English borrowings vs. English words

Here's an interesting sign that we saw recently in the window of a clothing store at a highway rest stop, advertising a really good deal.

Reduced from $300 to $150!

You will notice immediately that there is an English word on this sign. But it may surprise you to know that, in fact, all the words on this sign but one are English. Or, to be more precise, they are of English origin.

The text in green reads:

Orthography: 매쉬 베스트 + 점퍼 SET
Transcription: meswi beseuteu-wa jeompeo seteu
Pronunciation: me-shwee be-suh-tuh-wa juhm-puh setoo [mɛ.sʷi bɛ.sɨ.tʰɨ-wa tʒʌm.pʰʌ sɛ.tʰɨ]
Meaning: "mesh vest and jacket set"

Excluding the plus sign, this line consists entirely of words of English origin:

meswi 매쉬 from mesh
beseuteu 베스트 from vest
jeompeo 점퍼 from jumper (British English meaning 'sweater', but used for 'jacket' in Korean)
seteu SET from set

So why are the first three written in the Korean alphabet, while the last is written in the Roman alphabet?

I don't know why.

First hypothesis: The first three words are Korean words—though Koreans may know they are from English, they function as ordinary Korean words. The fourth word is not a Korean word, but an English word that all Koreans recognize from having studied English in school. This accounts for the difference in orthography.

Second hypothesis: All four words are equally Korean, but the last is written in the Roman alphabet to attract attention and lend cachet.

Teachers' Day

This month we've already had Children's Day and Parents' Day, and now, today, is Teachers' Day. Many gifts have been exchanged this month.

The name of the holiday in Korean is of interest. It is called Seuseung ui nal 스승의 날 "Teachers' Day". What's interesting about it is that the word used here is not the common Korean word for teacher, which is seonseang 선생 先生. Seonsaeng, of course, is just a borrowing from Chinese (cf. Mandarin xiānsheng 先生)—or, more properly, just a borrowing from Japanese (cf. sensei 先生) which is a borrowing from Chinese.

Seuseung is the native Korean word for teacher, a word that has been almost entirely replaced by the borrowing. I've never heard it used in normal conversation.

At any rate, this is the day that students give gifts to their teachers to show their appreciation. It was a pleasant surprise for me to receive a gift from one of my students in America.

The word for teacher on the ribbon is seonsaeng 선생 (plus honorific suffix -nim 님).

This basket is a mix of roses and carnations. The carnation is a symbol of affection and respect, so it is frequently used as a gift for both Parents' Day and Teachers' Day.

According to Wikipedia, the date of Teachers' Day was moved to May 15 from May 26 in 1965. May 15 is the birthday of King Sejong, perhaps the most famous of Korea's monarchs, who is known for his wisdom and love of learning. He is credited not only for wise rule but also for a number of impressive inventions, not the least of which is the Korean alphabet. This makes his birthday a fitting day to celebrate the contributions of teachers.

What's wrong with Korean alphabet

Actually, nothing is wrong with the Korean alphabet per se. It's great. But there is a problem with the way the letters of the alphabet are presented and learned. It's the result of some changes in pronunciation that have happened over the 500+ years since the alphabet was invented.

Here's a poster of the alphabet the way it is usually presented, with 24 letters: 14 for consonants and 10 for vowels.

I've placed a bright red vertical line after the last consonant and before the last vowel.

The ordering is quite systematic. All the consonant letters come first, then all the vowel letters. Within each group there is also a logical ordering. Little kids learn the alphabet by reciting these 24 letters in order.

Here's an example of systematicity in letter design. If a vowel sign has an extra short line attached to it, that signifies a preceding "y" sound. Below are the vowel letters in the same order seen on the poster, along with their transcriptions. As you can see, they are paired together in groups with and without "y".

