Ledyard's Theory on the Creation of Hangul

Gari Ledyard, Sejong Professor of Korean History Emeritus at Columbia University, believes that the derivation in the Hunmin Jeong-eum is a mnemonic, or a rationalization invented after the fact, and that hangul actually derives, at least in part, from the Mongol Phagspa alphabet (known as the 蒙古篆字 měnggǔ zhuānzì, or Mongol seal script) of the Yuan dynasty. Only five basic consonants were borrowed from Phagspa, with the rest derived from these internally, similar to the account in the Hunmin Jeong-eum. However, the consonants believed to be basic differ in the two accounts. Whereas the Hunmin Jeong-eum credits the graphically simplest letters ㄱㄴㅁㅅㅇ as being basic, with all others derived from these six by adding strokes, Ledyard believes the five letters ㄱㄷㄹㅂㅈ were basic, with strokes sometimes added, but also sometimes subtracted, to derive the other letters. These five basic letters would then ultimately derive from the Tibetan letters ག ད ལ བ ས, and thus may be cognate with Greek Γ Δ Λ Β and the letters C D L B of the English alphabet. (The history of the S sounds in Tibetan and Greek is more difficult to reconstruct.) A sixth basic letter, ㅇ, was invented ex nihilo, as it was in the Hunmin Jeong-eum account. Columbia University is a private university in New York City. ... Hangul (한글) is the native alphabet used to write the Korean language, as opposed to the Hanja system borrowed from China. ... The Mongolian language historically has four writing systems that have been used over the centuries. ... The Yuan Dynasty (Mongolian: Dai Ön Yeke Mongghul Ulus; Chinese: 大元大蒙古帝国) lasting officially from 1271 to 1368, also called the Mongol Dynasty, was the name given to the significant ruling family of Borjigin in Asia. ... The Tibetan script was created in the mid-7th century, by Thonmi Sambhota, a Tibetan official, with the assistance of some Indian Buddhist monks. ...

The derivation of the vowel letters is essentially the same in the two accounts.

Consonantal jamo design

(Top) Phagspa letters [k, t, p, s, l], and their supposed hangul derivatives [k, t, p, ts, l]. Note the lip on both Phagspa [t] and hangul ㄷ.
(Bottom) Derivation of Phagspa w, v, f from variants of the letter [h] (left) plus a subscript [w], and analogous composition of hangul w, v, f from variants of the basic letter [p] plus a circle.

The Hunmin Jeong-eum credits the 古篆字 "Gu Seal Script" as being the source King Sejong or his ministers used to create hangul. This has traditionally been interpreted as the Old Seal Script, and has confused philologists because hangul bears no functional similarity to the Chinese seal scripts. However, 古 gǔ had more than one meaning: besides meaning old, it could be used to refer to the Mongols (蒙古 Měng-gǔ). Records from Sejong's day played with this ambiguity, joking that "no one is more gu than the Meng-gu". That is, Gu Seal Script may have been a veiled reference to the Mongol Seal Script, or Phagspa alphabet. (Seal script is a style of writing, used for name seals and official stamps. Phagspa had a seal script variant modeled after the appearance of the Chinese seal script of its day. In this guise it was called the 蒙古篆字 Mongol Seal Script.) There were certainly plenty of Phagspa manuscripts in the Korean palace library, and several of Sejong's ministers knew the script well. (Top) The Phagspa letters , and their hangul derivatives, g, t, b, j, l . ... (Top) The Phagspa letters , and their hangul derivatives, g, t, b, j, l . ... 《尋隱者不遇》—賈島 松下問童子 言師採藥去 隻在此山中 雲深不知處 Seeking the Master but not Meeting by Jia Dao Beneath a pine I asked a little child. ...

There are a couple reasons why Sejong and his ministers may not have wanted to advertise the Mongol origin of hangul. After the fall of the Yuan dynasty, all things Mongol were verboten in China, and relations with the Ming dynasty may have been important enough for Korea not to want to overtly credit the Mongols with an important cultural development. It may also be that resistance to hangul among the Korean cultural elite, who favored writing in Chinese, was strong enough without acknowledging the "barbarian" Mongols. Indeed, such China-centered resistance kept hangul out of common use until the dawn of the twentieth century. This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...

