How does a featural writing system represent speech sounds?

A featural writing system, such as the Korean Hangul script, represents speech sounds by analyzing them into their most fundamental components: distinctive articulatory features.1

Unlike alphabetic systems that represent phonemes as indivisible units, a featural system breaks down sounds into the specific physical actions used to produce them, such as the placement of the tongue, the position of the lips, or the state of the throat.12

In Hangul, this is represented as follows:
* Consonants: These are designed as two-dimensional signs that visually suggest the articulation involved. For example, specific shapes represent the lips coming together or the tongue touching the roof of the mouth.12
* Vowels: These are represented by horizontal or vertical lines, often distinguished by small marks, which historically relate to symbolic representations of the Earth, the Sun, and the human.312

By organizing these features into 24 basic graphs, the system creates an efficient way to map the mechanics of speech directly onto written characters. Furthermore, Hangul enhances readability by grouping these letters into blocks to represent syllables.1