From the Phonemic Principle to the Morphophonological Principle

The Korean lexicon constitutes native Korean, Sino-Korean, loan, and hybrid words. When the Korean writing system was first introduced in the fifteenth century, grapheme–phoneme correspondences were regular and consistent with near-perfect fidelity, which promoted scriptal learnability. While spoken language had gradually changed from the fifteenth century through the nineteenth century, however, the phonographic script could not keep abreast with the drift of speech changes. To address the phonological changes in the script, Korean linguists integrated a morphophonological principle into the script in the early twentieth century. The orthographic reform of the controlled morphemic representation in writing resulted in various sound alternations in phonology between morphemes within disyllabic Sino-Korean compound words and between words, which disrupted the consistent form-sound mapping of the Korean script. Owing to contemporary orthographic reforms, the Korean script underwent a change in the spectrum of orthographic depth from a transparent shallow orthography (a phonographic script) to a somewhat shallow orthography (a morphosyllabic alphabetic script). The modern orthographic reforms eventually made Hangul an incongruent decoding-encoding script such that it is easy to learn to read but is convoluted to spell words correctly (i.e., easy decoding yet difficult encoding).