Circles and sticks: Korean code

The Korean script, i.e. the characters used to create written Korean words, is quite unique. There is pretty much nothing like it out there (and for a reason!). I mean, if someone asked me what an alien code might look like (provided they exist and use one), I would definitely imagine something like that:

An encoded message —concise, neat, and clearcut. But it is not some alien communique that I intercepted —it is the one-and-only Korean script, or hangul (한글) as it is called in South Korea, whereas in North Korea it is known as chosongul (조선글).

The history of these circle-y and stick-y symbols is so unexpected! See, the Korean language is quite old, no one really knows how old exactly, but more than 2,000 years. At that time, with the buddhism spreading around, the Chinese characters arrived to transform, after the adaptation to the Korean way of speaking, into the main script, called hanja, that stick around for a very long time.

Which is expected, really, considering that ancient China was a mighty empire with influential culture, so the countries around it were affiliated to it and learned from it.

Sounds familiar, right? That's what happened with kanji in the Japanese language! Only with a difference: in the Japanese language the Chinese characters remained up until now. But the Korean language went in a different direction. All these hangul symbols didn't just magically evolved out of thousands of hanja-s. They were designed on purpose! Just how cool is that?!

King Sejong the Great invented hangul in 1446, since hanja were difficult to learn without spending years in school, and that put literacy out of reach for most commoners. Hangul was made specifically for Korean, and it was also created to be easy to learn and use! A script tailored for learners —isn't that a dream?

Each symbol in hangul corresponds to a specific sound, and the shape of each character mimics the shape of your tongue when pronouncing them. This is why the Korean script we know nowadays is considered to be the "most perfect phonetic system", for the written way of the language "fits" perfectly its spoken form —quite a legacy, King Sejong, well done! No wonder that both South and North Korea celebrate hangul on a certain day each year.

See the story of hangul "craft" in this video (4:23):

So how does hangul work?

Since the script was created with an idea in mind to make the alphabet easy to learn, the first important feature of hangul to take in account, also mentioned above, is that this script is phonetic, in other words each character represents a specific sound. So, there won't be different ways to pronounce one symbol, like, say, the letter E in English words "wet", "we", "were".

How many characters are we talking about? Overall, we have 24 letters —14 consonants and 10 vowels— and 16 digraphs (or digrams), meaning sounds represented by a sequence of two letters. When written, all the characters are grouped into blocks, i.e. syllables. In each syllable, there are:

• a beginning consonant, or initial sound;
• a medial vowel, or medial sound;
• and an optional final consonant, or final sound.

Out of 16 digraphs of hangul, there exist 5 tense consonants formed by doubling some certain consonants, and 11 diphthongs. So, 40 symbols in total! Quite a doable challenge!

Good news: learning hangul is not going to take you that much time —sure, it will be unusual at first (well, it is a foreign language, after all) but you'll get along with it quicker than might be expected. Here, check out this comic on hangul that teaches all the tricks of Korean characters, just to get you started or acquainted with it. But don't forget to actually learn the real Korean sounds via listening to them.

Now that we are familiar with the symbols, how exactly do we put them together into syllable blocks? You must have noticed all these different ways the symbols are stoked in. Schematically they can be shown as such:

See the logic there? Well, an example will help. So, each block is a syllable, we know this already. And, you also picked up, obviously, that Korean vowels are either a horizontal line or a vertical one. Now to go on, some rules first:

• The medial position "M" is always a vowel. Always!
• The initial and final positions "I" and "F" are always consonants. Yes, always!
• Blocks from the first column are for the vowels drawn vertically! Of course, always!
• Blocks from the second column are for the vowels drawn horizontally. Always, again!

With these rules in mind, it is just a matter of putting the consonants and vowels together to make blocks. For example, if we want to write "han" ("great" or "Korean"), we do the following:

Step 1: Determine whether the vowel is horizontal or vertical. In our case, "a" (ㅏ) is vertical, so we will use one of the blocks from the first column.

Step 2: Determine whether the syllable ends with a consonant. Let's see: "han"—yes, it does. So our block is this one:

Step 3: Fill in the positions of the block with the respective letters. This one is just intuitive:

• The position "I" takes the letter "h": ㅎ;
• The position "M", according to the order of the letters and the rules mentioned earlier, takes the letter "a":ㅏ;
• The position "F" takes the last letter — "n": ㄴ.

Let's thank the great king Sejong and his team for creating one of the neatest, simplest and most logical writing systems in the world! And now that we decoded all these straight lines and circles of Korean, it is time to look a bit deeper into the language. Ready? See you in the next Episode!

화이팅! Hwai-ting! Good luck!

"W_ha^t a gre^at a_rti^cle! F^eel fr_ee to sh^a_re!"

Discover more about Korean and other languages at langventure.strikingly.com!