Hangul, Letters Shaped Like Speech

One dot. One horizontal stroke. One vertical stroke.

Just those three shapes. Any three-year-old can draw them.

From those three shapes, people built every vowel of an entire writing system. Today a whole country writes with it.

That writing system is Hangul.

The three shapes come first, because each one has a meaning that was written down plainly.

The dot is heaven.

The horizontal stroke is earth, lying flat like the ground.

The vertical stroke is a human being, standing upright between heaven and earth.

Then the pieces were put together. A dot to the right of the vertical stroke makes one vowel. A dot to the left makes a different vowel. A dot above the horizontal stroke makes yet another. And so on. Simply by shifting those three elements around one another, every vowel of the Korean language appeared, one after the other.

Heaven, earth and humankind, arranged again in many different ways. That is the whole principle.

The consonants were made in a completely different way, an even more surprising one.

Nobody invented a shape first and then gave it a sound. It went the other way around. First the sound was made. Then someone watched what the mouth was doing while making it, and drew that shape.

The book that explains the script, called the Hunminjeongeum Haerye, sets out each case clearly.

To make a k sound, the back of the tongue lifts and presses against the roof of the mouth, blocking the way. The letter for that sound is drawn in exactly that blocking shape.

To make an n sound, the tip of the tongue touches the roof of the mouth. The letter for that sound is drawn after the tongue as it touches.

The letter for the m sound is drawn after the mouth itself. It is a square, just like the outline of closed lips.

The letter for the s sound is drawn after a front tooth: a pointed shape.

And the sound that comes from deep in the throat is drawn after the throat. It is a circle.

Anyone can try it on the spot. Closing the lips and humming an m makes that closed, squared-off mouth. Opening the throat and letting a sound rise from deep inside it brings out the other shape, the round, open throat. Those are the square and the circle that someone turned into letters nearly 600 years ago.

The other consonants needed no new drawings. Strokes were simply added to the basic shapes. One more stroke, and the sound comes out stronger, heavier. So just by counting the strokes of a letter, anyone can guess whether its sound is harsh or soft.

The last step was putting letters together into syllables.

Korean is not written as one long line of letters. It gathers each syllable into a square block. First the opening consonant, then the vowel, then a final consonant if there is one. Where each part goes depends on whether the vowel is a vertical stroke or a horizontal one. So from a distance, a line of Korean writing looks like a row of small, even bricks, not one continuous string of letters.

Gathering letters into blocks has a very practical advantage. Every syllable spoken is one block of writing, no more and no less. A glance at a line of text shows at once how many syllables it holds, just like counting the beats when reading it aloud.

The script began with 28 letters. Today the spelling uses 24 basic letters. Fourteen of them are consonants, and ten are vowels.

Twenty-four drawings. That is all anyone needs to learn to write down everything Koreans say.

And this is the best part of the whole story. People in many other places also created writing. But most of the scripts in the world grew slowly, over thousands of years, with no one designing them and no one explaining them. The letters kept changing shape, little by little, until nobody knew why a letter looked the way it did.

Hangul is different. It was created within a set period of time, by people with a clear purpose. Most important of all, they took the trouble to write down the explanation. That is why, nearly 600 years later, a child can still ask why this letter is a square and get the right answer.

The book that explains all these principles is the Hunminjeongeum Haerye. In 1997, UNESCO added it to the Memory of the World, UNESCO's program for documentary heritage. It is now on a list of documents that the whole world wants to help preserve.

An evening walk through the streets of Seoul is a good time to try this.

Look up at any shop sign, and do not try to read it. Just hunt for shapes.

A square is a mouth closing.

A circle is a throat opening.

And the dots, the horizontal strokes and the vertical strokes around them are heaven, and earth, and a person.

Looked at closely, a whole sign for a fish noodle shop turns out to be built from parts of the human body and the three greatest things in the universe.