The letters are pictures of the mouth. Look again, and they are also a year in a rice field.
1. Two pictures, one alphabet
In “Hangul, Upside Down” we saw that the consonants are drawings of the mouth: ㄱ and ㄴ are the shape of the tongue, ㅅ is a tooth, ㅇ is the throat. That is what the 1446 manual says, and it is true.
But a good design can be read in more than one way. Joseon was a farming country, and rice was everything. King Sejong had already printed a farming guide for Korean soil in 1429, and his scholars thought about the world in seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter. The book behind this site puts the same letters on a rice field and finds that they tell the story of one year:

책 그림 — 논에 놓인 자음들. 지평선을 왼쪽부터 오른쪽으로, 한 해처럼 읽는다.
Read the line of letters along the horizon from left to right. It goes through the seasons in order – and each season is one group of consonants, made in one place in the mouth.
2. Spring: the seed wakes up – ㆁ ㄱ ㅋ

싹트는 볍씨 — 뿌리가 먼저, 싹이 다음. (책 그림)
At the far left of the field lies a seed in the ground: ㅇ. In spring it sprouts, and a small tip pokes out of the top. That is ㆁ – a circle with a little stem on it, one of the letters modern Hangul has lost. Then the seed sends its root down and sideways into the soil: ㄱ. As the root grows stronger, it gets one more stroke: ㅋ.
This is not a modern idea. The 1446 manual itself says that ㆁ is “like the sprout of a tree, born from water, soft and still full of water,” that ㄱ is the tree taking form, and that ㅋ is the tree growing thick. These are the back-of-the-mouth sounds (velars), and in the old cosmology they belong to wood, spring and the east.
3. Summer: the leaves fill out – ㄹ ㄴ ㄷ ㅌ

여름 벼 위의 한낮 해. (책 그림)
When young rice is planted, it first spreads sideways, then turns upward and opens its leaves toward the sun. Follow the next letters on the horizon: ㄹ, ㄴ, ㄷ. Each one is a little fuller than the one before, as the plant climbs and leafs out.
Where is the last one, ㅌ, with the most strokes? Look at the plant in the middle of the picture. A stem with its leaves spread out on each side is ㅌ – the plant at its fullest. That is why ㅌ is not written on the horizon: the whole plant is ㅌ. These are the tongue-tip sounds, and they belong to fire, summer and the south, where the sun stands at noon.
4. Autumn: the harvest – ㅅ ㅈ ㅊ ㅿ

가을걷이 — 벼는 베고, 그루터기는 땅에 남고, 짚은 낣가리로 슚는다. (책 그림)
Now write the Chinese character for rice: 米. Its top half is an upside-down ㅅ – the heavy ears of grain bending over. In autumn the farmer cuts them with a sickle. What is left in the field is the stubble, still holding on to its roots in the ground: that is ㅈ and ㅊ. The cut straw is piled into a haystack, and a haystack is ㅿ, another lost letter.
And ㅅ itself? The book calls it an LGBT-like letter. That is not a judgment of any kind. It means that ㅅ does not fit the usual two-way sorting. The consonants fall into two families: the basic shapes, like ㄴ ㅁ ㅇ, which are the soft sounds, and the letters built by adding strokes, like ㄷ ㅂ ㅈ, which are the “clear” sounds. ㅅ has a basic shape, yet the manual puts it among the clear sounds. Its body says one thing and its sound says another – just as, for an LGBT person, the body one is born with and the identity one lives by need not line up with the simple split into male and female. So in the field ㅅ stands apart: upside down, above the ground, like the ears of rice on top of 米. These are the sounds made at the teeth, and they belong to metal – the blade of the sickle – autumn and the west.
5. Winter: seed in a jar – ㆆ ㅎ

