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The Korean alphabet is the modern writing system for the Korean language. In North Korea, the alphabet is known as ' (), and in South Korea, it is known as ' (). The letters for the five basic reflect the shape of the speech organs used to pronounce them. They are systematically modified to indicate Phonetics features. The vowel letters are systematically modified for related sounds, making Hangul a possible featural writing system. It has been described as a syllabic alphabet or alphabetic syllabary as it combines the features of Alphabet and Syllabary writing systems, though it is not technically an abugida.
Hangul was created in 1443 by Sejong the Great, the fourth king of the Joseon dynasty. The alphabet was made as an attempt to increase literacy by serving as a complement to Hanja, which were Chinese characters used to write Literary Chinese in Korea by the 2nd century BCE, and had been adapted to write Korean by the 6th century CE.
Modern Hangul orthography uses 24 basic letters: 14 consonant letters and 10 vowel letters. There are also 27 complex letters that are formed by combining the basic letters: five tense consonant letters, 11 complex consonant letters, and 11 complex vowel letters. Four basic letters in the original alphabet are no longer used: one vowel letter and three consonant letters. Korean letters are written in syllabic blocks with the alphabetic letters arranged in two dimensions. For example, Seoul is written as 서울, not ㅅㅓㅇㅜㄹ. The syllables begin with a consonant letter, then a vowel letter, and then potentially another consonant letter called a (). If the syllable begins with a vowel sound, the consonant ㅇ () acts as a silent placeholder. However, when ㅇ starts a sentence or is placed after a long pause, it marks a glottal stop. Syllables may begin with basic or tense consonants but not complex ones. The vowel can be basic or complex, and the second consonant can be basic, complex or a limited number of tense consonants. How the syllables are structured depends solely if the baseline of the vowel symbol is horizontal or vertical. If the baseline is vertical, the first consonant and vowel are written above the second consonant (if present), but all components are written individually from top to bottom in the case of a horizontal baseline.
As in traditional Chinese language and Japanese writing, as well as many other texts in East and Southeast Asia, Korean texts were traditionally written top to bottom, right to left, as is occasionally still the way for stylistic purposes. However, Korean is now typically written from left to right with spaces between words serving as word divider, unlike in Japanese and Chinese. Hangul/Chosŏn'gŭl is the official writing system throughout both North and South Korea. It is a co-official writing system in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture and Changbai Korean Autonomous County in Jilin, China. Hangul has also seen limited use by speakers of the Cia-Cia language in Buton, Indonesia.
The name (한글) was coined by Korean linguist Ju Si-gyeong in 1912. The name combines the ancient Korean word (한), meaning great, and (글), meaning script. The word han is used to refer to Korea in general, so the name also means Korean script. It has been romanized in multiple ways:
After the division of Korea, North Koreans call the alphabet (조선글), after Chosŏn, the North Korean name for Korea. A variant of the McCune–Reischauer system is used there for romanization.
Supporters of the Korean alphabet referred to it as () meaning correct pronunciation, meaning national script, and () meaning vernacular script.
The project was completed sometime between December 1443 and January 1444, and described in a 1446 document titled Hunminjeongeum ( The Proper Sounds for the Education of the People), after which the alphabet itself was originally named. The publication date of the Hunminjeongeum, 9 October, became Hangul Day in South Korea. Its North Korean equivalent, Chosŏn'gŭl Day, is on 15 January.
Another document published in 1446 and titled Hunminjeongeum Haerye ( Hunminjeongeum Explanation and Examples) was discovered in 1940. This document explains that the design of the consonant letters is based on articulatory phonetics and the design of the vowel letters is based on the principles of yin and yang and vowel harmony. After the creation of Hangul, people from the lower class or the commoners had a chance to be literate. They learned how to read and write Korean, not just the upper classes and literary elite. They learn Hangul independently without formal schooling or such.