ㅏ a   ㅑ ya
ㅓ eo  ㅕ yeo  ("uh" and "yuh")
ㅗ o  ㅛ yo
ㅜ u  ㅠ yu
ㅡ eu  (close to the vowel sound in English "put")
ㅣ i

These are the basic vowel letters in the alphabet, but they are not the only vowel sounds that can occur in a Korean syllable. Most other vowel sounds are actually combinations of vowels—diphthongs—and are written with two vowel letters each. This is why they are not considered basic and don't appear on the chart. You don't need to learn them as part of the alphabet, because they are just letter combinations.

For example, the word for 'ear' is gwi. It has two vowel sounds in it, u followed by i. It's written 귀, i.e. ㄱ (g) plus ㅜ plus ㅣ. The vowel combination wi ㅟ isn't considered part of the alphabet because it is transparently composed of ㅜ plus ㅣ and it is pronounced as u plus i. (Try saying "ui" fast and notice that it turns into "wi".)

Okay, so far so good. But something interesting happened to Korean pronunciation a few hundred years ago. In 15th-century Korean there were two diphthongs ay and eoy, pronounced like the vowels in the English words buy and boy, respectively. The first one, ay, is an a sound followed by an i sound, so was written ㅏ plus ㅣ, i.e. ㅐ. The second one, eoy, is eo ("uh") followed by i, so was written  ㅓ plus ㅣ, i.e. ㅔ. Just as with wi, these were transparent combinations, so they weren't learned as basic letters of the alphabet.

But then pronunciation changed. The sound ay coalesced into a single vowel ae (as in English met), and the sound eoy coalesced into a single vowel e (as in English mate).* But their spelled forms didn't change. So while graphically ㅐ and ㅔ look like sequences of two vowels, they are pronounced as single vowels. That means that you can't understand how to pronounce them by looking at their graphic structure the way you can with wi ㅟ. You just have to learn them as is:

ㅔ e
ㅐ ae

Well, think of poor little 3-year-old Tek. He's been looking at this poster in his room every day, learning the letters, singing them at school, and he's also learned how to write his name in Korean. And one day he says, looking at the chart, "Where is ㅐ?" That's the vowel in his name. And it's not on the poster!

In my opinion, the "alphabet" should have been reformed long ago with the addition of ㅐ and ㅔas basic letters. In our household we have taken a small step in that direction by amending our poster.

The alphabet chart, now supplemented with one of the two missing basic vowel sounds.

 * For almost all Korean speakers these two vowels have now merged, but they are kept distinct in spelling. Kind of like the way "w" and "wh" sounds have merged for most speakers of American English, but we still keep them distinct in spelling.

Names of Korean letters

When I was blogging here seven years ago, I was immersed in language classes and interacting with native and non-native Korean speakers on a daily basis. I was thinking a lot about Korean language and writing, and blogging extensively about both.

This is the introduction to Korean writing that I wrote back in 2007.

I haven't been doing that so much this time around. (I'm planning to blog in the future about how weird and constrained my life is here.) But it occurred to me that a post about the origin and structure of the Korean alphabet letter names might be of interest. Some of you have seen the video posted on FB showing Tek contorting his body into the shapes of various letters. You can hear him and me saying the names of the letters. Unlike the English names of the letters of the Roman alphabet, the Korean letter names are highly systematic (if not entirely consistent, as will be explained later).

These are the consonant letters, their transcriptions, and their letter names. It is helpful to remember that eu represents a single sound close to that in the English words book and put (for the linguists: [ɨ]) and eo represents a single sound close to that in the English words butt and some (for the linguists: [ʌ]).

ㄱ g: gi-eok
ㄴ n: ni-eun
ㄷ d: di-geut
ㄹ r: ri-eul
ㅁ m: mi-eum
ㅂ b: bi-eup
ㅅ s: si-ot
ㅇ zero/ng: i-eung
ㅈ j: ji-eut
ㅊ ch: chi-eut
ㅋ k: ki-euk
ㅌ t: ti-eut
ㅍ p: pi-eup
ㅎ h: hi-eut

(The vowel sounds are simpler; their names are just their sounds. For example, the name of the letter ㅏ a is "a".)

