Everything there is to learn about Hangul 

We DEFINITELY need more videos on non-hangul festural systems, so please make them

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

Hanja didn’t fade away, it straight up got banned in the 70s

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.

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.

i love the way hangul’s built :’D it’s so cool and it’s something i’ve fixated on for the past year

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.

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.

As a Korean I approve. Also I want another video of featural writting systems.

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 !!!

Love how there is a channel where I, a linguistics nerd can enjoy and learn the things that I like a lot. Thank you for your videos :D

Your pronunciation is pretty damn good. Kudos to you unless you are already a fluent speaker

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!

Fascinating! Thank you for the coverage

I hate how RU-vid forces me to learn Korean! But it's still a good video

YAY YOU UPLOADED AGAIN :DDD i love your videos :D

Juno seal of approval; very excellent :D

thank you so much, i have a project adopting Hangul for writing a language from the other side of the world and this helped a LOT

love your content!!! keep it going!!

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.

When Writing Systems of India?

At 13:25 I immediately thought 'huh, I wonder where those evolved from?' and then you proceeded to explain where they came from, so yes, I did ask

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

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.

definitely interested in learning about the other 2 featural systems

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

Tell us what those two other featural writing systems were, I want to look them up!

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.

as someone who literally just started learning hangul like yesterday thank u for this vid lol

Thank you mr lizard

I'd love a video on Canadian Syllabics!

By the way, I am wondering what is the source of the statement "later kings banned the use of Hangeul." I've read similar comments from RU-vid several times, but there are no such historical records that I can find. The statement "later kings banned the use of Hangeul" itself is also really contradictory by itself, if you know the history of Joseon dynasty. The inventor was not just a commoner; it was King Sejong whose sons, grandsons, grand-grandsons, and so on were the kings you mentioned. All the later kings were descendants of this very King Sejong, and filial piety was considered the highest priority and ethics at the time. Banning what their ancestor invented was highly unlikely. On top of that, later kings themselves even used Hangeul. There are numerous letters left, which later kings, their mothers, daughters, and their high ranking officials wrote in Hangeul. I think some myth of "the-later-kings-banned-Hangeul" was born because the Joseon dynasty didn't use Hangeul for official documents, resulting that western readers assumed that Hangeul was banned and forbidden to use.

Pleaseee can you make a video about the inuktitut syllabery

this is very interesting

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.

Yes I most certainly did ask where Korean vowel length came from

The Korean ㄹ sound is a tap sound, not a trill one. Your pronunciation of it sounds close to the trill r such as in Spanish. :)

Yo great job Stealthy!!!!!!!!

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

I GUESSED CORRECTLY!

Could you make a video about the Greek alphabet?? I really love alphabets

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???

good job, language yetch

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.

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?

국어(한국어) 교과서에서 가르치는 중세국어와 음운변동과 그외 관련 음운현상까지 많이 공부한 게 보이네 ㄷㄷ 조금 오류도 있긴하지만 한국인들에게도 유익한 명강이라고 생각함

Fun Fact: Hangul is used for writing Cia-Cia language which is an Austronesian from Sulawesi island, Indonesia.

Can you do The russian alpahabet next

After seeing all the phonetic rules and irregularities of Korean, I can pretty much say that Japanese and even Chinese seem way easier to learn. Of course, this comes from somebody who only studied Japanese and Chinese so take it with a grain of salt!

bro, 1894! is a very large number ≈ 6,95*10^5386 there will not even be as many Planck's times til the end of universe

3:22 This "r" looks like the flag of the Empire State. Imperator semper rectum est!

6:00 You just explained that stops are unreleased syllable-finally, and then you released the stops when listing their names :(

HIIIIII

Jesus fuck, I had no idea korean was this irregular.

no way, lingolizard pronouncing /tɕ/ correctly, let's go Edit. still pronouncing /ɕ/ as [sʲ] I hear 😟 9:32

Imagine if we used the current Hangul letters as well as the older archaic letters to transcribe English. It would be a ride.

The Abkhaz alphabet has this weird letter pronounced "hy" which looks like a theta

please make canadian aboriginal writing system

चलो, सालों बाद इसका विडियो आया! आख़िरकार

Mongol writing system please

please do the video please

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.

Joseongeul is beautiful

oh my god. This language is so difficult. I thought Thai is difficult but Korean is such more difficult so I will learn Thai first.

이 레알리 엔조옏 팃 피더! 이 포운ㄷ 잍 페리 인폴마티페!

This is because of that one comment by jan Misali, isn't it?

Joseongul*

I want Jeju to be cherished so bad

일요일 means sunday not monday. Monday is 월유일.

Hangul looks like a cool and very appropriate writing system for an "asian" language but would completely fall apart for some European ones, I think

The lenis/fortis difference is not unique to Korean as fsr as I know it appesred in most of the ancestors of turkic languages

I always call it Joseongul lol

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

whoa, you've mentioned nativlang, that guy that I barely even watch anymore... damn, what happened to that guy?

Abkhaz is a very weird language with over 42 letters lol

한글 is easy but 맞춤법 is really hard

Japan has no L sound so the name Eileen is pronounced "Irene" or "Airin" in Japanese lol

Hour pass

The spelling rules are too complex

Japanese R is sometimes pronounced "L" to sound cute lol Just listen to Morning Musume's song Ambitious Reina:haLe wataLu kaLa

Japanese Katakana look like Hangul Giyeok=fu Digeut=ko??? Mieum=ro Siot=ha??? Jieut=su Khieukh=wo??? Thieuth=yo??? Geu=yu Ieung=zero???

Japanese Hangul Vowels A I U(similar to Eu) E(sometimes Ae) O Eo(used only for Wo) Ya Yu(pronounced Yeu) Ye/Yae Yo

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.

With a million of allophones, clusters, spelling rules and "exceptions" it maybe would have been better to stay with Hanji.

You are often mispronouncing p̚ t̚ k̚ as p t k

Korean "ak" is pronounced "ahha" in Japanese lol Then "euk" is "uffu"? 😂😂😂

Alphabets are still better.

6:46