Hangul syllable Cwalh

It is one Korean syllable; read the surrounding word for meaning.

The label Cwalh is a construction recipe, not a translation or pronunciation: initial ㅊ, vowel ㅘ, and final ㅀ. By itself, 촳 gives no reliable English gloss; in a Korean word, the word supplies the intended meaning. Jamo are the consonant and vowel letters that combine into Hangul syllable blocks.

The National Hangeul Museum cites a 1443 entry in King Sejong’s annals as the script’s earliest record. Hunminjeongeum, a book explaining the new writing system’s purpose and design, was published in 1446. Chinese characters did not fit Korean neatly, which was the practical problem the system addressed. The script had several names—jeongeum, eonmun, banjeol, gukmun, and gukseo—before Hangeul became common in the early 1910s. Earlier Chinese-character methods for writing Korean included Idu, Gugyeol, and Hyangchal; these are part of the script’s history, not components of 촳.

Why does 촳 split into jamo?

Unicode can represent it as one block or separate jamo.

Hangul syllables can be stored as a single precomposed block or as conjoining jamo, the Unicode consonant and vowel letters that join into a block. 촳 decomposes as ᄎ + ᅪ + ᆶ: an initial consonant, a vowel, and a final consonant cluster. The final cluster ᆶ sits in the batchim, the syllable’s final-consonant position; it belongs to the spelling.

Unicode NFC normalization can combine that sequence into 촳, while NFD can keep its parts separate. If a message shows the jamo one by one, compare their sequence before assuming the syllable is damaged.