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The clever design of Korean Hangeul
The languages of the world are written in a number of different ways. Languages like English, Arabic, and Russian use alphabets, where each letter represents a particular sound, at least when things are spelled phonetically. Languages like Chinese, Ancient Egyptian, and Classic Maya use a logogrammatical script, where a character is like a symbol that represents a word or morpheme, much like & means and and # means number. (Such languages don't really use a purely pictographic writing system, but we can leave that for another newsletter. For more on Chinese characters, go here.) In between sounds and words you have syllables, and there are languages that write their words with syllabaries, like Japanese katakana and hiragana, both of which are known as kana. Korean, which is written in Hangeul, is a bit of a mixed bag. Like English, it has an alphabet, where letters represent individual sounds. Like Japanese kana, Hangeul is concerned with syllables; its letters are clumped together to form syllables, which are then lined up to form words. But Korean letters go deeper than the letters that you're reading now. They delve down below the level of the sound - or segment, in linguistic terms - and are designed to express phonemic features of those segments; in other words, where and how those sound segments are produced. To make this clear, it will help to return to English for a moment. Say "ma," "pa," and "ba." You'll notice that all three of the consonants in these words are formed in a similar way, starting with a closure of the lips. Technically, the segments /m/, /p/, and /b/ are "bilabial," since they're formed with the two lips. Now say "no" and "toe," and you'll feel your tongue against the alveolar ridge behind the back of your teeth, making /n/ and /t/ "alveolar" segments. Bilabial and alveolar are labels for two places of articulation in phonetic terminology. So, what does all of this have to do with Hangeul? Well, wouldn't the alphabet used in English be pretty clever if the shapes of /m/, /p/, and /b/ on the one hand, and /n/ and /t/ on the other, were somehow similar to show their shared places of articulation? In Hangeul, this is exactly the case. The bilabial segments are represented by a basic shape like an open square, ᄆ, suggesting a mouth and two lips. The alveolar segments are represented by the basic shape ᄂ suggesting the position of the tongue, raised at the front to touch the alveolar ridge. Modifications on these and other basic shapes show features such as aspiration, which you can hear (or rather feel) in English if you say "core" and "score" with your finger in front of your mouth. The /k/ sound in "core" will produce a puff of air (aspiration), but the same sound in "score" will not. English doesn't pay much attention to this difference, but in Korean it's contrastive, meaning a difference in aspiration of a sound can produce an entirely different word and meaning. Aspiration is marked in Hangeul with an additional stroke, so ᄀ is the unaspirated /k/ sound as in "score," and ᄏ is the aspirated /kh/ sound as in "core." Notice that the basic shape of these two letters is suggestive of a tongue with its back raised toward the velum, or soft palate, because both of these segments are velar. The fact that Korean Hangeul reflects articulatory phonetics is especially impressive, because it was developed in the 15th century. You can learn more about Korean Hangeul in this Wikipedia article. You can also hear the letters pronounced and see examples here. And finally, if you'd like to learn how to read and speak Korean, check out Living Language Korean. Tags: alphabet, Hangeul, Korean, language, newsletter, sounds, writing system
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