The names are each two syllables, and they indicate precisely how that letter is pronounced when it occurs at the beginning of a word and when it occurs at the end of a word. The difference in pronunciation can be considerable.

So: The name mi-eum shows that the letter ㅁ is pronounced with an "m" sound at both the beginning and end of a word. The name si-ot shows that the letter ㅅ is pronounced with an "s" sound at the beginning of a word but a "t" sound at the end of a word.

We actually know the origin of this system of naming letters. It is later than the invention of the alphabet itself. The alphabet was invented in 1443 and promulgated in 1446. The document explaining the use of the alphabet does not specify names of the letters. Some scholars believe they were simply pronounced with an i ("ee") vowel:

ㄱ g: gi
ㄴ n: ni
ㄷ d: di

etc. But we don't really know.

In 1527 a brilliant linguist named Choe Sejin 최세진 published a Chinese-character primer for children called Hunmongjahoe 훈몽자회 訓蒙字會. The pronunciations of the Chinese characters were given in the Korean alphabet. Choe lived at a time when most literate people were more comfortable and familiar with Chinese characters than with the still-new Korean alphabet. Because of this lack of familiarity, in his introduction Choe laid out the letters and examples of their pronunciation, much as a modern American dictionary explains its pronunciation guide in the front matter.

Here's what the relevant page of the introduction looks like:

The text is read from right to left, top to bottom. Click through for a larger image.

You should be able to identify the first eight letters listed (in the second column from the right) as identical to the first eight that I listed above. (As it happens, modern Korean alphabetical order also originates with this work.) These are the eight letters that could normally occur both at the beginning and the end of a word in Choe's time.

To illustrate the proper pronunciation of the letters, Choe provided two Chinese characters for each: one illustrating its pronunciation in word-initial position, and one indicating its pronunciation in word-final pronunciation. (The characters under each letter are half-width.) For example, the letter ㅁ is illustrated with the characters 眉 (pronounced mi meaning 'eyebrow') and 音 (pronounced eum meaning sound).

To the extent possible, he chose initial characters with an i vowel and final characters with an eu vowel. He was able to do so for the letters ni-eun, ri-eul, mi-eum, bi-eup, and i-eung. But there were no Chinese characters available that had the right pronunciations for the other letters, so he picked the closest available, yielding gi-eok, di-geut, and si-ot.

This basic system was later extended (I don't know when or by whom) to the other consonant letters in regular fashion, which is why the last six letters in my list above all have completely regular i-eu names. (Interesting aside: in North Korea they regularized the names of all the letters, so instead of gi-eok, di-geut, and si-ot, North Koreans call them gi-euk, di-eut, and si-eut.)

Now if you go back to that FB video, you should be able to hear and understand the letter names.

Hanja 2

At long last it's time to follow up on my post from way back when about the use of Chinese characters (hanja 한자 漢字) in Korean writing. Those of you who have been patiently (or impatiently--how should I know?) waiting need wait no longer.

1. The Puzzle

I ended that post with this photo and the questions below it:


See the two Chinese characters to the right of the (British) English words "Way Out"? Are they writing Korean or Chinese? Or something else?

At the top of the sign it says in Korean naga-neun got, literally 'place for going out', i.e. 'exit'. On the lower right are two Chinese characters, 出口, that any Chinese speaker would recognize immediately. In Mandarin they are pronounced chūkǒu, writing the word meaning 'exit'. So at first glance I thought that this was a trilingual sign: Korean, English, Chinese.

As it turns out, however, the two Chinese characters can also be read in Korean as chulgu 출구, which is a Sino-Korean word meaning 'exit'.

So it is also possible that this is a bilingual sign, English and Korean, on which are two different Korean words for 'exit', each written in a different script.

