In case you don’t already know, today is a very important day: Hangul Day! (If it’s on Google, you know it’s important.) Koreans really love their alphabet. So much so that one South Korean real estate magnate is using her money to spread the Hangul love outside of Korea by trying to teach it to people whose native languages lack written systems. From an article in The New York Times titled “South Korea’s Latest Export: Its Alphabet”:
Her project had its first success — and generated headlines — in July, when children from an Indonesian tribe began learning the Korean alphabet, called Hangul.
“I am doing for the world’s nonwritten languages what Doctors Without Borders is doing in medicine,” Ms. Lee, 75, said in an interview. “There are thousands of such languages. I aim to bring Hangul to all of them.”
While her quest might seem quixotic to non-Koreans, in this country — which has a national holiday called Hangul Day — it is viewed with enormous pride. Newspapers have gushed, and a Korean political party praised her feat in Indonesia — which Ms. Lee says involves just 50 children so far — as “a heroic first step toward globalizing Hangul.”
Such effusiveness is tied to Koreans’ attachment to their alphabet — a distinctive combination of circles and lines — and what they believe its endurance says about them as a people. During Japanese colonial rule in the past century, Koreans were prohibited from using their language and alphabet in business and other official settings; schools were forbidden to teach the language. Illiteracy in Korean soared, but many Koreans broke the rules to teach the language to their children and others.
Korean pride is warranted in that Hangul is a very well-designed alphabet (thank you, Good King Sejong) for effectively capturing the sounds of Korean in written form. However, I think this woman (and many other Koreans) unfortunately miss some very important points about language (see the rest of the article for more evidence of that). But, hey, welcome to the colonialism bandwagon, Korea. Better late than never?
(Reblogged from hiddentreasures)
Awesome!
