Who invented Hangul?
430052#15
Hangul, a phonemic Korean alphabet invented around 1446 by scholars in the court of Sejong the Great, was little used for several centuries because of the perceived cultural superiority of Classical Chinese (a position similar to that of Latin in Europe). However, the Catholic Church became the first Korean religious organization to officially adopt Hangul as its primary script. Bishop Siméon-François Berneux mandated that all Catholic children be taught to read it. Christian literature printed for use in Korea, including that used by the network of schools established by Christian missionaries, mostly used the Korean language and the easily learned Hangul script. This combination of factors resulted in a rise in the overall literacy rate, and enabled Christian teachings to spread beyond the elite, who mostly used Chinese. As early as the 1780s, portions of the Gospels were published in Hangul; doctrinal books such as the "Jugyo Yoji" (주교요지) appeared in the 1790s and a Catholic hymnal was printed around 1800.
Christianity in Korea
53450764#2
The statue of King Sejong was dedicated on 9 October 2009, in a ceremony attended by attended by President Lee Myung-bak and other Korean government official, on a Hangul Day in celebration of the 563rd anniversary of the invention of the Korean alphabet by King Sejong, two months after the Gwanghwamun Plaza opening. The golden statue is 6.2 meters high (another source gives the statue height as 9.5 meters and yet another, 6.7 meters) and weights 20 tons. The king has one hand raised and another placed on a book. Sides of the statue display all of the hangul alphabet characters. In front of the statue there are small models of a celestial globe, a rain gauge, and a sundial, the invention of which is also traditionally attributed to King Sejong in Korea. While King Sejong is best remembered for his invention of hangul, he is also considered to have been involved in promotion of agriculture, literature, science and technology, as well as Confucian philosophy, in Korea.
Statue of King Sejong (Gwanghwamun)
16749#80
Hangul Day (also spelled as Hangeul Day) is a day that celebrates the creation of the Hunminjeongeum (Hangul, Korean alphabet), which was inscribed to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 1997. Hangul was created by Sejong the Great in 1443 and proclaimed in 1446. Before the creation of Hangul, people in Korea (known as Joseon at the time) primarily wrote using Classical Chinese alongside native phonetic writing systems that predate Hangul by hundreds of years, including idu, hyangchal, gugyeol, and gakpil. However, due to the fundamental differences between the Korean and Chinese languages, and the large number of characters needed to be learned, there was much difficulty in learning how to write using Chinese characters for the lower classes, who often didn't have the privilege of education. To assuage this problem, King Sejong created the unique alphabet known as Hangul to promote literacy among the common people. Hangul Day was founded in 1926 during the Japanese occupation by members of the Korean Language Society, whose goal was to preserve the Korean language during a time of rapid forced Japanization. Today, both South Korea and North Korea celebrate Hangul Day as a national holiday.Sources
Korea
159204#27
Before the creation of Hangul, people in Korea (known as Joseon at the time) primarily wrote using Classical Chinese alongside phonetic writing systems based on Chinese script that predated Hangul by hundreds of years, including idu, hyangchal, gugyeol, and gakpil. However, due to the fundamental differences between the Korean and Chinese languages, and the large number of characters that needed to be learned, there was much difficulty in learning how to write using Chinese characters for the lower classes, who often lacked the privilege of education. To assuage this problem, King Sejong created the unique alphabet known as Hangul to promote literacy among the common people. His intention was to establish a cultural identity for Korea through its unique script.
Sejong the Great
293150#3
Before the creation of Hangul, people in Korea (known as Joseon at the time) primarily wrote using Classical Chinese alongside native phonetic writing systems that predate Hangul by hundreds of years, including idu, hyangchal, gugyeol, and gakpil. However, due to the fundamental differences between the Korean and Chinese languages, and the large number of characters needed to be learned, there was much difficulty in learning how to write using Chinese characters for the lower classes, who often didn't have the privilege of education. To assuage this problem, King Sejong created the unique alphabet known as Hangul to promote literacy among the common people.
Hangul Day
17470560#11
Ledyard holds that the Koreans adopted five core consonant letters from ’Phags-pa, namely ㄱ "g" , ㄷ "d" , ㅂ "b" , ㅈ "j" , and ㄹ "l" . These were the consonants basic to Chinese phonology, rather than the graphically simplest letters (ㄱ "g" , ㄴ "n" , ㅁ "m" , and ㅅ "s" ) taken as the starting point by the "Haerye." A sixth letter, the null initial ㅇ, was invented by Sejong. The rest of the consonants were developed through featural derivation from these six, essentially as described in the "Haerye"; a resemblance to speech organs was an additional motivating factor in selecting the shapes of both the basic letters and their derivatives.
Origin of Hangul
44065032#0
Hangul supremacy is the belief, most widespread in Korea, that the Hangul alphabet developed by King Sejong the Great's Hall of Worthies in 1443 is the simplest, most logical, most beautiful and most scientific of the world's writing systems. In its extreme form, the belief holds that Hangul is in fact best suited for the expression of sounds in all languages.
Hangul supremacy
2061049#34
The primary written language of Sungkyunkwan was hanja. Although hangul was invented in 1443, it did not become the primary language of study because the literary elite believed that the difficult hanja was more sophisticated. Hangul was invented to solve the widespread illiteracy of the common people at the time, but it was considered a threat by many in the upper class to their status as literary scholars, leading them to resist its implementation. As a result, hanja remained the written language used at Sungkyunkwan requiring anyone who wished to rise to the top levels of the government to be capable of reading and writing the characters.
Sungkyunkwan
42538288#19
Ju Si-gyeong, the linguist who had coined the term Hangul to replace "Eonmun" or "Vulgar Script" in 1912, established the Korean Language Research Society (later renamed the Hangul Society), which further reformed orthography with "Standardized System of Hangul" in 1933. The principal change was to make the Korean alphabet as morphophonemically practical given the existing letters. A system for transliterating foreign orthographies was published in 1940.
Hangul
16749#45
Modern Korean is written almost exclusively in the script of the Korean alphabet (known as Hangul in South Korea and Chosungul in China and North Korea), which was invented in the 15th century. Korean is sometimes written with the addition of some Chinese characters called Hanja; however, this is only occasionally seen nowadays. While Hangul may appear logographic, it is actually a phonemic alphabet organised into syllabic blocks. Each block consists of at least two of the 24 hangul letters ("jamo"): at least one each of the 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Historically, the alphabet had several additional letters (see obsolete jamo). For a phonological description of the letters, see Korean phonology.
Korea