The Korean alphabet was designed so that people with little education could learn to read and write. According to Hunminjeongeum Haerye, King Sejong expressed his intention to understand the language of the people in his country and to express their meanings more conveniently in writing. He noted that the shapes of the traditional Chinese characters, as well as factors such as the thickness, stroke count, and order of strokes in calligraphy, were extremely complex, making it difficult for people to recognize and understand them individually. A popular saying about the alphabet is, "A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; even a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days." Hunminjeongeum Haerye, postface of Chŏng Inji, p. 27a, translation from Gari K. Ledyard, The Korean Language Reform of 1446, p. 258
The opening page of Hunminjeongeum Haerye and its printed form, Hunminjeongeum Haeryebon, contains King Sejong's foreword written in Literary Chinese, which reads:
國之語音。異乎中國。與文字不相流通。故愚民。有所欲言而終不得伸其情者。多矣。予。爲此憫然。新制二十八字。欲使人人易習。便於日用矣。
Because the spoken language of this country is different from that of China, it does not flow well with Chinese characters. Therefore, even if the ignorant want to communicate, many of them in the end cannot state their concerns. Saddened by this, I have had 28 letters newly made. It is my wish that all the people may easily learn these letters and that they be convenient for daily use.
Another document titled Dongguk Jeongun was published on September 1446, which is a rhyme dictionary that sets out standard phonetics for the Sino-Korean pronunciations of Chinese characters.
Prince Yeonsan banned the study and publication of the Korean alphabet in 1504 during his kingship, after a document criticizing him was published. Similarly, King Jungjong abolished the Ministry of Eonmun, a governmental institution related to Hangul research, in 1506.
In 1796, the Dutch people scholar Isaac Titsingh became the first person to bring a book written in Korean to the Western world. His collection of books included the Japanese book Sangoku Tsūran Zusetsu ( An Illustrated Description of Three Countries) by Hayashi Shihei.WorldCat, Sangoku Tsūran Zusetsu ; alternate romaji Sankoku Tsūran Zusetsu This book, which was published in 1785, described the Joseon KingdomCullen, Louis M. (2003). and the Korean alphabet.Vos, Ken. "Accidental acquisitions: The nineteenth-century Korean collections in the National Museum of Ethnology, Part 1", p. 6 (pdf p. 7); Klaproth, Julius. (1832). In 1832, the Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland supported the posthumous abridged publication of Titsingh's French translation.Klaproth,
Thanks to growing Korean nationalism, the ' push, and Western missionaries' promotion of the Korean alphabet in schools and literature, the Hangul Korean alphabet was adopted in official documents for the first time in 1894. Elementary school texts began using the Korean alphabet in 1895, and Tongnip sinmun, established in 1896, was the first newspaper printed in both Korean and English.
The orthography of the Korean alphabet was partially standardized in 1912, when the vowel arae-a (ㆍ) — was restricted to Sino-Korean roots: the emphatic consonants were standardized to ㅺ, ㅼ, ㅽ, ㅆ, ㅾ, and final consonants restricted to ㄱ, ㄴ, ㄹ, ㅁ, ㅂ, ㅅ, ㅇ, ㄺ, ㄻ, and ㄼ. Long vowels were marked by a diacritic dot 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 more final consonants ㄷ, ㅈ, ㅌ, ㅊ, ㅍ, ㄲ, ㄳ, ㄵ, ㄾ, ㄿ, and ㅄ were allowed, making the orthography more morphophonemic. The double consonant ㅆ was written alone (without a vowel) when it occurred between nouns, and the nominative particle 가 was introduced after vowels, replacing 이.
The arae-a, in any case, began to be merged with other vowels starting from the 15th century and the merging process was mostly complete by the 16th century. In the 21st century it only survives in the Jeju language which is mutually unintelligible with mainland South Korean varieties.
