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.

Syllabic blocks

Except for a few grammatical morphemes in the early days of Hangul, no jamo may stand alone to represent the Korean language. Instead, jamo are grouped into syllabic blocks containing, at minimum, an initial (syllabic onset) and a medial (syllabic nucleus). When a syllable has no initial consonant, the null initial ?ieung is used as a placeholder. No placeholder is needed when there is no final (syllabic coda).

Related Topics:
Syllabic - Syllabic onset - Syllabic nucleus - Syllabic coda

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The null initial was originally just that, null, but since it was only used in initial position, and the consonant ng was silent when initial as well as having a similar shape to the null character, the two came to be seen as the same letter.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Syllabic blocks may be composed of two or three jamo:

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

• Two jamo: an initial (a consonant or consonant cluster, or the null ㅇ) + a medial (a vowel or diphthong)
• Three jamo: an initial + a medial + a final (a consonant or consonant cluster)

The placement, or "stacking", of jamo in the block follows set patterns:

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

• The components of a complex jamo are written left to right. The most complex are two: ?, ?, etc. (Obsolete combinations are more complex: ?, ?, etc.)
• All modern Hangul vowels have either a vertical or horizontal axis.
• *Vertical vowel jamo are written to the right of the initial: ? i.
• *Horizontal vowel jamo are written under the initial: ? eu.
• *When a vowel jamo has both horizontal and vertical components, it wraps around the intitial from the bottom to the right: ? ui.
• A final jamo, if there is one, is added at the bottom. This is called ?? batchim "supporting floor".
• Blocks are always written in phonetic order, initial-medial-final. Therefore,
• *Syllables with a horizontal vowel jamo are written downward: ? eup.
• *Syllables with a vertical vowel jamo and simple final are written clockwise: ? ssang.
• *Syllables with a wrapping vowel jamo switch direction (down-right-down): ? doen.
• *Syllables with a comlex final are written left to right at the bottom: ? balp.

The resulting block is written within a rectangle of the same size and shape as a hanja, so to a naive eye syllabic blocks may be confused with hanja.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Not including obsolete jamo, there are some 11,571 possible Hangul blocks.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

There was a very minor movement in the twentieth century to abolish syllabic blocks and write the jamo individually and in a row, in the fashion of the Western alphabets: ??? geut. However, the blocks make Hangul very efficient to read, as each syllable has a unique shape. Now that Hangul orthography is morphophonemic (see below), this means that Hangul words have easily recognizable shapes. This is a great help to the reader; a similar word-recognition advantage has kept the Semitic abjads vowel-free for millennia. Indeed, people raised reading Chinese or Korean often report that reading the strings of letters in an alphabet like English is like trying to read Morse code, and the Korean linear writing movement has never gained much support.

Related Topics:
Twentieth century - Morphophonemic - Abjad - Morse code

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~