Hangul as alphasyllabary
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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
Philip Taylor said,
May 14, 2025 @ 6:37 am
Could I trouble you to explain "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", Victor ? To what does "one for the populace and one for the literati" apply ? To the manuscript, to the script, to "The Correct Proper Sounds", or to something else ?
Victor Mair said,
May 14, 2025 @ 6:41 am
"two facsimile versions"
Philip Taylor said,
May 14, 2025 @ 7:14 am
Aha — how did I miss that at a first reading ?!
Jongseong Park said,
May 14, 2025 @ 8:38 am
The romanization of Korean is a huge and complex topic, and I think the official guidelines leave a lot to be desired. I'm not talking about the choice of how to write individual sounds (even if not everyone is happy with it, that ship has sailed). I mean things like word division and how to mark ambiguous syllable boundaries.
The thirteenth-century tome 삼국유사(三國遺事), or Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms, should be written as Samgungnyusa according to the official guidelines. I can guarantee that no one in Korean studies is using that romanization. Everyone treats it as two words, writing Samguk Yusa or Samguk yusa depending on whether to capitalize the second element. The detailed "Korean Romanization and Word Division" document from the Library of Congress would favour the latter, as it capitalizes only the first word in titles of books.
One only has to compare the 66-page guidelines from the Library of Congress to South Korea's official romanization guidelines which would take up a couple of pages at most in large print to see that the latter barely gives any consideration to the issue of word division. But this is a huge issue because Korean tends to be more flexible with word spacing than languages such as English. Spaces between words that make up a compound are optional, and in practice you end up with long compounds that would be unwieldy to romanize as single words.
Korean also has a number of phonological processes that work across syllable boundaries, so the word divisions matter quite a bit as you can see from the example of Samgungnyusa vs Samguk yusa.
I myself tend to combine the official romanization with the Library of Congress word division rules, roughly speaking. I also prefer to use the apostrophe to disambiguate syllable boundaries, and think that they should always be used when a sequence is created that could be interpreted as a single sound. For example, 가을 should be written ga'eul not to be confused with 개울 gaeul. The official rules use hyphens instead and only on an optional basis. I prefer to reserve hyphens for other uses such as separating particles.