Korean/Principles of Orthography - Wikibooks, open books for an open world (2024)

FAQs

What are the rules for Korean orthography? ›

There are 3 basic rules for writing Korean characters—they are written from left to right, top to bottom, and from outside to inside. This means that when you start writing a syllable in Korean, you would start at the top left corner of the block. Start at the top left corner and work down to the bottom right.

The system, known as Chosŏn muntcha in North Korea, consists of 24 letters (originally 28), including 14 consonants and 10 vowels. The consonant characters are formed with curved or angled lines. The vowels are composed of vertical or horizontal straight lines together with short lines on either side of the main line.

The Principle Behind Creating Hangul:

After creating the basic vowels and consonants, other letters were created combining a stroke order and adding the initial, middle, and final consonants into a letter. The consonants as I mentioned earlier are based on the vocal organs.

She states (2010:17) that there are five basic criteria for orthography design, and “someone interested in developing orthography should definitely start with these principles.” These five principles—accuracy, acceptability, consistency, harmonization, and convenience—are the foundation, the beginning point of ...

The Korean language only has three tenses: past, present, and future. In this way, Korean grammar is pretty straightforward. You use different particles and modify the endings of verbs and nouns to indicate the tense, formality, and whether a noun is the subject or object of a sentence.

Modern Korean is usually written horizontally from left to right.

As per reports, writing in red ink will not cause death per se. However, in the traditional Korean culture, the names of the deceased are written in red-coloured ink. Hence, people do not use this pen to write the names of the living.

At first sight, Korean script — known as Hangul, or Hangeul — looks ultra-complicated to Western eyes. It's made up of unfamiliar symbols, arranged in dense blocks. However, these symbols follow a number of simple rules, which are possible to learn in just a few hours.

The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul (English: /ˈhɑːnɡuːl/ HAHN-gool; Korean: 한글) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl (조선글) in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language.

Which is easier, Japanese or Korean? ›

Unlike Korean, Japanese doesn't have so many speech levels, and for the most part, in order to conjugate verbs into polite forms, you can add either 'desu' to nouns and adjectives or 'masu' to verbs. So Japanese is a little simpler.

Korean script: Korean Hangul script is usually written to the right in a horizontal style but can also be written vertically. In vertical written Korean text, the direction is from right to left and from top to bottom.

Its ten vowels represent the three concepts of Yin (Earth) and Yang (Heaven), with Man at the intersection of the two. Thus, we might also say that Hangul is the most philosophical of all alphabets, but that would be a subject for another essay.

An Overview of Hangul - The Korean Alphabet

Unlike English letters, Korean letters are not written in a line. Rather they are grouped into syllable blocks. These blocks are written left to right, the top line then the bottom line, and make a square of consonants and vowels that represent one syllable of a word.

One of the constant elements in the pride of Korean heritage is the reference to the Korean Language being the most-scientifically-superior among world languages. They point out the logical manner in which the system is constructed and the variety of ways Korean can be called upon to perform.

In modern Korea, vertical writing is uncommon. Modern Korean is usually written in left-to-right horizontally. Vertical writing is used when the writing space is long vertically and narrow horizontally. For example, titles on the spines of books are usually written vertically.

Korean letters, called jamo (자모), are written in syllable blocks arranged in two dimensions, where each block always has exactly one Korean syllable. For example, writing “honeybee” in Korean (kkulbeol), would be 꿀벌, and not ㄲㅜㄹㅂㅓㄹ.

The way each syllable is constructed depends on the vowel used. If it's a vertical vowel, in other words, ㅣ, ㅏ, ㅓ, and so on, then the initial consonant is placed on the left side of the vowel. If the vowel is horizontal, so ㅜ, ㅡ, ㅗ, and so on, then the first consonant should be placed above the vowel.