On the face of it, it would seem more plausible for this to be a trilingual sign. After all, there are lots of Chinese tourists and residents in Seoul who would be well served by signs with Chinese on them. And furthermore, why would the Koreans need to put two different Korean words for 'exit' on the same sign, and write one of them in Chinese characters, which are increasingly unfamiliar to many Koreans?

Setting aside plausibility considerations, however, there is no linguistic way to determine whether the Chinese characters on this sign are writing Korean or Chinese. There is insufficient context to decide the question. A Chinese tourist would certainly think it is writing Chinese (and perhaps breathe a sigh of relief).* I have no idea what the average Korean would say if pressed on the question.

But we do have another means of settling the question. If we assume that all of the subway signage works in the same way, then we can keep looking at other subway signs until we find one that allows us to determine unambiguously if Korean or Chinese is being written. For example, if we could find a sign that has Chinese characters that write a common Chinese word, but which do not write a possible Sino-Korean word, then this would demonstrate that the sign is in fact written in Chinese. Or, if we found a sign that had an entire phrase on it (instead of just a single word), the grammatical structure would give the underlying language away.

2. The Clues

Put on your linguistic detective beanie cap! Let's take a look at some other subway signs and see what we, as brilliant linguistic detectives, can determine.

Here's a sign at one of the stations on Line #4 of the subway system, indicating some of the stops that you can reach by boarding a train on the platform to the left. You'll notice the same pattern as on the "Way Out" sign: Korean (written in hangeul) on top, English** on the bottom left, and Chinese characters on the bottom right.


But look at it more carefully. Go on, click on it to open a larger version of the picture, and study it good.

Did you find it? Did you spot the clue?

I'll wait another minute while you look at it one more time. There is something fishy about the Chinese characters writing one of the place names.

Okay, hopefully you've spotted it by now. It's the Miasamgeori stop. The hangeul is 미아삼거리. The Chinese characters are 彌阿삼거리. But wait a minute -- let's look at those again.

미아삼거리
彌阿삼거리

Those last three things aren't Chinese characters! They're hangeul--written exactly the same as the last three syllables above them. No way could that be the Chinese language, which is never written with the Korean alphabet.

As it turns out, most Korean place names are Sino-Korean, and these can be written with Chinese characters. But some Korean place names are, in whole or in part, native Korean words. The native Korean parts can't be written with Chinese characters. They have to be written in hangeul. (Geori is the native Korean word for 'road'. Samgeori means 'three-way intersection'.)***

[An aside: Philologists and epigraphers often face similar questions when studying newly discovered ancient texts. They may recognize the writing system--the Brahmi script, say--but still have to puzzle out what language is being written with it.]

3. The Solution

There you have it: proof that what is being written in Chinese characters is the Korean language, not the Chinese language.

[An aside again: Suppose, just suppose, that you wanted to write this place name in Chinese, not Korean. How could it be done? Well, you'd have two options. One, transliterate the pronunciation of the Korean samgeori using Chinese characters, just as the pronunciation has been transliterated into English on the lower left. Two, translate the meaning of the Korean using Chinese words. Since I don't want to leave you in suspense, I went and found a Chinese-language map of the Seoul subway system on the web. The stop is named 彌阿三岔路口 Mǐāsānchàlùkǒu. Sānchàlùkǒu is the Chinese word for 'three-way intersection'. So this is a translation, rather than a transliteration, into Chinese.]

Now you should be able to spot a second clue on this same sign. The second clue is simpler, but possibly harder to notice. Take another look.

Did you find it? It's the last stop listed on the sign. There are NO Sino-Korean elements in this place name (gogae means 'ridge'; I don't know what the dang part is). So there was no point writing the name again on the lower-right: it would have looked exactly the same, all in hangeul.

Once you realize that the signs have no Chinese on them, just Korean written twice (once all in hangeul, as Koreans normally write it; once with all Sino-Korean words written in Chinese characters and the rest in hangeul), then you see evidence of it everywhere.

Consider this neighborhood map. All the subway stations have them -- they are a great way to orient yourself and figure out where you should exit the station to get to where you want to go.


