This week’s posts focus on the genesis of languages. Although languages develop over time, and are almost always (*thanks,* Esperanta) spoken before being written down, sometimes it is possible to identify singular moments in linguistic history when enormous change happens.
Take the case of Korean, for instance. Historians are still in debate about whether it emerged in a primordial soup of the Altaic language family which includes Turkish and Mogolian Chinese, or whether proto-Japanese or even elements from Indian Dravidian (that’s old — like, pre-Sanskrit India) may have contributed. Regardless, Korean is so different from any currently spoken language that it is now categorized as a “language isolate” — meaning that no one can definitively prove it is related to another spoken language.
This vaguesness is not reflected in its writing system, however, which has a very specific birthday — 1453. In this year King Sejong (super famous and on the South Korean currency) commissioned and possibly helped create the “han’gul” writing system, and he did it to Make Things Easier. For about 1500 years prior, only highly trained male elites could write the Korean language, which derived from Chinese characters. As you no doubt know, writing in these characters is extremely difficult because they are logograms and not an alphabet, representing words or phrases and not sounds. As you might imagine, using Chinese logograms for Korean words created an overly complex writing system.
So, King Sejong (who encouraged all kinds of amazing learning in Korea, btw) ordered han’gul created, which is an alphabetic system — each sound connects to a different symbol. Common people were able to learn this much more easily, and literacy rates in Korea rose dramatically across social classes and genders.
The way han’gul was written was supposed to be a helpful guide to pronunciation. So, for instance, the letter shapes of the consonants are said to represent the position of the mouth, tongue, throat, and teeth when saying the words.
Here you see a portrait of the philologist-king and the manual in which he originally pubkished han’gul (the _Hunmin Jeong-eum_).
Source(s): @asiasociety.org, “Korean Language,” Amanda Snellinger, Ross King, Bruce Falton; ibid, “The World’s Most Incredible Alphabet,” Chris Livaccari. Wikipedia.
