Hangul as a global alphabet manque
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Best 16:34 introduction to the Korean alphabet you'll ever encounter — by Julesy, of course:
Her title: "The Lost Letters of Hangul That Could’ve Changed the World" (about two weeks ago).
Aside from restoring the lost letters, other things to consider for the further perfection of Hangul: parsing / spacing, indexing, ordering, inputting, capitalization, punctuation, linearization (instead of being imprisoned in the tetragraphic block form, which was strictly designed for compatibility with hanja).
Selected readings
- "The Hangeul Alphabet Moves beyond the Korean Peninsula" (8/6/09)
- "Hangeul for Cia-Cia, part II" (12/24/09)
- "Hangeul for Cia-Cia, part III" (10/7/10)
- "Cha-cha Cia-cia: the last dance" (10/8/12)
- "Hangeul for Cia-Cia, part IV" (1/5/24)
- "Hangul as alphasyllabary" (5/14/25)
- "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
- "Happy Hangul Day!" (10/9/23)
- "The pragmatic and innovative Choe Sejin — 15th-16th c. Korean phonetician, translator, and interpreter" (4/21/22)
- "Hangul Day" (10/9/05) — a very nice article by Bill Poser
- "Hangul Day" (10/9/15) — catchy theme song; noteworthy comments
- "A Dartmouth grad's contribution to the development of Hangul" (6/25/15)
- "Korean Romanization" (6/26/21)
- "The esthetics of East Asian writing" (4/7/12)
- "Apostrophe in Hangul" (11/16/16)
- "Sinitic 'ha ha ha' in Hangul letters" (9/18/20)
Peter Grubtal said,
November 8, 2025 @ 10:12 am
…manqué, please.
Victor Mair said,
November 8, 2025 @ 11:17 am
Watch your prescriptivism, please. I was certainly aware of the pronunciation "manqué" already in middle school, but by college and up to today, I noticed that many people whom I respect didn't adhere to that religiously. See here.
Stephen Goranson said,
November 8, 2025 @ 11:07 am
Fascinating. The use of Hangul in Indonesia was news to me.
AntC said,
November 8, 2025 @ 4:05 pm
It's always pronounced as if spelt 'manqué' — and that's what wikti at the link says (both IPA and audio). Whether it's _spelt_ with an écoute depends on your keyboard.
Yes, Julesy gives an excellently clear description and history. Except I was left with one question: how was Korean written before introducing Hangul? And did the new script cut off Koreans from their literary history? (Avoiding that loss is often given as the reason for persisting with Chinese logograms.)
David Morris said,
November 8, 2025 @ 6:06 pm
Korean was previously written in modified Chinese characters (hanja) and continued to be by the upper classes, partly because of literary continuity and partly as a marker of the time and effort required to master them. In their eyes, hangul was for children, women and peasants.
In 2008-9, when I was teaching English at a high school in South Korea, the students had one class per week for Chinese characters, which they obviously disliked.
Coincidentally, last Friday I visited King Sejong's burial site south-east of Seoul. There were replicas of his scientific instruments, but nothing I immediately saw about hangul. The large statue of him of Seoul's main plaza has hangul letters inscribed around the pedestal.
Anthony said,
November 8, 2025 @ 6:23 pm
écoute?
Anon said,
November 8, 2025 @ 7:14 pm
Few times occasionally Modi posts on X something like this:
ᱥᱮᱱᱳᱪᱦᱳᱫᱚᱲᱮᱣᱚᱭᱮᱣᱚᱶ
Wonder what kind of alphabet is that.
David Morris said,
November 8, 2025 @ 7:17 pm
I wrote that comment before I watched the video. Julesy answers your first question at 1.42.
Gokul Madhavan said,
November 8, 2025 @ 9:40 pm
@Anon: at first glance this looks like the Ol Chiki script used for writing the Santali language (the only Auatroasiatic (Munda) language included in the list of the 22 official languages in the Indian constitution).
wgj said,
November 8, 2025 @ 11:55 pm
The best way to demonstrate that hangul *could* be used to write Chinese or English is to "just do it". The fact that the video chose not to just do it tells me that the feasibility isn't real because there are a thousand problems yet to solve.
