2. Dr. David Kosofsky's View

"HANGEUL LETTERS FROM A KING"

( WORDS by David Kosofsky – MORNING CALM : December 1993, p.35)

— Good King Sejong's greatest gift to his people was the power of communication.

 “Before you read this article, consider what you are about to consume. Words – English words spelled in letters from the English alphabet. And think for a moment about how well or how poorly that alphabet represents the sounds of those words. Ask yourself, for example, whether the letter “h” from the word “ H ow” is doing in the word “Englis H ”, “alp H abet”, “t H ink”, and “w H at”. H mmm? But enoug H ! Let me put it on the record that I have nothing against the English language. I teach it and write it for a living, and I'm not about to bite the hand that feeds me.

But H onestly this compels me to admit that the English writing system is . . . well . . . g H astly.

The letters we use – borrowed from the Romans, who inherited them from the Greeks, who adapted them from the Phoenicians, who took them from the Egyptians, who derived them from hieroglyphic drawings – simply do not correspond to the sounds of our words.

In fact, most of the world's languages use writing systems derived from other, generally unrelated languages, with historical accident, not linguistic suitability as the determining factor. English is but one somewhat extreme example of the common pattern of languages whose words are represented, more or less inefficiently and inaccurately, by a borrowed writing system.

Instead of straining and fudging to apply an alien orthography, would it not make more sense to start from scratch and create a new writing system specifically designed to express the sounds of your own language? It seems like the obvious solution, yet almost no language community has ever pulled it off.

The dazzling exception is Korean, the only significant and successful application of the truly creative approach on a national scale in the history of writing. Koreans write in Hangeul , an alphabet which King Sejong introduced in 1446, a writing system created specially for their language.”