00:00If we look at the various writing systems of the world, we will find thousands of years of messy evolution,
00:07mistranslations, and transcription errors from when the scribes just couldn't read all that well.
00:13That's how we went from Egyptian hieroglyphs 5,000 years ago to the Latin script we all know and love.
00:20But what if I told you that there's an alphabet out there that didn't evolve messily but was rather quite
00:27deliberately engineered from scratch to be linguistically perfect?
00:31Yes, my friends, today we're heading to Korea to explore Hangul, the script that we hear at SideQuest consider to
00:40be the best writing system known to man.
00:43To the untrained eye, the Korean alphabet might appear similar to Chinese, so one might assume that it evolved from
00:51it over the centuries.
00:53That is indeed what happened with Japanese.
00:56Around the 5th century, they took the Chinese writing system, called Hanzi, and adapted it into the kanji that we
01:05know today.
01:06But that is not what happened with Korea, or at least not its current alphabet.
01:11The Koreans had tried to use the Chinese script, creating what is known as Hanja around the 4th century, but
01:19this was at least somewhat done at swordpoint.
01:23Lest we forget, Han China occupied the northern part of the Korean peninsula for nearly 5 centuries, so the Koreans
01:31had plenty of time to study their writing system.
01:34But the Koreans quickly ran into problems with Hanja.
01:38You see, the Korean language is fundamentally different from Chinese, with grammar and sounds that are entirely incompatible.
01:47It would be a bit like trying to write English using Egyptian hieroglyphs.
01:51You could theoretically do it, but it would not be a pleasant experience.
01:55However, since Chinese was the only script in town, the Koreans would use the clunky Hanja system to write their
02:04language for the next 1,000 years.
02:07Every Korean scholar, nobleman and bureaucrat would have to first learn Chinese with its thousands of characters,
02:15and then also learn how to read Korean in the Chinese script.
02:20The result was one of the lowest literacy rates in the world, where only the very top of Korean society,
02:27the aristocratic scholar class known as the Yangban, could read and write.
02:32And the Yangban liked it that way, as their literacy was a prized possession that gave them a total monopoly
02:39on power across the government, military and religion.
02:43So, even by the 15th century, when contemporary states were pushing above 5% literacy among their general population,
02:52Korea was perpetually stuck at 2% through no fault of its own.
02:57This would hardly be a concern for most medieval monarchs, but the Koreans were lucky enough to have a ruler
03:04who was what we would today call an absolute nerd.
03:09King Sojong of Chosen is undoubtedly Korea's wisest king, having spent his entire life in scholarly study across all branches
03:19of knowledge.
03:19He founded Korea's Royal Research Institute, through which he and his followers made great breakthroughs and reforms in everything from
03:29astronomy and medicine to music and agriculture.
03:33It was a set of very unique circumstances that allowed the wise King Sojong to reform Korean society so rapidly.
03:41His father and grandfather had jointly overthrown Korea's previous ruling dynasty, Goryeo, from where the country gets its name.
03:51And in the process of doing so, they had murdered a big chunk of Korea's aristocratic Yangban so that no
03:58one would dare threaten their rule.
04:00So, King Sejong inherited a very stable country with minimal political opposition, allowing him to indulge in his scholarly pursuits
04:10unhindered.
04:11Yet, despite his absolute power, the king was humble and cared deeply for his people.
04:18That's why he wrote an agricultural manual for them, as the ones they had from China weren't suitable for Korea's
04:26climate.
04:26He even built what we might call a printing press, two decades before Gutenberg, to get the manual in the
04:34hands of as many farmers as possible.
04:37Yet, King Sejong knew that the vast majority of his loyal subjects had no way to read his manual.
04:44He was also keenly aware of the great injustices they suffered at the hands of the literate Yangbang, who frequently
04:51abused their knowledge of the law.
04:53And so, sometime around 1440, King Sejong embarked on a grand scholarly quest to invent a new writing system for
05:04the Korean language.
05:05Rather than following the Chinese approach, where every symbol represents a full word or concept, he chose to create an
05:13alphabet of just 28 letters that represent sounds.
05:17To make his new Hangul alphabet easier to learn, he designed the consonants to visually represent what your mouth should
05:26do to make that sound, like small anatomical diagrams.
05:31For example, the letter representing N is shaped like a tongue touching the roof of the mouth, while the letter
05:38for M is shaped like closed lips.
05:41As for the vowels, he based their designs on the fundamental trinity of Confucian philosophy.
05:49A dot representing heaven, a horizontal line representing earth, and a vertical line representing man.
05:57Out of these three building blocks, Sejong designed Hangul's vowels to carry special meaning.
06:03The lighter vowels were positive, facing up or right towards heaven, while the deeper ones were negative, facing down or
06:13left towards earth.
