English 11- period 6
26 November 2013
King Sejong the Great
King Sejong was born in 1392 and had two older brothers, Yangnyeong and Hyoryeong. His brothers desired to play or hunt rather than to study. Different from his older brothers, Sejong loved to read and write that he barely went out and play since he was young. This difference among his brothers made Sejong’s father, the king, to love Sejong a lot. This disparity even made his brothers to trust instead of being jealous of Sejong and thought that he would do a great job ruling the people. Unlike other kings in the history, King Sejong had no fought with his brother to become a king of Joseon because the older brothers yielded the position to Sejong and let he became the fourth king of Joseon Dynasty.
The invention of Hangul is great because the words are scientific, which make the language easy to learn. “an illiterate person learn Hangul; being able to read and write words within the only 6 hours.” (Choi line 9-10) John Man, who is English historian, said, “ Korean Hangul was the long-awaited perfect script.” Also R. Dormels from University Vienne claimed, “It is not too much to say that Hangul is the best work among the creations Korean culture.” Former professor of Tokyo University, whose name is Hiroyuki Umeda, spoke “Hangul is the finest phonemic writing and more upgraded nature character than the Roman alphabet.”
When King Sejong was inventing the alphabet, he wanted to record every sound from the nature. The method that he picked was using the shape of the alphabet by observing the shape of the mouth, tongue, teeth, and threat and making the work look similar to the observation. Since the shape of the alphabet was analogous to that of the body part people use while speaking, people found easy to learn- they don’t have to consider how to pronounce it and just follow the shape of the alphabet. Also even with small amount of alphabet Hangul can manufacture lots of syllables. By comparing to about...