Gari Ledyard
Encyclopedia
Gari Keith Ledyard is Sejong Professor of Korean History Emeritus at Columbia University
. He is best known for his work on the history of the hangul
alphabet.
. He grew up in Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan
, and moved with his family to San Rafael, California
in 1948. After high school, he attended the University of Michigan
and San Francisco State College, but did not do well, and in 1953 he joined the army to avoid the draft. Luckily, he missed so much basic training due to illness that he had to repeat it, and during that time opportunities opened up for language training, one of his interests.
He was scheduled for one year intensive Russian language
training at the Army Language School
in Monterey
, but was soon reassigned to Korean. He graduated too high in his class to be sent to Korea, but after a few months was able to get a posting in Tokyo in July, 1955, and then a transfer to Seoul
in November. While there he looked up the families of his Korean teachers, ate in town, and taught at the American Language Institute. When his superiors found out, he was accused of fraternization
and reassigned to Tokyo, after only nine months in Korea, and returned to the US in December.
The next spring he enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley, in Chinese language and literature
, studying under, among others, Peter Alexis Boodberg and Zhao Yuanren, as there was no Korean Studies program in the United States at the time. For his Bachelor degree in 1958 he translated the Hunmin Jeongeum Haerye
into English; for his Master degree in 1963 he documented early Korean–Mongol diplomatic relations; and with a year for research in Seoul for his dissertation, he received his PhD in 1966 and a position at Columbia, at the Centre for Korean Research, succeeding William E. Skillend
. He was made a full professor in 1977, and retired in 2001.
Ledyard's dissertation was The Korean Language Reform of 1446, on King Sejong's alphabet project, but concerned with the political implications and controversies of hangul as much as its creation. Unfortunately, he failed to copyright his dissertation, and it was distributed in microfilm and photocopy, so that he could not copyright it and publish without substantial revision. He was finally convinced to do so by the first director of the National Academy of the Korean Language, Lee Ki-Moon, and the book was published in Korea in 1998.
He has also published on Korean cartography
, the alliance between Korea and China during the first Japanese invasions, and the relationship between the wars of the Three Kingdoms
and the founding of the Japanese state
from Korea. He also wrote a book about the journal written by the 17th century Dutch explorer Hendrick Hamel
who was held hostage in Korea for 13 years. The title of this book is 'The Dutch come to Korea' and was first published in 1971. He was invited to visit North Korea in 1988.
of the Yuan dynasty
, known as the 蒙古篆字 měnggǔ zhuānzì (Mongol seal script).
Only five letters were adopted from Phagspa, with most of the rest of the consonants created by featural
derivation from these, as described in the account in the Hunmin Jeong-eum Haerye. However, which letters the basic consonants were differs between the two accounts. Whereas the Haerye implies that the graphically simplest letters ㄱㄴㅁㅅㅇ are basic, with others derived from them by the addition of strokes (though with ㆁㄹㅿ set apart), Ledyard believes the five phonologically simplest letters ㄱㄷㄹㅂㅈ, which were basic in Chinese phonology, were also basic to hangul, with strokes either added or subtracted to derive the other letters. It was these five core letters which were taken from the Phagspa script, and ultimately derive from the Tibetan letters ག ད ལ བ ས. Thus they may be cognate with Greek
Γ Δ Λ Β and the letters C/G D L B of the Latin alphabet
. (The history of the S sounds between Tibetan and Greek is more difficult to reconstruct.) A sixth basic letter, ㅇ, was an invention, as in the Haerye account.
The creation of the vowel letters is essentially the same in the two accounts.
The Hunmin Jeong-eum credits the 古篆字 "Gu Seal Script" as being the source King Sejong or his ministers used to create hangul. This has traditionally been interpreted as the Old Seal Script, and has confused philologists because hangul bears no functional similarity to the Chinese seal script
s. However, 古 gǔ had more than one meaning: besides meaning old, it could be used to refer to the Mongols (蒙古 Měng-gǔ). Records from Sejong's day played with this ambiguity, joking that "no one is more gu than the Meng-gu". That is, Gu Seal Script may have been a veiled reference to the Mongol Seal Script, or Phagspa alphabet. (Seal script is a style of writing, used for name seals and official stamps. Phagspa had a seal script variant modeled after the appearance of the Chinese seal script of its day. In this guise it was called the 蒙古篆字 Mongol Seal Script, with only the initial character distinguishing it from the 古篆字 credited by the Hunmin Jeong-eum as the source of hangul.) There were many Phagspa manuscripts in the Korean palace library, and several of Sejong's ministers knew the script well.
