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.