Hangul’s Unique Status Among Scripts

This chapter discusses the unique position that the Korean alphabet, Hangul, holds among the world’s writing systems. The uniqueness begins with a man-made invention without taking evolutionary paths. Not only did the purposeful invention have the cosmological, philosophical, and linguistic principles of orthography, phonology, and morphology expressively embedded within the system, but practicality was also incorporated. These wide-ranging characteristics also make Hangul simultaneously straddle over more than one category in the taxonomy of writing systems. As it crosses the boundaries of an alphabet and a syllabary with morphology-addressed syllables in the Korean lexicon, the term morphosyllabic alphabet can capture all the aspects of Hangul’s scriptal features. A well-known designation of Hangul as a featural writing system is critically discussed by raising a validity issue surrounding the terminology. To have a precise taxonomy for the multifaceted Korean script, a theoretically sound, linguistically adequate, and empirically grounded classification of Hangul remains as a desideratum.