Philip Taylor said,
November 9, 2025 @ 5:51 am
I concur with Golul — Babelstone's "What Unicode character is this" states that all characters in the fragment that Anon posted are Ol Chiki —
David Marjanović said,
November 9, 2025 @ 6:57 am
e avec accent aigu, but the HTML entity is called é, so I suppose there's been some confusion.
Peter Grubal said,
November 10, 2025 @ 12:41 am
The fly in the ointment with hangul could be that it doesn't look terribly adaptable to a cursive version. But that would apply to many writing systems in fact.
Andreas Johansson said,
November 10, 2025 @ 1:51 am
I assume a way to write Mandarin in hangul must already exist – surely the North Koreans, who have abandoned Hanja, must have some means of writing Chinese words and names?
Peter Cyrus said,
November 10, 2025 @ 4:13 am
As someone who has spent years developing a practical universal alphabet – one that can write any language, and whose letters have consistent sounds – my reaction to the idea of using Hangeul in that role is that commenters have vastly underestimated what's required.
Hangeul has almost 60 letters in an exhaustive count; about as many as English needs. Now think of all the world's phonetic features that English lacks: front rounded vowels, nasal vowels, vowel length, tone, breathy plosives, implosives, ejectives, clicks, voiceless sonorants, lateral fricatives, aspirated or ejective fricatives, emphatic consonants, … What's the plan for writing those in Hangeul?
The Musa Alphabet needs over 500 letters, and such a large number moves the challenge from "having letters" to "organizing letters" in such as way as to be learned, remembered, found on keyboards and in fonts, and interpreted when encountered. Graphical series in Hangeul string three letters into an evolutionary sequence: simple, double, stacked or hatted. But graphical series in Musa are 15-20 letters long, and letters are part of multiples sequences.
I'm a big admirer of Hangeul, and very jealous of Sejong's power to see it implemented. But proposing it for widespread use beyond Korean seems to me fantastical, along the lines of "Let them eat cake".
wgj said,
November 10, 2025 @ 6:21 am
@Andreas: North Korea has not (completely) abandoned ganja – they're still used in proper names, at least. I've seen them with my own eyes – on official documents produced within the last ten years.
Andreas Johansson said,
November 10, 2025 @ 2:39 pm
And they use only hanja to write Chinese words and names?
wgj said,
November 11, 2025 @ 11:54 am
Not Chinese names – if by that you mean names of persons and things from China. I'm talking about proper names of persons and things from (and in, and by) North Korea, written in hanja by North Korean authorities, on documents that are mostly hangul.
Andreas Johansson said,
November 12, 2025 @ 4:49 am
So they use hanja for (some) Korean words and names, but hangul for Chinese ones? That's beautifully backwards.
But it would seem to answer my original query in the affirmative: there is already a way of writing Chinese in hangul.
Jim Breen said,
November 12, 2025 @ 8:19 pm
I enjoyed this video very much. Very informative.
Stephen Goranson said,
November 13, 2025 @ 8:04 am
In the ad portion, about 5:44, Julesy says "I'll bet your bottom dollar." I am more used to hearing "bet my bottom dollar." But her choice fits advertising context?
Chris Button said,
November 13, 2025 @ 8:20 am
I would love to get my hands on a copy of Gari Ledyard's book: "The Korean Language Reform of 1446."
Philip Taylor said,
November 13, 2025 @ 12:07 pm
Chris — https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/zorcgnxrggpncu87daqo9/the-korean-language-reform-of-1446_compress.pdf?rlkey=rqfcsyjjwxngejns0f2xdyd2m&dl=0
Chris Button said,
November 13, 2025 @ 4:25 pm
@ Philip Taylor
Very much appreciated. Thank you so much!
Chris Button said,
November 13, 2025 @ 4:27 pm
I had been scouring used bookstores, and was about to ask a Korean friend to see if they knew which ones were legit.
Philip Taylor said,
November 14, 2025 @ 5:29 am
My pleasure, Chris. Since my source was almost certainly unsanctioned, I decided it was better to clone a copy than offer a (public) link to the original …
Chris Button said,
November 14, 2025 @ 8:17 pm
I went straight to the section on ʼPhags-pa influence. Very interesting indeed.
