The ABC's of Hangul

If you ask a Korean to name something uniquely Korean, they will likely say kimchee, the spicy national dish of fermented cabbage. Or maybe Taekwondo, a branch of martial arts from Korea. Or maybe some sort of technological development, which are all true, but not what this blog is about. Today you will read about the Korean alphabet known as Hangul.

The Korean language is thousands of years old. Linguists say that it belongs to the same language family as Mongolian, Hungarian, Turkish and Finnish. When I read that I was flabbergasted, I mean, what does Korean and Finnish have in common right? None of those languages (besides Mongolian) even come from the same continent!

From the fifth century, Korean was written in Chinese characters. There were a few ways to write it, but they were all quiet complicated, and in order to read and write, you had to learn thousands of intricate characters. This meant on scholars could master it.

King Sejong the Great is the father of the modern alphabet. Sejong became king in 1418, and ruled during a period of great economic, cultural and political development in Korea. The era was known as the Golden Age. The Golden Age? I know, right? My exposure to history is so skewed to Western Civilization, when I first read Golden Age I thought that can’t be possible, first of all, that took place in Italy about 40 years later. But alas, I can freely admit that when it comes to Eastern history (and most parts of Western history too I dare say) I am completely ignorant.

Anyway, this king, King Sejong, was quite the Renaissance man himself. He was a swordsman, an astronomer, a poet, a musician and a scholar. He founded the Chiph-yon-jon, a royal academy of scholars. This institute published books on history, geography, agriculture and medicine.

Clearly he was an enlightened ruler, and part of his vision included a national plan to have all Koreans become literate. He believed using Chinese characters to express Korean ideas was like trying to fit a square tool into a round hole. Along with the academy, he began a ten-year project to design an easily learnable alphabet. When the work was completed, King Sejong published a proclamation called Hun-Min-Jeong-Eum (‘Correct Sounds to Instruct the People’). In this document he wrote:

‘Because Chinese characters are a foreign writing system, they cannot truly capture Korean meaning. Common people have no way to express their thoughts and feelings. Therefore, we have created a set of twenty-eight letters. The letters are easy to learn and it is our hope that they will improve the lives of the people.’

The new alphabet became known as Hangul, meaning great letters.

Unlike Chinese, Hangul is a phonetic language: each sign represents a sound. And unlike English, where each letter may have several sounds, the pronunciation of the Korean letters is constant. Originally Hangul had twenty-eight letters, but only twenty-four are used today. There are three basic vowels, shaped like the three most important elements in Taoist thought: sky, earth and humanity. The symbol for the sky is a dot, the symbol for earth a horizontal line, and the symbol for humanity is a vertical line. The other vowels are created by adding strokes to these basic symbols.

The shape of the five basic consonants is based on the shape of the mouth and tongue when the sound is pronounced. Other consonants are variations of these five consonants. Letters are grouped into ‘syllable blocks.’ Each syllable block has a max of four letters and begins with a consonant. Each consonant is followed by one or two vowels. Hangul can be written in vertical columns from top to bottom and right to left, or in horizontal rows running from left to rignt.

Just because King Sejong create an easily learnable alphabet doesn’t mean it was immediately accepted. Scholars who had spent a lifetime learning Chinese characters opposed the new alphabet most. They referred to Hangul as ‘morning letters’ because the alphabet could be learned in a sing morning. Sometimes they called it ‘women letters’ because, at that time, only men could be scholars. For centuries, Hangul was mainly used by people of lower social status. It wasn’t until after WW II that it was more and more popular in South Korea. And in 1949, North Korea outlawed the use of Chinese letters altogether.

The invention of this language has created some remarkable results. Korean children learn to write at an early age, and illiteracy is almost unknown, though I suspect there’s a high population of Koreans in Andong who can’t read because of such despairing income levels (Andong is primarily farm land remember.)

Because Hangul is a phonetic alphabet, it’s better suited for computer keyboards and programs than a pictograph-based language is, like Chinese. A fifteenth-century alphabet has helped Korea in the modern global market.

Hangul is a source of Korean pride. For many years, October 9^th was a national holiday known as “Hangul Day.’ Many people were disappointed when the government decided it would no longer be celebrated, and I’ve decided to create an organized effort to change the minds of these bureaucratic officials by coordinating a massive student revolt. Really, I don’t need much of a reason to want to encourage revolts, so this seemed as good a cause as any! So if you see a newscast about an American instigator imprisoned for creating a riot in a rural part of Korea, you’ll know where I am.