📜 Story — Korea, around 1900
Ahakpyeon began as a primer for learning Chinese characters, compiled by Jeong Yak-yong, a scholar of the Joseon dynasty’s later years. Editions that came afterwards added English words and set them down in Hangul — the Korean alphabet, a small set of consonant and vowel letters stacked into square syllable blocks. What those blocks say is the surprise: a spelling from a century ago lands closer to the spoken sound than the standardised one Koreans use now.
Each line gives the Hangul spelling as printed, then how those letters read, then the English word. This is an alphabet pushed to the limit of what it can record.
“The son of Mr Jang, appointed as an interpreter, pronounced F and P as distinct sounds, and was flawless in both the reading and the speaking of English”
In 1886 King Gojong invited teachers out of Dartmouth, Princeton and Oberlin to Yugyeong Gongwon, the royal English school. They were native speakers, and what they taught was conversation and pronunciation rather than grammar and translation. Students were interpreting within six to ten months of starting. The British consul reported home that Koreans were the finest linguists in the East, and that neither the Chinese nor the Japanese could come near them. Part of the reason was sitting in their hands — an alphabet able to write down very nearly any sound they were asked to hear.
Under Japanese colonial rule the native-speaker teachers were replaced by Japanese teachers who did not speak English, and the subject was rebuilt around grammar, composition and reading comprehension. Records survive of students demonstrating to get the native teachers back. That syllabus outlived the occupation, and its descendant is the exam-shaped English taught across Korea today — which is why so many people here can take a sentence apart on paper and lose it entirely the moment somebody says it aloud. → [[why-english-doesnt-click]]
Hangul can put English on paper close to its actual sound today just as it could then. What the writers of those old spellings did was not clever transcription; it was the order they worked in. They listened, and then they wrote down what they had heard. Catch the sound first, open the ear by listening fast, open the mouth by shadowing — the modern method runs in the same direction, and it was proved on this peninsula a hundred years ago. → [[listening-first-order]]
Hangul has twenty-four letters, and they are not laid out in a line — they are stacked into a block, an opening consonant above a vowel with an optional closing consonant beneath. Because each syllable is built rather than listed, the writing system can spell far more sounds than the Korean language itself uses, so a sound foreign to Korean still has somewhere to go. That spare room is what made 촤일드 and 으라이쓰 possible. (Exactly how many sounds depends entirely on how you count them, so this article gives no number.) One warning all the same: being able to write a sound is not the same as being able to make it. Spelling is where you start, not where you arrive.
Source
Adapted from Oh Seung-jong’s columns, together with the account quoted by the reporter Lee Ho-seong in the monthly magazine Joeun Saenggak (April 2018) and Shinobu Junpei, “The Korean Peninsula” (1901). The romanisations beside each Hangul spelling are ours, in the Revised Romanisation of Korean, and are given so that a reader who does not read Hangul can hear what the letters are saying. On the order these spellings imply see [[listening-first-order]]; on what happens when print comes before sound, [[why-english-doesnt-click]]. — Not carried over from the Korean edition: its comparison of Korean and Japanese standings in the TOEFL speaking section, and of Finland, which rest on national rankings the test publisher does not issue.
Read the original →※ This article summarizes and restructures the key points of the source above.