Origin of Hangul - Ledyard's Theory of Consonant Letters

Ledyard's Theory of Consonant Letters

Although the Hunmin jeong-eum haerye (hereafter Haerye) explains the design of the consonantal letters in terms of articulatory phonetics, it also states that Sejong adapted them from the enigmatic 古篆字 "Gǔ Seal Script". The identity of this script has long been puzzling. The primary meaning of the character 古 gǔ is "old", so 古篆字 gǔ zhuānzì has traditionally been interpreted as "Old Seal Script", frustrating philologists because hangul bears no functional similarity to Chinese 篆字 zhuānzì seal scripts. However, Gari Ledyard, Sejong Professor of Korean History Emeritus at Columbia University, notes that the character 古 gǔ also functions as a phonetic component of 蒙古 Měnggǔ "Mongol". Indeed, records from Sejong's day played with this ambiguity, joking that "no one is older (more 古 gǔ) than the 蒙古 Měng-gǔ". Ledyard deduces from palace records that 古篆字 gǔ zhuānzì was a veiled reference to the 蒙古篆字 měnggǔ zhuānzì "Mongol Seal Script", that is, a formal variant of the Mongol ’Phagspa alphabet of Yuan dynasty that had been modified to look like the Chinese seal script, and which had been an official script of the empire. There were ’Phagspa manuscripts in the Korean palace library from the Yuan Dynasty government, including some in the seal-script form, and several of Sejong's ministers knew the script well. If this was the case, Sejong's evasion on the Mongol connection can be understood in light of the political situation in the current ethnically Chinese Ming Dynasty. The topic of the recent Mongol domination of China, which had ended just 75 years earlier, was politically sensitive, and both the Chinese and Korean literati considered the Mongols to be barbarians with nothing to contribute to a civilized society.

Ledyard holds that five core consonant letters were adopted from ’Phagspa, ㄱ g, ㄷ d, ㅂ b, ㅈ j, and ㄹ l . These were the consonants basic to Chinese phonology, rather than the graphically simplest letters (ㄱ g, ㄴ n, ㅁ m, and ㅅ s ) taken as the starting point by the Haerye. A sixth letter, the null initial ㅇ, was invented by Sejong. The rest of the consonants were created through featural derivation of these six, essentially as described in the Haerye; a resemblance to speech organs was an additional motivating factor in selecting the shapes of both the basic letters and their derivatives.

Although several of the basic concepts of hangul were inherited from Indic phonology through the ’Phagspa script, such as the relationships among the homorganic consonants and, of course, the alphabetic principle itself, Chinese phonology played a major role. Besides the grouping of letters into syllables, in functional imitation of Chinese characters, according to Ledyard it was Chinese phonology, not Indic, that determined which five consonants were basic, and were therefore to be retained from ’Phagspa. These included t