REPOST: Science Blog, “Korean alphabet forming sound”
Why I’m Reposting
I am terrible at learning languages. I need mnemonics. Read "Hebrew is Beautiful".
If I ever work on a new language, to compete with my fiancée's six languages and counting (y contando / Tendenz steigend / וממשיך לעלות / dan terus bertambah), I'd have to consider Korean for the reasons outlined below.
Also, I love fried chicken and kimchi.
Anywhoodles, the post: Korean's alphabet, Hangul, was deliberately designed in the 15th century under King Sejong. The basic consonants represent the positions of your tongue, teeth, lips, and throat when you make their sounds. The system is so logical that one contemporary scholar claimed a wise person could learn it before lunch.
ScienceBlog is a science publication that, according to ChatGPT, turns research and scientific oddities into stories for general readers, covering everything from health and psychology to technology, physics, and space. They describe their mission simply as "clear science for curious people." Go check 'em out.
Read it here or read below.
Source: Science Blog
The Korean alphabet is the only one on Earth with a known inventor and a written explanation for why every letter looks the way it does — designed in 1443 by King Sejong, who shaped each consonant to trace the tongue, teeth, or lips forming that exact sound
A 15th-century alphabet designed by tracing the human mouth—each letter a visual diagram of how your tongue, teeth, and lips produce that exact sound.
Daniel Moran; Aug 8, 2026
Put a fingertip just behind your top front teeth and say “nnn”. Feel where the tongue lands, tip pressed flat against the ridge of the palate. Now look at ㄴ, the Korean letter for that exact sound. Same shape, drawn from the side, as though someone had sliced a head open to see exactly how the sound was made.
Try “mmm”. Lips shut, the mouth closed into a small square box. ㅁ.
Someone worked this out in the 1440s and, more unusually, wrote down the reasoning.
The king who took a sound apart
“The correct sounds for the instruction of the people.” That is what Sejong, fourth ruler of Korea’s Joseon dynasty, called the document he issued in 1446, three years after first announcing a new script for his subjects. A companion volume, the Haerye, did what no other writing system had bothered to do and explained the design. Which letters came first. How the rest were derived. What each shape was meant to depict. UNESCO placed the surviving manuscript on its Memory of the World register in 1997, and the copy is held at the Kansong Art Museum in Seoul.
Five consonants form the base set, and each is a diagram of a mouth caught mid-sound. Choi Hong-Shik, a laryngologist at Yonsei University College of Medicine, ran the shapes past modern speech science and published his analysis in the Journal of the Korean Society of Laryngology, Phoniatrics and Logopedics, concluding that all five work as side-on cross sections of the vocal tract. ㄱ gets called the molar letter, but Choi reads it as the hump of the tongue rising near the back teeth rather than a picture of a tooth. ㅁ is the front of the mouth in profile. ㅇ is the open space of the throat.
Everything else grows out of those five. Add a stroke and the sound gains a puff of air behind it, turning ㄱ into ㅋ. Double the letter and the sound tightens, turning ㄱ into ㄲ.
Learn five shapes and you have effectively learned seventeen.
Every other alphabet is a hand-me-down
Latin letters arrived by accident. A was a Phoenician ox head, tipped on its side and abstracted through Greek and Etruscan hands until nobody could see the ox any more. Nobody chose that. It happened slowly, across a few thousand years of copying, mistakes and drift, which is why the shape of a Roman letter tells you nothing whatsoever about the sound it makes.
Korean is odd enough that linguists had to build a new category for it. British linguist Geoffrey Sampson coined the term “featural” writing for scripts whose shapes encode the physical ingredients of a sound rather than the sound as a lump, and he has argued that no other national writing system pushes the idea as far as Korea’s does. Not everyone in the field loves the label, and some prefer to call Hangul an alphabet with unusually tidy internal logic. Either way, the letters know something about your tongue.
Seven scholars filed a complaint
Why would seven of the king’s own scholars try to talk him out of his own invention? In the second month of 1444, Choe Manri, first counsellor in the Hall of Worthies, submitted a memorial to Sejong on behalf of himself and six colleagues. Columbia University’s Asia for Educators project hosts a translation of that memorial from the Sejong Sillok, the court annals, and the objections are startlingly frank. Only barbarians have scripts of their own, the scholars argued. Adopting one meant walking away from China and joining them. Worse, if a clerk could get ahead on twenty-seven easy letters, why would anyone endure years of Neo-Confucian study? A novelty, they called it, bad for scholarship and no use to the state.
Sejong’s reply was not gentle. He noted that the older idu system had also leaned on Chinese characters for their sounds, then asked why the scholars praised the work of Seolchong, an aristocratic Silla scholar, while rejecting the work of their own king. How many vowels, he wanted to know, could they count in the Four Tones and Seven Sounds? If not him, who was going to fix the rhyme dictionaries?
Choe was dismissed and reinstated the next day, after which he resigned and went home to his village. Ross King, quoted in an exchange on Language Log, points out that the memorial never quite attacks the script itself, and that Korean scholars tend to read it as an objection to Sejong’s broader overhaul of Sino-Korean pronunciation. He died the following year, before the alphabet was even published.
Learnable before lunch
“A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over.” That line comes from Jeong Inji, one of the scholars who wrote the Haerye commentary, and six centuries later it still works as the best pitch for the script. A slower learner, he added, would need about ten days. The University of Illinois International and Area Studies Library quotes the line in its primer on learning Korean.
Elite scholars agreed with the assessment and meant it as an insult. One of their nicknames for the new writing translates as something close to morning script, on the grounds that anything a farmhand could master before lunch was beneath a gentleman. Chinese characters stayed the prestige medium for nearly five centuries afterward.
Which is where it gets strange.
For most of that stretch, nobody actually knew why the letters looked the way they did. Haerye, the volume holding all the explanations, fell out of circulation and stayed lost until 1940, when a copy surfaced in a house in Andong. Korea was under Japanese colonial rule by then, and Korean was being steadily pushed out of schools and public life. The book proving the alphabet had been engineered on purpose, by name, with reasons, reappeared at exactly the moment Koreans most needed evidence that the thing had been theirs all along.
Thoughts?
I fact-checked this one and can confirm everything above, except for one detail you can go argue with AI about.
The author says Hangul is the only writing system in the world for which we know the inventor. There are more recently invented writing systems still used by sizable populations whose creators we know, including the Cherokee syllabary, invented by Sequoyah in the early 1800s. That doesn’t diminish that Hangul is extraordinarily unusual among major writing systems.
