Hangul or Chosongul is the native alphabet of the Korean language, as distinguished from the logographic Hanja and phonetic systems. It was created in the mid-15th century, and is now the official script of both North Korea and South Korea, being co-official in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture of Jilin Province, People's Republic of China.
Hangul is a phonemic alphabet organized into syllabic blocks. Each block consists of at least two of the 24 Hangul letters (jamo), with at least one each of the 14 consonants and 10 vowels. These syllabic blocks can be written horizontally from left to right as well as vertically from top to bottom in columns from right to left. Originally, the alphabet had several additional letters.
Official names
The modern name Hangul was coined by Ju Sigyeong in 1912. Han meant "great" in archaic Korean, while geul is the native Korean word for "script". Han could also be understood as the Sino-Korean word 韓 "Korean", so that the name can be read "Korean script" as well as "great script".한글 is pronounced [hanɡɯl] and has been romanized in the following ways:
o Hangeul or han-geul in the Revised Romanization of Korean, which the South Korean government uses in all English publications and encourages for all purposes.
o Han'gŭl in the McCune–Reischauer system. When used as an English word, it is often rendered without the diacritics: hangul, often capitalized as Hangul. This is how it appears in many English dictionaries.
o Hankul in Yale Romanization, a system recommended for technical linguistic studies.
* North Koreans prefer to call it Chosŏn'gŭl, for reasons related to the different names of Korea.
* The original name was Hunminjeongeum (훈민정음; 訓民正音). Due to objections to the names Hangeul, Chosŏn'gŭl, and urigeul (우리글) by the Korean minority in Manchuria, the otherwise uncommon short form jeongeum may be used as a neutral name in some international contexts.
Other names
Until the early twentieth century, Hangul was denigrated as vulgar by the literate elite who preferred the traditional hanja writing system. They gave it such names as:
* Achimgeul (writing you can learn within a morning)
* Gungmun (Hangul: 국문, hanja: 國文 "national script")
* Eonmun (Hangul: 언문, hanja: 諺文 "vernacular script")
* Amgeul (women's script). Am is a prefix that signifies a noun is feminine
* Ahaetgeul or Ahaegeul (children's script)
However, these names are now archaic, as the use of hanja in writing has become very rare in South Korea and completely phased out in North Korea.
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