By Strang Burton and Stanley Nam
Introduction
In the 15th century, King Sejong the Great of Korea decided to reform Korean writing.
Up until that time, Koreans had used Chinese characters—sometimes writing in Chinese, other times re-purposing the Chinese characters to represent Korean words and sounds. Either way, learning to read and write in Korea before Sejong meant years of work mastering thousands of characters.
But Sejong wanted something better. Specifically, he wanted a system of symbols so simple that “a wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over, and a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days.” And he got it!
The resulting alphabet, which Sejong and a royal think-tank put together from scratch, is called hangul—and it is one of the simplest and most elegantly designed writing systems ever created.
The rest of this post is a short introduction to the hangul system. It won’t teach you the full system, but it will lead you through some examples that illustrate how hangul works, followed by some discussion of the underlying design features that make it such a uniquely effective writing system.
PART 1 – EXAMPLES
1.1 Pre-learning
We will be building six hangul characters as examples. Before we start the hangul, please familiarize yourself with these phonetically by scanning the slideshow below.
1.2 Building hangul for dog
In Hangul the symbol for each sound is called a jamo (pronounced / tˢɑmo /, like ‘tsa-mo’). The jamos for dog are pretty straightforward: ㄱ for / k /, followed by ㅐ for the vowel, combined left to right. The slideshow below summarizes this.
1.3 Building hangul for gap
You already know that / kɛ / is 개. To turn that into the hangul for / kɛp / (‘gap’) we just need to add the jamo for / p /, and here it is: / p / = ㅂ.
One thing is a bit tricky here, though: instead of following them linearly, ㅂ will go underneath the other symbols in this word. This is because, in this particular word, ㅂ is at the end of the syllable; when a consonant comes at the end of a syllable, its jamo always goes at the bottom of the character, underneath the other stuff.
The slideshow below shows this step by step:
1.4 Building hangul for South Korea
To build the hangul for / hɑn / (Korea) you’ll need three more jamos:
- ㅎ = / h /
- ㅏ = / ɑ /, and
- ㄴ = / n /.
Note that in this word the ㄴ will go underneath the other jamos, because the / n / is at the end of the syllable.
To expand this to / nɑm.hɑn / (South Korea) you’ll need to add the / nɑm / part, which is represented in hangul as a combination of:
- ㄴ = / n /
- ㅏ = / ɑ /
- ㅁ = / m /
Note that in this word the ㄴ will go on the top row, beside the vowel jamo, because here the / n / is at the start of the syllable.
The assembly for both characters, culminating in the full hangul for / nɑm.hɑn / (South Korea), is summarized in the slideshow below.
1.5 Building hangul for hangul
Now we’ll build the hangul for the word hangul (/ hɑn.kɯl /) itself. How meta!
The / hɑn / part you already know, from the previous example: 한. But the / kɯl / part is challenging, from an English perspective, because of the vowel, which as you can see linguists represent phonetically as / ɯ /. This vowel does not occur in English, so here is a quick primer on how one makes it:
- Start by making the vowel sound / u / as in English flute or Sue.
- As you say the / u /, you will notice that your lips are slightly rounded and protruding. While carefully keeping your tongue and jaw in the exact same position (don’t let your tongue or jaw move!), widen the corners of your mouth, so that your lips are pulled back and spread. In other words, make an / u / but without the lip rounding. Congratulations, you are making / ɯ /!
- If you’d like to see more discussion and examples of this vowel, check out this fun video here.
In hangul, this vowel (phonetically / ɯ /) is represented by a straight line, ㅡ. Unlike the vowel jamos in the previous examples, the ㅡ jamo goes underneath any onset (starting) consonant in the syllable. Other than that, the / hɑn-kɯl / for hangul is pretty straightforward, and the steps are broken down in the slidehow below.
1.6 Building hangul for awesome
Our last example will be to build the hangul for awesome (literally ‘honey-jam‘), represented phonetically as / k͈ul.d͡zɛm /).
Before we start the hangul, a bit of background on the first sound in this word. Phonetically represented as / k͈ / (with two little marks under the / k /) this is another sound that doesn’t occur in English; it is what linguists call the ‘tense’ version of / k /. Compared to a regular/ k /, the tense / k͈ /:
- Has more tension in the muscles in the mouth;
- Has higher air pressure in the mouth during the closure;
- Lasts for a significantly longer closure time; and
- Triggers a noticeably higher pitch on the following vowel.
For more discussion and examples, you can check out a video here that compares plain vs. tense consonants in Korean.
Now we’re ready to build the hangul character for awesome! You already know several of the jamos for this example; the slideshow below shows you the additional ones you’ll need, and summarizes how they combine.
PART 2 – DESIGN REFLECTIONS
2.1 The alphabetic leap
From a design perspective, hangul fundamentally changed how Korean writing was done. It was a paradigm shift, from what linguists call ‘logographic’ writing to a fully alphabetic system:
- Logographic writing consists of meaning-based symbols (a.k.a. ‘logograms’) where one whole character represents one whole word, with no reference to sounds. Chinese writing, the basis of Korean writing before Sejong, does include some sound symbols, but it also makes very heavy use of logograms; in fact, traditional Chinese is so heavily logographic that to learn it you have to master nearly as many symbols as there are words in a speaker’s vocabulary—which is to say, thousands.
- Alphabetic systems, on the other hand, are purely sound based: they consist of one symbol for each contrasting consonant and vowel in the language…and that’s it. With an alphabetic system, you therefore only need to learn as many symbols as there are distinctive speech sounds in the language—in the case of Korean, a mere 24—and you can read and write anything.
The idea of ditching logograms and switching to a fully alphabetic system might seem obvious today, in a world where alphabets are common; but it’s apparently not a very obvious move. Across human history, the alphabetic leap has occurred in only a small number of cultures, starting with the first alphabet in ancient Greece.
Given that that Sejong’s goal was to create an easy-to-learn system, he couldn’t have made a better choice. And though he and his team were not the first people in history to create a fully alphabetic system (that was the ancient Greeks), it is still pretty remarkable that they figured this out, and managed to implement it so quickly in a completely original system: most other alphabets (including the original one in ancient Greece) arose from borrowings and adaptations from existing alphabetic or near-alphabetic systems, and none of these were in use anywhere in the south asian context where Sejong was working.