Hangul

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The Korean alphabet or hangul (revised romanization of Korean, hangul; McCune-Reischauer, han'gŭl; Yale, han-kul) is the native Korean alphabet (in contrast to hanja, or Chinese characters). Each hangul syllabic block consists of one of 24 phonemes ( jamo): 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Historically, it had 3 consonants and one more vowel.

These syllabic blocks can be written both horizontally, from left to right, and vertically, from top to bottom, with the columns arranged from right to left.

Before partitioning

The modern name hangul is a term coined by Ju Si-gyeong in 1912, meaning "great script" in archaic Korean and "Korean script" in modern. It cannot be written in hanja, although the syllable Han can be written 韓 meaning "Korean". It is pronounced /hanɡɯl/ (IPA) and can be romanized in the following ways:

• Hangul in the revised Romanization of the Korean language. The South Korean government uses this system in all its official publications in English, as well as promoting its use. Many recent publications have adopted this system.
• Han’gŭl at McCune-Reischauer.
• Hankul in the Yale Romanization.

His original name was Hunmin Jeong-um (in Hangul, 훈민정음).

Words from other languages are accepted in South Korea, just that they are adapted to the Hangul alphabet.

South Korea

South Korea continues to call the Korean alphabet as hangul (한글), as it was named by Ju Si-gyeong.

North Korea

North Koreans prefer to call it joseon'gul or chosŏn'gŭl (조선글, /tɕosʌnɡɯl/) due to the name given to the Korean peninsula, being Joseon or Chosŏn by the North Koreans and Namhan by the South Koreans.

Other names

• Jeongeumabbreviation of Officer Hunmin Jeongeum
• Urigeul (Exhibition Organizingnu “our writing”) is used in North Korea and South Korea, but not by non-Koreans.

Han-geul was occasionally denigrated by those who preferred traditional Hanja (漢字) until the early XX century d. c.:

• Eonmun (“Vernacular Writing”)
• Amgeul (femenina “female writing”):. is a prefix that indicates femininity. Women were considered inferior to men in traditional Korea.
• Ahaegeul (urgees “child’s writing”).

History

Hangul was created in 1443 and promulgated in 1446 by King Sejong the Great, the fourth king of the Joseon dynasty, noting the frustration felt by his servants at not being able to express their feelings through the Chinese ideograms used until then.

Therefore, Sejong communicated to his servants the pronouncement on the destination chosen unanimously, that of writing Korean in an alphabet independent of hiragana and katakana and the Brahmanic scripts of Southeast Asia. It should be noted that there were three options: written with the Brahmanic alphabets of Southeast Asia, written with hiragana or katakana, or set up as a sovereign alphabet independent of another script. This new script would be called "goryeogeul" or "koryokul" (고려글; hanja: 高麗글; Revised Korean romanization: "goryeogeul") or "goryeomun or "koryomun" (고려문; hanja: 高麗文; Revised Korean romanization: "goryeomun")

Because of its ease of learning, some contemporary scholars of Sejong dubbed it "amkul" ("letra de mujeres"). Precisely thanks to this ease, illiteracy has virtually disappeared from Korea^{[citation needed]}.

In 1912 it was named "hangul", from big (한^?, han^RR) and writing (글 ^?, geul^RR): "great writing".

UNESCO included the deed in its "Memory of the World" in 1977.

Creation

Koreans wrote primarily using Classical Chinese along with native phonetic writing systems that predate "Hangul" over hundreds of years, including the Idu, Hyangchal, Gugyeol, and Gakpil scripts. However, many lower-class Koreans were illiterate due to fundamental differences between the two languages, as well as the large number of Chinese characters. literacy among the common people, the fourth king of the Joseon dynasty, Sejong the Great, personally created and promulgated a new alphabet. Although it is widely assumed that King Sejong ordered the Hall of Notables to invent "hangul& #34;, contemporary records such as the Joseon Annals and Jeong Inji's preface to the Hunminjeongeum Haerye emphasize that he invented it himself.

The Korean alphabet was designed so that people with little education could learn to read and write. A popular saying about the alphabet explains: 'A wise man can become familiar with them before the morning is out; even a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days".

A page of the Hunminjeong'eum Eonhae. The Hangul-only column, the third from the left (endorsement) has diacritic signs with tone accent to the left of the syllables blocks.

The project was completed by the end of December 1443 or January 1444, and was described in 1446 in a document titled Hunminjeong'eum (Sounds Suitable for People's Education), so originally the alphabet itself was named this way.

