Hangul

Hangul (??) is the native alphabet used to write the Korean language, as opposed to the Hanja system borrowed from China. For other Romanized spellings of "Hangul", please see Names below.

Orthography

Until the 20th century, no official orthography of Hangul had been established. Due to liaison, heavy consonant assimilation, dialectical variants and other reasons, a Korean word can potentially be spelled in various ways. King Sejong seemed to prefer morphophonemic spelling (representing the underlying morphology) rather than a phonemic one (representing the actual sounds). However, early in its history, Hangul was dominated by phonemic spelling. Over the centuries the orthography became partially morphophonemic, first in nouns, and later in verbs. Today it is as morphophonemic as is practical.

Related Topics:
Morphophonemic - Phonemic

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• Pronunciation and translation:

:{{IPA|}}

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:a person who cannot do it

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• Phonemic orthography:

:??????

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:{{IPA|/mo.t?a.n?n.sa.la.mi/}}

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• Morphophonemic orthography:

:??????

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:{{IPA||mos.ha.n?n.sa.lam.i |}}

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Morpheme-by-morpheme gloss:

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After Gabo Reform in 1894, Joseon Dynasty and later Korean Empire started to write all official documents in Hangul. Under the government's management, proper usage of Hangul, including orthography, was discussed, until Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910.

Related Topics:
Gabo Reform - Joseon Dynasty - Korean Empire - Annexed

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The Japanese Government-General of Chosen established the writing style of a mixture of Hanja and Hangul, as in the Japanese writing system. The government revised the spelling rules in 1912, 1921 and 1930, which were relatively phonemic.

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The Hangul Society, originally founded by Ju Si-gyeong, announced a proposal for a new, strongly morphophonemic orthography in 1933, which became the prototype of the contemporary orthographies in both North and South Korea. After Korea was divided, the North and South revised orthographies separately. The guiding text for Hangul orthography is the called the Hangul Matchumbeop, whose last South Korean revision was published in 1988 by the Ministry of Education.

Related Topics:
Hangul Society - Ju Si-gyeong - Hangul Matchumbeop

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Mixed scripts

During the Japanese colonial era, hanja were used for lexical (noun and verb) roots, and Hangul for grammatical words and inflections, much as kanji and kana are used in Japanese. However, hanja have been almost entirely phased out of daily use in North Korea, and in South Korea they are now mostly restricted to parenthetical glosses for proper names and for disambiguating homonyms.

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Arabic numerals are also mixed in with hangul, as in 2005? 7? 5? (5 July, 2005).

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The Latin alphabet, and occasionally other alphabets, may be sprinkled within Korean texts for illustrative purposes, or for unassimilated loanwords.

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