Hunminjeongeum: The World’s Only Script Whose Creation Principle Survives in a Book

We Rarely Know Where a Script Came From

Almost every writing system in the world has no birth certificate. The alphabet rolled down through the hands of ancient Phoenician merchants over centuries, and Chinese characters grew little by little out of the traces of divination(占卜) carved on oracle bones(甲骨). Who first drew it, in what year it was made, with what thoughts its shapes were chosen — most scripts cannot answer these questions. They were not so much ‘invented’ as they ‘flowed in’ like a river.

On the Korean peninsula, however, there is an exception. Here is a script for which not only the maker and the year of making survive, but the very design principle — ‘why was this letter made in this way’ — was written down and left behind in a single book. It is the Hunminjeongeum(訓民正音). The name itself means ‘the correct sounds for the instruction of the people’. The explanatory book that describes the motive for creating the letters, the principle by which the consonants and vowels were each shaped, and how they are combined into syllables, is precisely the Hunminjeongeum Haerye(訓民正音 解例本). That this commentary survives alongside the script places the Hunminjeongeum in an unusually special seat in the history of writing(文字史).

One thing must be made clear from the start. The name we call ‘Hangeul’ today did not exist in the 15th century. People in King Sejong’s time called this script ‘Hunminjeongeum’ or ‘eonmun'(諺文). The name ‘Hangeul’ is a modern coinage given in the early 20th century by Ju Si-gyeong(周時經) and other scholars of the Korean Language Research Society. So in this article’s 15th-century story, we will use the name of that era, Hunminjeongeum.

The Letters King Sejong Made

The year of creation(創製) was 1443, the 12th lunar month of the 25th year of King Sejong. The Annals of King Sejong record that around this time the king personally made twenty-eight letters. The heart behind making the letters is clearly held in the king’s own writing placed at the head of the Hunminjeongeum, the royal preface(御製序文). Because our country’s speech differs from that of China and does not flow together with Chinese characters(漢字), there are many among the ‘simple people’ (the unlettered, those who do not know writing) who, though they have something to say, cannot in the end express their meaning — Sejong, taking pity on this, made twenty-eight new letters. His purpose, he states, was that everyone might learn them easily and use them conveniently in daily life.

Here a common but mistaken belief must be corrected. The expression ‘King Sejong and the scholars of the Jiphyeonjeon(集賢殿, Hall of Worthies) made it together’ is not accurate. The picture the records convey has a different grain. The Annals of King Sejong and the preface by Jeong In-ji(鄭麟趾) appended to the end of the Haerye record that Sejong himself composed the main text — that is, the Yeui(例義), which set out the sound values and use of the letters, and the royal preface. Chinje(親制): that the king made it with his own hand. The role of the Jiphyeonjeon scholars comes afterward.

After the creation was accomplished, eight scholars — Jeong In-ji, Sin Suk-ju(申叔舟), Seong Sam-mun(成三問), Choe Hang(崔恒), Bak Paeng-nyeon(朴彭年), Gang Hui-an(姜希顔), Yi Gae(李塏), and Yi Seon-ro(李善老) — compiled the ‘Haerye'(解例, the explanation), which set forth the principles of the letters’ making and their examples of use. In other words, the agent of creation (Sejong) and the agents of compiling the Haerye (the eight Jiphyeonjeon scholars) belong to different stages. Making the letters themselves and editing the book that explained them academically must be distinguished.

Moreover, the Jiphyeonjeon did not uphold this work of one mind. In 1444, some of its members, including Deputy Director(副提學) Choe Man-ri(崔萬理), instead submitted a memorial(上疏) opposing the new letters. Its content held that sharing writing with China accorded with the duty of serving the great(事大), and it worried that a new script would make learning frivolous. To lump it all into the single sentence ‘the Jiphyeonjeon made it together’, then, erases both the stage difference between creation and Haerye-compilation and the internal conflict of for and against. The birth of the Hunminjeongeum was an event that set out from one person’s will and passed through both the cooperation of some scholars and the opposition of others.

How the Consonants Were Made — Imitating the Mouth

Now let us enter the design principle the Haerye revealed. The first thing to stress is that the consonants and the vowels were made by different principles. People often say in one sentence that ‘the Hunminjeongeum was made by imitating the speech organs’, but this is only half right. What imitated the speech organs were the consonants; the vowels followed an entirely different principle. The moment one lumps the two together, this script’s most intricate design is blurred. The consonants first.

The consonants, that is the initial sounds(初聲), were made by imitating the shape the mouth, tongue, and throat take when making that sound. The Haerye’s Jejahae(制字解, Explanation of the Design of the Letters) explains the five basic letters thus:

• ㄱ — imitates the shape of the root of the tongue blocking the throat. It is a molar sound, the aeum(牙音).
• ㄴ — imitates the shape of the tongue tip touching the upper gum. It is a lingual sound, the seoreum(舌音).
• ㅁ — imitates the shape of the mouth. It is a labial sound, the suneum(脣音).
• ㅅ — imitates the shape of the tooth. It is a dental sound, the chieum(齒音).
• ㅇ — imitates the round shape of the throat. It is a guttural sound, the hueum(喉音).

