š¤ I Bet You Didnāt 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 Valentineās 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 didnāt have anything red to wear thoughā¦š)
In the last email, I said that Iām not going to go over Hangul, Korean alphabet, because you are going to have to memorize the letters on your own and if you havenāt 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.š
If you havenāt learned the letters yet, donāt worry you still have time because we are not getting into any grammar aspect of the language today. In fact, Iām going to talk about something very interesting about Korean alphabet that you probably havenāt heard before. (Maybe? Maybe not?š¤·š»āāļø)
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 āėæė¦¬ ź¹ģ ėė¬“ā, or āDeep Rooted Treeā in translation, which was aired in Korea in 2011. Click here to watch.
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 didnāt 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 couldnāt express their thoughts in writing, so he spent more than 10 years with his scholars to develop Koreaās 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:
Who created it,
When it was developed, and
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.
Science behind Hangul
Korean Consonants
The most widely used alphabet in the world today is the Latin alphabet and nearly 70% of the worldās population employs it.
Letās 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 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 Iām 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 āAhā sound when we see the letter A, but there isnāt really any scientific correlation between them. However, itās 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:
Velars: sounds made around uvula
ć±, ć , ć²
Alveolars: sounds made from just behind front teeth where there is a ābumpā
ć“, ć·, ć , ć¹, ćø
Bilabials: sounds made around lips
ć , ć , ć , ć
Dentals: sounds made around teeth
ć , ć , ć , ć , ć
Glottals: sound made around vocal cords
ć , ć
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 ć has an extra stroke added on the consonant ć±, because its sound is a little stronger than its counterpart. So, this is why similar sounding consonants also look very similar in Hangul!
Isnāt this interesting? (I personally think itās so coolš¤)
Well, this email is getting a little too long so Iāll 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!
Iāll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of the week!
ė¤ģģ ė ė“!š
Very interesting. I knew one part of this lesson, but the part about the way different vocal organs are used in the pronunciation of letters help me understand somewhat of my previous try in learning Korean.
I loved this history lesson. It's very fascinating and I can't wait to watch the movie. In America we speak mainly with our tongues. this is fascinating that it involves a lot of the muscles of the mouth and the throat. I have to be very aware of the shape of my mouth when I speak in Korean to make sure I'm getting the correct sound for the word. I'm sure it looks very funny for now till my face gets used to working correctly. Thank you again for the information.