Ju Si-gyeong, the linguist who had coined the term Hangul to replace Eonmun or Vulgar Script in 1912, established the Korean Language Research Society (later renamed the Hangul Society), which further reformed orthography with the Standardized System of Hangul in 1933. The principal change was to make the Korean alphabet as morphophonemically practical as possible given the existing letters. A system for transliterating foreign orthographies was published in 1940.
Japan banned the Korean language from schools and public offices in 1938 and excluded Korean courses from elementary education in 1941 as part of a policy of cultural assimilation and genocide.
Both North Korea and South Korea have used the Korean alphabet or mixed script as their official writing system, with ever-decreasing use of Hanja especially in the North.
A high proficiency in Hanja is also useful for understanding the etymology of Sino-Korean words as well as for enlarging one's Korean vocabulary.
The Hunminjeong'eum Society in Seoul attempted to spread the use of Hangul to unwritten languages of Asia. In 2009, it was unofficially adopted by the town of Baubau, in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia, to write the Cia-Cia language. Indonesian tribe to use Korean alphabet
A number of Indonesian Cia-Cia speakers who visited Seoul generated large media attention in South Korea, and they were greeted on their arrival by Oh Se-hoon, the mayor of Seoul.
=== Consonants ===
| g | kk | n | d | l | m | b | s | ss | ng | j | ch | k | t | p | h | |||||
| "—" denotes characters that are never used syllable-finally. | ||||||||||||||||||||
The consonants are broadly categorized into two categories:
The chart below lists the Korean consonants by their respective categories and subcategories.
| +Consonants in Standard Korean (orthography) ! ! ! !Bilabial !Alveolar !Alveolo-palatal !Velar !Glottal |
Korean sonorants are voiced.
Originally, Choe gave ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, and ㅎ the irregular one-syllable names of ji, chi, ḳi, ṭi, p̣i, and hi, because they should not be used as final consonants, as specified in Hunminjeongeum. However, after establishment of the new orthography in 1933, which let all consonants be used as finals, the names changed to the present forms.
As in South Korea, the names of vowels in the Korean alphabet are the same as the sound of each vowel.
The collation order of Korean in Unicode is based on the South Korean order.
This is the basis of the modern alphabetic orders. It was before the development of the Korean tense consonants and the double letters that represent them, and before the conflation of the letters (null) and (ng). Thus, when the North Korean and South Korean governments implemented full use of the Korean alphabet, they ordered these letters differently, with North Korea placing new letters at the end of the alphabet and South Korea grouping similar letters together.
All digraphs and trigraphs, including the old diphthongs and , are placed after the simple vowels, again maintaining Choe's alphabetic order.
The order of the final letters () is:
Unlike when it is initial, this is pronounced, as the nasal which occurs only as a final in the modern language. The double letters are placed to the very end, as in the initial order, but the combined consonants are ordered immediately after their first element.
The modern vowels come first, with the derived forms interspersed according to their form: i is added first, then Iotation, then iotated with added i. beginning with w are ordered according to their spelling, as or plus a second vowel, not as separate digraphs.
The order of the final letters is:
Every syllable begins with a consonant (or the silent ㅇ) that is followed by a vowel (e.g. + = ). Some syllables such as and have a final consonant or final consonant cluster (). Thus, 399 combinations are possible for two-letter syllables and 10,773 possible combinations for syllables with more than two letters (27 possible final endings), for a total of 11,172 possible combinations of Korean alphabet letters to form syllables.
The sort order including obsolete characters defined in the South Korean national standard KS X 1026-1 is:
For the iotated vowels, which are not shown, the short stroke is simply doubled.