If this were the case, Sejong's evasion on the Mongol connection can be understood in light of Korea's relationship with China after the fall of the Yuan dynasty, as well as the Korean literati's contempt for the Mongols as "barbarians". Indeed, such China-centered resistance kept hangul out of common use until the dawn of the twentieth century.
Although several of the basic concepts of hangul came from Indic phonology through the Phagspa script, such as the relationships among the homorganic consonants and, of course, the alphabetic principle
itself, Chinese phonology also played a major role. Besides the grouping of letters into syllables, along the lines of Chinese characters, it was Chinese phonology, not Indic, that determined which five consonants were basic, and therefore to be retained from Phagspa. These were the tenuis
(non-voiced, non-aspirated) plosives, g for ㄱ [k], d for ㄷ [t], and b for ㅂ [p], which were basic to Chinese theory, but which were voiced in the Indic languages and not considered basic; as well as the sibilant s for ㅈ [ts] and the liquid l for ㄹ [l]. (Korean ㅈ was pronounced [ts] in the 15th century.)
(It is somewhat problematic that hangul ㅈ [ts] has been derived from Phagspa s [s] rather than from dz [ts]. However, the shape of the Phagspa s may have been more conducive to deriving multiple hangul letters than Phagspa dz would have been. Such a shift could easily have happened if the entire Phagspa alphabet were first used as a template for the new alphabet, and then whittled down to a minimal set of basic letters through featural derivation, so that a more convenient shape from among the Phagspa letters [s, ts, tsʰ, z, dz] could be used as the basis for the hangul letters for the sibilants [s, ts, tsʰ].)
The basic hangul letters have been simplified graphically, retaining the essential shape of Phagspa but with a reduced number of strokes. For example, the box inside Phagspa g is not found in hangul ㄱ [k]. This simplification allowed for complex clusters, but also left room for an additional stroke to derive the aspirate plosives, ㅋㅌㅍㅊ. On the other hand, the non-plosives, nasals ng (see below) ㄴㅁ and the fricative ㅅ, were derived by removing the top of the tenuis letter. (No letters were derived from ㄹ.) This clears up a few points. For example, it's easy to derive ㅁ from ㅂ by removing the top of ㅂ, but it's not clear how you'd get ㅂ by adding something to ㅁ, since ㅂ is not analogous to the other plosives: if they were derived, as in the traditional account, we'd expect them all to have a similar vertical top stroke.
Sejong also needed a null symbol to refer to the lack of a consonant, and he chose the circle, ㅇ. The subsequent derivation of the glottal stop ㆆ, by adding a vertical top stroke by analogy with the other plosives, and the aspirate ㅎ parallel the account in the Hunmin Jeong-eum. The phonetic theory inherent in this derivation is more accurate than modern IPA usage. In the IPA, the glottal consonants are posited as having a specific "glottal" place of articulation. However, recent phonetic theory has come to view the glottal stop and [h] to be isolated features of 'stop' and 'aspiration' without a true place of articulation, just as their hangul representations based on the null symbol assume.
The ng is the odd letter out here, as it is in the Hunmin Jeong-eum. This may reflect its variable behavior. Hangul was designed not just to write Korean, but to accurately represent Chinese. Besides the letters covered here, there were quite a few more used to represent Chinese etymology. Now, many Chinese words began with ng, at least historically, and this was being lost in several regions of China by Sejong's day: that is, etymological ng was either silent or pronounced [ŋ] in China, and was silent when borrowed into Korean. The expected shape of ng had the additional problem that, by being just the vertical line left by removing the top stroke of ㄱ, it would have been easily confused with the vowel ㅣ [i]. Sejong's solution solved both these problems: the vertical stroke from ㄱ was added to the null symbol ㅇ to create ᇰ, graphically representing both regional pronunciations as well as being easily legible. (If your browser doesn't display this, it's a circle with a vertical line on top, like an upside-down keyhole or lollipop.) Thus ᇰ was pronounced ng in the middle or end of a word, but was silent at the beginning. Eventually the graphic distinction between the two silent initials ㅇ and ᇰ was lost.
