The stories about Korean Language

Origin of the Korean Language

The Korean language is believed to have been spoken for roughly 9,000 years, dating back to the Neolithic period. Korean belongs to the Transeurasian language family, together with Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic and Japanese.

As it evolved through ancient Korean and later into Middle Korean during the Goryeo Dynasty, the language existed mainly as a spoken language without a writing system. To record the language, Chinese characters were borrowed, but Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family, which is very different from Korean. As a result, Chinese characters could not accurately represent Korean sounds and expressions.

Origin of Hangul

Chinese characters were difficult to learn, could not fully represent Korean pronunciation and limited written expression. Because this caused widespread inconvenience in society, King Sejong of the Joseon Dynasty initiated the creation of a new writing system specifically for Korean, which we now call Hangul.

Among the world’s writing systems, Hangul is unique in that both its inventor and the time of invention are clearly known. However, developing Hangul and establishing it as the official script of Korea was not an easy process.

The Hangul Creation Story (Hunminjeongeum)

King Sejong wanted to relieve the difficulties of everyday written communication and, out of compassion for his people, wished to enable “the uneducated commoners to express their thoughts easily.” With this humanitarian spirit, he decided to create a new writing system.

• Creation Process and Period: Working secretly with scholars of the Hall of Worthies, King Sejong completed 28 new letters in 1443.
• Proclamation and Name: In 1446, the script was officially proclaimed as Hunminjeongeum, meaning “The Proper Sounds for the Instruction of the People.”
• Scientific Principles: Hangul is a scientific and original script based on the shapes of the speech organs. Consonants are modeled on the shapes of the tongue, lips and teeth, while vowels are built on the philosophical principle of the Three Elements: Heaven (·), Earth (ㅡ) and Human (ㅣ).
• From Hunminjeongeum to Hangul: Initially, the script was called Hunminjeongeum or Eonmun, but in the early 20th century, linguists such as Ju Si-gyeong popularized the name “Hangul”, meaning “the great and perfect script.”

The creation of Hangul democratized access to written communication, enabled full expression of the Korean language and laid the foundation for Korea’s cultural and technological development. The original Hunminjeongeum manuscript is designated as Korean National Treasure No. 70 and its records are registered as a UNESCO Memory of the World.

Structure and Features of Hangul

Hangul consists of 14 basic consonants and 10 basic vowels. Including double consonants (5) and compound vowels (11), there are 40 letters (jamo).

By combining these letters into blocks called syllables (gulja), Hangul can form 11,172 possible syllables. Once you learn the consonants and vowels, you can read all of these syllables without memorizing them individually.

For comparison:

• Japanese: fewer than 300 possible sounds
• Chinese: around 400 possible sounds
• Hangul: over 7,000 possible sounds

In short, Hangul is very easy to learn, can represent a huge variety of sounds and has remarkable flexibility and expandability. For example, the Cia-Cia people of Indonesia, who historically had no native writing system, adopted Hangul and even use additional consonants that appeared in early forms of Hangul.

In the preface of the Hunminjeongeum Haerye, the manual for using Hangul, King Sejong wrote: “A wise man can learn it before the morning is over, and even an uneducated person can learn it in ten days.”

Hangul in the AI Era

Hangul is very easy to type on a keyboard, and because each character represents a single sound, pronunciation is clear and straightforward. With its rich expressive capacity and high scalability, Hangul is widely regarded as a writing system that is well suited to the age of AI.

Try learning Hangul and writing your name with it. If you can say it, Hangul can write it.