Hangeul

As an addendum to my previous post about learning Korean, I thought I might relate a little of what I've learned about the origins of hangeul, the Korean alphabet. Like Japanese, and unlike Chinese, modern Korean has its own alphabet, which is more or less phonetic. Certainly, this makes learning the language easier than it would be if "everyday" Korean was still written in hanja, the Chinese characters introduced to the peninsula from Manchuria in the 4th century B.C. since the student of Korean would have to memorize tens of thousands of different characters (obviously, it is still important to learn hanja because it helps one understand Korean vocabulary that is borrowed from Chinese and it sometimes appears in newspapers). During the Three Kingdoms period of Korean history (1st to 7th centuries C.E.), hanja was adopted by the royal courts as a means of written communication. However, it was only taught to the elite classes, and so that vast majority of Koreans remained illiterate. Three methods were developed to represent the specificities of Korean vocabulary, syntax, and grammar while using the original Chinese phonemes and semes: idu, which was used primarily for legal contracts even after the invention of hangeul; gugyeol, which Confucian scholars and Buddhist monks used to make annotations to the Chinese texts that they studied; and hyangchal. Although these writing systems were useful for professionals, Korea still lacked a popular, unified script that reflected the unique character, so to speak, of the peninsula.

Finally, in 1440, King Sejong of the Joseon dynasty ordered a team of linguistic scholars to set about creating a way to accurately represent spoken Korean in distinctive graphemes. King Sejong and the creation of hangeul is one of the most important of Korean national myths. Many Koreans take great pride in this event in their history (for example, a few months ago one of our one-on-one interview questions at work was "Who was the greatest person in history?" to which the majority of my students answered "King Sejong, because he invented hangeul"). Over the course of six years, the scholars undertook an exhaustive survey of Korean vocabulary and accents, as well as studying different Asian writing systems. The project is considered by many to be the greatest scientific and cultural achievement in Korean history. The scholars eventually developed what we know today as hangeul, possibly based on a contemporary south Asian script. It is perhaps the only writing system in the world still in use today that is the result of such a scientific and methodical survey. In 1446, hangeul was codified in a document called Hunminjeongeum. There is a national holiday on October 9th to commemorate is adoption as the official national language.

There is an interesting footnote to this story that I found in an article by a German professor of Korean studies, Werner Sasse. Apparently, part of the reason for the invention of hangeul arose from the need for a standardized rhyming dictionary! As in China at that time, civil servants were chosen according to a system of meritocracy and an important part of the government examination was writing poetry in Chinese. Since the pronunciation of Chinese characters on the peninsula had become very confused by the 15th century, the hangeul project would give potential civil servants a method of determining the way words were actually pronounced (by providing a more accurate phonetic representation of spoken Korean) and therefore make rhyming easier.