Learning Journal #7

[Ruofan Jiang]

Korean is one of the world's oldest living languages. Originally written using “Hanja” (Chinese characters), Korean is now mainly spelled in “Hangul”, the Korean alphabet. “Hangul” consists of 24 letters – 14 consonants and 10 vowels – that are written in blocks of 2 to 5 characters. Unlike the Chinese writing system (including Japanese “Kanji”), “Hangul” is not an ideographic system. The shapes of the individual “Hangul” letters were designed to model the physical morphology of the tongue, palate and teeth. The Korean language may be written using a mixture of Chinese ideograms (“Hanja”) and a native Korean alphabet known as “Hangul”, or in “Hangul” alone, much as in a more limited way Indo-European languages sometimes write numbers using Arabic symbols and at other times spell numbers out in their own alphabets or in some combination of the two forms. Because of its greater variety of sounds, Korean does not have the problem of the Japanese written language, which some experts have argued needs to retain a sizable inventory of Chinese characters to distinguish a large number of potentially ambiguous sounds.