Hangeul, or No Dyslexic Elves

Recently, I decided that I should learn some Korean, since I spend a great deal of time in a Korean-owned cafe. At the very least, I could learn the basic pleasantries associated with cafe life. Hangeul, the Korean script, is well known for being linguistically sound and astonishingly perceptive, although that language, it must be admitted, is the language of 15th century Korea. The official history has King Sejong as the inventor of the script, although some more recent studies have suggested a connection between Hangeul and 'Phags-pa script, invented in Tibet under Kublai Khan as an international script.

The basic principles of Hangeul were that each block should be square, in order that it look like "proper", i.e., Chinese, writing, and that the block be composed of the consonants which make up a syllable. Although Hangeul looks like a string of Chinese characters, it is much easier to disentangle the parts. The progress of time, both in phonetic change, assimilation, and increasing stylization of the "characters", has created some difficulties, but they are hardly insurmountable. My goal, for now, is to master the jamo (some of which are phonetically complex, but treated as a single graphic unit). The more I examine the jamo, the more I understand why the lovely Miss Moon grasped the principles of my Egyptian hieroglyph homework so quickly.

The systematic structure of the jamo may be linguistically inspired, but as some wag said of Tolkien's tengwar, there is no such thing as a dyslexic elf (I'm sure Tolkien would have found Hangeul fascinating). Some of the diacritics which are used to distinguish various vowels in Korean are minimal, even after the most recent reform of the script, a luxury which small linguistic communities can manage more easily than large democratic ones. It's easy for the Anglophone, accustomed to letters more distinct in shape, to confuse /a/ and /eo/. I can recognize the dental series (d, t, tt) but my brain appears to want that series to open in the same direction as the velar (g, k, kk); this is probably a conflict between the accurate picture of tongue placement and orthographic consistency. If I did not desire regularity in writing, Hangeul would not fascinate me so much! My greatest difficulty, however, is differentiating /oe/, /wi/, and /ui/; I have mastered the regular and iotated forms. The cafeteria method of learning Korean does not enlighten me on the rules of vowel harmony in Korean, leaving some vocalic pronunciations a mystery.