Two additional details lend credence to Ledyard's hypothesis. For one, the composition of obsolete ᇢᇦᇴ w, v, f (for Chinese initials 微非敷), from the graphic derivatives of the basic letter ㅂ b [p] (that is, ㅁㅂㅍ m, b, p) by adding a small circle under them, is parallel to their Phagspa equivalents, which were similarly derived by adding a small loop under three graphic variants of the letter h. Now, this small loop also represented w when it occurred after vowels in Phagspa. The Chinese initial 微 represented either m or w in various dialects, and this may be reflected in the choice of ㅁ [m] plus ㅇ (from Phagspa [w]) as the elements of hangul ᇢ. Not only is the series ᇢᇦᇴ analogous to Phagspa, but here we may have a second example of a letter composed of two elements to represent two regional pronunciations, m and w, as we saw with ᇰ for ng and null.
Secondly, most of the basic hangul letters were originally simple geometric shapes. For example, ㄱ was the corner of a square, ㅁ a full square, ㅅ was a caret-like Λ, ㅇ was a circle. In the Hunmin Jeong-eum, before the influence from Chinese calligraphy on hangul, these are purely geometric. However, ㄷ was different. It wasn't a simple half square, like we might expect if Sejong had simply created it ex nihilo. Rather, even in the Hunmin Jeong-eum, it had a small lip protruding from the upper left corner. This lip duplicates the shape of Phagspa d [t], and can be traced back to the Tibetan letter d, ད.
and iotation
.
Of the seven vowels, four could be preceded by a y- sound ("iotized"). These four were written as a dot next to a line: ㅓㅏㅜㅗ. (Through the influence of Chinese calligraphy, the dots soon became connected to the line, as seen here.) Iotation was then indicated by doubling this dot: ㅕㅑㅠㅛ. The three vowels which could not be yotized were written with a single stroke: ㅡㆍㅣ.
The Korean language of this period had vowel harmony to a greater extent than it does today. Vowels alternated according to their environment, and fell into "harmonic" groups. This affected the morphology
of the language, and Korean phonology described it in terms of yin and yang: If a word had yang ('bright') vowels, then most suffixes also had to have a yang vowel; and conversely, if the root had yin ('dark') vowels, the suffixes needed to be yin as well. There was a third group called "mediating" ('neutral' in Western terminology) that could coexist with either yin or yang vowels.
The Korean neutral vowel was ㅣ i. The yin vowels were ㅡㅜㅓ eu, u, eo; the dots are in the yin directions of 'down' and 'left'. The yang vowels were ㆍㅗㅏ, ə, o, a, with the dots in the yang directions of 'up' and 'right'. The Hunmin Jeong-eum states that the shapes of the non-dotted letters ㅡㆍㅣ were also chosen to represent the concepts of yin (flat earth), yang (sun in heaven), and mediation (upright man). (The letter ㆍ ə is now obsolete.)
There was a third parameter in designing the vowel letters, namely, choosing ㅡ as the graphic base of ㅜ and ㅗ, and ㅣ as the base of ㅓ and ㅏ. A full understanding of what these horizontal and vertical groups had in common would require knowing the exact sound values these vowels had in the 15th century. Our uncertainty is primarily with the letters ㆍㅓㅏ. Some linguists reconstruct these as *a, *ɤ, *e, respectively; others as *ə, *e, *a. However, the horizontal letters ㅡㅜㅗ do appear to have all represented mid to high back vowels, [*ɯ, *u, *o].
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
. He is best known for his work on the history of the hangul
Hangul
Hangul,Pronounced or ; Korean: 한글 Hangeul/Han'gŭl or 조선글 Chosŏn'gŭl/Joseongeul the Korean alphabet, is the native alphabet of the Korean language. It is a separate script from Hanja, the logographic Chinese characters which are also sometimes used to write Korean...
alphabet.