There are several theories explaining the origin of Korean characters. However, the most credible is the one that explains that the vowel letters are based on the elements that represent the sun (ㆍ), the earth (ㅡ) and man (ㅣ); and that the consonants have their origin in the graphic representation of the phonation organs used to emit the sounds.

Opposition

The Korean alphabet faced opposition in the 1440s from the literary elite, including Choe Manri and other Korean Confucianism scholars. They believed that hanja was the only legitimate writing system. They also viewed the circulation of the Korean alphabet as a threat to their status. However, the Korean alphabet entered popular culture as King Sejong intended, used especially by women and writers of popular fiction.

King Yeonsangun banned the study and publication of the Korean alphabet in 1504, after a document critical of the monarch was published. King Jungjong similarly abolished in 1506 the Ministry of Eonmun, a related government institution. with hangul research.

Resurgence

Songangasaa collection of poems by Jeong Cheol, printed in 1768.

At the end of the 16th century, however, there was a revival of the Korean alphabet as Chiffon poetry and sijo. In the 17th century, Korean alphabet novels became an important genre. However, the use of this alphabet it went without spelling standardization for so long that the spelling became quite irregular.

In 1796, Dutch scholar Isaac Titsingh became the first person to bring a book written in Korean to the Western world. His collection included the Japanese book Sangoku Tsūran Zusetsu (An Illustrated Description of Three Countries) by Hayashi Shihei. This writing, which was published in 1785, describes the Kingdom of Joseon and the Korean alphabet. In 1832, the Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland supported the posthumous abridged publication of Titsingh's French translation.

Thanks to growing Korean nationalism, the impetus of the Gabo reformers, and the promotion of the Korean alphabet by Western missionaries in schools and literature, Hangul was first adopted in official documents in 1894. Elementary school textbooks began using the Korean alphabet in 1895, and Tongnip Sinmun, established in 1896, was the first newspaper printed in both Korean and English.

Reforms and prohibition under Japanese rule

After the Japanese annexation, which occurred in 1910, Japanese became the official language of Korea. However, the Korean alphabet was still taught in established schools in Korea built after annexation and Korean was written in a mixed Hanja-Hangul script, where most lexical roots were written in Hanja and grammatical forms in the alphabet. Korean, similar to and apparently in imitation of the Japanese script. Japan banned earlier Korean literature from public schools, making it compulsory for children.

The spelling of the Korean alphabet was partially standardized in 1912, when the vowel arae'a (ㆍ), which has now disappeared from Korean, was restricted to Sino-Korean roots: the emphatic consonants were standardized to ㅺ, ㅼ, ㅽ, ㅆ ㅾ and final consonants were restricted to ㄱ, ㄴ, ㄹ, ㅁ, ㅂ, ㅅ, ㅇ, ㄺ, ㄻ, ㄼ. Long vowels were marked with a diacritic point to the left of the syllable, but this was dropped in 1921.

A second colonial reform occurred in 1930. The arae-a was abolished: the emphatic consonants were changed to ㄲ, ㄸ, ㅃ, ㅆ, ㅉ and the more final consonants ㄷ, ㅈ, ㅌ, ㅊ, ㅍ, ㄲ, ㄳ, ㄵ, ㄾ, ㄿ, ㅄ were allowed, making the spelling more morphophonemic. The double consonant ㅆ was written alone (without a vowel) when it appeared between nouns, and the nominative particle -가 was introduced after the vowels, replacing -이.

Ju Si-gyeong, the linguist who had coined the term Hangul to replace Eonmun or "Vulgar Script" in 1912, he established the Korean Language Research Society (later renamed the Hangul Society), which further reformed the orthography with the Hangul Standardized System in 1933. The main change was to make the Korean alphabet as practical as possible since the morphophonemic point of view, given the existing letters. In 1940 a system for transliterating foreign words was published.

Japan banned the Korean language in schools in 1938 as part of a cultural assimilation policy, and all Korean-language publications were banned in 1941.

Later reforms

The definitive spelling of the modern Korean alphabet was published in 1946, just after Korea's independence from Japanese rule. In 1948, North Korea attempted to make the alphabet perfectly morphophonemic by adding new letters, and in 1953, Syngman Rhee in South Korea attempted to simplify the script by reverting to the 1921 colonial spelling, but both reforms were abandoned after a few years.

Contemporary use

Poster of a primary school in Baubau written in Latin alphabet and hangul.

