Origin of Hangul

The inscription on a statue of King Sejong, illustrating the original forms of the letters. It reads 세종대왕, Sejong Daewang. Note the dots on the vowels, the geometric symmetry of s and j in the first two syllables, the asymmetrical lip at the top-left of the d in the third, and the distinction between initial and final ieung in the last.

Hangul (Korean: 한글) is the native script of Korea. It was created in the mid fifteenth century by King Sejong,[1][2] as both a complement and an alternative to the logographic Sino-Korean Hanja. Initially denounced by the educated class as eonmun (vernacular writing; 언문, 諺文), it only became the primary Korean script following independence from Japan in the mid-20th century.[3]

The Korean alphabet is a featural alphabet written in morpho-syllabic blocks, and was designed for both the Korean and Chinese languages, though the letters specific to Chinese are now obsolete.[4] Each block consists of at least one consonant letter and one vowel letter. When promulgated, the blocks reflected the morphology of Korean, but for most of the fifteenth century they were organized into syllables. In the twentieth century the morpho-syllabic tradition was revived. The blocks were traditionally written in vertical columns from top to bottom, although they are now commonly written in horizontal rows from left to right as well.

Spacing has been introduced, to separate words, with punctuation to indicate clauses and sentences, so that the Korean alphabet now transcribes Korean at the levels of feature, segment, syllable, morpheme, word, clause and sentence. However, the suprasegmental features of tone and vowel length, seen as single and double tick marks to the left of the syllabic blocks in the image in the next section, have been dropped.

  1. ^ Kim-Renaud, Young-Key (1997). The Korean Alphabet: Its History and Structure. University of Hawaii Press. p. 15. ISBN 9780824817237. Retrieved 16 May 2018.
  2. ^ 알고 싶은 한글. 국립국어원. National Institute of Korean Language. Retrieved 4 December 2017.
  3. ^ Fischer, pp. 190, 193.
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference CHA was invoked but never defined (see the help page).