It's got dozens of place names on it. Here's a close-up (from a different neighborhood map than the one pictures above):


The part in parentheses says Gu Peuraja 'Turtle Plaza'. Peuraja, of course, is a borrowing from English 'plaza'. Below it you see a translation into English: "Gu Plaza".**** Then you see below that Korean written in Chinese characters. But peuraja, of course, is not Sino-Korean, so it appears again in hangeul as 프라자.

One more sign:


This sign is for the East Seoul Bus Terminal. (For some reason the English says "Dongseoul"--dong being Sino-Korean for 'east'-- instead of "East Seoul".) Seoul is one of the only city names (perhaps THE only city name?) in Korea that is not Sino-Korean. So at the bottom it stays in hangeul. The Korean word for 'bus terminal' is teomineol 터미널, an English borrowing. So it too stays in hangeul at the bottom. Only dong, 'east', can be written with a Chinese character: 東.

Based on linguistic evidence, we've determined that the subway signs are bilingual, not trilingual. But this raises a perplexing non-linguistic question. Why? Why write Korean twice on the same sign, using a writing system that is bordering on the obsolete for most Korean speakers?

I can only speculate. I think that it was done for Japanese and Chinese tourists. True, the words on the signs don't necessarily always make sense to Japanese and Chinese speakers.† And true, sometimes there is hangeul mixed in with the characters, or there are no characters at all. But on the whole, the signs are still very useful for such tourists. They are easier to recognize, understand, and remember than the pure hangeul or romanized forms. And in many cases they end up being identical to written Japanese or Chinese words.

Why not go all the way then, and just translate everything into Chinese or Japanese, as they've done with English? Two reasons I can think of. One, doing it this way allows a single written form to do double-duty for Chinese and Japanese speakers. Second, the signs can be made by Korean speakers--no need to hire Chinese and Japanese translators--without error.


*Would you believe that I'm still oversimplifying things? Well, I am. There are two forms of the Chinese character script, usually termed "traditional" and "simplified". The so-called simplified forms were promulgated by the Communist government of mainland China in the 1950s and 1960s in an effort to make the characters easier to learn and thus promote literacy. The traditional forms continued to be used in Taiwan and Hong Kong -- and in Korea when writing Sino-Korean. In the case of 出口，the simplified and traditional forms are exactly the same. But on other subway signs, it's clear that only traditional forms are being used. Some might be unfamiliar to travelers from mainland China. That alone doesn't, however, indicate whether what is being written is Chinese or Korean. The Korean sign-makers might have chosen to write Chinese using traditional characters. Return to main text.

**This isn't actually English, of course. These being place names, there is no English to be had. This is just a Romanized form of the Korean names. It's as much French as it is English, and more Korean than either of those. But I'll refer to it as English for simplicity. (Apologies to all non-English speakers whose writing system uses the Roman alphabet.) Return to main text.

***Yes, I'm afraid so. I've been caught oversimplifying again. In fact, the sam of samgeori, which means "three", is Sino-Korean. It could have been written with the Chinese character 三. Why wasn't it? I'm not sure, but I think it's because that if the place name were written as 彌阿三거리 it would be natural when reading it to group the Chinese characters together and misread the place name as Miasam Road instead of as Mia Three-way Intersection. By putting the sam in hangeul, the wordhood of samgeori is made more apparent. Perhaps a Korean speaker could comment on this. Return to main text.

****Oh ho, so it was English after all! (See footnote **.) Return to main text.

†Case in point: If you look again at the picture at the top of this post, you'll notice a smaller sign in the background reading "Toilet". The Chinese characters on the lower right, 化粧室, do not write a normal word for 'bathroom' in Chinese. Return to main text.

