Hangul letter names

History

Names were not recorded for any of the letters when they were first promulgated in 1446.^[5]

A prominent hypothesis^[a] is that the consonants were possibly commonly referred to in the 15th and early 16th centuries by a single syllable containing the corresponding consonant and ㅣ, e.g. gi (기), ni (니), di (디), etc. The hypothesis's reasoning is that, in the Hunminjeongeum Eonhae, the particle ᄂᆞᆫ is used after each consonant. That particle is only used if the previous syllable is pronounced with a final vowel sound; otherwise it'd be ᄋᆞᆫ. Also, that particle is only used after positive vowels (ㅏ, ㆍ, ㅗ) or the neutral vowel ㅣ. ㆍ was most commonly used among the positive vowels to illustrate sounds, making ㆍ or ㅣ seem the most likely candidates. Scholars then rely on various context clues to support the use of the latter over the former, including reasoning on the 1527 text Hunmong chahoe. That text was designed to reflect common practices around Hangul and calls for ㅣ names for syllables not used as finals.^[7][8]

Names for the base consonants were first attested to in the Hunmong chahoe,^[9][10][5] although it is unclear if Ch'oe coined the names himself.^[b] These names have formed the basis of the modern letter names.^[11] Many consonant names tend to follow a pattern where the first syllable has the consonant and ㅣ and the second 으 with the consonant on bottom, for example ㅁ is named mieum (미음). This was done to illustrate the sound of the consonant in both the initial and final position. However, because the names were recorded in an approximate phonetic fashion using Hanja, some of the names broke that pattern when converted back to Korean. For example ㄱ should be gieuk (기윽) by that pattern, but the Hanja given for it (其役) yields giyeok (기역) when converted back. Consonants that were then only used as initials and not finals had names following a different pattern: they were a single syllable containing the consonant and ㅣ. For example, the name of ㅋ was ki (키).^[1][12][13] The 1569 Buddhist text Chinŏnjip (진언집; 眞言集) used the same names.^[14]

In the 1909 report Kungmun yŏn'gu ŭijŏngan (국문연구의정안; 國文硏究議定安) by the government-sponsored Hangul research organization National Language Research Institute [ko], the names of all basic consonants were given in the ㅣ으 pattern, including the formerly irregular names (e.g. giyeok → gieuk) and the names of non-final consonants (e.g. ki → kieuk).^[15]

The 1933 Unified Hangul Orthography [ko] (UHO) preserved several historical spellings of names, like giyeok, but adopted the ㅣ으 pattern for the non-final consonants that had ㅣ names in the Hunmong chahoe. It was decided to do this as those letters had become used as finals by this point. South Korea still maintains the names chosen by the UHO. It was felt that some of these names had a long tradition, and keeping them would be minimally disruptive.^{[13][16][17][18]} North Korea adopted the apparent intended names of the consonants that broke the ㅣ으 pattern and uses toen (된; lit. 'hard', referring to the harder pronunciation) instead of ssang (쌍; 雙; lit. 'double', referring to letter shapes) for the duplicated consonants (e.g. 된기윽; toen'giŭk).^[19][6][20] The main reason for this was that ssang is a Sino-Korean word, which North Korea sometimes discourages in favor of native Korean vocabulary.^[19][6]

Archaic letter names

Many archaic letters did not have official names; even into the modern period, scholars described them using a variety of names. In 1992, the National Institute of Korean Language (NIKL) met and decided which official names to give the archaic letters; these names were to be applied to Unicode.^[23][24] These names were then romanized using the ISO/TR 11941 romanization system (but without apostrophes).^[25]