Position a fingertip just behind your upper front teeth and pronounce “nnn”. Notice where the tongue rests, its tip flat against the ridge of the palate. Now observe ㄴ, the Korean character representing that precise sound. It possesses the same shape, viewed from the side, as if someone had cut open a head to reveal how the sound is produced.
Attempt “mmm”. Mouth closed, lips sealed together, forming a small rectangular box. ㅁ.
This was deduced in the 1440s, and notably, the rationale was documented.
The monarch who dissected a sound
“The appropriate sounds for the education of the populace.” This was how Sejong, the fourth monarch of Korea’s Joseon dynasty, referred to the document he released in 1446, three years subsequent to initially introducing a new script for his people. An accompanying text, the Haerye, undertook the rare task of delineating the design, detailing which letters were introduced first, how the others evolved, and what each shape was intended to signify. UNESCO recognized the surviving manuscript in its Memory of the World register in 1997, with the copy housed at the Kansong Art Museum in Seoul.
Five consonants constitute the foundational set, each a representation of a mouth mid-sound. Choi Hong-Shik, a laryngologist at Yonsei University College of Medicine, examined the shapes using contemporary speech science and published his findings in the Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics, asserting that all five serve as side-view cross sections of the vocal tract. ㄱ is referred to as the molar letter, but Choi interprets it as the tongue’s hump rising near the back teeth rather than a depiction of a tooth. ㅁ represents the front of the mouth in profile. ㅇ symbolizes the open space of the throat.
All other letters stem from those five. Add a line, and the sound receives a burst of air, converting ㄱ into ㅋ. Duplicate the letter and the sound compresses, transforming ㄱ into ㄲ.
Master five shapes, and you have effectively mastered seventeen.
Every other alphabet is inherited
Latin letters emerged by chance. A originated from a Phoenician ox head, rotated sideways and abstracted through Greek and Etruscan influences until the ox became unrecognizable. Nobody elected that. It transpired gradually, over several millennia of copying, errors, and evolution, which is why the form of a Roman letter conveys nothing about its corresponding sound.
Korean is unique enough that linguists felt the need to create a new classification for it. British linguist Geoffrey Sampson introduced the term “featural” writing for scripts where the shapes encode the physical components of a sound rather than simply representing the sound as a whole, arguing that no other national writing system embodies this concept as thoroughly as Korean. Not everyone within the discipline appreciates the term, and some prefer to classify Hangul as an alphabet with particularly neat internal logic. Regardless, the letters reveal aspects about your tongue.
Seven scholars raised an objection
What could provoke seven of the king’s own scholars to dissuade him from his own creation? In the second month of 1444, Choe Manri, the foremost advisor in the Hall of Worthies, submitted a memorial to Sejong on the behalf of himself and six peers. Columbia University’s Asia for Educators project presents a translation of that memorial from the Sejong Sillok, the court records, and the objections are remarkably candid. Only savages possess their own scripts, argued the scholars. Embracing one would signify a departure from China and an alignment with them. Even more troubling, if a clerk could excel using twenty-seven simple letters, why would anyone endure years of Neo-Confucian learning? They branded it a novelty, detrimental to scholarship and of no practical use to the state.
Sejong’s response was stern. He remarked that the older idu system had similarly relied on Chinese characters for their sounds, then questioned why the scholars lauded the achievements of Seolchong, an aristocratic Silla scholar,