Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
AN ALPHABET OF PRINCIPLE
newspaper in a mix of hangul and
hanja
(Chinese characters)
The Korean people are immensely proud of hangul, their homegrown alphabet,
which has become inextricably bound up with the national identity. It's not uncom-
mon for foreign residents proudly to be informed that hangul is the “most scientific”
script in the world. This may seem an odd claim—how can an alphabet be “scientif-
ic”?—but when one understands how hangul was developed, it's not utterly without
merit.
When King Sejong ordered a committee of scholars to create an alphabet in the
15th century, their main task was to come up with something easy to learn in or-
der to pull the masses out of illiteracy, but they managed to cram some very clever
concepts into hangul's no-nonsense design. Hangul consonants are actually designed
to map the shapes made by vocal organs when they're pronounced. Thus the char-
acter
ᄂ
(“n”) resembles the tongue touching the upper gums, while
ᄆ
(“m”) shows
two lips coming together. The basic vowel signs, meanwhile, symbolize earth, the
sky, and people, the basic trinity in much Taoist and Confucian philosophy. Although
