Principles of Hangul Script
Many Korean words, along with their pronunciation, originated in Chinese words. But hangul,which literally means Korean script, is a product of a system completely different from Chinesecharacters. One might think that because Korea transmitted the Chinese writing system to Japanits indigenous writing system would resemble the Chinese more than the Japanese system would.
But there is no imitation of Chinese characters in Korean system. Hangul letters
are purely phonetic representations, the original creation of Korean court
scholars. Each character is a one-syllable sound which is represented in a
unit comprised of from one to four letters. Hangul is different fromthe Chinese
in another way, too. One distinguishing feature of the unique characters of
the Korean system is that if you change the position of the character, maybe
turn it on its side or invert it, there is a basic difference in the pronunciation
of the character. This does not happen in the Chinese ideogram-even if we
were to take one of the lines in a Chinese character, or the whole character
itself, and face it in another direction, there would be no confusing the
sound of one character with another character. It would simply look wrong.
The same goes for English, except for the m, which, turned on its head, is
a w. In hangul, the vertical or horizontal direction and top, bottom, inside
or outside placement of even only one line will often change the pronunciation
of that character.
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