The Linguistic Legacy of King Sejong
I have created 28 letters because I felt compassion for people who cannot express their thoughts.”
— King Sejong the Great
I’ve always been a language nerd. So in true fashion, I spent one of my 2014 evenings trying to get acquainted with the written form of the language that laced my latest interest at the time: K-Dramas. I wanted to know if I could watch the shows without reading subtitles. So I began to watch videos with both English and Korean subtitles. I learned the alphabet in that same evening by spending an hour observing the phonetic patterns.
The simplicity of the Korean writing system was shocking to me, considering the contrasting complexity of Chinese characters. It was so simple that I decided that I needed to learn it’s history. Here’s what I learned:
A Brief History of the Korean Writing System, Hangeul (한글)
The Korean writing system was not always this simple. Like several languages, spoken Korean (한국, Hanguk) is much older than the Korean writing system (한글, Hangeul). Historically, Koreans wrote with Chinese characters — and this was limited to nobles who were privileged to learn the Chinese writing system. This meant that the poor could not express themselves in writing. This also meant that Korean ideas got lost in translation, as thoughts written in Chinese characters were translated first to Chinese then back to Korean.
In 1443, King Sejong the Great observed this lack of a writing system uniquely tailored to the Korean native. Upon seeing this, he set out to create a system that would make writing accessible to his people and democratise literacy. He created Hangeul (한글), which originally had 28 letters.
Hangeul (한글) consisted of 14 consonant and 10 vowel characters, all of which were crafted to mimic every phonetic sound made by the native Korean speaker. King Sejong’s idea was to ensure that every natural sound could be represented in writing. While Chinese characters are logograms used to illustrate meaning, Korean characters are phonetic, used to illustrate sound.
The creation of Hangeul (한글) was essentially an act of social justice. King Sejong wished for the masses to express themselves in writing, without being hindered by the complexities of the Chinese writing system. The Korean people had writing as a large part of their culture, in form of poetry, annals, etc. So the motivation for King Sejong was to unlock that part of their culture that was completely lost to the commoners that made up the masses. And his intervention has paved the way for Korean to be one of the easiest languages to learn to read and write today.
Speaking of how easy it was to learn the new writing system,King Sejong popularly said:
A smart man can learn it before lunchtime, and a fool can learn in 10 days!
I’m proud to say I sit closer to the smart man described by Sejong, than the fool.
