Hangul Was So Simple Even a Peasant Could Learn It And That Became A Problem

I think anyone with common sense would agree that there are only a few powerful men whose hearts don’t beat to the rhythm of greed. They live and die to keep that power out of the hands of those they deem unworthy. In a way, it’s fair to say that powerful men who seized power with an iron fist are paranoid—they fear the people they once crushed might rise from the ashes. 

That’s what happened when King Sejong the Great invented Hangul during the mid-15th century, in the Joseon Dynasty (in what is now the Korean Peninsula), to bring about a linguistic revolution. The scholarly elite opposed it with much indignation—perhaps wondering why a king would do such a terrible thing as care for the well-being of his peasant subjects, the very people who would suffer most during any strife. Shouldn't he care about elites who eat till their stomachs explode? 

King did care for their ugly cries because King saw the bigger picture.

Prior to Hangul, bureaucrats wrote official documents in classical Chinese. The taxes they imposed bled peasants dry, often forcing them to sell their own children into slavery. A tenant farmer might be fooled into signing a land lease marked as “for five years,” only to later discover the document actually read “permanently forfeited after five years” in obscure characters. 

There were local officials—typically from the yangban class—who, while in charge of recording taxes, forged records to overstate dues or registered fake names to pocket state coins. Eventually, the government had enough of this nonsense. So, in the 17th century, they introduced the Daedong Law to fix the mess by standardizing grain tax collection.

With this much corruption, it’s a miracle men like Yi Sun-shin still chose loyalty. I mean, every ignoble noble seemed to live by one rule: “Damn, there was so much corruption—disgusting, sure, but if it ever handed me an opportunity on a silver platter… welllllll, who am I to say no?”

It is because of crap like this Hangul was invented and it was revolutionary. It had 28 letters (now 24), and each character represented a distinct sound. For instance, the consonant shapes were based on the position of the articulators—such as the tongue, mouth, and throat—during pronunciation, making it highly intuitive. The vowels were created using horizontal and vertical lines, meant to symbolize the harmony between man, earth, and heaven.

With just a few letters—each shaped exactly to match how a common person forms sounds—and combined like building blocks to form syllables, Hangul was incredibly easy for peasants to learn and quickly start reading and writing. No more struggling with thousands of complicated Classical Chinese characters; you can write a character that is precisely like the sounds you make, making it easy to remember. 

The easiness had been Sejong the Great's idea all along. He published the manuscript in 1446 as Hunminjeongeum ("The Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People") and declared, “A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days.” A bit condescending, sure—but hey, the man had the spirit!

The Confucian scholars and nobility, armed with state-of-the-art education and perfectly capable of learning the script in a fortnight, were not pleased. They saw Hangul as a threat—letters as sharp as an axe, as disruptive as a cat's yowl to their ears. To them, it was a vulgar script that dared to undermine the sacred hierarchy. Leading the outrage was none other than Choe Manri, the most insecure scholar of them all, a glorified associate professor in the Hall of Worthies. He called Hangul a diplomatic nightmare that would offend China and ruin everything blah blah blah.

Eventually, these people succeeded—though not entirely. The common folk continued using Hangul for labeling goods and keeping accounts. Women in aristocratic families weren’t allowed to study classical Chinese, so they used hangul to write letters to their homegirls and compose poetry about pretty birds or the hot single bachelor in the area.

Low-class scribes wrote novels of all types — ghost stories, bawdy romances, biting satires — the kind of stuff Confucian elites hated. These Hangul texts were wildly popular, even if never considered "respectable." Works like honggildongjeon - a tale of korean half noble stealing from rich to give to poor can be considered such tale.

Later, Buddhists and Christians realized something smart: if you want to influence masses, you’d better speak their language. They put aside the old Chinese characters and started spreading their teachings in Hangul.

By the 19th and 20th centuries, Korean nationalist movements used Hangul as a symbol of Korean people. It became the language of resistance, a linguistic middle finger to the japanese empire that  tried to suppress Korea’s voice. 

Fast forward to today: it’s Hangul that’s on government forms, in K-dramas, in memes, and in tweets, even in so-called high literature. The once “vulgar script” is now a national language. Classical Chinese? Not even modern chinese speak it.

Sources

• Lee, Iksop, and S. Robert Ramsey. The Korean Language. University of Hawaii Press, 2011.

• Kiaer, Jieun. “Hangul and the Politics of Literacy in Early Joseon Korea.” Harvard University, unpublished paper.

• Kim, Youngmin. Women’s Writing in Korea. Columbia University Press, 2010.

• Buswell Jr., Robert E., and Timothy S. Lee. Christianity in Korea. University of Hawaii Press, 2015.