This is damn interesting.

Headphones recommend it.

In the late 1430s and early 1440s, a Korean scholar embarked on a massively ambitious project,

working almost single-handedly and spurred on largely by a personal interest.

Although the Korean language had existed for almost 1,500 years, it had never had its own

dedicated writing system. Korean writers had long tended to rely on Chinese writing, which was

logographic, that is, it was a system of symbols that stood for concepts.

Adapting the Chinese characters to Korean meant borrowing some Chinese symbols because of the way

they were pronounced and others because of the concept they conveyed.

This approach had centuries of tradition behind it, but it was not ideal.

In particular, Korean had more prefixes, suffixes, and short grammatical words,

such as prepositions, than Chinese did, and Chinese logographs were not well suited to capturing

these. More practically, learning the thousands of Chinese characters required a good deal of study,

which meant that only the most well-educated Koreans could read and write.

The Korean scholar in question was determined to bring literacy to the masses.

His insight was that they needed an alphabet, that is, a writing system based entirely on pronunciation,

and one that required far fewer characters than

the logographs.

What do you know of language and linguistics?

The bold scholar asked several of the high-ranking officials who objected to his idea.

This project is for the people, and if I don't do it, who will?

The scholar happened to be a man named Sejong, who happened to be the king of Korea,

...