History

The Korean people have their own language and their own alphabet, Hangeul. From ancient times, many peoples of the world have tried to invent characters with which to write their languages. The world's major orthographies gradually took form and came into use over long periods of time, and most of them changed as time went by. The creation of Korean Hangeul, however, is a unique example of a new writing system being developed by a small number of people in a short time, without any direct influence from any existing orthography, and becoming a written language that permitted mass literacy and eventually became the nation's official script.

Literacy had come to Korea with the adoption of Chinese characters around the beginning of the Christian era, and by the middle of the 15th century Korea had produced a substantial literature of scholarly and creative works composed in classical Chinese. However, Chinese characters were designed for writing the Chinese language and were not suitable for Korean, a language quite different from Chinese. Before the invention of Hangeul, Koreans had a dual system of literacy: hanmun, or classical Chinese, for the upper class and idu, a system of writing Korean sounds in Chinese characters, for the middle class. Great inconvenience was caused by the incompatibility between the two systems, one based on a literary language and the other on a spoken vernacular. Neither system was well adapted to written communication in Korean.

Realizing this, King Sejong (r. 1418-1450) of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) and the scholars who belonged to the Jiphyeonjeon, the Hall of Worthies, studied Chinese prosody and the orthographies of neighboring countries and analyzed the contem-porary state of Korean phonology. This knowledge provided the foundation for the new alphabet which they promulgated in 1446. Sejong had the scholars write examples of the new orthography with commentaries and compile them in a book along with his own simple explanation of the new script. The book, Sejong's introduction, and the alphabet itself, were all given the same name: Hunmin Jeongeum, or Proper Sounds to Instruct the People. This is the writing system known today as Hangeul.

The first section of the book is the main text, written by King Sejong himself. In the preface Sejong elucidates his purpose in inventing the new alphabet. He points out that, because the Korean language is quite different from Chinese, it contains elements that are hard to represent in Chinese characters, making it difficult for the common people to express their thoughts in writing. Finding this unacceptable, he proposes the adoption of 28 new letters which are easy to learn and convenient to use in everyday life. The main text lists the 28 letters - 17 consonants and 11 vowels - with brief descriptions and examples. It then explains that the consonants can be used at the end of a syllable as well as the beginning, that more than one consonant can be combined in either initial or final position by writing them from left to right, and that more than one vowel can be combined in the middle of a syllable, fitting the letters together according to their shape. It also indicates that speech tones are marked with dots to the left of the syllable.