That is the five ‘root letters’. But the genius of the Hunminjeongeum’s consonant system lies in what comes next: the rule that the stronger the sound, the more strokes(劃) are added one by one — that is, gahoek(加劃, adding a stroke). Even sounds made at the same place, when they grow more forceful, have strokes added to the letter so as to make that strength visible to the eye. As a result, the shape of the letter and the strength of the sound grow side by side.

• ㄱ → ㅋ (molar)
• ㄴ → ㄷ → ㅌ (lingual)
• ㅁ → ㅂ → ㅍ (labial)
• ㅅ → ㅈ → ㅊ (dental)
• ㅇ → ㆆ → ㅎ (guttural)

ㄷ is a stronger sound than ㄴ, and ㅌ stronger than ㄷ, and that much more, one stroke is added each time. Within the very look of the letter, the kinship of the pronunciation and the stages of its strength are inscribed at once. From the shape alone one can guess which letters are siblings (the same place of articulation) and which among them is the more forceful sound. This is not an accidental design but the fruit of phonetic thought that observed and classified sounds.

How the Vowels Were Made — Heaven, Earth, and Human

The vowels, that is the medial sounds(中聲), follow a principle wholly different from the consonants. Not the speech organs, but cheonjiin(天地人) — heaven, earth, and human, the three powers(三才) — were imitated. Those three, regarded in the East Asian cosmology as the three foundations that compose all things, became, just so, three basic vowels.

• ㆍ (araea) — a round dot. It imitates the roundness of heaven.
• ㅡ — a horizontal stroke. It imitates the flatness of earth.
• ㅣ — a vertical stroke. It imitates a human standing upright.

Combining these three with one another makes the rest of the vowels. Placing heaven(ㆍ) above or below earth(ㅡ), or to the left and right of human(ㅣ), forms letters such as ㅗ, ㅏ, ㅜ, ㅓ; doubling the dot then extends them to ㅛ, ㅑ, ㅠ, ㅕ. If the consonants set out from the imitation of mouth shapes and grew by adding strokes, the vowels set out from the three elements of the cosmos and unfold through the combination of dots and strokes. So the explanation that ‘the whole of the Hunminjeongeum imitated the speech organs’ is wrong. What imitated the speech organs were only the five root letters of the consonants; the vowels imitated heaven, earth, and human. That two principles are paired and interlocked within one script — this is the heart of the Hunminjeongeum’s letter-design(制字) principle.

What about the final consonant? Here the Hunminjeongeum chooses a clever economy instead of increasing the number of letters: jongseong buyong choseong(終聲復用初聲), the principle that the final sound (the batchim) makes no new letter of its own but reuses the initial-sound (consonant) letters already made. Initial, medial, and final gather to form one syllable, but in the final position an initial letter is simply borrowed as it is. A design philosophy of holding the most sounds with the fewest letters shows itself here as well.

In his preface, Jeong In-ji praised that this script holds the principle of nature and that its application is endlessly wide, writing that ‘even the sound of the wind, the cry of a crane, the crowing of a rooster, and the barking of a dog can all be written down’. It was the pride that not only human speech but all the sounds of the world could be taken down.

The Commentary That Was Nearly Lost

And yet there is one astonishing fact. Even though such an intricate design principle had been left in writing, the very book that recorded that principle — the Haerye — had long been hidden from view. When the book vanished, the principle too was veiled. Down through the late Joseon period and into modern times, scholars could not be sure what the Hunminjeongeum had been modeled on, and many guesses ran rampant, including the ‘old seal script’ theory(古篆) that it was modeled on the seal-script(篆書) styles of old Chinese characters.

The reversal came around 1940. A copy of the Haerye revealed itself in Andong, North Gyeongsang Province. It was the era of Japanese colonial rule, a time when our cultural treasures were being scattered and lost here and there. The cultural-property collector Gansong(澗松) Jeon Hyeong-pil(全鎣弼) spent a great sum to buy and safeguard this book. The copy he preserved is today called the ‘Gansong edition’, now held by the Gansong Art Museum. Had this single volume not been found, or had it been lost amid war, we might to this day still be repeating guesses, never finally knowing ‘how’ the Hunminjeongeum was made.

The value of the Haerye soon led to the state’s recognition. In 1962 it was designated National Treasure No. 70, and in 1997 it was placed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register. (Among Korea’s documentary heritage, the Jikji(直指) was registered in 2001, at a different time.) With the discovery of a single book, the scattered guesses settled, and the principle — the speech-organ imitation(象形) of the consonants and the heaven-earth-human imitation of the vowels — was at last confirmed. The book was itself the proof of the principle.