Biography
Ledyard was born while his family happened to be in Syracuse for work during the DepressionGreat Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
. He grew up in Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ann Arbor is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the county seat of Washtenaw County. The 2010 census places the population at 113,934, making it the sixth largest city in Michigan. The Ann Arbor Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 344,791 as of 2010...
, and moved with his family to San Rafael, California
San Rafael, California
San Rafael is a city and the county seat of Marin County, California, United States. The city is located in the North Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area...
in 1948. After high school, he attended the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
and San Francisco State College, but did not do well, and in 1953 he joined the army to avoid the draft. Luckily, he missed so much basic training due to illness that he had to repeat it, and during that time opportunities opened up for language training, one of his interests.
He was scheduled for one year intensive Russian language
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
training at the Army Language School
Defense Language Institute
The Defense Language Institute is a United States Department of Defense educational and research institution, which provides linguistic and cultural instruction to the Department of Defense, other Federal Agencies and numerous and varied other customers...
in Monterey
Monterey, California
The City of Monterey in Monterey County is located on Monterey Bay along the Pacific coast in Central California. Monterey lies at an elevation of 26 feet above sea level. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 27,810. Monterey is of historical importance because it was the capital of...
, but was soon reassigned to Korean. He graduated too high in his class to be sent to Korea, but after a few months was able to get a posting in Tokyo in July, 1955, and then a transfer to Seoul
Seoul
Seoul , officially the Seoul Special City, is the capital and largest metropolis of South Korea. A megacity with a population of over 10 million, it is the largest city proper in the OECD developed world...
in November. While there he looked up the families of his Korean teachers, ate in town, and taught at the American Language Institute. When his superiors found out, he was accused of fraternization
Fraternization
Fraternization is "turning people into brothers"—conducting social relations with people who are actually unrelated and/or of a different class as though they were siblings, family members, personal friends or lovers....
and reassigned to Tokyo, after only nine months in Korea, and returned to the US in December.
The next spring he enrolled in the University of California at Berkeley, in Chinese language and literature
Chinese literature
Chinese literature extends thousands of years, from the earliest recorded dynastic court archives to the mature fictional novels that arose during the Ming Dynasty to entertain the masses of literate Chinese...
, studying under, among others, Peter Alexis Boodberg and Zhao Yuanren, as there was no Korean Studies program in the United States at the time. For his Bachelor degree in 1958 he translated the Hunmin Jeongeum Haerye
Hunmin Jeongeum Haerye
Hunminjeongeum Haerye , also called the Haerye Edition of Hunminjeongeum or simply The Haerye, is a commentary on the Hunminjeongeum, the original promulgation of hangul.It was written by scholars from the Jiphyeonjeon , commissioned by King Sejong the...
into English; for his Master degree in 1963 he documented early Korean–Mongol diplomatic relations; and with a year for research in Seoul for his dissertation, he received his PhD in 1966 and a position at Columbia, at the Centre for Korean Research, succeeding William E. Skillend
William E. Skillend
William E. Skillend was the first British academic specializing in the Korean language, and the first professor of Korean at SOAS....
. He was made a full professor in 1977, and retired in 2001.
Ledyard's dissertation was The Korean Language Reform of 1446, on King Sejong's alphabet project, but concerned with the political implications and controversies of hangul as much as its creation. Unfortunately, he failed to copyright his dissertation, and it was distributed in microfilm and photocopy, so that he could not copyright it and publish without substantial revision. He was finally convinced to do so by the first director of the National Academy of the Korean Language, Lee Ki-Moon, and the book was published in Korea in 1998.
He has also published on Korean cartography
Cartography
Cartography is the study and practice of making maps. Combining science, aesthetics, and technique, cartography builds on the premise that reality can be modeled in ways that communicate spatial information effectively.The fundamental problems of traditional cartography are to:*Set the map's...
