ㄱ giyeok

Sejong's scholars drew this consonant in the shape the tongue takes when its back lifts to touch the soft palate. The letter is its own articulation diagram. You are looking at a phoneme rendered as anatomy.

ㄴ nieun

The tongue tip rests against the ridge behind the upper teeth. The letter records that posture, frozen mid-articulation. A phonetic diagram disguised as a hook.

ㅁ mieum

The mouth, sealed. Both lips meet to form the sound, and the letter is literally a box — the geometry of a closed mouth seen from the front. This is the radical from which ㅂ and ㅍ derive.

ㅏ a

A vowel of cosmic geometry. The vertical bar is the standing person; the dot — once a circle, now a stroke — is the sun, placed to the east, "bright." Even the side of the dot encodes Yin and Yang.

ㅗ o

Earth is a horizontal line. The sun, again as a stroke, rises above it. Bright, outward. Every Hangul vowel is composed from three primitives: the dot (heaven), the horizontal (earth), the vertical (human).

ㅇ ieung

The throat seen from the front. A perfect circle for a sound that begins nowhere — the silent placeholder, the carrier of vowels. Geometry borrowed directly from the body.