Origin of Hangul

rdf:langString Origin of Hangul

rdf:langString The Korean alphabet (Hangul, 한글) is the native script of Korea, created in the mid fifteenth century by King Sejong, as both a complement and an alternative to the logographic Sino-Korean Hanja. Initially denounced by the educated class as eonmun (vernacular writing; 언문, 諺文), it only became the primary Korean script following independence from Japan in the mid-20th century. The Korean alphabet is a featural alphabet written in morpho-syllabic blocks, and was designed for both the Korean and Chinese languages, though the letters specific to Chinese are now obsolete. Each block consists of at least one consonant letter and one vowel letter. When promulgated, the blocks reflected the morphology of Korean, but for most of the fifteenth century they were organized into syllables. In the twentieth century the morpho-syllabic tradition was revived. The blocks were traditionally written in vertical columns from top to bottom, although they are now commonly written in horizontal rows from left to right as well. Spacing has been introduced to separate words, and punctuation to indicate clauses and sentences, so that the Korean alphabet now transcribes Korean at the levels of feature, segment, syllable, morpheme, word, clause, and sentence. However, the suprasegmental features of tone and vowel length, seen as single and double tick marks to the left of the syllabic blocks in the image in the next section, have been dropped. In 1948 North Korea introduced six new letters, including two of Sejong's which had become obsolete in order to make the Korean alphabet a perfect morphophonological fit to the Korean language. However they were soon discarded.