Listen now | In this episode, I speak with Dr. Young-Key Kim-Renaud, a theoretical linguist and Professor Emeritus at George Washington University, on King Sejong the Great and his invention, the Korean script. We explore why after more than a millennia of using Chinese characters to notate the Korean language, we needed our own writing system and how King Sejong went about to create it.
A friend of a friend married a descendent of Shim On, father-in-law of King Sejong. Apparently my friend's wife didn't mention it. His story was that while learning to research geneaologies in Korea, for fun he traced back his wife's family record book for many generations and found Sim On. When he mentioned this to his father-in-law, the man apparently shrugged and said it was a long time ago. Then he added, "If you were a Pak, no marriage." There's a complicated story about court intrigue and the killling of Sim On but what I remember is that my friend learned that several hundred years is not too long to hold a grudge in Korea. He said that our diplomats seemed oblivious to that detail.
In my own more recent experience, a CCP contact was explaining to me that the actual boundaries of "greater China" included Korea because "they used Chinese writing and still do." A hilarious comment, considering the elegance and simplicity of hangul as compared to the ideographic monstrosity of written Chinese.
King Sejong and the Invention of the Korean Script
A friend of a friend married a descendent of Shim On, father-in-law of King Sejong. Apparently my friend's wife didn't mention it. His story was that while learning to research geneaologies in Korea, for fun he traced back his wife's family record book for many generations and found Sim On. When he mentioned this to his father-in-law, the man apparently shrugged and said it was a long time ago. Then he added, "If you were a Pak, no marriage." There's a complicated story about court intrigue and the killling of Sim On but what I remember is that my friend learned that several hundred years is not too long to hold a grudge in Korea. He said that our diplomats seemed oblivious to that detail.
In my own more recent experience, a CCP contact was explaining to me that the actual boundaries of "greater China" included Korea because "they used Chinese writing and still do." A hilarious comment, considering the elegance and simplicity of hangul as compared to the ideographic monstrosity of written Chinese.