Vowels of Hangul

King Sejong created symbols for Korean vowels based on the old oriental philosophical concept. It represents the sky, the earth, and the human being. The king and the scholars made three basic symbols for each of them; a dot, a horizontal line, and a vertical line respectively. Those three symbols represent a low back vowel, a high central unrounded vowel, and a high front unrounded vowel respectively. They were the three basic symbols upon which the king built the rest of the Korean vowel symbols, again by adding or combining those basic symbols one way or another. If you look at the left picture, you can find the vowels symbols around upper left corner. They are no more than just a combination of dots, lines horizontal or vertical.

Are the symbols just simple to write? No, it's also easy to remember the sounds assigned to those symbols. A word of note at this point. We used to have a simple dot for the low back vowel of Korean, but nowadays we use a symbol like the one in figure 3 for the sound [a]. From the basic symbol for [a], we derive another symbol for [ya] by adding just one more dot (not strictly dot, but a somewhat oval dot which is realized as a short line). By changing the position of the dot and the line of the symbol for [a], we have yet another symbol for [o]. From that, we make a symbol for [yo] again by adding one more dot. So it's hard to forget them once you learn how to pronounce each vowel symbol. (click figure 3 or 4 to hear them in native Korean! Less than 30K for each sound file)

 At last it's time to combine all the vowel and consonant symbols into syllables. Hangul writing system is realized by the syllable. Korean syllable structure is V, CV, VC, CVC, and CVCC. Consonant and vowel symbols combine to form a block which represents one syllable in Korean.