Sejong and the Hangul script

[khiemtran]

This here is King Sejong, regarded as the greatest of the Korean rulers.



The caption underneath reads "Sejong Dae Wang" or "Great King Sejong". The script it's written in was one of Sejong's greatest achievements, and one of the most impressive scientific innovations of the era.



On the side of the pedestal, you can see the entire alphabet, in a simple, fitting tribute.



Hangul is an amazingly elegant solution to capturing the sounds of the Korean language. You can learn to read it in about a day. Literally. Especially clever people can do it in an hour. All the symbols are easy to remember, consonants and vowels are clearly divided, and, if you pay close attention, some of the characters also correspond to the positions in the mouth where the sounds are made.

Sound too good to be true? Well, yes, there is a catch. Korean has a whole bunch of pronunciation rules that you'll have to learn to go with it, based on the idea that certain consonant combinations (that no-one else seems to have a problem with) are "hard" and therefore can be replaced by other sounds. So, "hapnida" becomes "hamnida", for example, because words like "catnip" are just too hard to pronounce. Also, you have to watch out for consonants changing their sounds based on where they fall within a word.

But anyway, even with the pronunciation rules, you'll still be reading hangul within hours and a whole new world will open up to you. It doesn't take long to start recognizing words on signs and menus and there are a whole host of English loan words to help you along.

It really is transforming to see a street filled with signs that look like gibberish, only to realise that this one says "Curry", this one says "Soju", this one says "Samsung"...

Comments

[zeborah]

So, "hapnida" becomes "hamnida", for example, because words like "catnip" are just too hard to pronounce.

To be fair, English speakers don't actually say [kætnIp]; it's more like [kæ?nIp] (? representing a glottal stop) or even [kæ?nI?] depending on how the sentence flows. In my linguistics classes, we were taught with the example of "notebook" - if you say it at a reasonable speed and stop yourself just before saying "book", what you've actually *said* is closest to "nope". So when I learned hangeul those irregularities were easy for me because they follow very standard phonological rules (the spoken language presumably having changed along these lines since Sejong worked out the system) - though there were also a bundle of trickier rules I never did get a grip on, to do with syllables that end in two consonants.

(Do you have access to English-language-but-made-in-Korea news about the North Korea attack? It's obviously not at all *good*, but I lack sufficient historical and political perspective to have any idea how *bad* it is, and most of the news I find here derails into worrying about the stock market.)

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

To be fair, English speakers don't actually say [kætnIp]; it's more like [kæ?nIp] (? representing a glottal stop) or even [kæ?nI?] depending on how the sentence flows.

"Catnip. Catnip. Catnip." Hmm, the way I say it the T turns into a voiced alveolar flap ([kæɾnɪp].

Every language has its own set of sounds that that language considers hard to say and changes; these are subjective, not objective. For example, Hebrew at the pre-Biblical stage turned N before a consonant into a doubling of that consonant, but that didn't stop related languages keeping the original N; for example, "you" is *antā → attā in Hebrew, but ant in Aramaic; "India" is *Hondu → Hoddu, but that doesn't stop us saying "India" in English.

Why am I saying this? I'm sure you both know it (in the abstract, if not the examples I've given) already!

[zeborah]

New examples are always fun. :-)

I think English is at a point where what exactly happens to these consonants is a matter of dialect; give it (and various other changes going on) some more centuries and we may get diverging languages. The intervocalic glo'al stop (butter, button, etc) is really obvious in some seasons of Doctor Who (listen especially to Rose and her friends and family) where some other dialects have alveolar taps. I hadn't realised (though little in language surprises me) there was the same kind of variation in non-intervocalic contexts, and now I'm not quite sure what I say myself for either context. :-)

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Whilst I haven't watched Doctor Who since the Christopher Eccleston period, Rose is a Londoner, and Estuary English is infamous for its glottal stops...

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

for example, "you" is *antā → attā in Hebrew, but ant in Aramaic;

That's interesting. I wonder if it's a cognate of "anda" in Malay then too. Is *antā singular or plural? "Aap" in Hindi is the plural form of "you", but it gets used in the singular as an honorific form.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

That's interesting. I wonder if it's a cognate of "anda" in Malay then too.

No. The Semitic languages (which are thought to have arisen in the fourth millennium BCE) are a subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic languages, which are found in Africa and the Middle East, but not further east (except insofar as Islam has brought Arabic loanwords with it).

Is *antā singular or plural? "Aap" in Hindi is the plural form of "you", but it gets used in the singular as an honorific form.

It's singular. (The plural, in Hebrew, is attem/atten; I'm not familiar enough with Aramaic to know it there.)

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

(Do you have access to English-language-but-made-in-Korea news about the North Korea attack? It's obviously not at all *good*, but I lack sufficient historical and political perspective to have any idea how *bad* it is, and most of the news I find here derails into worrying about the stock market.)

No, but it got pretty much blanket coverage on the Korean then Japanese news on SBS this morning (and then about half the segment in the Mandarin news).

[zeborah]

I can imagine...

This morning I remembered Arirang News (text and audio) but still sounds very up in the air. Hopefully they'll let themselves be talked down.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

The papers here are all saying it's probably based around the ascension of Kim Jong-un to the number two spot (quoting various Chinese sources), but I guess the upshot is no-one really knows what the heck is going on in there.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Also, on the subject of hamnida, I actually had a lot of problems getting kamsa hamnida right. Not because of the consonants, but because I kept running out of breath at the wrong places. It really took me a few days to get the phrasing right, and to budget for enough air to really hit the da at short notice.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

That's fascinating! As I said, there is a small chance that we will be going to Seoul in a couple of year's time and, especially after reading green_knight's post about being functionally illiterate on the streets of Japan, I was a little worried about coping with the script, but if it can be learned quickly that suddenly turns it into just another interesting aspect of the trip.

[rymrytr.livejournal.com]

As a person who started School in 1950, I learned to enunciate in order to properly speak the English Language.

Over the years, I have stopped Speaking English...

an naow I taak Amarakin (and now I talk American).

I've noticed a lot of changes over the last 60 years and understand how fluid language is. We have lazy tongues. From the intersting example above, I felt around in saying the word, and came up with this (un-educated and unscientific) vocalization.

Kahtnip comes out like this: I say kha putting my tongue against the roof of my mouth in the beginning of forming the T sound, but do not complete it. Instead, I immediatly change the the second half of the N sound. I don't form the e sound that I hear when I say N along, but having left my tongue in the beginning of the T sound, finish it with the ending of the N sound, in one swift movement. Following that is the NIp sound. Here, I start the formation of the P sound by bringing my lips together but do not complete the "puff" that sound come when I open my lips.

Forgive me if this is to confusing, but I hope this isn't too confusing; I truly love discussions like this! :o)

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Thanks for commenting. Yes, it is a fascinating topic.