Meanwhile, in 2008 another copy was found in Sangju, North Gyeongsang Province — the so-called ‘Sangju edition'(尙州本). This copy, however, became entangled in an ownership dispute between its holder and the state; the court judged it state property, but it has not yet been returned and remains in a state whose whereabouts are not clearly disclosed.

The Verdict of ‘Featural’, and the Precise Range of ‘World’s Only’

The design of the Hunminjeongeum has drawn the eyes of modern linguists as well. The British linguist Geoffrey Sampson, in his 1990 book Writing Systems, classified Hangeul as a ‘featural writing system’ and held it in high regard. A featural script is one in which the shape of a letter not only corresponds to each individual sound but also reflects in its form the phonetic ‘feature’ that sound carries. The gahoek seen earlier — the rule of adding a stroke to mark a more forceful sound — is exactly such an example, since the feature of a sound’s strength shows itself through a change in the letter’s shape.

This appraisal, however, must not be absolutized. Some scholars, including John DeFrancis, have raised objections to classifying Hangeul as a featural script, criticizing that the letters in fact encode fewer phonetic features than is supposed. In short, it is more accurate to say that the scholarly assessment is ‘high praise as the mainstream, but with criticism coexisting’. The scientific quality of the Hunminjeongeum is certainly striking, yet to nail it down with a single absolute accolade is a thing to be scholarly cautious about.

So how far is the ‘world’s only’ of this article’s title true? Here too the range must be narrowed precisely. A flat assertion of the kind ‘the only script whose creator is known’ is often bandied about, but there is scholarly caution on this point (from scholars such as Kim Seul-ong). For the Hunminjeongeum is not the only script in history whose maker or time of making is to some degree known. Therefore the most defensible and precise distinction must be stated with this limit — the Hunminjeongeum is, in effect, a near-only script in the world for which the explanatory book setting out its very creation principle (the letter-design principle) survives alongside it. The expression ‘world’s only’ becomes accurate only when limited to this range: that ‘the principle by which the letters were made survives in a book’. That not the letters themselves but the blueprint of the letters has been handed down together — that is the true rarity of the Hunminjeongeum.

Creation and Promulgation, and from 28 to 24

Finally, let us close by sorting out two years and two numbers that are often mixed up.

First, creation (1443) and promulgation (1446) are separate events. Sejong made the twenty-eight letters in the 12th lunar month of 1443 (the 25th year of King Sejong), and the explanatory book Hunminjeongeum Haerye, which unpacked and explained those letters, was published and made known to the world in the 9th lunar month of 1446 (the 28th year of King Sejong). Between the year the letters were made and the year they were promulgated as a book lies a gap of about three years. That Hangeul Day is honored on October 9 today takes precisely this 1446 promulgation as its basis.

Second, the letters first made numbered twenty-eight. It was 28 letters, composed of 17 initials and 11 medials. But as the ages passed, four letters lost their use: ㆍ (araea), ㆁ (yet ieung), ㆆ (yeorin hieut), and ㅿ (bansiot). As a result, the letters we use today number twenty-four. So to say ‘they made 24 letters’ is inaccurate. What was made was 28, and of those four vanished to arrive at today’s 24.

And once more, the matter of the name that runs through this whole story. This 15th-century script was ‘Hunminjeongeum’ or ‘eonmun’. The name we love, ‘Hangeul’, was only born in the early 20th century at the hands of Ju Si-gyeong and other scholars — a modern naming carrying the meanings ‘the one script’, ‘the great script’, ‘the foremost script’.

Human intellect sometimes does not stop at observing the world but shapes that observation into form. The Hunminjeongeum is the result of looking into the shapes by which the mouth and tongue make sound, recalling the cosmic order of heaven, earth, and human, and rendering them into twenty-eight simple strokes. More remarkable still is that the principle so shaped was deliberately written down and left behind in a single book. A script for which the maker’s heart and hand, and even the logic of its design, are handed down together — that is the far-from-careless history of the letters we use, carelessly, every day. The National Hangeul Museum, which opened in Yongsan, Seoul, in 2014, stands in exactly the place that guards and unfolds that history.

References

• Wikipedia (Korean) — Hunminjeongeum
• Wikipedia (Korean) — Hangeul
• Wikipedia (Korean) — Hangeul Day
• Encyclopedia of Korean Culture — Hunminjeongeum
• Encyclopedia of Korean Culture — Jejahae
• Encyclopedia of Korean Culture — Jeong In-ji’s Preface
• National Institute of Korean History — Creation of Hangeul and the Hunminjeongeum
• Wikipedia (English) — Featural writing system
• National Hangeul Museum