Hangul | Suite101.com

Koreans call the characters of their writing system hangul, just as they call Japanese characters kancha and Chinese characters kanji. The word hangul is purely Korean in that it was not derived from Chinese (although many Korean words are in fact, of Chinese origin). Where, then, did this word hangul come from, and how did the Korean writing system come to be? The invention of the Korean alphabet is attributed to King Sejong and his group of scholars c. 1440. Korea had possessed its own spoken language for thousands of years, but even into the fifteenth century, it's writing system was based on classical Chinese. At the time of King Sejong's reign, Korean literature consisted of Chinese classics and works written by Koreans using a system called idu. Idu (and related forms called kugyeol and hyangch’al) used Chinese characters phonetically, not as ideographs or pictographs, to write Korean sentences. Still, by King Sejong’s reign, most Korean literature was still written in Chinese. King Sejong himself was personally interested in phonetics. The story of Sejong’s studies varies—some accounts have him interested in developing a specifically Korean written language in order to make the classics accessible to the less-educated people of his kingdom (previous to this, only the educated yangban could read); other stories indicate Sejong was more interested in refining the scholarly Chinese and rather coincidentally developed a Korean alphabet. It is accepted that the development of hangul by Sejong’s scholars was done in consultation with Chinese phonologists. In 1446, King Sejong’s group introduced the first Korean alphabet as hunmin jeongum ("Correct Sounds for Instructing the People"). Referred to as jeongnum ("Correct Sounds"), this alphabet was considered a poor substitute for Chinese, and the yangban believed it would alienate the Chinese aristocracy. Although today we look back at it and see it as a strong move toward Korean patriotism, at the time it was denigrated and mocked. It is not surprising, then, to learn that it took centuries for it to be adopted as the primary writing system of the Koreas. In fact, it was until the time of the grammarian Chu Sigyeong (1876-1914) that the word hangul (meaning "script of the Han (Korean) people") came into common parlance. When it was first designed, hangul had twenty-eight letters (17 consonants, eleven vowels). Today, if you include all the dipthongs, hangul can be said to have forty characters. The neatest thing about hangul, and the thing that makes it so easy to learn to write, is that it is so systematic. Unlike kanji, which I find completely confusing, hangul is developed around vertical and horizontal lines. The three major vowels are based on "yin-yang": "." represents heaven, "--" represents earth, and "|" represents humanity. The remaining vowels and dipthongs are all fusions of these three basic symbols. And the major consonants are all meant to represent the shape of the vocal organs when the sound is being uttered. Koreans should be proud of their alphabet. I can see why it could be a rallying point for patriotism—few countries can pinpoint the birth of their system of communication, and even fewer can claim their writing system was developed specifically for their people rather than being adapted from another alphabet.