🤔 I Bet You Didn’t Know This About Korean Alphabet

Things that make Korean alphabet so unique!

Hi there! I hope you are having a good week! I have been busy with my new Korean 101 classes, but I always feel so grateful to have the opportunity to meet people from all over the world, be friends with them and teach them my native language, Korean. Last Tuesday, which happened to be Valentine’s day, I had my Korean 102 class and everyone showed up looking gorgeous and we had so much fun as you can see from our laughs! (I didn’t have anything red to wear though…😭)

As you can see from our expressions, we have such a great time together in class!

In the last email, I said that I’m not going to go over Hangul, Korean alphabet, because you are going to have to memorize the letters on your own and if you haven’t learned it yet, you can purchase my e-book here and learn! If you are struggling with your pronunciation, I suggest you consider signing up for Korean 101 in the near future.😊

If you haven’t learned the letters yet, don’t worry you still have time because we are not getting into any grammar aspect of the language today. In fact, I’m going to talk about something very interesting about Korean alphabet that you probably haven’t heard before. (Maybe? Maybe not?🤷🏻‍♂️)

History behind Hangul

The Korean writing system aka Hangul was developed in 1443 by King Sejong the Great, the fourth king of Joseon dynasty. Before the creation of Hangul, the people living on the Korean peninsula had adopted Chinese characters to write down the Korean language of that time. As you might already know, Chinese characters are an ideogram meaning that it symbolizes the idea of a thing without indicating the sounds used to say it. And at the time, roughly one thousand characters were required in order to read and understand different writings to a certain extent. For a better context, you can watch this two minute video clip from a K-drama called “뿌리 깊은 나무”, or “Deep Rooted Tree” in translation, which was aired in Korea in 2011. Click here to watch.

K-drama “Deep Rooted Tree” tells the story of a royal guard investigating a case involving the serial murders of Jiphyeonjeon scholars in Gyeongbok Palace while King Sejong comes to create the Korean alphabet.

Back in the day, education was not widely available for everyone like how it is in modern world. It was only the people from upper class who had the privilege to learn. And the common people not only didn’t have the opportunity but also were tied up with deadly schedule doing labor work day and night as you can see from the video.

In brevity, King Sejong thought it was very unfortunate that people couldn’t express their thoughts in writing, so he spent more than 10 years with his scholars to develop Korea’s own writing system called Hangul that consisted of 17 consonants and 11 vowels and made it publicly available to everyone in 1446. (Today, a few letters have gone away over time and Hangul consists of 14 consonants and 10 vowels.) To this day, Hangul is known to be the only writing system in the world that you can trace back:

1. Who created it,

2. When it was developed, and

3. How it was developed

And what makes Hangul significantly unique apart from other writing systems from different parts of the world is worth noting, because it was developed systematically with many scientific principles applied to it.

You can find the statue of King Sejong at Gwanghwamun square in the center of Seoul. There is a little museum under the statue, so make sure you visit next time you go to Korea!

Science behind Hangul

Korean Consonants

The most widely used alphabet in the world today is the Latin alphabet and nearly 70% of the world’s population employs it.

Let’s take a look at the letter A. It was derived from an Egyptian drawing of a bull and went through many changes over a long period of time as shown in the picture below.

The evolution of the letter ‘A’

The creation of the Latin alphabet may actually look quite similar to how Chinese characters were developed as they were also derived from drawings of things. Well, what I’m trying to tell you here is that there is only a mere agreement between the letter A and its sound. In other words, we have agreed to make an “Ah” sound when we see the letter A, but there isn’t really any scientific correlation between them. However, it’s a different story when it comes to Korean letters. King Sejong studied how vocal organs, such as lips, teeth, palate, vocal tract and etc., move when certain sounds are being produced. As a result, he divided Korean consonants in 5 different groups:

1. Velars: sounds made around uvula

   • ㄱ, ㅋ, ㄲ

2. Alveolars: sounds made from just behind front teeth where there is a ‘bump’

   • ㄴ, ㄷ, ㅌ, ㄹ, ㄸ

3. Bilabials: sounds made around lips

   • ㅁ, ㅂ, ㅍ, ㅃ

4. Dentals: sounds made around teeth

   • ㅅ, ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅆ, ㅉ

5. Glottals: sound made around vocal cords

   • ㅇ, ㅎ

The bold letter in each group represents the basic letter of the group and the diagram below should give you a better idea how these consonants were developed. King Sejong made these 5 basic letters and added more strokes to them to create other letters in the same group depending on the intensity of the sounds. For example, the consonant ㅋ has an extra stroke added on the consonant ㄱ, because its sound is a little stronger than its counterpart. So, this is why similar sounding consonants also look very similar in Hangul!

King Sejong turned the shapes of the tongue and other vocal organs into Korean alphabet, Hangul

Isn’t this interesting? (I personally think it’s so cool🤓)

Well, this email is getting a little too long so I’ll continue in the next one! But please leave a comment what you think of these stories behind Hangul. I would also love to look at this from your perspective as a foreigner!

I’ll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of the week!

다음에 또 봐!💙