Hangul is the name of the main writing system used in Korea today, and I already knew a
a little bit about it when I started working on this video. In fact, I kinda already use
it a little bit. I knew the basics of how to sound out words, but it wasn't until I
started doing research for this video that I realized just how insanely awesome and unique
the Korean writing system is. Now, one of the main reasons that Korean is
the way it is is that it made up by one guy. Now, a lot of writing systems are purportedly
made up by individuals, but Korean is a little bit unique in that it isn't directly based
on any single other writing system, and you start to see why when you look at the situation
that Korea was in before Hangul was invented. At the time, Korean was written entirely with
Chinese characters. Some of you might remember how most of the point of my last video was
how a lot of languages have writing systems that fit their grammar really well, and how
it would be much more difficult to write some languages with some writings systems. Well,
the Chinese writing system works by associating a different symbol with every word, which
is kind of OK for Chinese, because Chinese is an analytic language, and it tends to use
a lot of smaller words rather than a few big ones, so it only has a few words comparatively,
but Korean is an agglutinative language, similar to Japanese! In Korean you're constantly making
bigger and bigger words by squishing together smaller ones, so how in Voynich’s name are
you supposed to do that with Chinese?! Trying to associate every word in the Korean language
with it's own symbol doesn't even make any sense! I mean, you'd have to have a different
symbol for every possible combination of sounds, and do you have any idea how long Korean words
can get?! And yet, somehow, they managed to do it. I'm a bit unclear on the details, but
as far as I can tell, they had this really, really absurdly complicated system where smaller
words each had their own symbol, and common prefixes and suffixes each had their own
symbol, and besides that you had symbols that were associated with individual sounds, or
sometimes syllables, or sometimes morphemes, and some symbols did all of these depending
on the context, and it's just like, 'Why?! Why would you live like that?!'
Not surprisingly, not too many people could read and write at the time. Mostly, it was
just upper class academics who could read and write, who could afford to study how for
years and years and years, but most of these academics didn't particularly mind all of
this insanity, because they wanted to be more like China, which, for them, was a symbol of
refinement and civilization. So, who eventually did come along to propose something different?
None other than the emperor himself, Sejong the Great. Sejong was emperor of Korea during
the early 1400s, and he was one of Korea's coolest emperors, and not just because he
personally invented Hangul. For one thing, he was a hardcore Confucianist. He believed
that it was his duty to use his power to benefit the people as best he could, and one of the
major things he did was he began appointing people to government positions based on their
merit, without regard to class or wealth. But one of the biggest confucian principals he
believed in was that everyone should seek to improve themselves by studying and learning.
So, not surprisingly, he was rather deeply disturbed by the fact that almost no one in
his entire kingdom could read or write, and he didn't blame this on his people either.
He knew how insanely hard the current system was. He himself actually said at one point
that trying to use Chinese characters for Korean was "like trying to fit a square handle
into a round hole." Because one of his main goals was to make
a system that was really easy to learn, he wound up creating probably the simplest, easiest
writing system in the world. Seriously, if I were trying to teach you this system in
this video, I would probably mostly done by now. I'll post a link to a short comic in
the description that claims to be able to teach it to you in 15 minutes, but I actually
think that that's a bit high. Seriously, just read the comic through and you’ll be able
to read and write Hangul by the end of it. Part of the reason it's so easy is because
each symbol is practically a diagram of how to pronounce it. The sound that make a "t"
sound was designed to look like the tongue touching the front of the mouth, which is
how you make that sound. Similarly, the sound that makes a "k" sound is supposed to be the
shape of the tongue when it makes that sound, and so on. And then, to make them all slightly
more breathy, you just add a little notch to them to indicate the extra air, basically.
Now, the consonant letters might have actually been based off of a Mongolian writing system,
but they might not have admitted it because of how at the time there was a bit of an anti-Mongolian
attitude, but there isn't really a consensus on that one.
The vowels, though, were definitely made up completely from scratch, and although they're
not exactly diagrams of the shape of the mouth, they're actually my favorite part of all of
this. You see, Korean has a system of what's called "vowel harmony," which means that the
vowels in Korean words tend to change around a lot. All Korean vowels were put into two
categories: deep vowels and shallow vowels, and if the root of a word had shallow vowels,
then all of the vowels and the prefixes and suffixes of that word have to be changed to
their corresponding shallow vowel, and vice versa if the root word had deep vowels. This
way, every Korean word was always composed entirely of either deep vowels or shallow vowels.
The main exception was the vowel that was pronounced "ee", which was neutral and could coexist with
deep vowels or shallow vowels. This system of vowel harmony fits right in with the Confucianist
idea of yin and yang, the idea that the universe is composed of dichotomies between two opposite
and yet mutually dependent forces. Yang is associated with females, darkness, death,
intuition, cold and passivity, while yin is associated with maleness, light, life, logic,
warmth and activity. So, Sejong the Great associated deep vowels with Yang and shallow vowels with
Yin. Now, Confucians tend to believe in what they call the Three Realms: heaven, a Yang
concept, earth, a Yin concept, and humans which mediate between the two. So, one of
the deep vowels was given a dot, representing the sun, one of the shallow vowels was given
a flat, horizontal line, representing the earth, and the "ee" sound which was neutral,
was given...this thing, which I think is supposed to represent a person? I don't know. Anyway,
what about the other four vowels? Well, the symbols for the other four vowels are straight
lines with another line coming out of the middle in some direction, either left, right,
up or down. The directions of left and down are associated with yin, while the directions
of up and right are associated with yang, so the remaining vowels are given these symbols
based on whether they were a yin vowel or a yang vowel and whether the middle line that
sticks out goes in a Yin direction or a Yang direction. In addition to this, all of the
vowels with horizontal lines as their bases are what are called "rounded" vowels, vowels
where you purse your lips in order to pronounce them, like the "oo" and "oh" sounds.
Anyway, that's enough for vowels. The last and possibly the most well known thing about
Korean is the fact that when you write the sounds, you have to organize them into blocks,
based on syllables. You start with the initial consonant, or a placeholder symbol if the
syllable doesn't start with a consonant, and then you add the syllable's vowel, either
to the right if the vowel symbol is based on a vertical line or beneath if it's based
on a horizontal line. Then, if there's a consonant on the end of the syllable, you put it beneath
everything else, and then you write these syllable blocks left to right.
And, that's it! That's the Korean writing system. Because it was so easy to tell how
things were pronounced based on how the symbols looked, this system spread all across Korea
like wildfire after Sejong invented it. Sejong said of these symbols that "A wise man can
acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the
space of ten days." And he was right. In fact, it was so effective at educating the population,
that latter kings tried to abolish it because they thought it was making people too smart.
It was revived later, but by then the Korean language had changed a lot while Hangul had
stayed the same, so today it's not quite the masterpiece of simplicity it used to be. However,
it still remains one of the most interesting, unique writing systems in the world.
Now, I know I've been giving Hangul a lot of credit because of how simple and intuitive
it is, but I want to make clear that that doesn't make it "better" exactly. In fact,
language is often really cool and interesting for the exact opposite reasons! Case in point,
the Thai writing system, which I will discuss in my next video, and then, after that, I
promise I'll give writing systems a rest and I'll start talking about something else for a while.