Koreans often make hyperbolic statements extolling the virtues of one or another of Korea’s historical accomplishments, and, like nationalist narratives anywhere, they are often rather implausible, or at the least, fudge the truth.
But one thing that I completely agree with (and speaking as a linguist) is that their writing system, hangeul (or hangul or “Hangle” as my student spelled it in an essay the other day) is utterly remarkable – by far the most logical writing system in general use by any people on planet Earth. Arguably, it was the first time a writing system was made “scientifically” – by a committee of scholars put together by King Sejong the Great in the 15th century, after getting fed up with the difficulty of promoting literacy in a language written using ideographs borrowed from an unrelated language (i.e. Chinese characters – which is, for example, how the Japanese still write their language, today).
If I were tasked with developing a writing system for some newly discovered human language from scratch, I would almost undoubtedly start with hangeul as a base, and then develop whatever new jamo were needed to cover whatever sounds that might exist in that new language but that don’t exist in Korean, and build from there.
Hangeul uniquely captures at least two aspects of human phonation that most writing systems fail at (including, most notably, the IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet) which is supposed to be the be-all and end-all of scientific writing systems): 1) hangeul is at least partially featural (there are progressive graphic relationships between related sounds); 2) it transparently indicates syllabicity.
I particularly fantasize that this last element of hangeul could be incorporated into the English writing system. Despite the fact that the syllable (or, alternately, the mora, depending on the language – there are some technical differences in the two concepts) is central to the way spoken languages work, no other writing system so transparently shows syllable divisions. So while American schoolchildren struggle with the concept of syllable (and syllabification) well into high school, explaining the idea of “syllable” to a literate Korean first-grader is trivial.
Even the supposed inconsistencies of hangeul, from a phonetic standpoint, end up reflecting morpho-phonological characteristics of the Korean language when viewed from higher up the “generative” chain, so to speak.
So, while there are many points on which I would challenge the Korea-centric narratives put forth in the media here, or in public education, I have no quibbles with the notion that “when Sejong made Hangle” was one of the greatest moments in world cultural history.
