On this day of the year 1446, the king of Korea invented a new alphabet. It is an alphabet that is used today by millions of people.<\/p>\n
King Sejong the Great was dissatisfied that only a small percentage of his subjects were literate. So he invented an alphabet that would be accessible to all.<\/p>\n
Of course this was all frowned upon by the elite literary class of the day. But it initiated a societal transformation by creating new educational and therefore economic opportunities for ordinary Koreans.<\/p>\n
What I find most remarkable is the scholarly consensus that the king did not commission someone to create this alphabet for him. Rather, he personally created it himself.<\/p>\n
Can you imagine any modern ruler doing something like that? It truly is unique as far as I can tell in the annals of history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On this day of the year 1446, the king of Korea invented a new alphabet. It is an alphabet that is used today by millions of people. King Sejong the Great was dissatisfied that only a small percentage of his subjects were literate. So he invented an alphabet that would be accessible to all. Of … Continue reading “Hongul”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24824"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24824"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24824\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24825,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24824\/revisions\/24825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}