Did King Sejong Design Hangeul?

The television special Bureekipun Namu is a good example of the popular conception of how King Sejong oversaw Hangeul’s creation in the 15th century. The show highlights the tension between King Sejong and his political contemporaries, depicting nobles plotting ways to sabotage King Sejong and his group of “secret” scholars, a team of carefully chosen ministers and commoners – women and men alike. The sabotage afflicted on this team ranges from spying and theft to outright assassination.

Almost everyone agrees that King Sejong actually did go against his contemporaries and much of the aristocracy in creating Hangeul, as fanciful as Bureekipun Namu’s depiction is. His new system made it possible for commoners to read and write under a regime that abused their illiteracy, especially in the court systems.

But how was the language designed? One common story is that the king’s first vision of Hangeul came when he mentally divided the boards of a traditional Korean window, which of course consisted of a series of lines and squares. The anecdote accounts for most of the letters, as many of them are made up of horizontal and vertical straight lines, but of course does not explain the curved symbols. A less poetic account by Japanese imperialists suggests that Sejong had a similar experience with the square tiles on his bathroom floor, while sitting.

Another popular belief is that Hangeul’s design is derived from the shape of the speaker’s lips, tongue, and throat. Some even claim that Sejong, in mad-scientist fashion, performed autopsies on human bodies to observe and replicate the affine characteristics between the mouth and letter shapes.

One scholar, Gari Ledyard, rejects these explanations almost entirely, claiming instead that the phonetic correlation was simply a way to mask Hangeul’s true source. It is stated in the postscript to Jeong In-Ji’s Hunminjeongeum, the book which introduced Hangeul to the world, that Sejong adapted the Chinese “Old Seal Script” to create Hangeul. This detail, however, has frustrated linguists because Hangeul has little concrete similarity to the Chinese seal script. Ledyard believes that the “gu” referenced in the old Chinese script title is actually a pun on the Menggu, or Mongol, seal script, which was designed to look like its Chinese counterpart. This supposition is backed by the fact that Mongolian manuscripts were both accessible and well-known to Sejong’s ministers.

If Ledyard is right, Sejong would have had very good reason to hide any semblance of the Mongol script in his adaptation into Hangeul. His ties with China would have been under question, since the Chinese literati held the commonplace view that the Mongols were barbaric at best. They would have shut down any chance for Hangeul to flourish – and Sejong could not have helped the Korean people interpret what they see, hear, and utter on a daily basis.