, the alliance between Korea and China during the first Japanese invasions, and the relationship between the wars of the Three Kingdoms
Three Kingdoms of Korea
The Three Kingdoms of Korea refer to the ancient Korean kingdoms of Goguryeo, Baekje and Silla, which dominated the Korean peninsula and parts of Manchuria for much of the 1st millennium...
and the founding of the Japanese state
Yamato period
The is the period of Japanese history when the Japanese Imperial court ruled from modern-day Nara Prefecture, then known as Yamato Province.While conventionally assigned to the period 250–710 , the actual start of Yamato rule is disputed...
from Korea. He also wrote a book about the journal written by the 17th century Dutch explorer Hendrick Hamel
Hendrick Hamel
Hendrick Hamel was the first Westerner to write and experience first-hand in the Joseon Dynasty era in Korea . He later wrote "Hamel's Journal and a Description of the Kingdom of Korea, 1653-1666", published after his return to the Netherlands.Hendrick Hamel was born and died in Gorinchem...
who was held hostage in Korea for 13 years. The title of this book is 'The Dutch come to Korea' and was first published in 1971. He was invited to visit North Korea in 1988.
Research on the origin of hangul
Ledyard believes that the basic hangul consonants were adopted from the Mongolian Phagspa scriptPhagspa script
The Phags-pa script was an alphabet designed by the Tibetan Lama 'Gro-mgon Chos-rgyal 'Phags-pa for Yuan emperor Kublai Khan, as a unified script for the literary languages of the Yuan Dynasty....
of the Yuan dynasty
Yuan Dynasty
The Yuan Dynasty , or Great Yuan Empire was a ruling dynasty founded by the Mongol leader Kublai Khan, who ruled most of present-day China, all of modern Mongolia and its surrounding areas, lasting officially from 1271 to 1368. It is considered both as a division of the Mongol Empire and as an...
, known as the 蒙古篆字 měnggǔ zhuānzì (Mongol seal script).
Only five letters were adopted from Phagspa, with most of the rest of the consonants created by featural
Distinctive feature
In linguistics, a distinctive feature is the most basic unit of phonological structure that may be analyzed in phonological theory.Distinctive features are grouped into categories according to the natural classes of segments they describe: major class features, laryngeal features, manner features,...
derivation from these, as described in the account in the Hunmin Jeong-eum Haerye. However, which letters the basic consonants were differs between the two accounts. Whereas the Haerye implies that the graphically simplest letters ㄱㄴㅁㅅㅇ are basic, with others derived from them by the addition of strokes (though with ㆁㄹㅿ set apart), Ledyard believes the five phonologically simplest letters ㄱㄷㄹㅂㅈ, which were basic in Chinese phonology, were also basic to hangul, with strokes either added or subtracted to derive the other letters. It was these five core letters which were taken from the Phagspa script, and ultimately derive from the Tibetan letters ག ད ལ བ ས. Thus they may be cognate with Greek
Greek alphabet
The Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
Γ Δ Λ Β and the letters C/G D L B of the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
. (The history of the S sounds between Tibetan and Greek is more difficult to reconstruct.) A sixth basic letter, ㅇ, was an invention, as in the Haerye account.
The creation of the vowel letters is essentially the same in the two accounts.
Consonantal design
Seal script
Seal script is an ancient style of Chinese calligraphy. It evolved organically out of the Zhōu dynasty script , arising in the Warring State of Qin...
s. However, 古 gǔ had more than one meaning: besides meaning old, it could be used to refer to the Mongols (蒙古 Měng-gǔ). Records from Sejong's day played with this ambiguity, joking that "no one is more gu than the Meng-gu". That is, Gu Seal Script may have been a veiled reference to the Mongol Seal Script, or Phagspa alphabet. (Seal script is a style of writing, used for name seals and official stamps. Phagspa had a seal script variant modeled after the appearance of the Chinese seal script of its day. In this guise it was called the 蒙古篆字 Mongol Seal Script, with only the initial character distinguishing it from the 古篆字 credited by the Hunmin Jeong-eum as the source of hangul.) There were many Phagspa manuscripts in the Korean palace library, and several of Sejong's ministers knew the script well.
