Teaching East Asia: Korea Teaching East Asia: Korea | Page 120
In fact, the inventor of the Korean alphabet King 세종, used the philosophy that was popular in
Asia that time. Those three elements used to make a vowel: a long vertical line ‘l’, a long horizon-
tal line ‘ㅡ’, and a small line ‘-‘ represent the human, the earth, and the heaven respectively. I
n addition, the Yin-Yang theory was employed to make the vowels. Do you know what the Yin-
Yang theory is? The yin-yang theory is quite popular Asian philosophy that was driven from China.
It says that to maintain and form the universe, the harmony and balance are important. The repre-
sentatives of the yin are female, night, left, below, dark and so on. The representatives of the Yang
are male, day, right, above, bright and so on. Therefore ㅏ and ㅗ are considered to be Yang and ㅓ
and ㅜ are considered to be Yin. In fact, phonetically ㅏ and ㅗ are bright sounds while ㅓ and ㅜ
has dark sounds. Remember ㅏ and ㅗ are Yang sounds and ㅓ and ㅜ are Yin sounds as these yin-
yang theory will be applied always when we conjugate the verbs later one.
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