouped into syllabic blocks of at least two and often three: a consonant or consonant cluster called the initial (초성, 初聲 choseong syllable onset), a vowel or diphthong called the medial (중성, 中聲 jungseong syllable nucleus), and, optionally, a consonant or consonant cluster at the end of the syllable, called the final (종성, 終聲 jongseong syllable coda). When a syllable has no actual initial consonant, the null initial ㅇ ieung is used as a placeholder. (No placeholder is needed when there is no final.) That is, a syllabic block contains a minimum of two jamo. The sets of initial and final consonants are not the same. For instance, ㅇ ng only occurs in final position, while the doubled jamo that can occur in final position are limited to ᆻ ss and ᆩ kk. For a list of initials, medials, and finals, see Hangul consonant and vowel tables. The placement or "stacking" of jamo in the block follows set patterns based on the shape of the medial. Blocks are always written in phonetic order, initial-medial-final. Therefore, The resulting block is written within a rectangle of the same size and shape as a hanja, so to a naive eye Hangul may be confused with hanja. Not including obsolete jamo, there are 11 172 possible Hangul blocks. Linear Hangul There was a minor movement in the twentieth century to abolish syllabic blocks and write the jamo individually and in a row, in the fashion of the Western alphabets: e.g. ㅎㅏㄴㄱㅡㄹ for 한글 hangul. However, it was unsuccessful, partly due to its low legibility. Orthography Until the 20th century, no official orthography of Hangul had been established. Due to liaison, heavy consonant assimilation, dialectical variants and other reasons, a Korean word can potentially be spelled in various ways. King Sejong seemed to prefer morphophonemic spelling (representing the underlying morphology) rather than a phonemic one (representing the actual sounds). However, early in its history, Hangul was dominated by phonemic spelling. Over the centuries the orthography became partially morphophonemic, first in nouns, and later in verbs. Today it is as morphophonemic as is practical. a person who cannot do it 모타는사라미 못하는사람이 Morpheme-by-morpheme gloss: After the Gabo Reform in 1894, the Joseon Dynasty and later the Korean Empire started to write all official documents in Hangul. Under the government's management, proper usage of Hangul, including orthography, was discussed, until Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910. The Japanese Government-General of Chosen established the writing style of a mixture of Hanja and Hangul, as in the Japanese writing system. The government revised the spelling rules in 1912, 1921 and 1930, which were relatively phonemic. The Hangul Society, originally founded by Ju Si-gyeong, announced a proposal for a new, strongly morphophonemic orthography in 1933, which became the prototype of the contemporary orthographies in both North and South Korea. After Korea was divided, the North and South revised orthographies separately. The guiding text for Hangul orthography is the called the Hangeul machumbeop, whose last South Korean revision was published in 1988 by the Ministry of Education. Mixed scripts During the Japanese colonial era, hanja were used for lexical (noun and verb) roots, and Hangul for grammatical words and inflections, much as kanji and kana are used in Japanese. However, hanja have been almost entirely phased out of daily use in North Korea, and in South Korea they are now mostly restricted to parenthetical glosses for proper names and for disambiguating homonyms. Arabic numerals can also be mixed in with hangul, as in 2005년 7월 5일 (5 July, 2005). The Roman alphabet, and occasionally other alphabets, may be sprinkled within Korean texts for illustrative purposes, or for unassimilated loanwords. Style Hangul may be written either vertically or horizontally. The traditional direction is the Chinese style of writing top to bottom, right to left. Horizontal writing in the style of the Roman alphabet was promoted by Ju Sigyeong, and has become overwhelmingly preferred. In Hunmin Jeongeum, Hangul was printed in sans-serif angular lines of even thickness. This style is found in books published before about 1900, and can be found today in stone carvings (on statues, for example). Over the centuries, an ink-brush style of calligraphy developed, employing the same style of lines and angles as Chinese calligraphy. This brush style is called gungche (궁체), which means "Palace Style" because the style was mostly developed and used by the maidservants (gungnyeo, 궁녀) of the court in Joseon dynasty. Modern styles that are more suited for printed media were developed in the 20th century, which were more or less influenced by Japanese typefaces, the serifed Myeongjo (derived from Japanese minchō) and sans-serif Gothic (from Japanese Gothic) being the foremost examples. Variations of these styles are widely used today in books, newspapers, and magazines, and several computer fonts. In 1993, new names for both Myeongjo and Gothic styles were introduced when Ministry of Culture initiated an effort to standardize typographic terms, and the names Batang (바탕, meaning "background") and Dotum (돋움, meaning "stand out") replaced Myeongjo and Gothic respectively. These names are also used in Microsoft Windows. A sans-serif style with lines of equal width is popular with pencil and pen writing, and is often the default typeface of Web browsers. A minor advantage of this style is that it makes it easier to distinguish -eung from -ung even in small or untidy print, as the jongseong ieung (ᆼ) of such fonts usually lacks a serif that could be mistaken for the ㅜ (u) jamo See also Bibliography Notes | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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