iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

박재범 (Jay Park) - ‘GANADARA (Feat. 아이유 IU)’ Official Music Video

Oh yeah, and here’s the link to the full music video for GANADARA, a perfect song for Hangul Day. www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFb1...

youtube.com

YouTube video by JAY PARK

040

If you’re curious about alphabetical order in general, and the mystery of the origin of the A-B-C ordering, see Salomon, Richard G. 2013. “On Alphabetic Ordering: Some Principles and Problems”. Scripta 5:1–20.

It’s the mnemonic I was taught in my first-year Korean language class for remembering the alphabetical order of the first seven Hangul letters. And I’ve relied on it ever since. CaNaDa La M P S ㄱ ㄴ ㄷ ㄹ ㅁ ㅂ ㅅ

I promised an answer to my riddle from last time! Canada lamps 🇨🇦🪔🏮, remember?

100

This isn’t the full story, but this is already rather too long for a single Bluesky thread. So it will have to do. Just a few more loose ends to tie up and then we'll call it quits and I can go to bed. 🎁

It’s not hard to see how that kind of pedagogical practice would eventually lead to Choe’s example characters becoming letter names, and his ordering of letters becoming the standard alphabetical order.

100

One can easily imagine generations of children chanting “gi-euk ni-eun di-geut ri-eul mi-eum bi-eup si-ot i-eung” over and over again as they learned their Hangul so that they could then learn their Hanja.

100

It was not just a basic primer for teaching Chinese characters to children, but also served for many as their introduction to Hangul itself.

What accounts for Choe having such an enormous influence on the development of Hangul? Hunmongjahoe was enormously popular. We know this because it went through many editions over hundreds of years.

100

Choe's vowel ordering, which differs from that in HMJE and appears to be similarly based on phonetic and graphic principles in combination—also became standard.

100

It’s Choe’s ordering of the first eight letters—the ones that can occur in both syllable onset and syllable coda position—that became the basis of the alphabetical order we know today. (But not the second group of eight! That's a story for another day.)

The idea of ordering letters by shape may have been influenced in part by the principles of creation of the Hangul letters, as outlined in the Explanations and Examples text that accompanied the promulgation of Hangul in 1446, as you can see in this image.

A page from the 1446 text Hunminjeongeum Haerye (Explanations and Examples of Hunmnjeongeum), showing how the letter shapes were derived.

This is almost the same as the order of these letters in HMJE, except that ㅿ is moved ahead of ㅇ and ㅎ because, like ㅈ and ㅊ, it is derived from the basic letters shape ㅅ.

100

The remaining eight letters, the ones that only occur in onset position, are ordered by the same principal. Start from the HMJE order, but keep derived letter shapes together. The result is: ㅋ ㅌ ㅍ ㅈ ㅊ ㅿ ㅇ ㅎ.

100

That leaves two more singleton basic letter shapes, ㅅ and ㆁ, which Choe gives in the order of their respective HMJE Groups. So now we have ㄱㄴㄷㄹㅁㅂㅅㆁ.

Among ㄷㅌㄴ, the most basic letter shape is ㄴ, then ㄷ and ㄹ are successively built from it through stroke additions, yielding: ㄴㄷㄹ. ㅌ is skipped because it doesn't occur in coda position. In Group 3, the letter ㅁ is the most basic, and ㅂ is derived from it through stroke addition. So we have ㄱㄴㄷㄹㅁㅂ.

The most basic letter shape within each group comes first. So the first letter is ㄱ, the first basic shape of Group 1 (ㄱㅋㆁ). Because it's the only letter in Group 1 that can occur in both onset and coda position, after ㄱ Choe is done with Group 1 and moves on to Group 2.

But he's modified the order to deviate from the purely phonologically-based ordering of HMJE, to reflect the influence of graphic structure.

100

I’ve never seen an explicit explanation for Choe’s ordering, but looking at it, it seems pretty clear to me what he’s done. He’s started with the seven ordered groups from Hunminjeongeum: 1 velars, 2 dentals, 3 labials, 4 sibilants, 5 glottals, 6 lateral, 7 palatal nasal.

