“LIKE trying to fit a square handle into a round hole” is how Sejong the Great, a Korean king, viewed the practice of using hanja, classical Chinese characters, to transcribe Korean. Hanja recorded meaning alone, not sound, and only aristocrats knew it. So the king and his literary circle crafted an alphabet from scratch and started promoting it in 1446. Known as hangul, it consists of 24 elements that can be grouped into blocks of syllables. Some take the shape that lips and tongue form in speech. It is fantastically easy to learn. The 80,000 speakers of the Cia-Cia language are also being encouraged to use the script on the Indonesian island of Buton.
Hanja lingered for centuries after the introduction of hangul. Nobles scorned the newfangled alphabet as being for peasants, women and children. But after the end of over three decades of Japanese occupation in 1945, the governments in both South and North Korea promoted hangul fiercely, ordering that hanja be expunged from all texts and...Continue reading
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