I read an article today about the Korean writing system by
Martin Majoor, a font designer from the Netherlands. He is the designer of many popular roman typefaces, and although not using Hangul, he gives an excellent recap of it's history, gained during research for his recent lecture in Seoul. Read part of it below:
The year 1443 marks another great achievement of the Koreans: King Sejong the Great in that year created Hangul, a whole new alphabet that nowadays is the national writing system in both South Korea and North Korea.
King Sejong was extremely well-read and showed a great interest in many fields: science, technology, linguistics, medicine, music but also farming and social justice. He strongly believed the common people, like the peasants, were the foundation of the nation:
“The common people are the foundation of any country. It is only when this foundation is strong that a country may be stable and prosperous”.
In 1420, in one of the buildings of the ‘Gyeongbokgung’ palace complex, King Sejong had established the ‘Halls of Worthies’ (Jiphyeonjeon), a sort of think tank in which about 20 of the best Korean scholars did research in many different fields. In 1443 this also became the birth place of Hangul. Three years later, in 1446, the book Hunmin Jeongeum was published in which Hangul was proclaimed (Hunmin Jeongeum means both the first official name of Hangul and the name of the book).
In creating Hangul, King Sejong wanted to provide the illiterate common people with an easy-to-learn alphabet. In 1446 he wrote:
“Because the speech of this country is different from that of China, it does not match the Chinese letters. Therefore, even if the ignorant want to communicate, many of them in the end cannot state their concerns. Saddened by this, I have had 28 letters newly made. It is my wish that every man may easily learn these letters and that they be convenient for daily use.”
Most of Korea’s (male) elite did not accept Hangul as their new writing system. They scrupulously sticked to the Chinese writing system. But in the mean time other groups that officially had been kept away from learning to read and write, profited from the invention of the easy-to-learn Hangul: peasants, lower classes and especially women. Gradually most Korean people started to use Hangul and a growing number of books were published in it. Finally in 1894 Hangul became the official Korean writing system, about 450 years after its introduction.
