Thanks for making such an interesting and in-depth video! 6:34 ス makes a 'su' sound in Japanese. Thus, after learning Japanese for years, I sometimes get tempted to pronounce the Korean 'ㅈ' as 's' when it is written in a way that is similar to ス. 9:53 '빨리' is the correct way to spell the word if I remember correctly.
few minor corrections: 1. the images included as 'korean written with hanja' are actually both korean texts written in literary chinese. 2. the only time hangul was banned was a brief period during the reign of the king yeonsan-gun (燕山君). It didn't even last half a year, and the ban was issued entirely because of a letter written in hangul (known as unmun (諺文) at the time) was found criticizing the king. Mostly reactionary, mostly fruitless. Hangul was already widely in use at the time (1504), completely ingrained in the culture of the pesantry as well as the elite. Besides, the script was invented by the dude's great-great grandfather. In a cartoonishly confucian society as the Joseon dynasty, there was no way you could get away with dissing your ancestors work like that. The Joseon court continued to publish books written in hangul for the masses long after sejong died. 3. Hangul didn't become 'official again' in 1894; It started being used in official government capacity. It's crucial to understand that this was a move to use written korean as a primary literary medium in the nation, since before then, most, if not all literary and academic activity was done in classical chinese. Korea at the time had proclaimed itself the 'Korean Empire', trying to distance itself from chinese control. The 'hangul text' of this era, namely the 1890s to the 1910s or so, was basically classical chinese written in korean word order with hangul particles and endings sprinkled in. It was a sort of 'literary korean' that hadn't existed before, and has not existed since. 4. 일요일 is sunday, not monday.
The peasants in medieval Korea: *can't find a way to spread literacy* Chad King Sejong the Great: Allow me to introduce myself it's honestly amazing how one man devised an entire writing system for a language and it almost hasn't changed in 600 years, that's how you know he did a good job
I mean to be fair the language did change. Because originally there were markings for tones next to the letters. But the alphabet simplified it way easier. It must have taken a long time to make these simple letters because hanja had to be studied in order for the sounds to be grouped into one. And having tone marks suggests that the language would de tonalize. And the sound of ㅏ was intidcated by a dot.
@@bedrock6443 True, Middle Korean had sounds that were lost in modern Korean, like /z/ and /ɒ/, that's why ㅿ and ㆍ aren't used anymore, and as you said, the tones but here's the funny thing: Seoul Korean is actually undergoing tonogenesis again, getting tones from neutralization of the distinction between plain, tense and aspirated stops - which means that soon, Korean may have a whole new way of marking tone in Hangul. It's all fascinating, really
@@evfnyemisx2121 welp so if I go to Seoul in like give or take 30 years the language would be completly different from how I knew it before. So I might have to learn the language in a different way.
@@bedrock6443 I wouldn't say it would be "completely different", language change is a dynamic thing that happens overtime and you would probably still be easily understood, you would just sound like an old person or someone from outside the capital, like today Koreans have mostly lost their vowel length distinctions in the South, but some older speakers still distinguish them
As a learner of Korean, every time I read Hangul, I’m astonished at how elegant it is (to use the word in the description). I almost have to stop myself from thinking it’s some artificial auxiliary phonetic writing system (like Bopomofo for Mandarin) and not the _actual_ writing system for Koreans by Koreans-amazingly developed in the mid-15th century! Just the act of reading it is immensely satisfying. I can’t imagine how whoever invented Hangul-King Sejong himself or in collaboration with scholars, or the scholars themselves on his command-felt when things began to fall into place _systematically_ and a stroke here signified aspiration and the doubling of consonants there meant tense (in a Korean language sense) and so on. It must have seemed miraculous, even to the one (or those) doing the inventing. That said, I _don’t_ subscribe to any notion of Hangul “supremacy.” It’s not the best writing system ever, even if it is a marvel of human invention-it’s just superbly suited, as it should be, for Korean.
