Hangeul

When you hear hangeul (한글), what do you think? The characters, the letters? Perhaps an odd mix of strokes and circles? Even if your answers are varied, you’ll notice that Korean writing is a system of graphic signs quite different from ours (the Latin alphabet) or the Chinese system (logographic writing). Before presenting the history of hangeul and the rules of its logic, we need to explain a few linguistic terms.

A difficult language?

People often say: “Chinese is very difficult”. Foreigners say: “French is so difficult”. Although both phrases refer to the difficulties involved in learning foreign languages, they refer to different aspects. Usually, when we say that “Chinese is difficult”, we mean that “Chinese writing is difficult to learn”. When we say that “French is difficult”, we think that “French pronunciation is difficult to learn”. When it comes to linguistic thinking, it’s important to differentiate between language and writing. Language is “a system of expression and communication, common to a social group (linguistic community)”. (Morvan, 2011, p. 410)

However, writing is “a system of visible, traced signs representing language”, like ideographic or alphabetic writing. More precisely, they are “characters adopted in such a system”, such as, for example, Roman, Arabic, Cyrillic, etc. (Morvan, 2011, p. 230).

After the introduction, we can move on to hangeul, with its interesting history and logic. It’s a Korean alphabet, created in the ^15th century by intellectuals under the direction of King Sejong the Great (세종대왕 Sejong Daewang, 1397-1450).

Until then, Koreans only used Chinese characters, i.e. hanja (한자 ; 漢字), adapted to their mother tongue. Because logographic writing works like a mathematical unknown, i.e. the characters can cover a variety of pronunciations, it’s really easy to adapt it to different languages. However, learning this writing system takes a lot of time. Some characters are very complicated because they have been constructed from several strokes. Consequently, it takes at least a few months to memorize them…

King Sejong

In King Sejong’s time, only members of the yangban (양반; 兩班), i.e. the Korean aristocracy, could read and write. It was very rare for a person from the common people to acquire this ability. Schooling functioned as a privilege of the nobility, not as a citizen’s right. In this context, the creation of hangeul was intended to reduce illiteracy. The first table of new letters and syllables appeared in 1446. Initially, the alphabet consisted of 28 letters, separated into consonants and vowels. It was called hunmin jeongeum (훈민정음), meaning “the teaching of correct language to the people”. A novel by Kim Da-eun (김다은) under the title The Secret of Hunminjeongeum (“훈민정음의 비밀” Hunminjeongeumui bimil, 2008) should be recalled here.

Over time, other names appeared, but it was the term hangeul that remained and is still valid. It was Ju Sigyeong (주시경; 周時經, 1876-1914), one of the intellectuals responsible for standardizing the Korean language, who introduced it only at the beginning of the ^20th century. The word hangeul can be translated as either “the great script” or “Korean script”. This depends on whether you interpret the syllable han (한) as the adjective “great” or as the adjective “Korean”.

Today, the alphabet is made up of nineteen consonants and twenty-one vowels. Each syllable has a vowel.

The structure of Korean syllabograms

There are syllabograms containing two, three or four letters. There is no such thing as a syllabogram consisting of a single vowel or consonant. The method of linking letters to create a syllable is clearly specified.

As for spelling rules, no distinction is made between upper and lower case, but punctuation marks such as commas and periods are used. In the case of languages that use a writing system other than the Latin alphabet, there is always the method of romanization. For Hangeul, there are several types of phonetic transcriptions. The two best known are the McCune-Reischauer romanization and the revised romanization. The former was created in 1937 and bears the names of its creators. The second was invented by the authorities of the Republic of Korea and put into use in 2000.

Bibliography

• Morvan Danièle (ed. 2011). Le Robert de poche 2012. Paris: Le Robert – Sejer.

Read more

• Bae Kichan, Jeon Sang-woon, Kim Ho, Pak Song-rae (2007). King Sejong the Great. Eternal light of Korea. The Diamond Sutra Office recitation group.

Illustrations

• ill. 1. The Jikji (직지), an anthology of Buddhist teachings, published in 1377. An example of the use of Chinese characters for the Korean language.

• ill. 2. Official portrait of King Sejong

• ill. 3. A page from the Hunmin jeongeum (훈민정음), a document published in 1446, introducing the new writing system.

• ill. 4. The structure of Korean syllabograms