Welcoming the upcoming Oct. 9, the 566th anniversary of Hangeul, South Korea is heated with preparation for the ceremony events. The
Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism announced to hold more than 120 events next week to promote Hanegul, in which Hangeul-bot, a robot for Hangeul education, will be introduced to the public. The Korean Language Society holds symposium to discuss how ancestors maintained Hangeul despite the cruel oppression during the Japanese colonial era. Asiana, a Korean airline, gives handkerchief that contains Hangeul-designed monogram to passengers whose names are purely Korean.
In Gyeonggi Academy of Foreign Language, a specialized high school in Korea, student held Hangeul quiz battele and a translating contest that translates given poems like Walt Whitman’s ‘Noiseless Patient Spider’ into modern Hangeul.
Then, what is Hangul? What is so important about Hangeul?
Hangeul is the only system of letter over the globe of which progenitor, publish date and the process it was created are all specifically recorded in history. Before Hangeul, Koreans used Chinese characters on paper and spoke in Korean. In other words, the way we spoke differed from the way we write. King Sejong, however, conducted a project with scholars of that time to make a whole new system of phonograms to facilitate people to read and write.
Hangeul consists of 14 consonants and 10 vowels. The shape of the 14 consonants represent the shape of our vocal apparatus- mouth and tongue. For example, try to pronounce ‘g’ or sound. You will find out that your root part of the tongue reaches upper soft palate. Therefore a consonant in Hangeul that matches with ‘g’ is ‘ㄱ’, as if a bent tongue.
Vowels, on the other hand, is basically made up of three components: a horizontal line ‘ㅡ’, a vertical line ‘ㅣ’ and a dot ‘∙’. These three components are said to symbolize earth, human and the sun, which imply humanitarian philosophy of King Sejong.
99 percent of litaracy rate in Korea is not a mere coincidence but a consequence of invention from five centuries ago. In 2010, Jiajia tribe in Indonesia adopted Hangeul as their official writing system. What Hangeul need, at this point, is the worldwide promotion so that globlians recognize it as a valuable language in the world.
Nawon Kim
"To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.", said Anatole France. Yes, I pray every night to ask for positive thinking and courage; positiveness to dream what seems too far away from where I am, courage to believe what I should believe. One of those fantastic great things would be, I think, "love", as my motto says: "Love me, Love the World!"
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