October 9th is 한글날, one of Korea's national holidays. This year it falls on a Friday, so a lot of people are enjoying a long weekend, and it's also the 580th anniversary of 한글 being announced to the public. Today, let’s take a look at the words you'll hear around 한글날 and what's behind them.
한글날 commemorates the day 훈민정음 was announced to the world in 1446. The records only say it happened in the first ten days of the ninth lunar month, and the 10th day of that month converts to October 9th on the modern calendar. It was dropped from the list of public holidays in 1991 and brought back in 2013, which is why some older Koreans remember working on this day.
"한글날은 훈민정음을 세상에 알린 날을 기념해요." — 한글날 commemorates the day 훈민정음 was announced to the world.
"한글날이 다시 공휴일이 된 건 2013년이에요." — 한글날 became a public holiday again in 2013.
A common mix-up: 한글 is the script, and the language itself is 한국어. Saying you're learning 한글 means you're learning to read and write the letters, while learning 한국어 means the whole language. The name 한글 is surprisingly recent. It was coined in the early 1900s and is usually credited to the linguist 주시경.
"한글은 문자이고 한국어는 언어예요." — 한글 is a script, and 한국어 is a language.
"한글은 하루면 읽을 수 있다고 해요." — They say you can learn to read 한글 in a day.
Before it was called 한글, the script was 훈민정음, roughly "the correct sounds for instructing the people." The document of the same name opens with the king explaining why he made it: the spoken language of Korea differed from Chinese, so ordinary people had things they wanted to say but no way to write them down. The famous first line is in 15th-century Korean, which is why the spelling looks unfamiliar.
"훈민정음은 백성을 가르치는 바른 소리라는 뜻이에요." — 훈민정음 means "the correct sounds for instructing the people."
세종대왕 was the fourth king of the 조선 dynasty, and the 대왕 at the end means "the Great," a title given to very few Korean kings. He is credited with leading the creation of 한글, with scholars from the 집현전 helping. His face is on the 10,000 won bill, and his statue sits in the middle of 광화문광장, so you've likely walked past him already.
"만 원짜리 지폐에 세종대왕이 있어요." — Sejong the Great is on the 10,000 won bill.
"광화문에 가면 세종대왕 동상을 볼 수 있어요." — If you go to 광화문, you can see the statue of Sejong the Great.
Statue of 세종대왕
한글 is unusual because the letters were designed to follow a logic. The basic consonants copy the shape of the speech organs: ㄱ is the tongue blocking the throat and ㅁ is the shape of the mouth. The other consonants are made by adding strokes, so ㅋ is ㄱ with an extra stroke for a stronger breath. The vowels follow an East Asian view of the world, where a flat line (ㅡ) is the earth and a vertical line (ㅣ) is a person. A dot for the sky was part of the original design, and ㅏ is basically ㅣ with that dot attached as a short stroke. Today there are 24 letters, made up of 14 consonants and 10 basic vowels.
"ㅁ은 입 모양을 본떠서 만들었어요." — ㅁ was made by copying the shape of the mouth.
"자음 열네 개와 모음 열 개로 이루어져 있어요." — It's made up of 14 consonants and 10 vowels.