Language Log

« previous post |

After visiting the massive National Museum of Korea in Seoul, I was eager to go to the National Hangeul Museum nearby.  Alas, it is under renovation, so I was unable to enter it this time, but I will go back on some future occasion when I travel to Korea.  I did, however, manage to buy two facsimile versions of the Hunminjeongeum 훈민정음 / 訓民正音 ("The Correct / Proper Sounds for the Instruction of the People), a 15th-century manuscript that introduced the Korean script Hangul, one for the populace and one for the literati.

Several of the comments to this post, "How to say 'Seoul'" (5/12/25), prompted me to think some more about a problem that had perplexed me from the time I did a review of The Korean Buddhist Canon: A Descriptive Catalogue, by Lewis R. Lancaster, in collaboration with Sung-bae Park (Berkeley and Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 1979).  That was nearly half a century ago, but I still remember keenly how difficult it was to romanize the titles and the proper nouns.  The hardest part of that was dealing with what happened at syllable boundaries.  It was obvious that different authorities romanized the sounds in discrepant ways.

As I wrestled with that large tome (724 pages) having more than a thousand detailed bibliographical entries, I grew increasingly frustrated and exasperated at not being able to get clear-cut answers about the romanization even from specialists on Korean Buddhism and language.  Somehow, I managed to get through the task, which took the better part of a month, but was not completely satisfied with the results.

All of this fits with the conception of Hangul as an alphasyllabary, in that it is neither an alphabet nor a syllabary, but somewhere in between.  How did that happen? 

To the extent that it possesses vowels and consonants, Hangul had / has the potential to develop into a true alphabet, but the desire to make Hangul compatible with Sinitic tetraglyphs caused its creators to squeeze the letters of the Hangul alphabet into square-shaped blocks, like the strokes / components of sinographs, which they are not.

This quadratic imperative of Hangul tends to emphasize the syllable in Korean phonology, and one can hear that when spoken at normal or slow speed.  But when speech is rapid, the syllable boundaries tend to get slurred or blended.  This happens even with sequences of sinographs, which I have often written about on Language Log (see, for example, the long series of posts on "When intonation overrides tone", but there are many others).

In one or two forthcoming posts, I will give specific examples of such blurring / blending at syllable boundaries of spoken Korean phrases.  In each case, they confused me greatly because I was not able quickly to disentangle the constituent phonemes.  Indeed, they often disappeared (got swallowed up by the resultant whole).

Selected readings

• "Grids galore" (11/19/23)
• "Hangul: Joseon subservience to Ming China" (5/14/22)
• "Hangul for Cantonese" (11/18/24)
• Coblin, W. South (2006). A Handbook of ʼPhags-pa Chinese. ABC Dictionary Series. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-3000-7 — 'Phags-pa played a key role in the creation of Hangul

May 14, 2025 @ 6:14 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Alphabets, Syllabism, Writing systems

Permalink