@@Alex_Euler That’s a good question! I’m not sure I can say any system is “best” (and, in any case, I know just a few of them). The Latin script works perfectly well for, say, Spanish. I will say that Hangul, though, is my favorite because it’s so cleverly thought out and consistent in terms of its design. As I alluded to in my first comment, when whoever invented it realized that aspiration distinguished some consonants from others (say, ㅋ from ㄱ or ㅍ from ㅂ) and added a horizontal stroke to indicate that, or doubled consonants to show tenseness (and other aspects that I won’t bother putting into a comment here), it must have seemed like a revelation. Everything just fell into place. And _then_ these mid-15th century Koreans could just easily write the words without using what must have been incredibly cumbersome Chinese characters. It’s really an incredible story and something that we-both learners of Korean _and_ native Korean speakers-benefit from today.
this !!! is exactly what i needed all those years ago trying to learn korean, only to be confused by all the irregularities that are either discussed in contradictory/unclear ways, or left totally unmentioned !!!
The only thing you may have missed is that many Korean people (such as my family) do NOT pronounce the /w/, /j/, or /ɥ/ semivowels in consonant clusters, so they pronounce "dwae" "hwe" and "gye" like "dae" "he" and "ge." For example, my mom pronounces "jeon-hwa-gi" (telephone) as "jeon-a-gi" (the /h/ disappears sometimes). edit: FYI, this is NOT just "dialectical" even if other Korean people want to debate me. You will encounter this across all dialects and age groups, it is just as common as "t-flapping" in American English.
@@gtc239 This isn't dialectical thing. /ɥ/ semivowel under /Cɥ/ structure was already dropped in 19-20th c., so it is the standard pronunciation to pronounce without it. Furthermore, in the 20-21st c., all /ɥ/ other than word-initial syllables were dropped. In case of /j/, The standard pronunciation law stipulates that consonants other than r + ye can also be pronounced as e, and the number of people who pronounce it as e is increasing across all dialects. In case of /w/, it started with the dropping of /w/ behind bilabial sounds in the 17-18th c/, and in the 21st c., the dropping of /w/ behind plosives and velar sounds is occurring. However, the dropping of /w/ after plosives and velar sounds is still an ongoing process, and there is a mix of people across the country who pronounce it by dropping it and those who do not.
The Hangul Jamo Unicode block was there because of two reasons: 1. Interoperability with the existing Korean Industrial Standard encoding 2. Font rendering was very primitive Type designers brute force Hangul by manually composing each possible block, instead of operating with a smart common font renderer that will dynamically generate jamo. They still do this today because of habit, even though OpenType and Harfbuzz are more than capable for dynamic jamo composition already.
The ban in the 70s was a big part of the demise of hanja, but it is true that hanja was gradually fading away long before the 70s. Besides, korean orthography, especially regarding the usage of hanja was very unstable during the past century, with there being little to no standardizaiton on how and when hanja and hangul should be used together. Even in the early 20th centry, people often wrote using exclusively hangul. The place of hanja in korean orthography based on hangul was never as concrete as kanji was in japanese kana writing.
@@bloopbird7057 no, the South Koreans always used hanja up until they suddenly couldn’t, Japanese sometimes in history wrote exclusively in hiragana but the doesn’t mean kanji was in decline. There was no “decline” of hanja like you say it was and you don’t elaborate about the hanja being unstable. It was a sudden move by the government to push this bizarre nationalism to the point where Koreans can’t even read there own historical literature or artifacts.
Uhh South Korean here, we still learn Chinese Characters and Basic Classical Chinese at school. Of course it is true that the government largely reduced the usage of Hanja in the 70s, that it was straight up banned is far from true.
i would say "shadow banned", as learning hanja doesnt put you into prison in both koreas, its just that you are left to learn hanja on your own with no government support
Korean was indeed written with Hanja prior to the invention of Hangul, but there's a lot more to say about that. For the most part, it wasn't really pure Korean that was written, but a hybrid written language blending Classical Chinese and Korean used by lowel-level bureaucrats. Or it could be Korean particles and connectors added to Classical Chinese text to aid in their comprehension. The only real exceptions are about two dozen poems. Exactly how Chinese characters were used to write Korean is quite a complicated topic, but it's a process that both inspired and parallelled the development of the kana syllabaries for Japanese. Throughout pre-modern Korean history, the prestige written language has always been Classical Chinese, and as other commenters have pointed out, the pictures shown at 1:13 are writings in Classical Chinese, not Korean. Also as other commenters have pointed out, the statement that later kings banned Hangul is a gross exaggeration at best. There was a brief ban by one king (in reaction to an anonymous poster criticizing him in Hangul) that didn't stick.