For instance, the consonant ㅌ ṭ is composed of three strokes, each one meaningful: the top stroke indicates ㅌ is a plosive, like ㆆ ʔ, ㄱ g, ㄷ d, ㅈ j, which have the same stroke (the last is an affricate, a plosive–fricative sequence); the middle stroke indicates that ㅌ is aspirated, like ㅎ h, ㅋ ḳ, ㅊ ch, which also have this stroke; and the bottom stroke indicates that ㅌ is alveolar, like ㄴ n, ㄷ d, and ㄹ l. (It is said to represent the shape of the tongue when pronouncing coronal consonants, though this is not certain.) Two obsolete consonants, ㆁ and ㅱ, have dual pronunciations, and appear to be composed of two elements corresponding to these two pronunciations: ~silence for ㆁ and ~ for ㅱ.
With vowel letters, a short stroke connected to the main line of the letter indicates that this is one of the vowels that can be iotated; this stroke is then doubled when the vowel is iotated. The position of the stroke indicates which harmonic class the vowel belongs to, light (top or right) or dark (bottom or left). In the modern alphabet, an additional vertical stroke indicates i-mutation, deriving ㅐ , ㅚ , and ㅟ from ㅏ , ㅗ , and ㅜ . However, this is not part of the intentional design of the script, but rather a natural development from what were originally ending in the vowel ㅣ . Indeed, in many Korean dialects, including the standard Seoul Dialect, some of these may still be diphthongs. For example, in the Seoul dialect, ㅚ may alternatively be pronounced , and ㅟ . (ㅔ as a morpheme is ㅓ combined with ㅣ as a vertical stroke. As a phoneme, its sound is not by i mutation of ㅓ .)
Besides the letters, the Korean alphabet originally employed to indicate pitch accent. A syllable with a high pitch (거성) was marked with a dot (〮) to the left of it (when writing vertically); a syllable with a rising pitch (상성) was marked with a double dot, like a colon (〯). These are no longer used, as modern Seoul Korean has lost tonality. Vowel length has also been neutralized in Modern Korean and is no longer written.
Short strokes (dots in the earliest documents) were added to these three basic elements to derive the vowel letter:
The compound vowels ending in ㅣ i were originally . However, several have since evolved into pure vowels:
| ㅏ | ㅑ |
| ㅓ | ㅕ |
| ㅗ | ㅛ |
| ㅜ | ㅠ |
| ㅡ | |
| ㅣ |
The simple iotated vowels are:
There are also two iotated diphthongs:
The Korean language of the 15th century had vowel harmony to a greater extent than it does today. Vowels in grammatical changed according to their environment, falling into groups that "harmonized" with each other. This affected the morphology of the language, and Korean phonology described it in terms of yin and yang: If a root word had yang ('bright') vowels, then most suffixes attached to it also had to have yang vowels; conversely, if the root had yin ('dark') vowels, the suffixes had to be yin as well. There was a third harmonic group called mediating (neutral in Western terminology) that could coexist with either yin or yang vowels.
The Korean neutral vowel was ㅣ i. The yin vowels were ㅡ, ㅜ, ㅓ eu, u, eo; the dots are in the yin directions of down and left. The yang vowels were ㆍㅗㅏ ə, o, a, with the dots in the yang directions of up and right. The Hunmin Jeong-eum Haerye states that the shapes of the non-dotted letters ㅡ, ㆍ, and ㅣ were chosen to represent the concepts of yin, yang, and mediation: Earth, Heaven, and Human. (The letter ㆍ ə is now obsolete except in the Jeju language.)
The third parameter in designing the vowel letters was choosing ㅡ as the graphic base of ㅜ and ㅗ, and ㅣ as the graphic base of ㅓ and ㅏ. A full understanding of what these horizontal and vertical groups had in common would require knowing the exact sound values these vowels had in the 15th century.
The uncertainty is primarily with the three letters ㆍㅓㅏ. Some linguists reconstruct these as , , and , respectively; others as , , and . A third reconstruction is to make them all middle vowels as , , and . The Japanese/Korean Vowel Correspondences by Bjarke Frellesvig and John Whitman. Section 3 deals with Middle Korean vowels. With the third reconstruction, Middle Korean vowels line up in a vowel harmony pattern, but with only one front vowel and four middle vowels:
| ㅣ | ㅡ | ㅜ |
| ㅓ | ||
| ㆍ | ㅗ | |
| ㅏ |
However, the horizontal letters ㅡㅜㅗ eu, u, o do all appear to have been mid to high , , and thus to have formed a coherent group phonetically in every reconstruction.