겨울 — 지평선 아래로 진 해, 그리고 항아리에 담아 둔 이듬해 볍씨. (책 그림)
The best grain is not eaten. Farmers keep it through the winter in a large earthen jar, as seed for next spring. Look at ㆆ and ㅎ: a round jar with a lid on top. ㆆ is also the sun after sunset, sunk below the line of the earth – the long winter night. These are the throat sounds, and they belong to water, winter and the north.
And then the year closes. The seed in the jar goes back into the ground – the ㅇ at the far left of the field – and next spring it sprouts as ㆁ again.
6. And the field itself – ㅁ ㅂ ㅍ
One group is missing from the horizon: the lip sounds ㅁ ㅂ ㅍ. They belong to earth, the center, the in-between time when one season turns into the next. They are not on the field because they are the field. The book points to the character for a rice field, 田: a square cut into parts by straight lines, up and down and side to side – the same square shape as ㅁ.
7. The whole year in one table
| Season | Consonants | In the mouth | In the field | Element · direction · color |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spring | ㆁ ㄱ ㅋ | back of the tongue (velar) | the seed sprouts and roots spread | wood · east · blue-green |
| Summer | ㄹ ㄴ ㄷ ㅌ | tip of the tongue | the plant climbs and leafs out | fire · south · red |
| Autumn | ㅅ ㅈ ㅊ ㅿ | teeth | harvest, stubble, haystack | metal · west · metallic white |
| Winter | ㅇ ㆆ ㅎ | throat | seed asleep in the jar and the ground | water · north · black |
| In between | ㅁ ㅂ ㅍ | lips | the field itself, 田 | earth · center · yellow |
Compare the two pictures side by side. The throat, where the voice begins, is the sun. The flat tongue is the ground. The front teeth are the standing stem. The mouth is a small field, and the field is a large mouth.

책 그림 — 입(왼쪽)과 논(오른쪽).
Why would a king want letters that can be read both ways? The anatomy explains how to say each sound. The field explains why the letters look the way they do, and why they sit together in families of the same season. For a country of farmers who were learning to read, a sprouting seed, a cut stalk and a jar of seed rice were pictures everyone already knew.
8. Three reasons for every letter
When you invent a new set of letters, anyone can draw shapes. The hard part is to make shapes that people will find reasonable – shapes that make sense even to someone who was not there when they were made. Chinese has a few characters like this: 上 (up) and 下 (down), 三 (three), 凹 and 凸 (hollow and bump). Whoever drew them first, anyone who sees them can tell why they look that way. Sejong gave his consonants not one such reason, but three. Take one family, ㆁ ㄱ ㅋ, and read it three ways:
- The body. In the mouth, the back of the tongue rises toward the soft palate: the bent shape of ㄱ. (See Hangul, Upside Down.)
- The earth and its seasons. In the field, a seed sprouts (ㆁ), sends out a root (ㄱ), and the root grows strong (ㅋ). Spring, wood. The four seasons – spring, summer, autumn, winter – are also the four elements wood, fire, metal and water.
- Number. Count the extra strokes. ㆁ has none, ㄱ has one, ㅋ has two – and the sound gets stronger at each step: soft, then clear, then with a puff of air. The same counting works for every family: ㄴ ㄷ ㅌ, ㅁ ㅂ ㅍ, ㅿ ㅈ ㅊ.
None of these three reasons needs Korean. Everyone has a mouth. Everyone who has lived through a year has seen seeds sprout, leaves grow, a harvest come in and a winter store put away. Everyone can count one, two. In the old Korean way of thinking, the three even line up with the three powers of the world: the body is Human, the field and its seasons are Earth, and number is Heaven.
The world has already noticed two of them. The 1446 manual itself explains the first: the letters picture the mouth. And in 1985 the British linguist Geoffrey Sampson, in his book Writing Systems, put Hangul in a class of its own, a featural script, because of the third: its shapes show the features of the sounds, with an extra stroke for a stronger sound. The second reason, the year in the field, is the one this book adds. Sejong wanted letters that would be reasonable to anyone, anywhere, at any time, so he did not rest them on one idea. He built each letter on three.
9. Read more
This post is a short English version of ideas from the book 《正音으로 듣고쓰다》 (Listening and Writing with Jeongeum); all the pictures are from the book. In Korean:
- III. 方合 三合 六合 6해 6충 6파 – the four seasons of the letters (Korean)
- 훈민정음 해례본 제자해(制字解) – how the 17 consonants were designed (Korean)
In English: Hangul, Upside Down (the consonants in the mouth) and A Compass Made of Vowels (the vowels).














![ㄱ+ㅁ 갑기합의 긔 [ɣ]: 베트남어 gần, 그리스어 agora, 스페인어 Higuera 이계라. / The ㄱ+ㅁ combination 긔 [ɣ]: Vietnamese gần, Greek agora, Spanish Higuera.](https://i0.wp.com/hun-min.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/ipa-gamma-agora-higuera-1.png?resize=660%2C50&ssl=1)