Always a pleasure to see your content for us language enthusiasts! Thanks for mentioning BATCHIM, cuz not many do it! And I have to admit that it is the first time I see someone talking about Middle Korean tones or letters, so keep on doing these great videos! Would alsoi be nice if you do something about Ryukyuan languages from the Japonic branch or the controversial ALTAIC languages . Regards from Chile!
@@myspleenisbursting4825 that's weird, there is a better way to write chia chia in hangeul if you say it like english: 취아취아. I wonder why they spell it 찌아찌아?
you should mention how many speakers merge, to some extent, the ㅂ, ㄷ, ㅈ, ㄱ and ㅍ, ㅌ, ㅊ, ㅋ sounds resulting in a pitch distinction due to vowels following ㅍ, ㅌ, ㅊ, ㅋ being pronounced at a higher pitch (the pitch distinction is there even if the consonants are not merged, but the merger makes this the only way to tell them apart)
몇월 and 몇억 being pronounced like [멷월] and [멷억] respectively are treated as regular pronunciations, because the surfacing of the coda consonants occurs only when they are followed by vowel-initial particles, not when they are followed by free morphemes. The 사이 시옷 (sai siot) may be pronounced as [t̚] before an obstruent, but in most cases it only indicates the tensification of said obstruent. Korean dictionaries will indicate both pronunciations as correct, so 햇빛 can be either [해삗] or [핻삗], and 찻집 can be either [차찝] or [찯찝] (although these last two would only be distinguishable in deliberate pronunciation). For a long time, the only standard pronunciation of 효과 did not have tensification, so it was pronounced [효과]. Lots of people pronounced it as [효꽈] anyway, so both pronunciations were eventually recognized as correct. Pronouncing 네가 as [니가] (which by the way you are not advised to pronounce as [diga] unless you're sure you can get the Korean denasalized /n/ right), is not considered standard so it should have been included with the colloquial irregular forms. By contrast, the irregular pronunciation of the genitive particle -의 as [에] is recognized as standard.
The tense obstuents of Korean are phonetically similar to voiceless unaspirated obstruents of many languages. For example, Korean ㅆ 'ss' is pretty much indistinguishable from the [s] of most languages including English. It is the word-initial lenis obstruents that are more unique cross-linguistically, which isn't obvious from the common practice (followed in this video) of representing them with the unadorned IPA symbols /p/, /t/, /k/, /s/ etc. It is probably better to think of them as underlyingly voiced obstruents that surface as soft, weakly aspirated obstruents at the start of an utterance. The phonetic description of allophones followed in this video are a bit of a mess. The allophones of ㅎ /h/ are approximants, so using the fricative symbols is misleading. If we really want to be precise, we could write them as [j̊] before /i/ or /j/, as [ɰ̊] or [x̞] before /ɯ/, and as [ʍ] before /o/, /u/, or /w/ (it says 'after' in the video, but it should be 'before'). Using actual fricatives [ç], [x], and [ɸʷ] as in the video sounds excessive. Also, the allophone of ㅋ in 키 is hardly [cç] and is closer to [kʲj̊], which is clear if you compare it to languages that use actual palatal stops or affricates. Word-initial denasalization is phonetically a very interesting phenomenon, but generally it doesn't mean that /m/ and /n/ completely turn to [b] and [d]. Pronouncing 너, 나, as [dʌ], [da], etc. as in 12:30 won't be understood outside of context. The conditions for denasalization are not completely understood, and not all speakers have denasalization, so it shouldn't be understood as an obligatory rule by any means. Learners can ignore this completely beyond being aware that it's something they might hear.
I would love to see more documentation about the northern dialect. Would probably be more interesting to learn. Especially if i am ever able to freely explore there.
My favorite part about Hangül is that its featural structure makes it particularly suited to be extended to other languages... and in fact that was attempted at least once, with Hyun-Bok Lee's proposal for an "International Korean Phonetic Alphabet", or IKPA. There's also the case of Cia-cia, an Indonesian language that tried using Hangül as it uses several semivowels unavailable in standard Latin alphabets.
