Origin of Hangul - Consonant Letters As Outlines of Speech Organs

Consonant Letters As Outlines of Speech Organs

Various fanciful speculations about the creation of hangul were put to rest by the discovery in 1940 of the 1446 Hunmin jeong-eum haerye "Explanation of the Hunmin Jeong-eum with Examples". This document explains the design of the consonant letters according to articulatory phonetics and the vowel letters according to Confucian principles such as the yin and yang of vowel harmony (see below).

Following the Indic tradition, hangul consonants are classified according to the speech organs involved in their production. However, hangul goes a step further, in that the shapes of the letters iconically represent the speech organs, so that all consonants of the same articulation are based on the same shape. That is, hangul is a featural alphabet, the only one in the world that is in common use. For example, the shape of the velar consonant (牙音 "molar sound") ㄱ is said to represent the back of the tongue bunched up to block the back of the mouth near the molars. Aspirate ㅋ is derived from this by the addition of a stroke which represents aspiration. Chinese voiced/"muddy" ㄲ is created by doubling ㄱ. (The doubled letters were only used for Chinese, as Korean had not yet developed its series of emphatic consonants. In the twentieth century they were revived for the Korean emphatics.)

Similarly, the coronal consonants (舌音 "tongue sounds") are said to show the (front of the) tongue bent up to touch the palate, the bilabial consonants (脣音 "lip sounds") represent the lips touching or parting, the sibilants (齒音 "incisor sounds") represent the teeth (in sibilants the airstream is directed against the teeth), and the guttural consonants (喉音 "throat sounds"), including the null initial used when a syllable begins with a vowel, represent an open mouth and throat. The labiodental consonants (輕脣音 "light lip sounds") are derived from the bilabial series. In all cases but the labials, the plain (清 "clear") stops have a vertical top stroke, the non-stops lack that stroke, and the aspirate stops have an additional stroke. There were a few additional irregular consonants, such as the coronal lateral/flap ㄹ, which the Haerye only explains as an altered outline of the tongue, and the velar nasal ㆁ . The irregularity of the labials has no explanation in the Haerye, but may be a remnant of the graphic origin of the basic letter shapes in the imperial ’Phagspa alphabet of Yuan Dynasty China.