Hangeullal

Today, October 9, is a holiday in Korea. Not a major holiday -- most everyone is working and shops are open -- but a holiday of note nevertheless. Today is Hangeullal: Hangeul Day. Hangeul is the name of the Korean alphabet, which is one of Korea's proudest cultural achievements. We had the day off from school.

Today, then, seems like an appropriate time to explain some things about the Korean writing system for those of you who are unfamiliar with it.

1. Hangeul 한글

There aren't too many alphabets that are celebrated by national holidays. (Does anyone know of any others?) There also aren't too many alphabets whose invention can be traced to a specific time, place, and person. But the Korean alphabet is one. It was invented in the mid fifteenth century by the great King Sejong. (There is speculation that the alphabet was actually invented by a committee appointed by the king, who then took credit. But King Sejong was actually very talented and learned. It's quite likely that he was the driving intellectual force behind the alphabet, even if he did have some help from advisors.)

Before the invention of the alphabet, there was no simple or systematic way of writing the Korean language. Literate Koreans wrote in Classical Chinese (much the way that medieval Europeans wrote in Latin rather than in their spoken vernaculars). The invention of Hangeul paved the way for the formulation of a truly Korean literate society, although it took several centuries before it became accepted to write formally in Korean instead of Chinese.

To the untrained Western eye, Korean writing doesn't look alphabetic. Take a look at this Korean sentence, randomly chosen from a web site:

한국 민속촌은 서울에서 30분 거리에 있으며 365일 언제든지 관람 하실 수 있습니다.

It looks like it is made up of Chinese-character like rectangular blocks. But this is a false impression. It is actually made of alphabet letters arranged into rectangular blocks.

For example, the first word of the sentence is Hanguk, meaning "Korea". It is composed of six letters: ㅎ (h), ㅏ (a), ㄴ (n), ㄱ (g), ㅜ (u), ㄱ (g). (Yes, I know, the last one should be a "k". I'll explain later.)

When writing Korean, the letters are always grouped into syllables. The first three letters make the syllable "han", so they are grouped together: ㅎ +ㅏ + ㄴ makes 한. The next three make the syllable "guk", so they are grouped together: ㄱ + ㅜ + ㄱ makes 국. The letters are arranged top-to-bottom and left-to-right within each block. The arrangement of the letters within a given syllable block depends on the particular letter shapes (of the vowel letters, to be precise), so that the blocks end up being neither too high nor too wide.

It's pretty neat that when you look at Korean writing you can see not only the letters, but also a clear delineation of the syllables. Even without knowing any Korean at all, you can tell that the first word in the sentence above (한국) contains two syllables and the second one (민속촌은) contains four syllables.

Influence from Chinese is certainly a major factor behind the way Korean writing is structured, even though Chinese is not written alphabetically. Chinese characters are rectangles that are slightly taller than they are wide, and each one represents a single syllable. Korean syllable blocks have the same overall shape and proportions as Chinese characters, and represent the same unit of speech. So it would have made sense to 15th-century Koreans to create rectangular written units representing syllables. And as a result, Hangeul syllable blocks and Chinese characters blend together well when intermixed in a single line of text.

2. Morphophonology

Although the Korean alphabet is extremely well designed, and although in almost all cases the spelling of Korean words uniquely encodes their pronunciation (by which I mean that, if you understand the rules of the alphabet, you can correctly pronounce any written word even if you've never seen it before), it is not the case that there is a one-to-one correspondence of written letters with pronounced sounds.

One reason this is the case is that Korean has very complicated morphophonology. Put simply, morphophonology refers to the way that pronunciations of word parts change when those parts come together to make words.

This concept can be illustrated with an example from English. Consider the word "electric". It ends in a "k" sound. And as part of the word "electrical", it also ends in a "k" sound. But when the noun-forming suffix "-ity" (cf. conformity, equality, etc.) is attached, the pronunciation of "electric" changes so that it ends in an "s" sound. In written English this change of pronunciation is masked, because we spell the "electric" part the same way regardless of the pronunciation. There's a disadvantage in that: the spelling doesn't consistently tell you about the pronunciation. But there's an advantage too: you can immediately spot the common root that the words "electrical" and "electricity" share, in a way that would not be as obvious if you spelled them "electrikal" and "electrisity".

Korean is full of this stuff -- there's tons more than in English.

For example, consider the Korean word for the Korean language. It's a compound word. The first part is Hanguk 한국, which we've seen above. The second part is mal 말 "language". When these two word parts combine, the -k ending of Hanguk turns into an "ng" sound, and the resulting word is hangungmal. But the spelling doesn't change: 한국말.

The fact that the spelling doesn't change is hugely helpful if you want to understand the meanings of unfamiliar written words. When you see 한국 at the beginning of 한국말, you know the word has something to do with Korea, even if you don't know what the second part of the word means. But there's also a big disadvantage of you are a new learner of Korean: you have to remember to change the pronunciation of the last consonant from "k" to "ng". It's a regular rule -- "k" always changes to "ng" before "m", in all Korean words -- but it takes time for non-native speakers to internalize it.

