Gari Ledyard

Gari Keith Ledyard (1932 – October 29, 2021) was an American scholar who was Sejong Professor of Korean History Emeritus at Columbia University.

After high school, he attended the University of Michigan and San Francisco State College, but did not do well, and in 1953 he joined the army to avoid the draft.

Ledyard's dissertation was The Korean Language Reform of 1446, on King Sejong's alphabet project, but concerned with the political implications and controversies of hangul as much as its creation.

He was finally convinced to do so by the first director of the National Academy of the Korean Language, Lee Ki-Moon, and the book was published in Korea in 1998.

He also wrote a book about the journal written by the 17th century Dutch explorer Hendrick Hamel who was held hostage in Korea for 13 years.

Only five letters were adopted from Phagspa, with most of the rest of the consonants created by featural derivation from these, as described in the account in the Hunmin Jeong-eum Haerye.

Gari Ledyard stated for clarity that the link between hangul and ʼPhags-pa was limited, and that extrapolating a wider descendance of the former from the latter was not, in his mind, correct.

Nothing would disturb me more, after this study is published, than to discover in a work on the history of writing a statement like the following: "According to recent investigations, the Korean alphabet was derived from the Mongol's phags-pa script.

"[4]The Hunmin Jeong-eum credits the 古篆字 "Gu Seal Script" as being the source King Sejong or his ministers used to create hangul.

In this guise it was called the 蒙古篆字 Mongol Seal Script, with only the initial character distinguishing it from the 古篆字 credited by the Hunmin Jeong-eum as the source of hangul.)

The basic hangul letters have been simplified graphically, retaining the essential shape of Phagspa but with a reduced number of strokes.

This simplification allowed for complex clusters, but also left room for an additional stroke to derive the aspirate plosives, ㅋㅌㅍㅊ.

On the other hand, the non-plosives, nasals ng (see below) ㄴㅁ and the fricative ㅅ, were derived by removing the top of the tenuis letter.

The subsequent derivation of the glottal stop ㆆ, by adding a vertical top stroke by analogy with the other plosives, and the aspirate ㅎ parallel the account in the Hunmin Jeong-eum.

However, recent phonetic theory has come to view the glottal stop and [h] to be isolated features of 'stop' and 'aspiration' without a true place of articulation, just as their hangul representations based on the null symbol assume.

The expected shape of ng had the additional problem that, by being just the vertical line left by removing the top stroke of ㄱ, it would have been easily confused with the vowel ㅣ [i].

Sejong's solution solved both these problems: the vertical stroke from ㄱ was added to the null symbol ㅇ to create ᇰ, graphically representing both regional pronunciations as well as being easily legible.

The Chinese initial 微 represented either m or w in various dialects, and this may be reflected in the choice of ㅁ [m] plus ㅇ (from Phagspa [w]) as the elements of hangul ᇢ.

Not only is the series ᇢᇦᇴ analogous to Phagspa, but here we may have a second example of a letter composed of two elements to represent two regional pronunciations, m and w, as we saw with ᇰ for ng and null.

The Hunmin Jeong-eum states that the shapes of the non-dotted letters ㅡㆍㅣ were also chosen to represent the concepts of yin (flat earth), yang (sun in heaven), and mediation (upright man).

A full understanding of what these horizontal and vertical groups had in common would require knowing the exact sound values these vowels had in the 15th century.