The same theory provides the most simple explanation of the shapes of the consonants as an approximation of the shapes of the most representative organ needed to form that sound. The original order of the consonants in Hunminjeong'eum was: ㄱ ㅋ ㆁ ㄷ ㅌ ㄴ ㅂ ㅍ ㅁ ㅈ ㅊ ㅅ ㆆ ㅎ ㅇ ㄹ ㅿ.
Although the Hunminjeong'eum Haerye explains the design of the consonantal letters in terms of articulatory phonetics as a purely innovative creation, it also states that King Sejong adapted the 古篆 ( gojeon, Gǔ Seal Script) in creating the Korean alphabet, leading to the development of several theories suggesting which external sources may have inspired or influenced King Sejong's creation. The 古篆 has never been identified; the primary meaning of 古 gǔ is old (Old Seal Script), frustrating philologists because the Korean alphabet bears no functional similarity to Chinese 篆字 zhuànzì . It has been documented that Sejong and his researchers thoroughly researched writing systems in Asia at the time, including Indic scripts such as Tibetan and Phags-pa, and several theories revolve around certain Indic scripts as sources of inspiration in the graphical development of Hangul. Homer Hulbert, for instance, believed that Tibetan was the graphical inspiration for some of Hangul.
Professor Gari Ledyard of Columbia University studied possible connections between Hangul and the Mongol 'Phags-pa script of the Yuan dynasty; he suggested that 古 gǔ may be a pun on 蒙古 Měnggǔ "Mongol", and that 古篆 is an abbreviation of 蒙古篆字 "Mongol Seal Script", that is, the formal variant of the 'Phags-pa alphabet written to look like the Chinese seal script. He, however, also believed that the role of 'Phags-pa script in the creation of the Korean alphabet was quite limited, stating it should not be assumed that Hangul was derived from 'Phags-pa script based on his theory:
Ledyard posits that five of the Korean consonants have shapes inspired by 'Phags-pa; a sixth basic letter, the null initial ㅇ, was invented by Sejong. The rest of the letters were derived internally from these six, essentially as described in the Hunmin Jeong-eum Haerye. However, the five borrowed consonants were not the graphically simplest letters considered basic by the Hunmin Jeong-eum Haerye, but instead the consonants basic to Chinese phonology: ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅂ, ㅈ, and ㄹ.
According to Ledyard, the five borrowed letters were graphically simplified, which allowed for consonant clusters and left room to add a stroke to derive the aspirate plosives, ㅋㅌㅍㅊ. But in contrast to the traditional account, the non-plosives (ㆁ ㄴ ㅁ ㅅ) were derived by removing the top of the basic letters. He points out that while it is easy to derive ㅁ from ㅂ by removing the top, it is not clear how to derive ㅂ from ㅁ in the traditional account, since the shape of ㅂ is not analogous to those of the other plosives.
The explanation of the letter ng also differs from the methodology described in the Hunminjeong'eum Haerye. Many Chinese words began with ng, but by King Sejong's day, initial ng was either silent or pronounced in China, and was silent when these words were borrowed into Korean. Also, the expected shape of ng (the short vertical line left by removing the top stroke of ㄱ) would have looked almost identical to the vowel ㅣ . Sejong's solution solved both problems: The vertical stroke left from ㄱ was added to the null symbol ㅇ to create ㆁ (a circle with a vertical line on top), iconically capturing both the pronunciation in the middle or end of a word, and the usual silence at the beginning. (The graphic distinction between null ㅇ and ng ㆁ was eventually lost.)
