[KS] Korean alphabetical order

[Gari Keith Ledyard]

There was a question on the origin of the present Korean alphabetical
order, and why was the original order, as given in the <Hunmin ch^ong'^um>
and in the <Hunmin ch^ong'^um haerye>, not followed or at least revived,
in modern times?  (The two works are abbreviated below as HC and HCH.)
	The short answer, as the questioner already noted, is that HC and
HCH disappeared from general circulation, probably before the middle of
the 16th century, and by the time it was rediscovered, in 1940, the
conventional ordering now used was too ingrained in popular habit to
change.  But it is really a question whether Sejong's ordering in HC and
HCH would necessarily have been better than the conventional one for
modern Koreans.
	The basic elements of the long-current conventional Korean
alphabetical order (ka, na, ta, etc.) were laid out by Ch'oe Sejin, who
was probably born in the early 1480s and died in 1547. He was an expert in
Chinese and as a teacher and compiler he produced many fine interpreters
and some excellent Chinese language textbooks and linguistic reference
materials.  He was intimately familiar with the lexical projects that
Sejong had ordered in the 1440s, and he also used Mongolian materials in
his research.  In 1527, he compiled the <Hunmong chahoe>, which was
basically a reference list of Chinese characters that students were
expected to know.  Each character was supplied with a pronunciation and
gloss in Korean.  He added to the main text his own list of the Korean
letters, inventing many of the familiar names that are still used today.
In that list he divided the letters into three groups, as follows:

I.  K kiy^ok, N ni^un, T tik'^ut L ri^ul, M mi^um, P pi^up, S siot,
ZERO/NG i^ung (8 letters)

II. K' k'i; T' t'i; P' p'i; CH chi; CH' ch'i; Z zi; ZERO i; H hi (8
letters)

III.  a, ya, ^o, y^o, o, yo, u, yu, ^u, i, A (arae a) (11 letters)

	There were 27 letters in all.  Ch'oe left out Sejong's "wholly
clear laryngeal sound," or the so-called glottal stop, which was
theoretically (but not practically) needed for Sino-Korean but had no use
in "pure" Korean. He retained Sejong's letter Z (written with a triangle)
which was still a feature of Korean in his day, although it would soon
cease to be viable.  He also retained Sejong's separate letters for the
zero initial and NG.  And of course he had the "arae a," which only
disappeared from the phonemic repertoire of Korean around 1700, but
survived in the orthography until formally abolished by the reformed
morphophonemic orthography introduced in 1933.

  	The rationale for Group I was that in the phonemic orthography
used in his day those eight letters could appear both at the beginning and
the end of the syllable, i.e., both as an initial consonant and as a
patch'im.  Therefore the names he devised demonstrated the letter in both
initial and final position.
	The rationale for Group II was that in the phonemic orthography
then current those eight letters could occur only as syllabic initials.
They could not appear as syllabic finals or patch'im.  Therefore his names
were devised to show only an syllabic initial use for the letter.
	In Group III, Ch'oe arranged the vowels according to the Yang
and Yin (^Um) categories of HCH. The vowels a and o (with ya and yo) are
yang; ^o and u (with y^o and yu) are yin.  We can see that the basis for
these two sub-groups was their ability to have a yodized onset--that is,
ya, y^o, yo, and yu.  The remaining three vowels, ^u, i, and arae a, could
not be yodized and so were listed at the end.  Of the three, arae a was
yang, ^u was yin, and i was neutral.  Given the fact that Ch'oe had placed
the yang vowels ahead of the yin ones in the first two subsets, perhaps
his order for the last three vowels should have been arae a, ^u, and i.
That in effect is what the modern order reflects once the arae a was
abolished.

	Looking back on the whole structure, Lee JooBai's complaint that
the traditional alphabetical order did not follow Sejong's ordering in HC
and HCH is revealed to be not completely justified.  HC and HCH listed the
consonants in the order of 1) "molar sounds" (= velar obstruents and
sonorant), 2) "tongue sounds" (= dental obstruents and sonorant), 3) "lip
sounds" (labial obstruents and sonorant), 4) "incisor sounds" (= dental
affricates and fricatives), "throat sounds" (= laryngeals).  But for one
exception, Ch'oe followed the same ordering in both Group I and Group II,
although unlike Sejong he put the sonorants ahead of the obstruents rather
than after them.  The glaring exception was the Zero/ng letter, i^ung,
which as a velar sonorant should, on the model of his other placements,
have come ahead of the velar obstruent.  It should have been the first
letter of the alphabet.  But this was a complicated problem, and he had
good grounds for making an exception.  In the first place, the phoneme ng-
could not then and cannot now be an initial consonant in Korean.  But
since Ch'oe had combined Sejong's zero initial and final -ng into a single
letter, that letter still did in fact have an initial and a final
function, and so belonged in his group I.  But perhaps to reflect its
anomalous behavior, he put it at the end of the list in Group I rather
than at the beginning.

	Apart from the three letters that have since become obsolete,
Ch'oe's groups I, II, and III are virtually intact today and recited in
the same sequence, except that in Group III the vowels are named with the
vowel -a rather than with -i. Unlike HC and HCH, which dropped out of
sight early on, Ch'oe's <Hunmong chahoe> was frequently reprinted during
the Chos^on dynasty and had the opportunity to make a lasting impact.
This glossary was also --at least as far as we know-- the first lexical
work to reflect the actual Korean pronunciations of Chinese characters
rather than the theoretical ones based on Chinese phonology, which had
appeared in all of the compilations in Korean compiled between Sejong's
day and his own.  It also preserves some word forms of Middle Korean that
are not found anywhere else.  When we look at his alphabetical ordering,
we can see that it was based on transparent principles that for the most
part were consistently followed.  In that sense it was "scientific," to
use the word that got all this started.

	Anyone desiring to look further into questions involving the early
history of the Korean alphabet and orthography might find useful my book
<The Korean Language Reform of 1446>, either as published under the
auspices of the National Academy of the Korean Language by Sin'gu
Munhwasa (Seoul, 1998), or in the dissertation version still available
from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan.  The published version
has many corrections and improvements over the dissertation in the first
three chapters and in the complete translations of HC and HCH in Chapter
4.  If I'm not mistaken, the published version, at 25,000 won, is probably
cheaper than the dissertation version through University Microfilms.
There is also my recent article "The International Linguistic Background
of the Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People," in Young-Key
Kim-Renaud's book <The Korean Alphabet, Its History and Structure>,
University of Hawaii Press, 1997, which goes into many issues involved
with the early Korean alphabet more concisely than in my book and
dissertation.

Gari K. Ledyard