On October 9 of each year, Korea celebrates a very unusual birthday: the 567th anniversary of the birth of the alphabet, invented, according to tradition, by King Sejong the Great in the XNUMXth century. Previously, Koreans wrote using ideograms, imported from the Chinese empire, of which the Korean kingdom was a vassal state, and imposed by virtue of the political and cultural supremacy of the powerful neighbor.
King Sejong, the chronicles narrate, decided to make a clean sweep of the ideograms and replace them with Hangul (this is the name of the Korean phonetic alphabet) after noticing that the complexity of the ideographic writing system allowed only the richest (who all era were also the most cultured) to devote time and energy to learning to read and write. Thus, in a decidedly democratic spirit, he invented - or had invented - a simpler writing system, one that could be learned easily by anyone, regardless of social class.
Korea is proud of Sejong's work, and Hangul Day is a big celebration, which this year was attended by 3000 citizens, many high-ranking state officials, and Prime Minister Chung Hong-won. During the celebration, awards and honors were awarded to individuals or groups who distinguished themselves for particular merits in the promotion and diffusion of the Korean language in the world. The problem of simplification of ideographic writing is common to other languages that use the same system, such as Chinese and Japanese. In China, for example, between the XNUMXs and XNUMXs, the cultural revolution proceeded to simplify the ideographic characters by "thinning them", i.e. reducing the number of strokes and making them simpler both in memorization and in writing.
In truth, there was also talk of abolishing them and replacing them with an alphabet, Pinyin, developed in 1958, but in the end nothing came of it, because the ideograms are considered by the Chinese to be part of their national heritage and - as you well understood the communist regime – traditional writing constitutes a powerful cultural glue. Almost the same goes for Japan, which also has not one but two alphabets, invented by a Buddhist monk in the distant XNUMXth century. d. C., and does not give up ideograms out of attachment to one's cultural tradition and also because - the Japanese experts claim - the study of ideographic characters trains discipline, the spirit of dedication and memory.
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2013/10/10/2013101001233.html
