Hyungwon Kang's insight column on Hangeul:

Hunminjeongeum was prepared in advance to be the language in the era of globalization.

In the Hunminjeongeum Haeryebon, the manuscript that created Hangeul, published in 1446, there is a cute-looking word "Kkyu" used by King Sejong the Great.

In the Hunminjeongeum manuscript, in addition to explanations of the 28 letters and the 6 double consonants ㄲ ㄸ ㅃ ㅉ ㅆ ㅎㅎ, a total of 34 letters, "Goon, Kkyu, Quae, Up" refer to "a joyful (quae) task (up) accomplished by the King (Goon) and the crown prince (Kkyu) together.

"Kkyu the prince" here refers to Yi Hyang, the eldest son of Sejong, who subsequently took the throne as King Munjong.

The Crown Prince grew up under the guidance of his father, King Sejong the Great, and had a rigorous education taught by the best scholars of the land, from early on after being named the Crown Prince at age seven in 1421.

The Crown Prince astonished many with his ability to perform complicated court rituals from a young age. The traditional royal court rules and institutional rituals were known to be difficult to remember even for adults.

"After the creation of Hunminjeongeum in 1443, Munjong officially assisted his father, King Sejong the Great, in successfully introducing the Korean Hunminjeongeum writing system to the public in 1446," said Kim Seul-ong, a prominent Hunminjeongeum researcher.

The first item in Korean identity is King Sejong's Hunminjeongeum, which is capable of writing all the sounds of nature. At the time of its creation, the Hangeul alphabet had 28 letters (17 consonants and 11 vowels).

When being put into computers, most of the world's 7,000 languages that do not have their own writing systems use the Roman English alphabet in today's computer era.

Unlike the English alphabet which has different phonetic values for each language, the Hunminjeongeum has a more exact and clearer "sound to dictation" ability, which makes it a superior input alphabet system for the computer age.

For people with Sejong's Hunminjeongeum knowledge, there's an added linguistic advantage over other writing systems -- it is the most scientific and exact alphabet.

Hunminjeongeum, whose name was changed to Hangeul in the 20th century, maintains consistent sound to dictation across all languages.

Additionally, Hangeul has seemingly unlimited ways to express sounds and thoughts as it boasts the largest vocabulary of all known languages.

When I was a middle school student in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, Korean American comedian Johnny Yune (1936-2020) appeared on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Yune made self-deprecating jokes about his own English accents as he performed a funny monologue of a few rhyming Korean words.

Yune, who also sang in Italian, said he learned to sing in 16 languages by writing the lyrics in Korean Hangeul. To a Korean-speaking teenager, Johnny Yune's language experiences were quite impressive. Yune's appearance on a national late night show probably was the first popular cultural event where Hangeul was introduced as a language tool to American viewers.

Yune's Korean name was Jongseung Yune when he came to the US to study. While working day and night, Yune was dozing off at his daytime workplace one day and his boss asked him, "Are you 자니(Johnny)? Johnny means "sleeping" in Korean. That's how he changed his American name to "Johnny," according to Yune.

Hangeul can uniquely combine up to three initial consonants, three middle vowels, and three final consonants. Hangeul's scientific and methodical construction makes it naturally computer-compatible. Hangeul is the most systematic and scientific alphabet in the computer age.

It has been known in the United States since the 19th century that Hangeul is a scientific language and how easy it was to learn.

Homer B. Hulbert (1863-1949), who taught English in Korea and helped publish The Independent newspaper, wrote in an American newspaper column that "Hangeul was the best alphabet in existence."

Hulbert learned Hunminjeongeum quickly upon arriving in Korea in July 1886, and wrote the first world geography textbook in Korean called "Sa-Min-Pil-ji" within three years of setting foot in the country.

Hulbert's love of Korea and the Korean alphabet was so well known that even Patriotic Martyr Ahn Jung-geun, who was being interrogated by Japanese police in December 1909, said, "No Korean should ever forget Hulbert even for a day."

Hulbert, who tried to alert the international community that the Japan-Korea Treaty of 1905 was illegal and invalid, was the fourth special envoy to the Universal Peace Conference in The Hague, Netherlands, where he was secretly dispatched by Emperor Gojong.

During the Japanese colonial period, there was a policy of eradicating the Korean language. An edict announced in April 1912 that the spoken language of the Seoul area would become the standard language and abolished arae ah (·). In line with the change to Korean spoken, the Korean Linguistic Society announced in 1933 that the basic written Hangeul would be streamlined to 24 characters (14 consonants and 10 vowels).

Four letters were discarded from the Hangeul alphabet, in addition to the consonants old yi-eung, light-hieut, half-siot, and vowel arae ah, four soon-gyeong-eum consonants were discarded because their sounds were no longer considered to be in the standard language, soon-gyeong-eum bieup ㅸ, soon-gyeong-eum mieum ㅱ, soon-gyeong-eum ssangbieup ㅹ, soon-gyeong-eum piheup ㆄ, and half. There is a half-seol-gyeong-eum (ᄛ).

Surprisingly, soon-gyeong-eum and half-seol-gyeong-eum have the ability to match English pronunciations that are not common in Korean. For example, soon-gyeong-eum (ㅸ) can represent the V sound in English pronunciation.

In the era of globalization, certain letters such as the four letters that are not currently in use, i.e. vowel arae ah (·), old yi-eung, light-hieut(ㆆ), and half-siot (ㅿ), are very useful for foreign language learning and have great potential.

"If you write the English alphabet B as 'ㅂ' and V as 'ㅸ', you can easily distinguish between confusing English pronunciations," says Professor Kim Seul-ong, the Hunminjeongeum authority.

Being able to transcribe English pronunciation more accurately not only improves the international competitiveness of Koreans, but also has the potential to enable foreign language users without writing systems to choose Hangeul as a writing system for their respective languages, a more accurate writing system than the Roman alphabet.

As seen in our modern Hangeul words, the awesome potential of Hangeul lies in its ability to incorporate words from any other tongue into the Korean language.

The Hunminjeongeum writing system can more accurately write foreign language words and match pronunciations.

The North Face Hangeul T-shirts were designed using the words of Hunminjeongeum and Soon-gyeong-eum consonants, which were eliminated in 1912.

Indiscriminate foreign words in the Korean language can be seen as a contamination of the purity of Hangeul language.

It is time to innovate our language to make Hangeul internationally competitive, and to further solidify the identity of Hangeul by including Hangeul in the Constitution of the Republic of Korea as our country's official language.

As many of the world's 7,000 languages are facing extinction due to non-use, it is our generation's responsibility to stand tall and take measures to protect Hangeul.

Reversing the Hangeul edict from 112 years ago, is the first step in the right direction to liberate ourselves from the cultural genocide which began in the early 20th century.

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