Korean Writing System
Korean (한국어/조선말, see below) is the official language of South Korea and North Korea as well as one of the two official languages in China's Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture. Approximately 78 million people speak Korean worldwide. For over a millennium, Korean was written with adapted Chinese characters called hanja, complemented by phonetic systems like hyangchal, gugyeol, and idu. In the 15th century, a national writing system called hangul was commissioned by Sejong the Great, but it only came into widespread use in the 20th century, because of the yangban aristocracy's preference for hanja.
Most historical linguists classify Korean as a language isolate while a few consider it to be in the controversial Altaic language family. The Korean language is agglutinative in its morphology and SOV in its syntax.
Read more about Korean Writing System: Names, Classification, History, Geographic Distribution, Dialects, Sounds, Grammar, Speech Levels and Honorifics, Vocabulary, Writing System, Differences Between North Korean and South Korean, Study By Non-native Learners, Glossary
Famous quotes containing the words writing and/or system:
“I have spent so long erecting partitions around the part of me that writes—learning how to close the door on it when ordinary life intervenes, how to close the door on ordinary life when it’s time to start writing again—that I’m not sure I could fit the two parts of me back together now.”
—Anne Tyler (b. 1941)
“The twentieth-century artist who uses symbols is alienated because the system of symbols is a private one. After you have dealt with the symbols you are still private, you are still lonely, because you are not sure anyone will understand it except yourself. The ransom of privacy is that you are alone.”
—Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911)