0.2 The Ten Basic Vowels — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read the six simple vowel letters ㅏ , ㅓ , ㅗ , ㅜ , ㅡ , ㅣ and the four that add a y-glide, ㅑ , ㅕ , ㅛ , ㅠ . Say which of the ten are traditionally bright and which dark, and why that grouping matters later. Decide, for any vowel letter, whether it stands to the right of the onset or sits underneath it. Use ㅇ as a silent placeholder to write a syllable that begins with a vowel. Name the two vowels an English speaker confuses, and the one that has no English counterpart. Prerequisites : 0.1, which gives you the five basic consonant shapes and the idea that letters are grouped into syllable blocks. If that is hazy, read 0.1 Hangul again first. Vowels come before consonants here for a practical reason: a consonant letter on its own cannot be read or even written, because a Korean syllable block needs a vowel to be a block at all. Ten letters sounds like a lot for one sitting, and it is not, because they are not ten independent facts. There are three source symbols, six letters built from them by adding one stroke, and four more built by adding a second. Learn the building rule and the ten come free. The letters Start with the three symbols the system was built from. The Hunminjeongeum explains them as pictures of heaven, earth and the human being: a dot for the round sky, a horizontal line for the flat earth, a vertical line for a person standing upright. [1] In printing the dot became a short stroke, so every vowel letter you will actually see is a long line with one or two short strokes attached. That gives a rule with no exceptions. A long vertical line means the vowel is tall; a long horizontal line means it is wide. A stroke to the right of a vertical line, or above a horizontal one, makes what tradition calls a bright vowel; a stroke to the left, or below, makes a dark one. Two strokes instead of one add a y-glide. Read the table below down the first column, saying each letter aloud, and check the third column against what you see. Letter The vowel of How it is built ㅣ mach i ne, but short the bare vertical line, nothing added ㅡ no English word has it the bare horizontal line, nothing added ㅏ f a ther, but short vertical line, one stroke on the right ㅓ c u p, s o n vertical line, one stroke on the left ㅗ b o ne, without the glide at the end horizontal line, one stroke above ㅜ m oo d, but short horizontal line, one stroke below The English words in the middle column are approximations; the Sounds volume replaces them with something better. For now they let you read. The four letters with a second stroke Now add one more short stroke to four of those letters. The place in the mouth stays where it was; what the extra stroke adds is a y before the vowel, the sound English writes at the start of yes . Only four of the six take this treatment. The two bare lines, ㅣ and ㅡ , do not, because a glide before those two would be inaudible. Simple With a second stroke The vowel of ㅏ ㅑ ya rd ㅓ ㅕ yea rn, you ng ㅗ ㅛ yo ke ㅜ ㅠ c u te, you Six plus four is ten, and that is the whole set of basic vowels. Dictionaries and keyboards list them in the order ㅏ , ㅑ , ㅓ , ㅕ , ㅗ , ㅛ , ㅜ , ㅠ , ㅡ , ㅣ , pairing each simple vowel with its y-partner. Memorise that as a chant: it is the order in which the whole language is alphabetised, and lesson 0.6 will ask you to look words up with it. Bright and dark The grouping by stroke position has a name and a consequence. Vowels whose stroke points right or up are bright; vowels whose stroke points left or down are dark. The two bare lines are neutral. Group Letters What they share Bright ㅏ ㅑ ㅗ ㅛ the added stroke points right or up Dark ㅓ ㅕ ㅜ ㅠ the added stroke points left or down Neutral ㅡ ㅣ no added stroke at all You do not need this to read. It is here because it becomes load-bearing at lesson 3.7, where the polite verb ending used in almost every sentence of the first phase chooses its shape according to the last vowel of the stem: a bright stem takes one form, everything else the other. No English suffix cares what vowel came before it, so it is worth knowing in advance that these columns are a live division in the language and not an antiquarian note about the sky and the earth. The letter that holds the place A block has a slot at the front for a consonant, and it cannot be left empty even when the syllable begins with a vowel. Korean fills it with ㅇ , which in that position stands for nothing at all: 아 is two letters, ㅇ and ㅏ , and nobody says anything for the circle. This is the most useful trick in the volume, because it lets you write all ten vowels as readable blocks straight away. Here they are in dictionary order; say each one aloud as you read across. Block Letters Read as 아 야 ㅇ plus ㅏ , then ㅇ plus ㅑ a, ya 어 여 ㅇ plus ㅓ , then ㅇ plus ㅕ eo, yeo 오 요 ㅇ plus ㅗ , then ㅇ plus ㅛ o, yo 우 유 ㅇ plus ㅜ , then ㅇ plus ㅠ u, yu 으 이 ㅇ plus ㅡ , then ㅇ plus ㅣ eu, i Whole words can be written with nothing but these blocks: 아이 is a child, 오이 a cucumber, 우유 milk, 이유 a reason. Read those four aloud now. One warning, so that lesson 0.5 does not surprise you: the same circle in the bottom position of a block is not silent. There it is the sound at the end of English sing . One letter, two jobs, decided by where in the square it sits. Where the vowel goes You met the layout rule last lesson; now you can state it from the letters themselves. Look at the long line. If it is vertical, the vowel is tall and stands to the right of the onset. If it is horizontal, the vowel is wide and sits underneath. There is no third case among the ten. Shape Letters Where the vowel goes Tall, a long vertical line ㅏ ㅑ ㅓ ㅕ ㅣ to the right of the onset: 가 , 기 Wide, a long horizontal line ㅗ ㅛ ㅜ ㅠ ㅡ under the onset: 고 , 그 The onset is drawn narrow beside a tall vowel and wide above a wide one, but that is proportion, not identity, and a font handles it. The position itself tells you which letter is the consonant, so a block never has to be puzzled out. Here are four sentences from the c