12:05 I think 잎 used to be 닢 but started to get pronounced 잎 on it's own but in compound words it kept the 닢 pronunciation but the spelling is changed to 잎 in 꽃잎 dispite the pronunciation staying the same
There’s also more anomalies not talked about in this video. The name for Shilla (ancient Korean kingdom) is written as 신라 due to a rule where ㄴ sound turns into a ㄹ sound when followed by ㄹ. Some remnants of sound changes are present as the place spelled 강릉 is pronounced 강능. Since originally the ㄹ was pronounced , but eventually it shifted to ㄴ when previous syllable ended in ㅇ or ㅁ. Since it’s easier to say. A massive thing not spoken of within this video is a rule called 두음법칙. Wherein ㄹ either switches to ㄴ or ㅇ. Effects mostly sino Korean words.
The writing system for my conlang is also featural and blocky, like korean. The way I would describe it to people is "what if hangul was an abugida" Btw I came up with the writing system long before I had the conlang. I originally made it up as my own way to write in my native language, Indonesian. Very useful to write down secrets.
This video got me to subscribe. I'd be very interested in hearing about other featural writing systems. One that I know of (but am unqualified to judge) is Phon, which is inspired by tengwar and can be found at Omniglot.
As a Chinese speaker, I want to quickly point out that in mandarin hanguk would be han guo and refers to South Korean, and joseon would be chao xian and refer to North Korea, so it wasn't like China uses joseon to refer to all of Korea.
Also note that the ㄱ at the bottem of a syllable cluster, usually it is muted. Unless of course the following has the ㅇ on the top where then you pronounce it.
13:46 oh my pregnant I thirst to know which ones, I also remember a Reddit post claiming Seoul Korean is currently undergoing tonogenesis which is super cool???
been trying to learn hangeul for a while but there is so much new info in this video, its amazing also i still dont understand tense consonants ... also those spelling rules x-x scary
Because of how common English loan words are in Korean, you do actually see this a lot. You run into problems with things like consonant clusters or with sounds that don't occur in Korean and therefore don't have their own character. The Korean word for cellphone "핸드폰" (handphone) is a good example of both issues. The "f/ph" sound isn't in Korean, so it's replaced with p/ㅍ, and you can't put the "ndp" sound in the middle all together in hangul, so it gets split into "haen-deu-pon".
Wow, a country having dialects that retained and lost tone/length is fascinating to me! How does that impact communication between speakers of different dialects?
Vowel length and tone aren't issues in inter-dialectal communication actually as I understand, but vowel sound changes are. For example in some dialects 어, 으, and 오 have shifted or overlap in pronunciation such that for example standard 어디 is pronounced "으디," and you have diphthongs preserved in some as well eg. "다이" and "데이" as dialectal variants of (iirc) -다 and -데.
A speaker of standard Korean(Korean spoken in Seoul) may think that an innocent dialect speaker with tone is angry. It is very common and has become a meme here. Also some dialect speakers may distinguish homonymous words by its tone and length, where standard Korean speakers can't.
12:22 Due to exceptions exist, Korean is not that regular and Spanish is the most regular language Even Russian and Greek have less exceptions than Korean
They’re not, really-and, actually, this video does a great job of categorizing them. After you apply them for a bit, they make sense and are easy to apply.
Old Hangeul (the original one) had 4 more characters and accent markers compared to modern Hanguel. It's the original IPA. It is entirely possible to write out pretty much every human sound using old Hangeul
Hangeul was not made to fit the shapes of the mouth, its writing system clearly comes from others. Wikipedias page on the Origin of Hangeul even states that idea as fanciful, which it is.
Lmao citing Wikipedia isn't a good look; and yes, it's a native developed script it was indeed intended to fit the shapes of the speaker while keeping it as simple as possible.
@@chappy3125 Did you maybe go and read the article and check what it says or do you just disregard what I say because it's from wikipedia? Which by the way, does have citations.
@frank_calvert you can think whatever you want, the discovery of the original Hunminjeongeum Haeryebon in the 1900s pretty much makes your point mute; literally stated during the time of the creation of Hangeul where each character gets its shape and form.
I study Korean. I’ve got topik 6 certificate but I’m so fed up with Korean’s ridiculous self conceit when they brag abt their alphabet. So I created my own Korean romanization scheme based on the orthography of Romance languages to completely replace their Hangul. And prove to them that their writing system is not any superior than the European’s and the Chinese’ 한글 완전히 기각한다 말이요. Hancul wanjonhi quicak hanta maliyó.
@@NUSORCA '게이' is slang for '게시판 이용자'(meaning Social Media User), where 게 from 게시판 and 이 from 이용자 form '게이'. It really means 'bro,' 'man,' or any other similar words.
