History of Hangul (Korean alphabet)

안녕하세요!! 

Welcome back to the “learn with me Korean and Hangul” blog, this is part of my Facebook page by the same name: https://m.facebook.com/kitticee 

So today I will be teaching you the basics history of Hangul (the Korean alphabet)

Hangul is the Korean alphabet and Korean is the 11th most spoken language in the world (and growing daily)

This is how the word “Hangul” is written in Hangul (in a form called “patchim” but you don’t need to worry about this right now)  한글 :

Although it looks really hard to learn Hangul (and it can be tricky) once you break into it it is very easy.

                           “A wise man can acquaint himself with them before he morning is over;

                             A stupid man can learn them in the space of  10 days”

    A quote from the original document describing Hangul letters

What this quote means is that no matter how slow you are at learning, these letters are so easy that ANYONE Can learn them.

• Until the 15th century Korean was written ONLY using CHINESE characters 
• In 1446 the 4th king of the Joseong Dynasty (Sejong the great) published a document titled hunmin jeong-eum eonhae – a description of the new alphabet (Hangul)
• Hangul was so much easier to learn that literacy even spread to Korean females and uneducated 
• Not everyone was happy about the creation of Hangul, people such as highly educated scholars and elites insisted that Chinese characters were the only real writing system
• Hangul was so successful that the tyrant king yeonsan-gun outlawed it when commoners made signs using Hangul to mock him (after his death, Hangul made a comeback)
• After the Hangul comeback it was often used in a mix of Chinese characters 
• Hangul was banned for a second time when Japan 🇯🇵 occupied Korea before the beginning of world war 2 (Japan tried to make Japanese the official language of Korea)
• At the end of the war Hangul came back still mixed with Chinese
• In the 1890s people had stopped using Chinese characters for the most part in South Korea (except in scholar documents)

(All information gathered from my personal study notes/study notes made from various sources)

Thank you for reading!! Please come back soon!!

Kitti Cee/ eonniekitti 

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