I'm actually pretty old school and much prefer physical copies over digital when it comes to anything longer than an article. This book seems particularly elusive though–not even the Library of Congress holds a copy.
I will keep my eyes out for a used copy. Until then, thank you again!
Philip Taylor said,
November 15, 2025 @ 6:37 am
Perhaps worth lodging a "wanted" request with Abebooks, Chris — they have one copy of another book on Korean history by the same author : https://www.abebooks.co.uk/National-Security-Confucian-Style-Korean-Crisis/9962475233/bd
Victor Mair said,
November 15, 2025 @ 7:22 am
The best history of the Hangul alphabet is Gari Ledyard's unpublished Berkeley dissertation, "The Korean Language Reform of 1446: The Origin, Background, and Early History of the Korean Alphabet" (1966). The greatest authority on Ledyard's magisterial monograph is S. Robert Ramsey, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, who lives not far from Chris Button.
Chris Button said,
November 15, 2025 @ 10:49 am
I think the Ledyard book is the publication of the monograph.
And yes, I know Bob Ramsey. We've met a couple of times and had some good conversations.
Jim Unger said,
November 15, 2025 @ 11:41 am
I'm glad Gari's outstanding dissertation is being cited here. As for the "perfect" alphabet, it seems to me that the quality of an alphabet cannot be judged except in relation to the phonemics of the language it is being (proposed to be) used for. The IPA contains provides symbols for many more contrasts than there are phonemic contrasts in any one language, and there is usually more than one way to select a subset of graphically distinct IPA characters needed to for a particular language's phonemic contrasts—and sometimes digraphs can be used to reduce the number further, avoid diacrtics, etc.
Robert Ramsey said,
November 15, 2025 @ 5:57 pm
Thanks for those kind words about me, Victor. Yes, it’s true that I’m a long-term promoter of Gari Ledyard and his unrivaled book on King Sejong and his invention of the Korean Alphabet—though I dare say I’m far from the only one!
And yes, Gari’s suggestion that ‘Phags-pa writing provided (at least in part) an influence and inspiration for the construction of Hangul consonants is just as interesting as Chris Button suggests. But that part of Gari’s work also caused a certain amount of grief in Korea itself for Gari, because it clashed with certain hard-line, nativist views among scholars who tended to sanctify Hangul and its invention as completely the product of native ingenuity without even the slightest hint of any sullying, non-Korean influence! To me, that’s the great pity. For I believe that it caused Gari not to have been given all the recognition in Korea for his wide-ranging work on Korea and its history that, in the end, he received.
Also, the neglect that pains me in particular is the sidelining in Korea of Gari’s complete translation of, and exposition of, the Hunmin Jeongeum, Sejong’s promulgating text for the Korean alphabet in 1446. That particular translation has not been properly recognized for its brilliance. Among the versions that I’ve seen, Gari’s is by far the best, the most natural and fluent rendering of King Sejong’s seminal work that anyone has ever produced. It deserves to be on prominent display in the “Hangeul” Museum—and anywhere else Sejong’s creation is discussed and made available for an international audience!
I might add that this work of Gari’s was originally (as has already been mentioned on this thread) his Berkeley Ph.D. dissertation. That dissertation was quickly recognized for its brilliance and importance by Professor Lee Ki Moon of SNU, who subsequently arranged for its publication as a bound volume, and the result was the book that has also been discussed in this thread.
Gari was never happy with that resulting publication, though. The book was filled with flaws, and Gari kept trying to correct and rewrite parts of it—the way he did with almost everything else he wrote and published! But the book version of his dissertation published in Korea nevertheless stands as a brilliant and important publication. Oh, and might I also mention that it has a very useful index?
Philip Taylor said,
November 17, 2025 @ 10:11 am
If you are willing to risk purchasing from a Korean vendor, Chris, this site would appear to be offering a copy — https://www.aladin.co.kr/shop/wproduct.aspx?itemid=184973
Chris Button said,
November 17, 2025 @ 5:14 pm
@ Philip Taylor
Ordered (with a lot of help from google translate)! Thank you so much for the link.