If this were the case, Sejong's evasion on the Mongol connection can be understood in light of Korea's relationship with China after the fall of the Yuan dynasty, as well as the Korean literati's contempt for the Mongols as "barbarians". Indeed, such China-centered resistance kept hangul out of common use until the dawn of the twentieth century.
Although several of the basic concepts of hangul came from Indic phonology through the Phagspa script, such as the relationships among the homorganic consonants and, of course, the alphabetic principle
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
itself, Chinese phonology also played a major role. Besides the grouping of letters into syllables, along the lines of Chinese characters, it was Chinese phonology, not Indic, that determined which five consonants were basic, and therefore to be retained from Phagspa. These were the tenuis
Tenuis consonant
In linguistics, a tenuis consonant is a stop or affricate which is unvoiced, unaspirated, and unglottalized. That is, it has a "plain" phonation like , with a voice onset time close to zero, as in Spanish p, t, ch, k, or as in English p, t, k after s .In transcription, tenuis consonants are not...
(non-voiced, non-aspirated) plosives, g for ㄱ [k], d for ㄷ [t], and b for ㅂ [p], which were basic to Chinese theory, but which were voiced in the Indic languages and not considered basic; as well as the sibilant s for ㅈ [ts] and the liquid l for ㄹ [l]. (Korean ㅈ was pronounced [ts] in the 15th century.)
(It is somewhat problematic that hangul ㅈ [ts] has been derived from Phagspa s [s] rather than from dz [ts]. However, the shape of the Phagspa s may have been more conducive to deriving multiple hangul letters than Phagspa dz would have been. Such a shift could easily have happened if the entire Phagspa alphabet were first used as a template for the new alphabet, and then whittled down to a minimal set of basic letters through featural derivation, so that a more convenient shape from among the Phagspa letters [s, ts, tsʰ, z, dz] could be used as the basis for the hangul letters for the sibilants [s, ts, tsʰ].)
The basic hangul letters have been simplified graphically, retaining the essential shape of Phagspa but with a reduced number of strokes. For example, the box inside Phagspa g is not found in hangul ㄱ [k]. This simplification allowed for complex clusters, but also left room for an additional stroke to derive the aspirate plosives, ㅋㅌㅍㅊ. On the other hand, the non-plosives, nasals ng (see below) ㄴㅁ and the fricative ㅅ, were derived by removing the top of the tenuis letter. (No letters were derived from ㄹ.) This clears up a few points. For example, it's easy to derive ㅁ from ㅂ by removing the top of ㅂ, but it's not clear how you'd get ㅂ by adding something to ㅁ, since ㅂ is not analogous to the other plosives: if they were derived, as in the traditional account, we'd expect them all to have a similar vertical top stroke.
Sejong also needed a null symbol to refer to the lack of a consonant, and he chose the circle, ㅇ. The subsequent derivation of the glottal stop ㆆ, by adding a vertical top stroke by analogy with the other plosives, and the aspirate ㅎ parallel the account in the Hunmin Jeong-eum. The phonetic theory inherent in this derivation is more accurate than modern IPA usage. In the IPA, the glottal consonants are posited as having a specific "glottal" place of articulation. However, recent phonetic theory has come to view the glottal stop and [h] to be isolated features of 'stop' and 'aspiration' without a true place of articulation, just as their hangul representations based on the null symbol assume.
The ng is the odd letter out here, as it is in the Hunmin Jeong-eum. This may reflect its variable behavior. Hangul was designed not just to write Korean, but to accurately represent Chinese. Besides the letters covered here, there were quite a few more used to represent Chinese etymology. Now, many Chinese words began with ng, at least historically, and this was being lost in several regions of China by Sejong's day: that is, etymological ng was either silent or pronounced [ŋ] in China, and was silent when borrowed into Korean. The expected shape of ng had the additional problem that, by being just the vertical line left by removing the top stroke of ㄱ, it would have been easily confused with the vowel ㅣ [i]. Sejong's solution solved both these problems: the vertical stroke from ㄱ was added to the null symbol ㅇ to create ᇰ, graphically representing both regional pronunciations as well as being easily legible. (If your browser doesn't display this, it's a circle with a vertical line on top, like an upside-down keyhole or lollipop.) Thus ᇰ was pronounced ng in the middle or end of a word, but was silent at the beginning. Eventually the graphic distinction between the two silent initials ㅇ and ᇰ was lost.
