3 - Writing System

Summary

Chapter 3 covers the way the Korean language is and has been written. The primary topic is Hangul, the writing system invented in the fifteenth century and now a symbol of Korean culture and language. The Hangul system is renowned for the elegance and rationality of its design. Alone among national writing systems in the world, it combines alphabetic and syllabic features. We cover the background and controversies surrounding the invention of Hangul and describe its important linguistic features. But we also stress the continuities between Hangul and the writing technologies that preceded and surrounded it. These include the system known as kugyol, which was devised in the Silla period as a way of glossing a Chinese text to read it in Korean. Like kugyol, the Hangul alphabet was originally devised to make texts in Chinese characters accessible to Korean readers. Although far superior to kugyol and, unlike its predecessor, designed as an all-purpose writing system, Hangul retained a central design feature – the ability to write the sounds of Korean as a syllabic block, thus occupying graphic space in the same way as other written languages of the region.