Everything there is to learn about Hangul
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 มิ.ย. 2024
- An extensive video going over everything there is to learn about Korean Hangul, from its elegant simplicity to its interesting but more complicated quirks.
Subscribe if you enjoyed the video!
Patreon: / lingolizard
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:52 Korean Phonology
2:39 Letters
7:41 Spelling Rules
9:29 Allophony
10:50 Irregularities
13:50 Obsolete Letters
15:44 Outro
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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
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.
@@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.
Better start documenting how the language works before it dies out.
@@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
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.
I’d be the opposite it’s weird for a similar symbol to make the S sound when I’ve always recognised it as making the j/z sound
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
Hanja didn’t fade away, it straight up got banned in the 70s
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
ㄹㅇ
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.
Actually that's a dialectical thing.
It's only a dialectical thing. That accent doesn't sound so formal.
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.
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
That's a great goal in mind; what are the specifics of your goal?
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 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.
As a Korean I approve. Also I want another video of featural writting systems.
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
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!
Your pronunciation is pretty damn good. Kudos to you unless you are already a fluent speaker
Except for how he pronounced Cia Cia like Chinese. Just pronounce it like English. Chia-Chia.
@@myspleenisbursting4825 pretty sure most english natives would pronounce what you last wrote as /t͡ʃaɪj̆ɜ t͡ʃaɪj̆ɜ/ lol
@@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?
Fascinating! Thank you for the coverage
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
Most of us koreans just mindlessly use these irregular rules on a daily basis. Never knew i would learn this much about my own language thanks!
YAY YOU UPLOADED AGAIN :DDD i love your videos :D
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.
love your content!!! keep it going!!
Fun Fact: Hangul is used for writing Cia-Cia language which is an Austronesian from Sulawesi island, Indonesia.
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 hate how TH-cam forces me to learn Korean!
But it's still a good video
Join the Hangeul society 😂❤
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)
When Writing Systems of India?
+
Yes the Brahmic scripts encompass so many languages and have lots of history behind them. Hangul may have even been influenced by Brahmic scripts.
@@praneethmashetty591 Where did you get that last part 💀
@@yeetrepublic9142 all languages descend from sanskrit
@@praneethmashetty591 prove it
Juno seal of approval; very excellent :D
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
definitely interested in learning about the other 2 featural systems
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.
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.
Yes I most certainly did ask where Korean vowel length came from
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.
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.
I'd love a video on Canadian Syllabics!
as someone who literally just started learning hangul like yesterday thank u for this vid lol
Tell us what those two other featural writing systems were, I want to look them up!
Thank you mr lizard
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
no way, lingolizard pronouncing /tɕ/ correctly, let's go
Edit. still pronouncing /ɕ/ as [sʲ] I hear 😟 9:32
Nah, he still pronounces /t͡ɕ/ as /t͡sʲ/ most of the time ☺️
he mispronounces a lot in this video, which is understandable
@@maxsz91he pronounced cia cia like t͡sʲa. Erugh
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.
Pleaseee can you make a video about the inuktitut syllabery
this is very interesting
I GUESSED CORRECTLY!
Could you make a video about the Greek alphabet??
I really love alphabets
Imagine if we used the current Hangul letters as well as the older archaic letters to transcribe English.
It would be a ride.
국어(한국어) 교과서에서 가르치는 중세국어와 음운변동과 그외 관련 음운현상까지 많이 공부한 게 보이네 ㄷㄷ
조금 오류도 있긴하지만 한국인들에게도 유익한 명강이라고 생각함
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
tense consonants is just having german accent (lol)
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???
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.
good job, language yetch
Yo great job Stealthy!!!!!!!!
Can you do The russian alpahabet next
The Abkhaz alphabet has this weird letter pronounced "hy" which looks like a theta
In Chechen they have a letter that I still can’t completely wrap my head around and I’ve been learning for four years. That goddamn palochka.
Jesus fuck, I had no idea korean was this irregular.
3:22 This "r" looks like the flag of the Empire State. Imperator semper rectum est!
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!
For the most part I've found that the phonetics follow what happens naturally when speaking. It's more convoluted than Chinese/Japanese, but nothing compared to English
This guy just overcomplicated it, its not that complex
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?
요즘은 사투리가 거의 사라져서 젊은세대에선 성조구분도 제대로 못함
국가차원에서 캠페인이라던가 벌여야할텐데 국립국어원은 세금만쳐먹고 하는일이 좆도없음
@@lliliiiliiilliililiilI mean having an institute like that in the first place is sketchy.
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.
please make canadian aboriginal writing system
चलो, सालों बाद इसका विडियो आया! आख़िरकार
please do the video please
6:00 You just explained that stops are unreleased syllable-finally, and then you released the stops when listing their names :(
Mongol writing system please
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.
Joseongeul is beautiful
Got stressed out watching this video, and then I remembered what American English is like... 😅😂 I just gotta believe in myself I guess 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
For English speakers.
I want Jeju to be cherished so bad
일요일 means sunday not monday. Monday is 월유일.
HIIIIII
This is because of that one comment by jan Misali, isn't it?
Joseongul*
이 레알리 엔조옏 팃 피더! 이 포운ㄷ 잍 페리 인폴마티페!
한글 is easy but 맞춤법 is really hard
I always call it Joseongul lol
Abkhaz is a very weird language with over 42 letters lol
The lenis/fortis difference is not unique to Korean as fsr as I know it appesred in most of the ancestors of turkic languages
Japan has no L sound so the name Eileen is pronounced "Irene" or "Airin" in Japanese lol
whoa, you've mentioned nativlang, that guy that I barely even watch anymore... damn, what happened to that guy?
He’s still making videos and going strong, he’s actually doing a series on animals and language right now.
Japanese R is sometimes pronounced "L" to sound cute lol
Just listen to Morning Musume's song Ambitious
Reina:haLe wataLu kaLa
I listened to it and it doesn’t sound like L to me
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
Coda consonants
P,T,K=atsu,appa,akka
M,N,Ng=an
L=aru
The spelling rules are too complex
No they aren't
I literally learned hangul in 4 hours
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.
Hour pass
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 I know of the theory you mention and quite frankly it doesn't hold up, sorry 😐
@@chappy3125 I'd argue it's slightly better than thinking it's the actual first ever writing system based purely on the shapes of the mouth.
@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.
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
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
Japanese Katakana look like Hangul
Giyeok=fu
Digeut=ko???
Mieum=ro
Siot=ha???
Jieut=su
Khieukh=wo???
Thieuth=yo???
Geu=yu
Ieung=zero???
Let's not forget Eu and *long vowel*
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
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.
게이야
@@lliliiiliiilliililiil you’d better not be meaning “gay@ here, Korean
@@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.
@@NUSORCA 게이야 ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
Korean "ak" is pronounced "ahha" in Japanese lol
Then "euk" is "uffu"?
😂😂😂
Alphabets are still better.
this is an alphabet
@@featherling is is more of a syllabary with alphabetic features
6:46
Another writing system goes right into my mental collection, as usual for no real life benefit
Korean is a world language! Never such a thing as real life benefit when it comes to linguistic knowledge