King Sejong and Hunminjeongeum

King Sejong created 28 letters in the winter of 1443, and the book explaining them came out three years later, in the ninth lunar month of 1446.

Before the 1440s, Koreans spoke Korean but wrote in Classical Chinese. Learning thousands of Chinese characters took years, so reading and writing belonged mostly to the educated elite. Farmers, merchants and most women had no practical way to write down what they wanted to say, and even scholars had to translate their own speech into a foreign written language. King Sejong, the fourth king of Joseon, set out to fix this gap with an alphabet built for the sounds of Korean.

A king who liked to measure things

Sejong ruled from 1418 to 1450. He set up the Jiphyeonjeon, a hall of worthies inside Gyeongbokgung, where young scholars studied and prepared books for the court. His reign also produced instruments for keeping time and watching the sky. The Jagyeongnu, a water clock that struck bells, drums and gongs by itself, was completed in 1433 by Jang Yeong-sil and others and went into use in 1434. The same year, hemispherical sundials called angbu ilgu were set up on a busy bridge in the city and in front of Jongmyo so that passers-by could read the time.

Twenty-eight letters

In the twelfth lunar month of 1443 the Annals record that the king himself made 28 letters and called them Hunminjeongeum, "the correct sounds for teaching the people". There were 17 consonants and 11 vowels. Four of them later fell out of use, so modern Korean writes with 24 basic letters. What makes the system unusual is that its shapes are not arbitrary. The book that introduced the letters explains how each one was designed.

The five basic consonants copy the shape of the speech organs as they make each sound. The letter for g shows the back of the tongue rising to block the throat. The letter for n shows the tip of the tongue touching the ridge behind the upper teeth. The letter for m is the outline of the mouth, the letter for s is a tooth, and the circle stands for the throat. Other consonants were made by adding strokes to these five for stronger sounds. The vowels start from three elements: a dot for heaven, a flat line for earth and an upright line for a standing person.

The book of 1446

In the ninth lunar month of 1446 a woodblock-printed book, also called Hunminjeongeum, presented the new script. Today it is usually called the Haerye edition, meaning the edition with explanations and examples. It has two parts: the king's own section stating the purpose and sound value of each letter, and a longer commentary written by eight scholars of the Jiphyeonjeon, led by Jeong In-ji. For about 500 years no copy was known. One was found in Andong in 1940, and it is now a National Treasure kept at the Kansong Art Museum. UNESCO listed it in the Memory of the World Register in 1997.

Below is the preface in two forms. The first box is the original in Classical Chinese, grouped into short phrases. The second gives its meaning in plain modern language. Read each a few times, then press the button to hide words and fill them back in from memory.