(EDITORIAL from the Korea Herald on Oct. 9) - King`s statue

Today, on the 563rd anniversary of the promulgation of Hangeul, a huge sitting
statue of King Sejong, who is credited with inventing the Korean writing system
in collaboration with a group of scholars, will be unveiled at the remodeled
Gwanghwamun Plaza.
Some negative opinions have been voiced about the statue due to its extraordinary
size of 6.2 meters in height on a 3-meter-high pedestal, its location behind the
back of another Joseon-era hero, Adm. Yi Sun-shin, and the absence of public
participation in Seoul City Hall's rather speedy designing of the monument.
Critics noted its generally dignified style which they claim does not fit well
with a democratic society.
Oblivious to the arguments about his posterity, the king will be sitting in the
very center of the capital city, holding the text of "Hunminjeongeum Heryebon,"
the introduction of the new writing system, which is included in the UNESCO World
Heritage list. We are always deeply moved by the king's own explanation in the
text that he created the 28 letters because he understood the difficulties of the
common people in trying to express themselves using Chinese characters.
Koreans' great pride in their writing system has ample justification. They are
the only letters in the world with a clear history of creation, motivated by a
ruler's desire to help his people. Hangeul characters' shapes, which derive from
the form of the lip, tongue and throat in pronunciation, the clear distinction
between vowels and consonants and the artistic design consisting of dots, strokes
and squares make the writing system unique.
The formation of a letter block by combining consonants with a vowel to represent
each syllable conveys the sounds of spoken words into the image of letters.
Furthermore, it means that words can be written vertically or horizontally,
either left to right or right to left, to fit any design. In this age of
information technology, we are more thankful to King Sejong while pounding the
keyboard and texting on cell phones.
Hangeul lovers were glad to hear the recent news of an Indonesian tribe in the
Sulawesi area having decided to use Hangeul as their writing system. They take
the move of Bau-Bau city in Buton Island with a population of about 120,000, as
evidence of the qualities of the Korean alphabet. It is good to help people that
do not have their own writing system by teaching them Hangeul so they can avoid
the possible extinction of their language. Such efforts should, however, remain
in the dimension of cultural exchanges and never be viewed as expanding Korea's
global influence.
On the other hand, Hangeul has been faced with a persistent problem regarding its
transliteration into other alphabets. The history of confusion with government
authorities providing different Romanization systems to replace the
Western-initiated McCune-Reischauer System is about to face yet another
challenge. A presidential commission is reportedly working on a new system for
the purpose of "increasing Korea's international competitiveness."
The current official Romanization system has been in use since 2000. It does have
difficulties in finding matching Roman characters for Hangeul's vowels and
consonants, but no system can be perfect because there are fundamental
differences in the languages involved. After all, a Romanization system can only
be a "code" to convey phonetic similarity. A certain level of compromise is
unavoidable. Consistency is most important in this affair. The controversies
should give way to the more gracious sight of the statue of King Sejong the
Great.
(END)