06:15The reason most people think Hangul isn't alphabetic, but logographic like Chinese, is because the letters aren't written out one
06:24by one, like in our familiar Latin scripts, but are rather grouped into syllable blocks.
06:30Each block is made up of a consonant, a vowel, and an optional second consonant.
06:37So, it's still easy to read, but it maintains the visual prestige of Chinese characters.
06:43Then, you just string these blocks together, originally vertically, but nowadays horizontally, and boom, you're writing Korean.
06:52It was a brilliant and simple system, designed to be learned in less than a week compared to the years
07:00needed for Hangul.
07:01What's even more brilliant is that you can learn Korean quickly and easily thanks to our dear friends over at
07:09Lingopie.
07:10I've been absolutely obsessed with Korean dramas lately, and not just the big hits, I'm talking about the shows that
07:18don't make it to Netflix.
07:20With Lingopie, I've been able to watch the best Korean content and learn Korean at the same time.
07:27Gone are the days of boring textbooks or guilt-tripping owl notifications.
07:33Lingopie has interactive subtitles with instant translations and grammar explanations when you click on them.
07:40And everything gets automatically saved to flashcards so you can review later.
07:46When the dialogue gets too fast, you can slow it down or loop specific lines until it clicks,
07:52so I'm finally understanding the jokes and references that make Korean shows so awesome.
07:59Lingopie also works for 12 other languages too, but for Korean specifically, it is exactly what you need.
08:07And as a special courtesy to SideQuest viewers, you can get a 7-day free trial and over 55%
08:14off of their annual subscription if you click on the link below.
08:19Now, unfortunately for King Sejong, he couldn't rely on Lingopie to popularize his new alphabet.
08:26So, he revealed Hangul to his royal court in 1443, but the reception was less than stellar.
08:34The aristocratic Yangban firmly opposed it, as did many of the scholars in the Royal Research Institute he had founded,
08:42mocking Hangul as a script for women or fools.
08:46In 1444, they banded together to write an official petition against Hangul.
08:53They argued that only barbarian nations like the Mongols and the Manchus had their own scripts,
09:00while all civilized Confucian nations used Chinese characters.
09:04When the Chinese learned about Hangul, they would see it as betrayal and would label all Koreans as barbarians,
09:13perhaps even invading Korea to subjugate it.
09:17Now, while going to war over an alphabet might seem extreme, Ming China had already set a precedent by invading
09:24Vietnam a few decades earlier,
09:26supposedly to restore Confucian values, so Korea's scholars were right to be afraid.
09:32But, of course, the real reason the Yangban opposed Hangul was to maintain their power.
09:39If the common people learned how to read, they would realize that they had been getting fleeced for centuries.
09:45King Sejong, however, was not an easy man to debate, and through his intellectual superiority, he stripped his opponents of
09:54all their arguments.
09:56When they continued to persist, he threw them into prison for a single day,
10:01as a thinly veiled threat of what his father had done to his enemies just a few decades prior.
10:07The king and his loyal scholarly followers then compiled a manual for Hangul, completing it in 1446 and publishing it
10:17as widely as possible.
10:19But, unfortunately, King Sejong was a lifelong sufferer of diabetes, and he passed away from poor health just four years
10:27later.
10:28His son and heir was similarly frail and died within two years, leaving an eleven-year-old boy on the
10:36Korean throne.
10:37So, before long, the Yangban had regained their power.
10:41They fought against Hangul for the next fifty years, finally leading to its ban in 1504.
10:48For the next four centuries, Hangul was relegated to the fringes of Korean society, kept alive in private by literate
10:57women and Buddhist monks.
10:59It was only towards the end of the 19th century, when Japan grew increasingly domineering towards Korea,
11:06that Koreans rallied to Hangul as a means to preserve their national identity.
11:12Hangul was made Korea's official script in 1894, but less than a decade later, Japan occupied and annexed Korea,
11:22spending the next thirty years systematically trying to destroy Korean identity and Hangul.
11:28Yet through the brave efforts of Korean scholars and resistance fighters, Hangul survived the Japanese occupation
11:36and remains the official script of both North and South Korea.
11:40Both Koreas have their own national holidays, celebrating Hangul, on different dates, of course,
11:47and linguists around the globe routinely drool over Hangul, praising it as the best writing system on Earth.
11:55In any case, my friends, if you enjoyed our brief linguistic walk through Korean history, consider supporting us on Patreon.
12:04Let us know what other historical curiosities you'd like us to cover,
12:08and stay tuned for the next linguistically logical episode of SideQuest.
12:15Why are Koreans such great architects? They always know their angles.
12:21Why are Isa priests going to make the same close as well?
12:21Let us know about the girls.
12:22Or the girls non-service walks with a young compatriot 내웃ER.
