Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

Sino-Phonic Papers, 27 (August 3 1. 199 1)
IXvelqxnent of Writing in Korea
The earliest evidence of writing in the Korean peninsula dates from
China's establishment of its Lolang colony in northern Korea in 108 B.C.
Chinese characters were used to record the Chinese language. It was not
until the 5th century A.D. that Koreans are known to have adopted these
symbols to elements of their own language. As was later true of Japanese,
Koreans used the characters in tm distinct ways. They could be used for
their semantic value to represent indigenous Korean mrds that had meanings
similar to the character's meaning in Chinese. The reader would look at
a character and supply an equivalent Korean word, as the Japanese do with
their -
kun readings today. The second type involved use of the characters
for their phonetic value. Korean approximations of the characters ' Chinese
sounds iere matched with the sounds of Korean words. The characters in
this way became units of a proto-syllabpry that expressed sound, regardless
of what the £oms meant originally. These two principles m e used
concurrently in - Idu (lit. "official readingsf'), the system employed in
the bureaucracy f m the 7th century onward, and in a number of other hybrid
systems.
Many will recognize in this phonetic use of Qlinese characters the
beginning of a process that led in Japanese and other languages to a
phonetic script, through which all of a language's words could be written
with a limited number of symbols, There was movement toward this in Korean
as well, encouraged by the difficulty Koreans had recording proper names,
and finding plausible semantic associations between Qlinese characters
and Korean grammar morphemes. Unlike Japanese, the process was thwarted
by the large number of syllable types in Korean. As long as the syllable
remained the basic orthographic unit, a system representing these units
muld be as unwieldy as the conventions already in place.
The dilemma was resolved, in principle, with the invention of Korea's
hangul alphabet in 1446. Based on symbols that bear an actual resemblance
to the human vocal organs at various points of articulation, hangul was
designed from the start to represent Korean sounds, and only sounds. Its
24 basic signs identify the language's vowel and consonant phonemes
accurately and unambiguously. As with any alphabet, hangul letters are
canbined to form a model of the word's sound when spoken. In most cases
the relationship between hangul letter and sound is direct. Elsewfiere
the spelling reflects what Koreans believe to be a word's underlying
- -
phonology, the pronunciation being derivable by a few simple rules. The
system is practical, sufficient and easy to use. It seems complex only
because Koreans decided to combine the letters into syllable blocks, in
deference to the Confucian-dminated court which rpr& that the oukd
appearance of the Chinese characters be maintained,
Despite its utility, hangul was unable to replace the Idu script favored
by the bureaucracy until the end of the 19th century, when both script
and users were ousted in a series of egalitarian political reforms. For
a few years after the Kap'o (1894) rebellion, hangul was the official medium