Although several of the basic concepts of hangul came from Indic phonology through the Phagspa script, such as the relationships among the homorganic jamo and, of course, the alphabetic principle itself, Chinese phonology also played a major role. Besides the grouping of jamo into syllables, along the lines of Chinese characters, it was Chinese phonology, not Indic, that determined which five consonants were basic, and therefore to be retained from Phagspa. These were the tenuis (non-voiced, non-aspirated) plosives, g for ㄱ [k], d for ㄷ [t], and b for ㅂ [p], which were basic to Chinese theory, but which were voiced in the Indic languages and not considered basic; as well as the sibilant s for ㅈ [ts] and the liquid l for ㄹ [l]. (Korean ㅈ was pronounced [ts] in the 15^th century.) An alphabet is a complete standardized set of letters — basic written symbols — each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past. ... A tenuis consonant is one which is unvoiced and unaspirated. ...

(It is somewhat problematic that hangul ㅈ [ts] has been derived from Phagspa s [s] rather than from dz [ts]. However, the shape of the Phagspa s may have been more conducive to deriving multiple hangul letters than Phagspa dz would have been. Such a shift could easily have happened if the entire Phagspa alphabet were first used as a template for the new alphabet, and then whittled down to a minimal set of basic letters through featural derivation, so that a more convenient shape from among the Phagspa letters [s, ts, tsʰ, z, dz] could be used as the basis for the hangul letters for the sibilants [s, ts, tsʰ].)

The basic hangul letters have been simplified graphically, retaining the essential shape of Phagspa but with a reduced number of strokes. For example, the box inside Phagspa g is not found in hangul ㄱ [k]. This simplification allowed for complex jamo clusters, but also left room for an additional stroke to derive the aspirate plosives, ㅋㅌㅍㅊ. On the other hand, the non-plosives, nasals ng (see below) ㄴㅁ and the fricative ㅅ, were derived by removing the top of the tenuis letter. (No letters were derived from ㄹ.) This clears up a few points. For example, it's easy to derive ㅁ from ㅂ by removing the top of ㅂ, but it's not clear how you'd get ㅂ by adding something to ㅁ, since ㅂ is not analogous to the other plosives: if they were derived, as in the traditional account, we'd expect them all to have a similar vertical top stroke.

Sejong also needed a null symbol to refer to the lack of a consonant, and he chose the circle, ㅇ. The subsequent derivation of the glottal stop ㆆ, by adding a vertical top stroke by analogy with the other plosives, and the aspirate ㅎ parallel the account in the Hunmin Jeong-eum. The phonetic theory inherent in this derivation is more accurate than modern IPA usage. In the IPA, the glottal consonants are posited as having a specific "glottal" place of articulation. However, recent phonetic theory has come to view the glottal stop and [h] to be isolated features of 'stop' and 'aspiration' without a true place of articulation, just as their hangul representations based on the null symbol assume. A stop or plosive or occlusive is a consonant sound produced by stopping the airflow in the vocal tract. ... The International Phonetic Alphabet. ...

The ng is the odd letter out here, as it is in the Hunmin Jeong-eum. This may reflect its variable behavior. Hangul was designed not just to write Korean, but to accurately represent Chinese. Besides the letters covered here, there were quite a few more used to represent Chinese etymology. Now, many Chinese words began with ng, at least historically, and this was being lost in several regions of China by Sejong's day: that is, etymological ng was either silent or pronounced [ŋ] in China, and was silent when borrowed into Korean. The expected shape of ng had the additional problem that, by being just the vertical line left by removing the top stroke of ㄱ, it would have been easily confused with the vowel ㅣ [i]. Sejong's solution solved both these problems: the vertical stroke from ㄱ was added to the null symbol ㅇ to create ᇰ, graphically representing both regional pronunciations as well as being easily legible. (If your browser doesn't display this, it's a circle with a vertical line on top, like an upside-down keyhole or lollipop.) Thus ᇰ was pronounced ng in the middle or end of a word, but was silent at the beginning. Eventually the graphic distinction between the two silent initials ㅇ and ᇰ was lost.

(It's also possible that the ng was inspired by the part of the Phagspa g that had been dropped when fashioning hangul ㄱ. Indeed, Phagspa g looks rather like a hangul ᇰ nested inside a ㄱ.)

