Girls Generation’s recent YMA win reminded me of how linguistically awesome the Korean alphabet is. Unlike many writing systems, which are most commonly derived from continued abstraction of pictograms and thus have no particular reason behind their shapes, Hangul was specifically designed around phonetic features in order to be logical and easy to learn. From the Wikipedia article:

Numerous linguists have praised hangul for its featural design, describing it as “remarkable”, “the most perfect phonetic system devised”, and “brilliant, so deliberately does it fit the language like a glove." The principal reason Hangul has attracted this praise is that the shapes of the letters are related to the features of the sounds they represent: the letters for consonants pronounced in the same place in the mouth are built on the same underlying shape. In addition, vowels are made from vertical or horizontal lines so that they are easily distinguishable from consonants.

Scripts may transcribe languages at the level of morphemes (logographic scripts like hanja), of syllables (syllabaries like kana), or of segments (alphabetic scripts like the Latin script used to write English and many other languages). Hangul goes one step further in some cases, using distinct strokes to indicate distinctive features such as place of articulation (labial coronal, velar, or glottal) and manner of articulation (plosive, nasal, sibilant, aspiration) for consonants, and iotation (a preceding i-sound), harmonic class, and i-mutation for vowels.

For instance, the consonant ㅌ t[tʰ] is composed of three strokes, each one meaningful: the top stroke indicates ㅌ is a plosive, like ㆆ ’, ㄱ g, ㄷ d, ㅈ j, which have the same stroke (the last is an affricate, a plosive–fricative sequence); the middle stroke indicates that ㅌ is aspirated, like ㅎ h, ㅋ k, ㅊ ch, which also have this stroke; and the curved bottom stroke indicates that ㅌ is alveolar, like ㄴ n, ㄷ d, and ㄹ l. (This element is said to represent the shape of the tongue when pronouncing coronal consonants, though this is not certain.) Two consonants, ㆁ and ㅱ, have dual pronunciations, and appear to be composed of two elements corresponding to these two pronunciations: [ŋ]~silence for ㆁ and [m]~[w] for obsolete ㅱ.

With vowel letters, a short stroke connected to the main line of the letter indicates that this is one of the vowels that can be iotated; this stroke is then doubled when the vowel is iotated. The position of the stroke indicates which harmonic class the vowel belongs to, "light” (top or right) or “dark” (bottom or left).