Within each of two sets of consonants, Choe has ordered the letters in a way that is notably different from the original ordering in HMJE, but is clearly derived from that ordering.

100

Let's pause and take a breath here. We're more than halfway through! If you're still with me, you'll definitely make it to the end. 🧘 As an incentive for us both, here's a riddle: Canada lamps 🇨🇦🪔🏮 I'll give the answer at the end of the thread.

👀 Take a careful look at that first set: These eight consonants exactly match the start of the modern ordering! ga-na-da-ra-ma-ba-sa-a ㄱ ㄴ ㄷ ㄹ ㅁ ㅂ ㅅ ㆁ

Still image from the video of the song GANADARA, the same image as in the first tweet of this thread. The caption "GA NA DA RA MA BA SA" matches the order of the letters presented in this reply post.

100

The first set were the letters that could occur at the beginning or at the end of a syllable (i.e. representing onsets or codas). The second set were the letters that could only occur in initial position.

A page from the introduction of Hunmongjahoe, showing the consonants divided into two distinct sets.

Let me explain why I think Choe ordered the letters as he did when teaching children (and adults) how to read Hangul. Choe’s first step was to divide the consonants into two sets, to make it easier to teach their sound values.

100

I doubt Choe ever imagined that it would permanently displace the more logical ordering of the original Hunminjeongeum in more formal settings.

100

Modern Hangul alphabetical order has its origins in Choe’s introduction to Hunmongjahoe. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I don't think Choe was trying to create a new alphabetical order. I'm quite sure that the ordering of the letters in his introduction was for pedagogical expediency.

100

The Korean pronunciations given for the first two characters are: 天 ‘heaven’ tyeon 텬, now cheon 천 (cf. Modern Mandarin tiān, Modern Cantonese tin1) 地 ‘earth’ di ·디, now ji 지 (cf. Modern Mandarin dì, Modern Cantonese dei6). The dot to the left of 디 is a tone mark.

Detail showing the two characters for 'sky' and 'earth', and the Korean meanings and pronunciations given in Hangul.

Here’s an image of the first page, from an edition held by the National Hangeul Museum. Note that Korean pronunciations were different in the 16th century than they are today.

Page from Hunmongjahoe, showing Chinese characters with annotations in Hangul

As with the modern names of the Hangul letters (on which look for a future thread!), we owe today’s alphabetical order to the widely used Chinese-character primer Hunmongjahoe 훈몽자회 訓蒙字會, written in 1527 by the brilliant Korean linguist Choe Sejin 최세진 崔世珍 (1465–1542).

100

So where should we look for the origin of our modern ga-na-da ㄱ ㄴ ㄷ order, and for an explanation for why the HMJE order was abandoned?

100

Two of these letters are now obsolete (ㆆ and ㅿ), and two others have merged (ㆁ and ㅇ), but those changes alone don’t account for the discrepancy in alphabetical order.

100

The seven groupings are: 1. velars: g k ng (in IPA: [k kʰ ŋ], but we needn’t concern ourselves with the phonetic details] 2. dentals: d t n 3. labials: b p m 4. sibilants: j ch s 5. glottals: ʔ h Ø 6. lateral: l 7. palatal nasal: ny

I’ve divided the 17 letters into the seven basic groupings found in traditional Chinese phonological works, based on place and manner of articulation. 1. ㄱ ㅋ ㆁ 2. ㄷ ㅌ ㄴ 3. ㅂ ㅍ ㅁ 4. ㅈ ㅊ ㅅ 5. ㆆ ㅎ ㅇ 6. ㄹ 7. ㅿ

100

🔎 Before we investigate the starting point for today’s alphabetical order, let’s take a closer look at what’s going on in HMJE. 🔍 We'll need to know just a bit more about the ordering to help us understand what happened next.