Two additional details lend credence to Ledyard's hypothesis. For one, the composition of obsolete ᇢᇦᇴ w, v, f (for Chinese initials 微非敷), from the graphic derivatives of the basic letter ㅂ b [p] (that is, ㅁㅂㅍ m, b, p) by adding a small circle under them, is parallel to their Phagspa equivalents, which were similarly derived by adding a small loop under three graphic variants of the letter h. Now, this small loop also represented w when it occurred after vowels in Phagspa. The Chinese initial 微 represented either m or w in various dialects, and this may be reflected in the choice of ㅁ [m] plus ㅇ (from Phagspa [w]) as the elements of hangul ᇢ. Not only is the series ᇢᇦᇴ analogous to Phagspa, but here we may have a second example of a letter composed of two elements to represent two regional pronunciations, m and w, as we saw with ᇰ for ng and null.

Secondly, most of the basic hangul letters were originally simple geometric shapes. For example, ㄱ was the corner of a square, ㅁ a full square, ㅅ was a caret-like Λ, ㅇ was a circle. In the Hunmin Jeong-eum, before the influence from Chinese calligraphy on hangul, these are purely geometric. However, ㄷ was different. It wasn't a simple half square, like we might expect if Sejong had simply created it ex nihilo. Rather, even in the Hunmin Jeong-eum, it had a small lip protruding from the upper left corner. This lip duplicates the shape of Phagspa d [t], and can be traced back to the Tibetan letter d, ད.

Vocalic jamo design

The seven basic vowel jamo were not taken from Phagspa, but rather seem to have been invented by Sejong or his ministers to represent the phonological principles of Korean. Two methods were used to organize and classify these vowels, vowel harmony and yotization. In linguistics, a language is said to possess vowel harmony (also metaphony) when it has a phonological rule that requires all vowels in a word to belong to a single class. ...

Of the seven vowels, four could be preceded by a y- sound ("yotized"). These four were written as a dot next to a line: ㅓㅏㅜㅗ. (Through the influence of Chinese calligraphy, the dots soon became connected to the line, as seen here.) Yotization was then indicated by doubling this dot: ㅕㅑㅠㅛ. The three vowels which could not be yotized were written with a single stroke: ㅡㆍㅣ.

The Korean language of this period had vowel harmony to a greater extent than it does today. Vowels alternated according to their environment, and fell into "harmonic" groups. This affected the morphology of the language, and Korean phonology described it in terms of yin and yang: If a word had yang ('bright') vowels, then most suffixes also had to have a yang vowel; and conversely, if the root had yin ('dark') vowels, the suffixes needed to be yin as well. There was a harmonic third group called "mediating" ('neutral' in Western terminology) that could coexist with either yin or yang vowels. Morphology is a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies word structure. ...

The Korean neutral vowel was ㅣ i. The yin vowels were ㅡㅜㅓ eu, u, eo; the dots are in the yin directions of 'down' and 'left'. The yang vowels were ㆍㅗㅏ, ə, o, a, with the dots in the yang directions of 'up' and 'right'. As mentioned above, the Hunmin Jeong-eum states that the shapes of the non-dotted jamo ㅡㆍㅣ were also chosen to represent the concepts of yin, yang, and mediation. (The dot ㆍ ə is now obsolete.)

There was yet a third parameter for designing the vowel jamo: namely, choosing ㅡ as the graphic base of ㅜ and ㅗ, and ㅣ as the base of ㅓ and ㅏ. A full understanding of what these horizontal and vertical groups had in common would require knowing the exact sound values these vowels had in the 15^th century. Our uncertainty is primarily with the jamo ㆍㅓㅏ. Some linguists reconstruct these as *a, *ɤ, *e, respectively; others as *ə, *e, *a. However, the horizontal jamo ㅡㅜㅗ do appear to have all been mid to high back vowels, [*ɯ, *u, *o].

References

Ledyard, Gari K. The Korean Language Reform of 1446. Seoul: Shingu munhwasa, 1998.

Ledyard, Gari. "The International Linguistic Background of the Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People." In Young-Key Kim-Renaud, ed. The Korean Alphabet: Its History and Structure. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1997.

The The Mĕnggŭ Zìyùn 蒙古字韻 "Mongolian Letters arranged by Rhyme"