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Hangul is a Korean script.
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Winter. I'm nine years old. My mother has gone away for ten days. My grandfather and I are sitting at a small table, eating kuduri (called "ondol" in South Korea). My grandfather has decided to teach me the Korean alphabet. It's going well. Despite the unfamiliar, hieroglyph-like letterforms, I remember them without difficulty. The letters are written two or three levels deep, but the logic of writing them quickly sinks into my childish head, somehow intuitively. The holidays are over, I left Charkhin (a village near Samarkand), and for some reason my grandfather and I never returned to the topic again.
More than 40 years have passed since then. Ah! At the age of fifty-one, I visited South Korea for the first time. Imagine my surprise when I first started reading the names of stations on the subway (thankfully, there was always an English name next to it). And at the end of the trip, I independently identified the "sobering soup" on the menu for my friend. He told me the name as best he could, and I read it as best I could.
In 1997, the Korean alphabet Hangul was added to the list of World Heritage Sites. It is the only alphabet in the world for which it is reliably known who created it, when, and for what purpose. Scholars consider it the most "scientific" alphabet, and the idea of drawing the letters to mimic the shape of the lips and tongue when pronounced is simply brilliant. In my opinion, if you want to learn any of the Eastern languages, learn Korean!!!
A unique Korean language teaching method was developed at the St. Petersburg Korean Youth Cultural and Educational Center (VKontakte group https://vk.com/centernan). Teachers Lee N. and Park H. developed their own approach to teaching Korean and published their own textbook. Over the course of more than twenty years, the center has helped countless Korean and non-Korean youth from St. Petersburg successfully pass tests and enter South Korean universities.
With the kind permission of the authors, we publish here an excerpt from the textbook: the history of Hangul and a highly original chapter on vowel sounds. Hangul (the Korean script) is considered one of the simplest and most rationally structured writing systems. One grapheme corresponds to one phoneme, and complex graphemes are formed from simple ones according to a clear system. Despite its simplicity, Hangul conveys the richness of the Korean language's sounds while maintaining a strict order. Hangul is easy to learn and print, which contributed to the high literacy rate in Korea and the development of printing. Furthermore, Hangul lends itself easily to computerization.
Meanwhile, the history of Hangul is as unique as it is tragic. Before Hangul, several writing systems coexisted in Korea. From the first centuries CE until the bourgeois reforms of 1894, the primary official script was Chinese characters. Attempts to adapt Chinese characters to write the agglutinating Korean language led, in the 5th and 6th centuries, to the creation of the syllabic-morphemic Yidu script, a complex system for representing Korean words and grammatical forms using specially selected and abbreviated Chinese characters. However, the translation of Korean words into Chinese characters was unsatisfactory for several reasons. Firstly, the types of sounds used in the two languages differ significantly, making it impossible to express "pure Korean sounds" using Chinese characters. Secondly, the non-phonetic nature of the Chinese writing system greatly hampered its application to the Korean language. As a result, literacy in Korea was exclusively a privilege of the aristocracy.
Hangul (phonetic, or alphabetic, writing) was created by a group of Korean scholars under the orders of Sejong the Great, the fourth emperor of the Joseon Dynasty. Unlike hieroglyphs, where each character represented a word and sometimes an entire concept, in Hangul, each character corresponded to a speech sound. This was a tremendous discovery for the East, where a writing system other than hieroglyphic writing was simply unimaginable. The alphabet project was completed in late 1443 or early 1444 and published in 1446 in a document entitled "Hunmin Jeongum," which meant "Instructions to the People on Correct Sounds." The alphabet was named after this document. The publication date of the "Hunmin Jeongum," October 9, is still celebrated as Korean Written Language Day.
Emperor Sejong explained that he created a new script because the Korean language differed from Chinese, and common people found it very difficult to learn to read using Chinese characters. At the time, only men from the aristocratic class were taught this complex script, and most Koreans were illiterate. Hangul encountered significant resistance from the aristocratic elite, who considered the newly created, unique alphabet too simple and therefore unworthy of them. Hangul was used primarily by women and the semi-literate.
In the late 19th century, following the Japanese occupation of the Korean Peninsula, a liberation movement arose in the country, and Hangul became a national symbol. For the first time, official documents were written in Hangul, and it began to be taught in schools, despite prohibitions from the Japanese authorities. Since 1945, after the liberation of the Korean Peninsula, Hangul has been the official state script.
As mentioned above, 15th-century Korean scholars, commissioned by Emperor Sejong, began creating their own Korean script. During their work, they came to the revolutionary discovery for the East: the word is not the smallest part of human speech, meaning that speech can be written using signs not just for words and concepts, as in hieroglyphic writing, but for the sounds that words are made of. This discovery opened up truly grandiose prospects - to abandon the cumbersome hieroglyphic writing, namely, to write and read, remembering only a few dozen signs denoting sounds, instead of several thousand hieroglyphs denoting words and concepts.
Further, studying speech sounds, ancient scientists came to another major discovery. They discovered that speech sounds can be divided into two groups: - long ones, without which a syllable cannot exist, they were called maternal sounds (vowels); - short sounds located next to maternal sounds, they were called child sounds (consonants).
Research by 15th-century scholars led to a clear systematization of all the vowels and consonants of the Korean language. They only had to solve one final problem: finding a graphic representation of the analyzed speech sounds. This problem, too, was brilliantly solved. It's no coincidence that the Korean alphabet (Hangul) is recognized by modern linguists as the most scientific of all existing alphabets. Each graphic element of a letter is justified and has its own purpose. The appearance (spelling) of a letter already contains comprehensive information about the sound it represents. Later, as you study the Korean alphabet, you will become familiar with the classification of speech sounds in the Korean language and the writing features of Hangul letters. |
1.2. Vowel sounds and their graphic representation
The outline of vowel letters consists of three elements:
- A horizontal line symbolizing the Earth as the beginning of all things.
- A dot symbolizing the Sun, or energy (later, when drawn with a brush, the dot turned into a short line).
- A vertical line symbolizing man as an entity located between Earth and Heaven.
Ancient scientists identified the following 6 basic (pure) vowel sounds, designating them using the three symbols mentioned above, depending on how the energy emanating from a person moves when pronouncing the sound.
[a] - The vertical line represents a person, and the short horizontal line represents the energy emanating from him. A person pronouncing the sound [a] directs the energy forward and away from themselves as they exhale.
[ ^ ]-When pronouncing the sound [^], the energy emanating from a person seems to push him back.
[o]-The sound [o] is light, the energy is directed upward from the earth.
[u]-The sound [u], on the contrary, is dark, and when pronounced, the energy is directed downwards towards the earth.
[ы]-The sound [ы] distributes energy horizontally along the ground.
[i] - When pronouncing the sound [i], energy passes vertically along the human body without leaving it."