3. An aside on cognitive processing

Koreans are very proud of their alphabet, and they should be. It's not just a matter of national pride -- it's their own alphabet, invented by one of their greatest rulers, and intimately connected to their beloved national language -- but also of usability. The alphabet is beautifully designed, flexible and efficient, and extremely functional.

[It's also linguistically very sophisticated. Those of you with linguistic training will appreciate two amazing, and inter-related features, of the Hangeul letters. First, the basic letter shapes are based on the appearance of the articulators when pronouncing the sounds represented by the letters (as seen in mid-sagittal section, of course). For example, ㄱ, which represents the plain velar stop, is meant to look like the curved tongue back raised up against the velum. Second, letters representing sounds at the same place of articulation are distinguished in a consistent way. For example, aspirated sounds are written with letters that are modified from the letters that write the unaspirated sounds through the addition of a single stroke. So, in a sense, the writing system is featural, as well as phonemic, syllabic, and iconic.]

But I think it does have some disadvantages. From a cognitive processing point of view, I suspect that it is not an easy alphabet to read. This is because different syllables can end up looking very similar to each other. It often takes top-down processing--that is, educated guesses about what syllable one is likely to encounter in a particular context--to read quickly. Otherwise, you have to slow down and peer really closely.

For example, look at these three syllables: 홍, 흥, 훙. Yep, they are all different. The first and last letters are the same in all three: ㅎ (h) and ㅇ (ng). But the vowel in the middle is different. The three vowels are ㅗ (o), ㅡ (eu), and ㅜ (u). Those little stems on the "o" and the "u" become so short that they are nearly invisible. Native speakers aren't much bothered by this because the other syllables in the word will clue them in to which of these three possible syllables is being written. But if you don't know Korean well, you've got to squint a lot to figure out what's going on.

Let's try blowing those up a bit bigger, shall we? [Note: If they don't look bigger for you, try increasing the font size in your browser.]

홍, 흥, 훙

See the difference now?

4. Transliteration

The nature of the alphabet and the complex morphophonology (sound changes involved in word formation) present interesting challenges for transliteration. What's the best way to render Korean words in the Roman alphabet for foreigners?

In these blog entries, I've been following the guidelines of the Korean government's Revised Romanization of Korean, promulgated in 2000, with one modification. (The one modification is that I write "sh" where the official Romanization has "s" whenever the actual pronunciation is closer to the English "sh" sound. For example, the neighborhood near us called Shinchon is officially romanized as Sinchon. But the first syllable sounds more like English "shin" than like "sin".)

The question that arises with any transliteration is: should you be trying to represent the original written form, or should you be trying to represent pronunciation?

For example, consider the by-now familiar letter ㄱ (g). It is consistently pronounced as "g" at the beginning of a syllable, and as "k" at the end of a word. So should the word for Korea, 한국, be transcribed as Hangug or as Hanguk? The former transliteration more accurately represents the written Korean form. It's also relatively easy for a Korean speaker to create the romanized form, since there is a one-to-one relationship between the Korean letters and the Roman letters. But for an American tourist with no knowledge of Korean who is reading a street sign, the latter is preferable because it is more likely to result in an accurate pronunciation.

A more complicated question arises with the word for "Korean language", 한국말. Should it be written Hangugmal, Hangukmal, or Hangungmal? The last is the only one that a foreign reader who doesn't know Korean will pronounce with any accuracy. But, it's impossible from that transliteration to either (1) recognize the component Hanguk "Korea" in the word or (2) be able to reconstruct the original Korean spelling. Where that "ng" appears in the Romanization, the original Korean letter could be either ㄱ (g) or ㅇ (ng), and there is just no way to know which it is.

For the most part, the Revised Romanization opts for representation of pronunciation rather than written form. But there are still a few tricky things you need to know if you want to be able to pronounce the transcribed words in my blog entries.

1) The letter combinations "eo" and "eu" represent single vowel sounds. "eo" is the vowel sound in English "hum". That's why I said in an earlier post that Chuseok is pronunced CHOO-suck. As for "eu", there is no real equivalent in English. But it's not so different from the vowel in English "full". (So pronounce the last syllable of Hangeul, the Korean alphabet, so that it rhymes with "full".)

2) Sometimes you will see double letters, like "tt", "kk", "pp", "jj". These are "tense" sounds. They sound rather sharp and strident. For our purposes, it's okay to just pronounce them like their single-letter equivalents. (That won't work if you're really trying to speak Korean though!)

3) The vowel sounds written "e" and "ae" are both pronounced the same, like the short "e" in an English word such as "bed".

By the way, the Korean word for "day" is nal 날. But Hangeul Day (한글날) comes out as Hangeullal (as in the title of this post). Yep, more morphophonology!

Since this post is already way too long (has anyone actually made it this far?), I'll talk about the role of Chinese characters in Korean writing -- a subject near and dear to my heart -- some other time.