Another letter composed of two elements to represent two regional pronunciations was ㅱ, which transcribed the Chinese Syllable onset 微. This represented either m or w in various Chinese dialects, and was composed of ㅁ m plus ㅇ (from 'Phags-pa w). In 'Phags-pa, a loop under a letter represented w after vowels, and Ledyard hypothesized that this became the loop at the bottom of ㅱ. In 'Phags-pa the Chinese initial 微 is also transcribed as a compound with w, but in its case the w is placed under an h. Actually, the Chinese consonant series 微非敷 w, v, f is transcribed in 'Phags-pa by the addition of a w under three graphic variants of the letter for h, and the Korean alphabet parallels this convention by adding the w loop to the labial series ㅁㅂㅍ m, b, p, producing now-obsolete ㅱㅸㆄ w, v, f. (Phonetic values in Korean are uncertain, as these consonants were only used to transcribe Chinese.)
As a final piece of evidence, Ledyard notes that most of the borrowed Korean letters were simple geometric shapes, at least originally, but that ㄷ d t always had a small lip protruding from the upper left corner, just as the 'Phags-pa d t did. This lip can be traced back to the Tibetan letter d.
In the original Korean alphabet system, double letters were used to represent Chinese voiced (濁音) consonants, which survive in the Shanghainese slack voice consonants and were not used for Korean words. It was only later that a similar convention was used to represent the modern tense (Faucalized voice) consonants of Korean.
The sibilant (dental) consonants were modified to represent the two series of Chinese sibilants, alveolar and retroflex, a round vs. sharp distinction (analogous to s vs sh) which was never made in Korean, and was even being lost from southern Chinese. The alveolar letters had longer left stems, while retroflexes had longer right stems:
After the Kabo Reform in 1894, Joseon and later the Korean Empire started to write all official documents in the Korean alphabet. Under the government's management, proper usage of the Korean alphabet and Hanja, including orthography, was discussed, until the Korean Empire was annexed by Japan in 1910.
The Government-General of Korea popularised a writing style that mixed Hanja and the Korean alphabet, and was used in the later Joseon dynasty. The government revised the spelling rules in 1912 with (普通學校用諺文綴字法), 1921 with Summary of Orthographic Rules for Vernacular Writing for Normal Schools (普通學校用諺文綴字法大要), and again in 1930 with Orthographic Rules for Vernacular Writing (諺文綴字法), to be relatively phonemic.
The Hangul Society, founded by Ju Si-gyeong, announced a proposal for a new, strongly morphophonemic orthography in 1933, titled (한글 맞춤법 통일안), which became the prototype of the contemporary orthographies in both North and South Korea. After Korea was divided, the North and South revised orthographies separately. The guiding text for orthography of the Korean alphabet is called Hangeul Matchumbeop (Spelling System of Hangul/The Rules of Korean Spelling), whose last South Korean enactment was published in 1988 by the Ministry of Education and whose last revision was published in 2017 by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism.
Indo-Arabic numerals are mixed in with the Korean alphabet, e.g. .
Two obsolete letters were restored: (리읃), which was used to indicate an alternation in pronunciation between the initial and final ; and (히으), which was only pronounced between vowels.
Two modifications of the letter ㄹ were introduced, one which was silent finally, and one which doubled between vowels. A hybrid ㅂ-ㅜ letter was introduced for words that alternated between those two sounds (that is, a , which became before a vowel).
Finally, a vowel was introduced for variable iotation.
The sets of initial and final consonants are not the same. For instance, ㅇ ng only occurs in final position, while the doubled letters that can occur in final position are limited to ㅆ ss and ㄲ kk.
Not including obsolete letters, 11,172 blocks are possible in the Korean alphabet.
Consonant and vowel sequences such as ㅄ bs, ㅝ wo, or obsolete ㅵ bsd, ㆋ üye are written left to right.
