By Jeongnam Kim
(Former Senior Presidential Secretary for Education·Culture·Society, World Korean News advisor)
The Hangul Day is again becoming a holiday since 2013. The holiday designation of Hangul Day was abolished in 1991 in consideration of the fact there were too many holidays and at the same time due to the fact that there's no country in the world to designated as a holiday in delectation of a nation's language or letter. With this, our nation is newly reborn as a country of culture with a holiday in celebration of its language and letters. This made us become the first nation in the world celebrating a day for its language and letters.
Philologists compete each other to call Hangul "the simplest but greatest letters," or "the world's most reasonable letters." We realize of ourselves how scientific our Hangul is, and that it is the only letter that can write all sounds in the world into letters. And at the same time, the significance and the symbol of the alphabet is artistic as well as scientific.
Author Lee Woe-su says, "To me the Hangul is a philosophy as well as an art. The alphabet is a coordination of Yin and Yang. With this coordination, it embodies a beautiful image. Each letter of the Hangul represents a combination and at the same time contains the beauty of a space. It make it possible to delineate something that accords with our five senses such as hearing and vision. We write the Hangul just as we paint an image. The Hangul is the beauty with a perfection."
October 9 is the day when the invention of Hangul was proclaimed, not the day when the Korean alphabet was invented. The Sejong the Great proclaimed the invention of the Hangul in early September in the 28th year of his sovereign in the Lunar calendar, which falls in October. The time of its invention was in December in the 25th year of his sovereign in the Lunar calendar which falls in January. Therefore, North Korea observes the Hangul Day on January 15.
The Chosun Philological Research Center designated the Hangul Day on the basis of its proclamation, not of its invention. In the view of the users, the proclamation day is more important than the day of its invention. King Sejong himself took its proclamation more important than its invention. He said, "I proclaim the invention of the Hangul with a sense of pity for the poor people..." And therefore I would regard its proclamation more important than its invention.
Indonesia's minor ethnic group Tsiatsia, aware of the fact that the Hangul is the system of letters that could write all sounds of the world, has adopted it as their own means of writing. The news that their Hangul education is presently going through a crisis not because of their problem but because of our mistaken approach suggests something vital to us. One thing is we should be the first to take it in high regard.
There are so many posts of unknown nationality around us, full of foreign languages, and the social media networks are overflowing with messages and responses tainted with abusive words and even foreign words. The road of the Hangul we should build and take care is distant and rough. It is us who should first find again the beauty of the Hangul.
Some time ago, singer Psy said that he would "continue to write lyrics of the songs he would sing in Korean" in a lecture he gave at Oxford University in Britain. He made a mention of the Hangul globalization, clearly and with pride. It is one of the urgent tasks for us to distribute the Hangul to those many people in the world who have the languages but not the letters. In a sense Psy is leading the distribution or the globalization of the Hangul of which the government agencies and the scholars are unable to do. It is about time and it is also very important for us as a nation to build our pride for the Hangul.
