Chu Sigyà Âng (; December 22, 1876 â July 27, 1914) was one of the founders of modern Korean linguistics. He was born in Pongsan-gun, Hwanghae Province in 1876. He helped to standardize the Korean language, based on the spelling and grammar of vernacular Korean.
Chu Sigyà Âng was born in Hwanghae Province, in what is now North Korea. He studied Classical Chinese from an early age. In 1887 he moved to Seoul and studied linguistics. In 1896, he found work in the first Hangeul-only newspaper, Dongnip Sinmun, founded by the Korean independence activist Seo Jae-pil. In 1897, Seo Jae-pil was sent into exile to the United States, and Chu Sigyà Âng left the newspaper.
Interested in Western linguistics and teaching methods, Chu Sigyà Âng served as a Korean instructor for the American missionary William B. Scranton, founder of today's Ewha Womans University.
Having realized the need of a standardized Korean alphabet, Chu Sigyà Âng established the Korean Language System Society () in 1886 along with several of his colleagues. Chu also hosted several seminars in the National Language Discussion Centre of the Sangdong Youth Academy of the Korean language ().
Chu proposed that the Korean parts of speech include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, unconjugated adjectives (), auxiliaries (), conjunctions, s, and sentence-final particles (). Chu Sigyà Âng coined the name Hangul () between 1910 and 1913 to identify the Korean writing system, which had previously existed under several other names, such as eonmun (, vernacular script), since the 15th century.
In his 1914 publication, Sounds of the Language (), he promoted writing Hangul linearly such as ã Âã Âã´ã±㠡ã¹ (h-a-n-g-eu-l) rather than syllabically as ÃÂÂ긠(han-geul). This is one of his few proposals not to have been implemented in modern Korean linguistics, although there have been experiments with linear Hangul, most notably in Primorsky Krai.