Quick Facts Type C&V Alphabetic Genealogy Sinitic Location East Asia Time 1st Century CE to Present Direction Top to Bottom

Due to its proximity to China, it is no surprise that writing in the Korean peninsula started with Classical Chinese. Like Latin in Medieval Europe, Classical Chinese had tremendous prestige and was employed in official and literary context.

The earliest writing in Korean was an adaption of Chinese characters (called hanja) to write Korean in a system called Ido. Certain Chinese characters were adapted for their sound values, whereas others for their meanings. However, often times the same character is used both for sound as well as meaning, which leads to an ambiguous system.

This ambiguity was slightly alleviated in the 13th century CE with the simplification of some characters used to represent morphemes to glyphically distinguish them from those representing phonetic values. This system is called kugyol, but is too little and too late. Classical Chinese by this time is deeply rooted in Korean literary culture and it would take a lot more to remove it.

Hangul

In the middle of the 15th century CE (approx. 1440), King Sejong employed a group of scholars to create a writing system that is simpler and more suited to Korean than Ido. The result was Hangul ("Korean letters"). However, tradition prevailed, and scholars continued to use Classical Chinese as the literary language and it was not until 1945 that Hangul became popular in Korea.

However, Chinese is still prestigious, and like Japan, Hangul is still used side by side with Chinese characters in South Korea. On the other hand, North Korea has completely abandoned all Chinese characters and use exclusively Hangul.

The consonants in Hangul:

The vowels and dipthongs in Hangul:

The Korean consonants /p/, /t/, /k/, and /ch/ have a three-way phonetic differentiation. (Note /ch/ and /jj/ are in the same series).

Group		Signs					Description
Single consonant		p	t	k	ch		Unaspirated (or only slightly aspirated) and voiceless everywhere except between two vowels where it is voiced.
Consonant followed by an apostrophe		p'	t'	k'	ch'		Aspirated (pronounced with a puff of air)
Double consonant		pp	tt	kk	jj		Glottalized, meaning that you tense up your throat at the same time you're pronouncing the consonant.

The /ng/ sign has two uses. At the end of words it sounds like the ng in English 'sing'. If it appears at the beginning of a word it is actually silent where it is used only as a placeholder. In fact, all vowel-initial words must use the silent /ng/ sign before the vowel.

And here's some notes regarding the vowels:

• The vowel /æ/ nowadays is indistinguishable from /e/.
• The vowel /eo/ is like half way between /o/ and /a/, somewhat like the vowel in "y'all" as pronounced in southern United States.
• The vowel /eu/ is a high central vowel, namely [u].

Drawing a Syllable

While the basic Hangul signs are segmental (consonants and vowels), when writing out words the signs are grouped by syllables into squares. For example, the word for pickled cabbage ('kimchee' or more correctly, /kim ch'i/) looks like this: The first square represents /kim/, while the second is /ch'i/.

The layout of signs inside the square depends greatly on the syllable structure as well as which vowels are involved. The best way to describe the layout strategy is to use an illustration. But before we jump into that, we need to talk about the symbols I use.

C denotes a consonant in general, and the subscripts denote the order in which they appear in a syllable (so C₁ comes before C₂).

Some vowels are "horizontal", such as /o/, /u/, /eu/, meaning that they have a long horizontal line. We'll denote them as V_h. Others are "vertical", with one or more vertical lines, such as /i/, /a/, /e/, etc., and we denote them as V_v.

In general the syllable structure of Korean is pretty simple. The cases we'll consider here are V, CV, VC, and CVC (there are others, but we'll ignore them for now). However, since vowel-initial syllables must have the silent /ng/ sign in front, we can further simply the structure to only two cases, namely CV and CVC.

Each of the two syllabic structures would be drawn differently depending on whether the vowel is horizontal or vertical. Therefore there are a total of four cases below: CV_v, CV_h, C₁V_vC₂, and C₁V_hC₂. Each one of these is laid out below.

Well, this is mostly the basics of Hangul. Since it's a living writing system, you can find a ton of resources about it on the web. Here's a good one that I used myself:

• An Introduction to Korean