4. Excerpts from the Interviews with Foreign Scholars

—Their Views on Hangeul in 1996 (the 550 th Anniversary of the Promulgation

of the Ortho-phonic Alphabet)

(C) Interview with Prof. Geoffrey Sampson

 (1) I think there is no question that it is scientifically one of the most interesting scripts. I would say it is the most interesting script in the world . It has always seemed to me quite remarkable if one thinks that the alphabetic principle of writing has really only ever been invented once . All the normal alphabets, as you would call them, the Greek, the Hebrew alphabet, our own Roman alphabet, all descend from one single invention in the Middle East .

And yet here in your nation, in a very distant part of the world, your alphabet is a completely original invention.

Predecessors created a writing system which, in this sense, goes beyond the alphabetic principle. Not only does it analyze words into sounds, which is in itself an example of scientific achievement, but also it goes further and analyzes the sounds into the individual features of the sound. In English, we have a “T” and an “N” and they are related sounds, but if you look at the letter ‘T' and ‘N', there is no graphic indication of this relationship ---they are just different letters. But in Hangeul you have your “N” sign ? , which shows the tongue tip touching the roof of the mouth (alveolar ridge) and then the ‘T' ? is the same as the ‘N' ? phonetically. But you make an additional movement with the mouth, you lower yourself forward, and there in the Hangeul ‘N' ? you can see the line across the top which shows the relationship, phonetically between the “T” ? and the “N” ? , and the principle runs all the way through the Hangeul script . There is no other script in normal use in the world that goes to this degree of scientific analysis and I find it really quite amazing that more than half a millennium ago such a script should have been created and come into use.

I think many other Western linguists who know enough about Korean to be aware of this, and find it to be quite a fascinating phenomenon .

(2) Well, this theory that has been put forward by an American or Canadian, I'm not sure, North American anyway, that Hangeul was invented by your King Sejong or maybe a committee presided over by Sejong in response to one of the Indic alphabets. In other words, it suggested that it was not totally original, and even if that were true, the fact is that the basis of the Hangeul script, the way it analyzes sounds into individual features, as I just described, goes far beyond anything in any of the Indic alphabets. But as far as I'm aware, and I'm not an expert on this early history, the evidences for Ledyard's theory is very weak, and it appears to me, in fact, that it was a completely original invention.

(3) There isn't any other script in use as the ordinary writing system of a nation, where you can look at the shapes of the letters, if you want to call them that, and tell by the shapes what sort of sounds they are. The fact that, for instance, all the vowels are based on long lines (either horizontal or vertical) whereas the consonants are more compact shapes. And then you look into the individual consonants and the individual vowels and there's a logic in the way each one is designed . That is completely unique . You get artificial systems in modern times. The kinds of short-hand systems that is in use here in Britain , is somewhat comparable in that respect to Hangeul . I mean it is separate but the principle is rather similar.

But that's an entirely artificial thing, nobody…. you would never write a book in that or see it written. Most British people can't read short-hand and it is a recent scientific invention within the last hundred years or so. And as I say, it seems to me remarkable, what you have has this scientific, analytic characteristic and it is so old. I mean it is more than 500, in fact now exactly 550 years old.

 (4) Well it actually seems to me that your nation has two great boasts in the linguistic area, in terms of scientific achievements. One is the fact that you created this script which goes further than any other into analyzing the phonetic principles of the sounds that it uses.

This, as I say, is completely unique in the world as far as I know, and I think I do know. The other, of course, is in the area of printing, where although the idea of printing with movable type was I believe a Chinese invention, Korea seems to have been the first country where it was seriously put into practice to any great extent. So, in one sense, I mean, our early printers, Guttenburg and Cackston in Europe should be looking to Korea as the origin of this art, which has become such an important component of modern life.

(5) That's a very interesting question whether computers will help to promote Korean writing or create a difficulty. I think there's a feeling at the moment in the middle 1990's that the spread of computers are making it very difficult for any scripts that are not the basic ABC that we use in Britain to survive. But logically, that should not be so. The difficult period for the variety of scripts, it seems to me, was earlier in the 20 th century when you used typewriters and things like that which were fixed, not flexible, not fluid. There it was rather difficult to accommodate the technology to a variety of scripts.

But with computers, of course, everything is flexible and fluid. You can define codes for any characters that you like. And we now have an international standard that covers all the world's writing systems, including Hangeul. There are standard computer codes for all the elements of the alphabet. And it ought to be the case now that scripts of the different nations begin to flourish in information technology .

I have to say unfortunately it is not happening and the reason it is not happening is that the nations which are most influential in computing, well particularly the United States of America , have no great motive for doing so. Of course, their script is well served by the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet. But there is no technical problem. All it takes is for nations that use other scripts to press for them to be implemented in computer terms. And Korea is in a good, strong position to do that, I think.

You use a different script. You are a nation that is technologically quite significant and important. And if your nation and for instance Japan, which uses a different sort of writing, again, and some other nations press that really we must abandon sticking just to ASCII code, just to the 24-letter Roman alphabet for computing purposes.

We must implement the Unicode system that gives you two bite codes for every character of every writing system in the world. It will happen and I hope very much that you do that because personally as somebody involved in linguistics as well as computing, I think it would be a very sad day if the variety of world scripts diminishes, and everybody moves over to using the one which as it happens my language has always used. I don't want to see that happen. But it is only people like yourselves from other nations that can stop it from happening.

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The word ‘predecessors' is used for the same reason as was indicated in note 2.

Ledyard's origin theory is based on the ‘imitation theory that the Korean alphabet letters are designed by the imitation of Mongul Phagespa script.