Names

A few thoughts about names. Many of our readers in America probably know, or are related to, some Steve Lees or John Kims or Helen Parks. We're accustomed to the idea of immigrants, typically Asian immigrants, taking on "normal" sounding first names when coming to the States (or Canada or the UK), or giving such names to their children. (I have to admit, though, that very ethnic first names mixed with Asian last names, such as Shaniqua Wong or Luigi Choi, still don't sound quite normal to me.)

It seems that this happens in non-English speaking countries as well. When we were in Greece we negotiated what would turn out to be a long and somewhat harrowing taxi ride with driver named Kostas. Since he had such a prototypically Greek name, I was surprised to learn that he was in fact an Albanian immigrant. It turned out, of course, that Kostas was not his real name, but his Albanian name was much harder for me, and probably for most of his Greek customers, to remember.

Before coming to study at the Language Institute, I thought that in Korea, foreigners generally did not adopt Korean names. As you know by now, Korean uses an alphabet, which makes it possible to phonetically represent a person's name in hangeul. For instance, Lance's name can be written in Korean as 랜스, or raenseu, which is pretty close. But I have encountered some people at the Language Institute who have unofficially adopted Korean names. One is a Mongolian woman whose Mongolian given name ends in a lateral fricative (!)*. Perhaps she, like our Albanian taxi driver, found it easiest to have people call her something more familiar.

Interestingly, a number of Chinese people also adopt Korean names as well. One might not expect this, since Chinese people have a couple of other options when choosing what to be called in Korean. You have to understand that most Koreans have names that use Chinese characters, just as Chinese people do, so Korean names and Chinese names are similar in many respects. So Chinese people in Korea could choose to transliterate their names into Hangeul according to the Chinese pronunciation, or they could use the Korean pronunciation of the Chinese characters in their names. For example, suppose that Chow Yun-Fat were coming to study at the Language Institute. He could either transliterate his name into 차우 윤팟 (Cha-u Yunpat), or he could use the Korean pronunciation of his characters, 주윤발 (Ju Yunbal).

By the way, Westerners who study Chinese typically adopt Chinese names, probably because it is difficult to transliterate foreign words into written Chinese. Lance, for instance, took the Chinese name 蘇懶思 Sū Lǎnsī. As I said, he doesn't have to make himself a Korean name, but if he wanted to, he could make one based on his Chinese name. Using the Korean pronunciation of his Chinese name would result in the name 소나사 (So Nasa), which is perfectly pronounceable to Koreans, but doesn't really sound like a name. The surname is fine (So is a Korean surname) but the Nasa is not a typical name. This sometimes happens to actual Chinese people when they use the Korean pronunciation of their characters. So I've found that there are some Chinese people who skip the two options discussed above for transforming their Chinese names into Korean names, and actually choose a different Korean given name altogether.

Finally, perhaps I can illustrate with a somewhat analogous Western example. One might imagine that a Spanish speaker in the States named Jesus might want people to pronounce his name as hay-SOOS, as it is in Spanish. Or that he might have people pronounce his name as they normally read that word in English, JEE-zuhs. Or he might decide that "Jesus" is not really a normal first name for English speakers, and decide to go by "Justin" instead. Of course this is a fake example, since there are enough Spanish speakers in the US that we have mostly accepted hay-SOOS, if not JEE-zuhs, as a perfectly normal name. For Spanish speakers, that is. Jesus Kim still seems kind of strange.

[Footnote added October 27, 2007 at 8:24 pm]

* A lateral fricative is like an "l" sound, but with more friction.  It's like a cross between a "l" and a French "j" (we sometimes spell it "zh").  The IPA symbol is ɮ.  You can hear what that sounds like by going to this site and clicking on the ɮ symbol (sixth row down, third big column over).  I don't really know what sound is at the end of the Mongolian student's name, not actually knowing anything about Mongolian.  But I do know that her romanized name ends with an "l", and that when Lance (who didn't know how her name was spelled) heard her say her name in a noisy cafeteria, he thought it ended in an "s", and that Wikipedia says that Mongolian has a lateral fricative (two actually, but for our purposes let's say they sound pretty similar).

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.