Vowels (medials) are written under the initial consonant, to the right, or wrap around the initial from bottom to right, depending on their shape: If the vowel has a horizontal axis like ㅡ eu, then it is written under the initial; if it has a vertical axis like ㅣ i, then it is written to the right of the initial; and if it combines both orientations, like ㅢ ui, then it wraps around the initial from the bottom to the right:
A final consonant, if present, is always written at the bottom, under the vowel. This is called 받침 batchim "supporting floor":
A complex final is written left to right:
Blocks are always written in phonetic order, initial-medial-final. Therefore:
In Korean, typefaces that do not have a fixed block boundary size are called ( , 'out of square typeface'). If horizontal text in the typeface ends up looking top-aligned with a ragged bottom edge, the typeface can be called ( , 'clothesline typeface').
These fonts have been used as design accents on signs or headings, rather than for typesetting large volumes of body text.
Avant-garde typographer Ahn Sang-soo created a font for the Hangul Dada exposition that disassembled the syllable blocks; but while it strings out the letters horizontally, it retains the distinctive vertical position each letter would normally have within a block, unlike the older linear writing proposals.
Modern styles that are more suited for printed media were developed in the 20th century. In 1993, new names for both Myeongjo (明朝) and Gothic styles were introduced when Ministry of Culture initiated an effort to standardize typographic terms, and the names Batang (바탕, meaning background) and Dotum (돋움, meaning "stand out") replaced Myeongjo and Gothic respectively. These names are also used in Microsoft Windows. A sans-serif style with lines of equal width is popular with pencil and pen writing and is often the default typeface of Web browsers. A minor advantage of this style is that it makes it easier to distinguish -eung from -ung even in small or untidy print, as the jongseong ieung (ㅇ) of such fonts usually lacks a serif that could be mistaken for the short vertical line of the letter ㅜ.
Hangul Jamo Extended-A (U+A960–U+A97F) and Hangul Jamo Extended-B (U+D7B0–U+D7FF) blocks were added to the Unicode Standard in October 2009 with the release of version 5.2.
Parenthesised (U+3200–U+321E) and circled (U+3260–U+327E) Hangul compatibility characters are in the Enclosed CJK Letters and Months block:
Half-width Hangul compatibility characters (U+FFA0–U+FFDC) are in the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block:
The Korean alphabet in other Unicode blocks:
Obsolete letters
Numerous obsolete Korean letters and sequences are no longer used in Korean. Some of these letters were only used to represent the sounds of Chinese . Some of the Korean sounds represented by these obsolete letters still exist in dialects.
+ Obsolete consonants
+Obsolete double consonants
+Obsolete vowel
+Place of Articulation (오음, 五音) in Chinese Rime Table
Most common
Orthography
Until the 20th century, no official orthography of the Korean alphabet had been established. Due to liaison, heavy consonant assimilation, dialectal variants and other reasons, a Korean word can potentially be spelled in multiple ways. Sejong seemed to prefer Morphophonology spelling (representing the underlying root forms) rather than a phoneme one (representing the actual sounds). However, early in its history the Korean alphabet was dominated by phonemic spelling. Over the centuries the orthography became partially morphophonemic, first in nouns and later in verbs. The modern Korean alphabet is as morphophonemic as is practical. The difference between phonetic romanization, phonemic orthography and morphophonemic orthography can be illustrated with the phrase motaneun sarami:
Mixed scripts
Since the late Joseon period, various Hanja–Hangul mixed systems were used. In these systems, Hanja were used for lexical roots, and the Korean alphabet for grammatical words and inflections, much as kanji and kana are used in Japanese. Hanja have been almost entirely phased out of daily use in North Korea, and in South Korea they are mostly restricted to parenthetical glosses for proper names and for disambiguating homonyms.
New Korean Orthography
To make the Korean alphabet a better morphophonology fit to the Korean language, North Korea introduced six new letters, which were published in the New Orthography for the Korean Language and used officially from 1948 to 1954.