The Hunminjeong'eum Society of Seoul tries to spread the use of the Korean alphabet in the unwritten languages of Asia. In 2009, the Korean alphabet was unofficially adopted by the city of Baubau in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia, to write the cia-cia language. Several Indonesian cia-cia speakers who visited Seoul generated great media attention in South Korea, and were greeted upon arrival by Oh Se-hoon, the mayor of Seoul. In October 2012 it was confirmed that attempts to spread the use of the Korean alphabet in Indonesia failed. Some people continue to use the Korean alphabet at home or as a co-official.

Structure of writing in Hangul

Order of the word have-geul.

This table shows 2 of the 9 stacking patterns, the connection of a consonant and a vowel.

The stacking pattern is determined by whether the vowel is "horizontal" or "vertical".

Written words in Hangul are made up of syllables, and syllables are made up of three parts: an initial sound, a middle sound, and usually a final sound.

We must draw an imaginary box where we are going to form the syllable and place the first vowel or consonant in the upper left part of it. If the vowel that follows the first letter is horizontal, it is placed below it; if it is vertical, to the right. The final sound (or last letter of the syllable) must go below, as long as it is consonant.

For example: love in Korean we say: Sa-rang = 사랑

The first thing we need to do is identify the syllables. Next, we place the first letter of the first syllable (ㅅ) at the top left. Then we put the vowel (ㅏ). Since this is vertical, we put it to the right of the first consonant; our syllable would look like this: 사(sa).

The next step is to build the second syllable. We place the first letter (ㄹ) at the top left of the imaginary box. We then proceed to place the vowel (ㅏ) to the right of the first letter. And we put the last consonant (ㅇ) below (remember that in a syllable the last letter, if it is a consonant, is located below). Our syllable would look like this: 랑.

We put the syllables together, and our word is ready: 사(sa)+랑(rang) = 사랑(sa-rang).

Another example:

In Korea, the bear was assigned the following character: 곰 (Gom)

To form this syllable, place the consonant ㄱ (G) at the top left, then place the vowel ㅗ (o) below the consonant, since the latter is a horizontal vowel. And finally, the consonant ㅁ (m) is placed at the bottom.

r(G)+h(i)+am)= 곰(go).

This way you can write all Korean and non-Korean words.

Jamo

Jamo (자모; 字母) are the letters that make up the Hangeul alphabet. The name jamo comes from mo-eum (“vowel”; 모음; 母音; literally, mother sound) and ja-eum (“consonant”; 자음; 子音 or child sound, literally). There are 51 divided into:

• 21 vowels:
  • 11 simple vowels (om)
  • 10 diptongos

• 30 consonants:
  • 14 simple consonants
  • 5 double consonants
  • 11 complex consonants

Hangul Jamo

Each consonant in Hangeul corresponds to a single phoneme in the Korean language. However, these may vary in pronunciation for foreign ears. The first consonant indicates the pronunciation that is heard at the beginning of the word, and the second when it is not.

For example, in the case of the word 비비다, which means "to rub,", it is heard as pibida. Remember that Koreans recognize a single phoneme ㅂ(bieup) in the two syllables, and they are not different, as we often think. Similarly, in Spanish an example can be given with words like "dedo". The first "d" corresponds to a voiced plosive dental consonant, and the second "d" to a voiced fricative dental. For a Spanish speaker, the letter "d" It always has the same pronunciation, even if we do it differently without realizing it.

• There are three basic rules to form Korean words:
  • You have to start with a consonant.
  • It contains at least one vocal and one consonant.
  • Each syllable must be written in a square.

The letter ㅇ (ieung) is a special case. It is used as a silent consonant at the beginning of the syllable in order to comply with the first rule. Instead, at the end of the syllable, it is pronounced as ng, called yet-ieung, which became one with the ieung with Over time.

• The character pronounced k or also g if it's between vowels.

• The consonant It always sounds b except at the end of syllable, where it is said p.

• pronounced as s before vowels that do not contain i ᅲ Yeah, and, uh, yeah. In such cases it is palatalized as sh. However, at the end of syllable it sounds like t.

• Some consonants are aspiratedI mean, they're followed by a breath of air. This happens with , ▪, and (ch', k', t' and p'respectively)

• The vowel it romanizes as or and pronounced as one or Long.

• This vowel is romanized as u but pronounced as a long.

• It romanizes like eu although pronounced as or closed (without separating the teeth and without rounding the lips), like the Japanese.