Two additional details lend credence to Ledyard's hypothesis. For one, the composition of obsolete ᇢᇦᇴ w, v, f (for Chinese initials 微非敷), from the graphic derivatives of the basic letter ㅂ b [p] (that is, ㅁㅂㅍ m, b, p) by adding a small circle under them, is parallel to their Phagspa equivalents, which were similarly derived by adding a small loop under three graphic variants of the letter h. Now, this small loop also represented w when it occurred after vowels in Phagspa. The Chinese initial 微 represented either m or w in various dialects, and this may be reflected in the choice of ㅁ [m] plus ㅇ (from Phagspa [w]) as the elements of hangul ᇢ. Not only is the series ᇢᇦᇴ analogous to Phagspa, but here we may have a second example of a letter composed of two elements to represent two regional pronunciations, m and w, as we saw with ᇰ for ng and null.
Secondly, most of the basic hangul letters were originally simple geometric shapes. For example, ㄱ was the corner of a square, ㅁ a full square, ㅅ was a caret-like Λ, ㅇ was a circle. In the Hunmin Jeong-eum, before the influence from Chinese calligraphy on hangul, these are purely geometric. However, ㄷ was different. It wasn't a simple half square, like we might expect if Sejong had simply created it ex nihilo. Rather, even in the Hunmin Jeong-eum, it had a small lip protruding from the upper left corner. This lip duplicates the shape of Phagspa d [t], and can be traced back to the Tibetan letter d, ད.
Vocalic design
The seven basic vowel letters were not taken from Phagspa, but rather seem to have been invented by Sejong or his ministers to represent the phonological principles of Korean. Two methods were used to organize and classify these vowels, vowel harmonyVowel harmony
Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels that occurs in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on which vowels may be found near each other....
and iotation
Iotation
Iotation is a linguistic phenomenon very characteristic of the Slavic languages. It should not be confused with palatalization, which is an entirely different process....
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Of the seven vowels, four could be preceded by a y- sound ("iotized"). These four were written as a dot next to a line: ㅓㅏㅜㅗ. (Through the influence of Chinese calligraphy, the dots soon became connected to the line, as seen here.) Iotation was then indicated by doubling this dot: ㅕㅑㅠㅛ. The three vowels which could not be yotized were written with a single stroke: ㅡㆍㅣ.
The Korean language of this period had vowel harmony to a greater extent than it does today. Vowels alternated according to their environment, and fell into "harmonic" groups. This affected the morphology
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
of the language, and Korean phonology described it in terms of yin and yang: If a word had yang ('bright') vowels, then most suffixes also had to have a yang vowel; and conversely, if the root had yin ('dark') vowels, the suffixes needed to be yin as well. There was a third group called "mediating" ('neutral' in Western terminology) that could coexist with either yin or yang vowels.
The Korean neutral vowel was ㅣ i. The yin vowels were ㅡㅜㅓ eu, u, eo; the dots are in the yin directions of 'down' and 'left'. The yang vowels were ㆍㅗㅏ, ə, o, a, with the dots in the yang directions of 'up' and 'right'. The Hunmin Jeong-eum states that the shapes of the non-dotted letters ㅡㆍㅣ were also chosen to represent the concepts of yin (flat earth), yang (sun in heaven), and mediation (upright man). (The letter ㆍ ə is now obsolete.)
There was a third parameter in designing the vowel letters, namely, choosing ㅡ as the graphic base of ㅜ and ㅗ, and ㅣ as the base of ㅓ and ㅏ. A full understanding of what these horizontal and vertical groups had in common would require knowing the exact sound values these vowels had in the 15th century. Our uncertainty is primarily with the letters ㆍㅓㅏ. Some linguists reconstruct these as *a, *ɤ, *e, respectively; others as *ə, *e, *a. However, the horizontal letters ㅡㅜㅗ do appear to have all represented mid to high back vowels, [*ɯ, *u, *o].