— ㅿ ㆆ —
Morpho-syllabic blocks
Except for a few grammatical morphemes prior to the twentieth century, no letter stands alone to represent elements of the Korean language. Instead, letters are grouped into syllable or morpheme blocks of at least two and often three: a consonant or a doubled consonant called the initial ( syllable onset), a vowel or diphthong called the medial ( syllable nucleus), and, optionally, a consonant or consonant cluster at the end of the syllable, called the final ( syllable coda). When a syllable has no actual initial consonant, the zero consonant ㅇ ieung is used as a placeholder. (In the modern Korean alphabet, placeholders are not used for the final position.) Thus, a block contains a minimum of two letters, an initial and a medial. Although the Korean alphabet had historically been organized into syllables, in the modern orthography it is first organized into morphemes, and only secondarily into syllables within those morphemes, with the exception that single-consonant morphemes may not be written alone.
Letter placement within a block
The placement or stacking of letters in the block follows set patterns based on the shape of the medial.
medial initial medial initial med.
2med. 1 initial medial final initial medial final initial med.
2med. final initial medial final 1 final 2 initial medial final 1 final 2 initial med.
2med. fin. 1 fin. 2
Block shape
Normally the resulting block is written within a square. Some recent fonts (for example Eun, HY깊은샘물M, and UnJamo) move towards the European practice of letters whose relative size is fixed, and use whitespace to fill letter positions not used in a particular block, and away from the East Asian tradition of square block characters (方块字). They break one or more of the traditional rules:
Linear Korean
There was a minor and unsuccessful movement in the early twentieth century to abolish syllabic blocks and write the letters individually and in a row, in the fashion of writing the , instead of the standard convention of 모아쓰기 ( 'assembled writing'). For example, ㅎㅏㄴㄱㅡㄹ would be written for 한글 (Hangeul). It is called 풀어쓰기 ( pureo-sseugi 'unassembled writing').
Readability
Because of syllable clustering, words are shorter on the page than their linear counterparts would be, and the boundaries between syllables are easily visible (which may aid reading, if segmenting words into syllables is more natural for the reader than dividing them into phonemes). Because the component parts of the syllable are relatively simple phonemic characters, the number of strokes per character on average is lower than in Chinese characters. Unlike syllabaries, such as Japanese kana, or Chinese logographs, none of which encode the constituent phonemes within a syllable, the graphic complexity of Korean syllabic blocks varies in direct proportion with the phonemic complexity of the syllable. Like Japanese kana or Chinese characters, and unlike linear alphabets such as those derived from Latin, Korean orthography allows the reader to utilize both the horizontal and vertical visual fields. Since Korean syllables are represented both as collections of phonemes and as unique-looking graphs, they may allow for both visual and aural retrieval of words from the lexicon. Similar syllabic blocks, when written in small size, can be hard to distinguish from, and therefore sometimes confused with, each other. Examples include 홋/훗/nocat=yes (), nocat=yes/nocat=yes (), nocat=yes/nocat=yes (), and nocat=yes/nocat=yes/nocat=yes ().
Style
In Hunminjeongeum, the Korean alphabet was printed in sans-serif angular lines of even thickness. This style is found in books published before about 1900, and can be found in stone carvings (on statues, for example). Over the centuries, an ink-brush style of calligraphy developed, employing the same style of lines and angles as traditional Korean calligraphy. This brush style is called gungche (), meaning "palace style", because the style was mostly developed and used by the maidservants () of the Joseon court.
Unicode
Hangul Jamo (U+1100–U+11FF) and Hangul Compatibility Jamo (U+3130–U+318F) blocks were added to the Unicode Standard in June 1993 with the release of version 1.1. A separate Hangul Syllables block (not shown below due to its length) contains pre-composed syllable block characters, which were first added at the same time, although they were relocated to their present locations in July 1996 with the release of version 2.0.
See also
Notes
Bibliography
External links
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