Korean Was Deliberately Invented by a King

Before the 15th century, writing in Korea was a privilege reserved for the educated elite. The nation relied on classical Chinese characters, a system requiring the memorization of thousands of complex symbols. This created a vast literacy gap, leaving the majority of the population unable to read official notices, agricultural texts, or literature. King Sejong the Great, a ruler deeply invested in his subjects' welfare, viewed this as a fundamental injustice and a barrier to national progress. He secretly commissioned his scholars to create a new, simple alphabet that anyone could learn.

The result, unveiled in 1443 as Hangul, is a masterpiece of linguistic engineering. Unlike scripts that evolve organically over centuries, Hangul was scientifically designed from the ground up for simplicity and logic. Its genius lies in its phonetic basis. The shapes of the basic consonants are not arbitrary; they are minimalist drawings of the speaker's speech organs. For example, the character for 'g' (ㄱ) mimics the shape of the back of the tongue raised, while the character for 'm' (ㅁ) represents the shape of a closed mouth.

The vowel characters were created from just three simple elements representing the core tenets of neo-Confucianism: a dot for Heaven (•), a horizontal line for the flat Earth (ㅡ), and a vertical line for Humanity (ㅣ). By combining these basic consonant and vowel shapes into syllabic blocks, the entire Korean language could be written. This revolutionary system was so easy that it was said a wise person could learn it in a morning, and even a fool could learn it in ten days, finally giving a written voice to the common people.