#85: question about the original Hangul alphabet

[ajk]

I thought episode 85 was outstanding. It’s a shame that more Koreans aren’t watching the series, because 85 gave a great portrayal of why the country should be so proud of Sejong and his alphabet accomplishment. It was fascinating to learn about the logic that underlies the whole system (more on this in a future post).

Anyway, here’s a question that I couldn’t really answer using English-language websites (although I’ve been pressed for time and I might have missed something): Sejong’s original alphabet had 28 characters. The current alphabet has 24. Can anyone explain why four characters were dropped? I’m guessing that there might have been some redundancy in some of the sounds and maybe a few characters fell into disuse, but I’m kind of surprised that they would have been “officially” dropped from the alphabet as it’s used today.

The only information I could find on this was a brief statement that the four became obsolete due to “phonetic evolution and various orthographic reforms since Sejong’s time.” But if anyone feels like posting a bit more than that, I think all of the non-Koreans here on the board would find it very interesting. And I’ll name you Employee of the Week, how’s that.

[MTR]

From the novel which is pretty factual but not as much fun as the drama the four characters were dropped due to similarities to other characters(Goddam Brush Warbler again !!!) thus making it harder to learn .
It was Queen Soheon that actually pointed this out ,after Sejong consulted with his director of music they decided to amend the alphabet .
There is a great scene in the book which should have made it to the series that would have been amazing .
After hearing a scholar ramble on about Liu Bai and the Three Kingdoms he decided to question some of the scholars on K History only to find out they knew every last thing about China but could not name the actor that played Dae Jo Young (sorry bad joke )rather knew nothing about Korean History .
So Sejong gets more than a little pissed to the point of throwing manuscript's of chinese history at the scholars ,as such one of the first book's in Hangul was a History of Joseon from pre History through Taejong (who got a great write up as expected )and every member of the Hall was required to learn it from Memory .
The Historical text became the first mandatory learning in Hangul

[TheBo]

Dom, this series is based on a novel? Is the novel translated to English? This may be an extremely stupid question if the show is based on some classic text LOL...

Bo

[MTR]

There is a BOOK VS TV SERIES post a few posts down ,
its a 1981 book ,very famous in Korea and its 10 Volumes ,sadly only an abridged version of Volume 10 was translated into English .

[TheBo]

Ooops. Sorry. Also, I am sorry to hear they only published one volume of the book here. Do you read Korean? Were you able to read the whole thing, or just that abridged volume?

If you already answered this in the "book v TV" post, don't answer here because I'm going there now.

Bo

Okay, I looked at the thread and it seems to answer these questions. Oh, well, perhaps learning Korean is not such a bad idea after all.

You'd think I'd have absorbed it by NOW. LOL.

[oasis6107]

The four original Hangul characters that got dropped out are: ¤ñ,¤ö,¤ï and ¤ý.


'¤ö' didn't embody any Korean sound at all from the start. (To be accurate it was a medial sound between '¤¾' and '¤·' but that kind of sound doesn't exist! Imagine a sound between 'h' and 'o'!) It just existed to express Chinese pronunciations for Chinese characters more accurately. But obviously Koreans pronounced Chinese characters in Korean, so '¤ö' had no reason to exist and was the first to disappear(during the 16th century).

'¤ï'is a medial sound between '¤µ' and '¤¸', but it was mostly pronounced as '¤¸' so it got integrated into the sound '¤µ' and 'o'. It also disappeared in the 16th century.

'¤ñ' has the same sound as '¤·', though '¤ñ' was used only for final sound and '¤·' for initial. This division was proven unnessecary as time passed so '¤ñ' gradually disappeared during the 17~19th century.

And finally.. '¤ý'. It has the same sound with the vowel '¤¿' so no exclusive sound just for this character existed. This charcter disappeared not so long ago; probably in the 20th century.
(As a matter of fact this character is seldom used to this day when people want to give a bit of 'tinge of antiquity' to a word.)

Now.. the disappearance of these four characters was not officially accepted until 1933, when the unification for Korean orthography was finally established. It is being renewed periodically.

I'm not sure if all of the info is 100% accurate, but at least those are the basics. Plus the disappeared characters had many other uses apart from what I mentioned, but those require such intricate knowledge about original Hangul to understand so I don't think I need to, or am able to explain that.

Plus I don't know if the disappeared Hangul characters do show up on your monitor; if not just let me know.

[ginnycat5]

They showed up, but not in Hangul. One had the second element as "n" with the Spanish curvy line/accent above it. Another has the second element as "y" with an accent above it. (at least on my computer)

Thanks for the explanation, though, oasis 6107. Interesting that some letters went away so early.

[ajk]

That's wonderful, oasis; as usual, thanks for providing such good information. It isn't even so important that we see the characters; I just wondered why and when they faded out.

What's most interesting about it is that we have several redundant letters in our own alphabet, but those don't seem to be going anywhere! Obviously the difference is that Hangul was put forth as a complete but untested system and most of the "bugs" worked themselves out during early application.

Anyway, I appreciate the post, not only for us here on the board but also to have an English-language explanation available on the Internet now, for whoever in the future might be looking for it. Much obliged.