That is an interesting story, TA. I first learned of it years ago on a trip to Cherokee, N. Carolina. I even bought a grammar from the museum there. Never learned a bit of it, though.
rasetsu wrote:Sequoia? I hardly know you, sir.
Wikipedia wrote:
Hangul was promulgated by Sejong the Great, the fourth king of the Joseon Dynasty. The Hall of Worthies (Jiphyeonjeon, 집현전) is often credited for the work.
The project was completed in late December 1443 or January 1444, and described in 1446 in a document titled Hunmin Jeongeum ("The Proper Sounds for the Education of the People"), after which the alphabet itself was named. The publication date of the Hunmin Jeong-eum, October 9, became Hangul Day in South Korea. Its North Korean equivalent is on January 15.
Various speculations about the creation process were put to rest by the discovery in 1940 of the 1446 Hunmin Jeong-eum Haerye ("Hunmin Jeong-eum Explanation and Examples"). This document explains the design of the consonant letters according to articulatory phonetics and the vowel letters according to the principles of yin and yang and vowel harmony.
In explaining the need for the new script, King Sejong explained that the Korean language was fundamentally different from Chinese; using Chinese characters (known as hanja) to write was so difficult for the common people that only privileged aristocrats (yangban, 양반), usually male, could read and write fluently. The majority of Koreans were effectively illiterate before the invention of Hangul.
Hangul was designed so that even a commoner could learn to read and write; the Haerye says "A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days."
You beat me to it. But, strictly speaking, the Koreans weren't quite an illiterate people; literacy was just limited to the scholarly (양반) and ruling classes, and the writing system was Chinese. There was no writing system for the Korean language before 세종대왕, though.
A somewhat interesting part of the story is that his scholars had to work in absolute secrecy, because the aristocracy passionately resisted the idea of bringing literacy to the commoners. They enjoyed their elite status. Few, if any, Korean monarchs had "off with his 'ed!" powers, and most ruled only at the behest of the aristocrats. Had his scheme been discovered, he would almost certainly have been dethroned at best, and maybe even assassinated. After it was presented publically and was enthusiastically accepted by the masses, though, they couldn't do much about it except resist using it. Even now, texts for subjects such as Philosophy and Oriental medicine use Chinese characters because they're still considered to be scholarly. It's still common to see Chinese characters sprinkled in newspaper stories, mixed in with Korean.
But the writing system is ingenious. I memorized it in one evening. After that, I could read and correctly pronounce almost any Korean word (there are a few exceptions to the basic rules of pronunciation). The devil was in memorizing what those words meant.
"A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it." ~ H. L. Mencken
"We ain't a sharp species. We kill each other over arguments about what happens when you die, then fail to see the fucking irony in that."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion."
