Hangul

The Korean alphabet is the modern writing system for the Korean language. It has gone by a variety of names, such as Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, Hangul internationally, and Hangeul in South Korea. The script's original name was Hunminjeongeum. Before Hangul's creation, Korea had been using Hanja (Chinese characters) since antiquity. As Hanja was poorly suited for representing the Korean language, and because its difficulty contributed to high illiteracy, Joseon king Sejong the Great (r. 1418–1450) moved to create Hangul. The script was announced around late 1443 to early 1444 and officially published in 1446 via the text Hunminjeongeum and its companion commentary Hunminjeongeum Haerye. While Hangul saw gradual adoption among both the elite and commoners, it was looked down upon by the elite for centuries. It only began to receive societal acceptance in the late 19th century. It is now the predominant script for Korean in both Koreas and among the Korean diaspora. It is also used to write the Jeju language, and to a limited degree, the Cia-Cia language of Indonesia. Hangul orthography has changed over time and differs between North and South Korea. Modern Korean language orthographies use 24 basic letters, which are called jamo. The 14 consonants can be combined amongst themselves to represent additional and composite sounds; the same principle applies for the 10 vowels. Such combinations yield 27 additional letters, resulting in a total of 51. They are arranged in syllable blocks consisting of an initial consonant, a vowel, and an optional final consonant. The syllables can be arranged in vertical or horizontal rows, although the latter practice has become dominant. Hangul punctuation is now largely similar to Western punctuation, with some differences. Spaces between words or phrases are a modern feature of Hangul. Hangul letters were designed to be graphically simple, and traditionally consisted of only straight lines, dots, and circles. The shapes of five basic consonants are based on those of human speech organs. Most of the other basic consonants, which are considered to correspond to "harsher" sounds than those five, are derived by adding additional lines to those letters to indicate progressively harsher sounds. There are a number of other hypothesized inspirations for the letter shapes, but these are still debated. The script has received significant praise from international linguists and historians. It is now a major point of pride for Korean people.

Names

The Korean alphabet has been referred to by various names since its invention. Its original name was Hunminjeongeum (훈민정음; 訓民正音; Hunmin chŏngŭm; 'Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People'). It shared this name with the manuscript that introduced it. Internationally, the script goes by Hangul. This spelling has been adopted as a word in the English language and is used by organizations like the International Organization for Standardization (which gives it the four-letter code Hang and numeric code 286). Hangul is an ad-hoc romanization of the name South Korea uses for the script; South Korea's preferred Revised Romanization system renders this as Hangeul (한글). The McCune–Reischauer and related romanization systems render this as Han'gŭl. Without diacritics, this is rendered as Hangul. The name means script of Han, where Han is one of the names of Korea. The name appeared some time around the early 1910s. In North Korea, the name Hangul was briefly used until it was replaced by Chosŏn'gŭl in 1949. This is in part due to differing preferences for names of Korea: North Korea refers to the whole of Korea as Chosŏn, while South Korea uses Hanguk. The script also historically went by a variety of other names, including ŏnmun (언문; 諺文; lit. 'vernacular script'), panjŏl (반절; 反切), and kungmun (국문; 國文; 'national script').

Classifications Hangul is a phonographic script: a writing system where graphemes represent the sounds of a language. It is also an alphabet. The script is often described as "syllabic" because of how its letters are grouped into syllables (see § Syllable blocks), although linguist John DeFrancis is skeptical of this. Several linguists have instead argued for calling it an "alphabetic syllabary", "syllabic alphabet", or "alpha-syllabary". While Hangul was originally a more phonemic script (where spelling is strictly tied to pronunciation), modern Hangul has become more morphophonemic (where some pronunciation changes are not reflected in spelling) over time (see Hangul orthography § Buncheol vs. yeoncheol debate). Hangul and mixed script are considered to have a property called ŏnmun ilch'i (언문일치; 言文一致; lit. 'spoken–written agreement'): tight correspondence between pronunciation and text. By contrast, the Idu and Kugyŏl scripts for writing Korean do not have this property. Pae, Winskel, and Kim argue this property was initially stronger but weakened over time due to changes in the language and script.

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