100

The consonant order of modern usage doesn’t match what’s in HMJE—and in fact, neither does the vowel order! What’s the deal here? 😡 I mean, if it was good enough for King Sejong the Great, shouldn't it be good enough for us?

100

So there you have it, right? King Sejong the Great promulgated the letters of the alphabet in a logical order based on a long-standing tradition that had diffused throughout East Asia after importation from India. 🎉 Except … that’s not the order of the letters today.

Colorful image of the modern Korean alphabet in alphabetical order.

If you want to examine the text of HMJE yourself, here is a link to a digitized version on Wikisource: ko.wikisource.org/wiki/%ED%9B%...

ko.wikisource.org

훈민정음 - 위키문헌, 우리 모두의 도서관

100

(I’ve omitted the doubled letters, which were originally devised to represent the voiced obstruents of Middle Chinese—sounds that did not exist in 15th-century native Korean or Sino-Korean character readings, and had long since disappeared from spoken 15th-century Mandarin.)

100

Here is the ordering of consonants found in Hunminjeongeum (I'll abbreviate the title as HMJE from now on). ㄱ ㅋ ㆁ ㄷ ㅌ ㄴ ㅂ ㅍ ㅁ ㅈ ㅊ ㅅ ㆆ ㅎ ㅇ ㄹ ㅿ (Start with the image on the right, look for the "ㄱ" at the top, and then proceed right to left.)

This is page 2; we are reading from right to left.

Pages from Hunminjeongeum showing the Korean letter names and the explanations of what sounds they represent.

100

That traditional Chinese ordering in turn can be traced back to the ordering of consonants in the Indic tradition—an ordering devised by the greatest and most subtle linguists of the ancient world, about 2,000 years before King Sejong was born.

100

And sure enough, the letters were presented in a clear and logical order, based on traditional Chinese phonological principles. Here is a chart from one of the medieval Chinese rime tables, the Qièyùn Zhĭzhǎngtú 切韻指掌圖 of 1203. (This is a 19th-century reprint.)

Table 2 of the Qièyùn Zhĭzhǎngtú (切韻指掌圖), original dated 1203. This edition was published by the London Missionary Society in the 19th century, and is held by the National Library of Australia. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Qieyun_Zhizhangtu_table_02.png

Hunminjeongeum 훈민정음 訓民正音, as Hangul was first called, was announced to the Korean people by King Sejong the Great in 1446, in a short eponymous document. (I'm spelling Hangul as it usually appears in English, not in the transcriptional form Hangeul 한글.)

Photo of the large statue of King Sejong the Great at Gwanghwamun in Seoul. On the stone base upon which the statue of the seated king is placed are the words "세종대왕" (King Sejong the Great).

The origins of A-B-C order may be lost in the mists of ancient time, but you’d think we’d have a clear picture of the origin of Hangul alphabetical order. But … well, you’d be surprised. It’s a bit more complicated — and interesting! — than you'd expect. 🕵️‍♀️🕵️‍♂️ Let's explore!

100

So what about Hangul? Hangul was invented only 500 years ago through a process of informed deliberation. The rationale for its creation and the logic underlying its structure are well documented.

100

The influence of the Indic ordering extends farther than you might imagine. The a-i-u-e-o ka-ki-ku-ke-ko ordering of Japanese kana is based on it, as is the ordering of consonants in medieval Chinese rhyme tables.

Some alphabets have logical orderings, notably the Indic scripts derived from Brāhmī (including modern Devanāgarī), which are ordered based on a highly sophisticated understanding of articulatory phonetics.

Which means the orderings of Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Cyrillic, and every other alphabet that, together with Latin, descends ultimately from the 2nd-millennium BCE Phoenician script are also of unknown origin. Image source: usefulcharts.com/blogs/charts...

Image of colorful poster showing evolution of the Latin alphabet from Proto-Sinaitic to Phoenician to Greek.

100

Alphabetical order is so natural and familiar to us, we sometimes forget that it isn’t a pre-ordained law of nature. The reason, if there even is one, for the A-B-C ordering of the Latin alphabet is unknown.

100