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About The Art of Korea
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New Items
New Items for 2011
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The 2011 Christmas Collection
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Flying Cranes and Clouds
Teardrop Vase
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Download our free eBook about the art of Korea! It contains all the article
above in the handy eBook format for viewing on your PDA. Click the link below to
download it now. After you download it, move it to your PDA and it will be added
to your Microsoft Reader Library.
The Korean alphabet
(called "Hangul" in Korean) was developed by a team of scholars under
King
Se-jong (1397-1450) of the
Yi Dynasty and
is the most recently invented and most scientifically designed alphabet in the
world. "Hangul" has only 21 vowel/vowel combinations and 19 consonants, 5
of which are the same symbol repeated twice and 5 of them are simply a consonant
with the addition of an accent mark. That makes a total of only 30 basic
character shapes to be learned.
Due to western
influence "Hangul" is often written from left to right and top to bottom
like English, but
can also be
written from top to bottom and right to left like Chinese.
Each letter of the
alphabet is a simple shape that represents a sound, (some characters change
sounds or just have a harder sound depending on their location in the syllable).
Example: The Korean letter "ㄱ" sounds like a G in the initial position in a
syllable and like a K in the final position in a syllable as we can see in the
word "국
Guk,"
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국 |
Here the
letter "ㄱ"
sounds like G because it is in the initial position in the syllable. |
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Between the
two consonants is the vowel "ㅜ";
it is represented by a U and sounds like the oo
in
Pool. |
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And the "ㄱ"
here in the final position sounds like a K. |
"국
Guk" is the
Korean word for country. (The sound changes are recorded on the last page and
are easy to follow).
Each word in
Korean is broken down into syllables which are composed of 2 to 4 characters;
every syllable starts with a consonant and has a vowel in it. For example: The
word for Korea in Korean is "한국 Han guk"; here is a breakdown of the
letters and syllables for the word "Han guk"
Syllable #1.
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한 |
Consonant; "ㅎ"
sounds like the letter H as in hotel. |
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Vowel; "ㅏ"
sounds like the letter A as in father. |
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And the "ㄴ"
here in the final position sounds like an
N. |
Syllable #2.
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국 |
Consonant; "ㄱ"
sounds like the letter G in the initial position. |
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Vowel; "ㅜ"
is represented by the letter U and sounds like oo
as in pool. |
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Consonant; "ㄱ"
same as the first letter but sounds like a
K because it is
in the final position in the syllable. |
Read more...
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