Korean is one of the older living languages whose origins are not quite clear because this language has similarities to both Chinese and Japanese. The Korean writing system is known as Hangul and on every 9th October, Koreans celebrate its birthday by having a day off work. The script was made from scratch and each alphabet or phoneme is grouped into symbols to represent a syllable and therefore is called a syllabary instead of an alphabet. In the past, the characters were written in columns but nowadays, Hangul is written from left to right. The language has ten vowels and 21 consonants and words are spelled by putting the symbols into blocks similar to Chinese characters. It is interesting to note that Korean is spoken by 2.7 million people in Chinese provinces that border North Korea. The combination of blocks are either consonant-vowel or consonant-vowel-consonant. If a vowel is at the beginning of a syllable then the silent vowel, ‘ㅇ’ is placed in front of it, for example ‘아.’ The Korean language has words that resemble classical Chinese that are sometimes written in Chinese characters. The words are not written phonemically and instead are written in a constant form, therefore, even if the pronunciation is correct according to the spelling, the symbol block formations may be wrong.
Bibliography
Hallen, Cynthia. "The History of Korean Language, The Overview." The History of Korean Language, The Overview. Department of Linguistics, 6 Sept. 1999. Web. 22 Feb. 2017
Martin, Samuel E. "Korean Language." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 01 Mar. 2011. Web. 22 Feb. 2017
Thompson, Irene. "Korean ." About World Languages. About World Languages, 19 Oct. 2015. Web. 22 Feb. 2017.
S, S. C. "How Was Hangul Invented?" The Economist. The Economist Newspaper, 08 Oct. 2013. Web. 22 Feb. 2017
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