I remember first reading about it on a Zed Shaw's article:
"Ever seen the Korean alphabet? It’s called Hangul and it is probably the most advanced alphabet humans have right now while also being simpler than most of them at the same time. It can be stacked like Chinese characters, but it’s also built more like ours with an ability to construct unusual vowel sounds. Get this, it was invented in about 1443 AD and even mimicks the way the mouth is constructed. That’s right, the characters actually look like how the mouth, jaw, and glottis form to make the sound. It’s brilliant and a gorgeous piece of work that demonstrates how something simple can also have incredible complexity lurking under the surface.
Did you know that Hangul is so good at mimicking other language constructs that some anthropologists want to use it to record near-extinct languages? It takes an average person about 3 days to learn it, whether they speak Korean or not, and they can use it to write down their own language even if it’s completely different from Korean. It’s that universal. Imagine being able to get native speakers of dying languages to actually write down how their language is pronounced. Now that’s power.
I’ll give you a great example. I was walking around Seoul one day and drinking this soda call “Pocari Sweat” (said so in English on the side). Yeah, it says it’s got sweat in it but damn it was good. I turn to a Korean woman, point at the Hangul on the side of the can, and ask in bad Korean, “Can you say this?” She reads each character of Hangul as:
“poh car ee sw et”
That’s right, the English on the can was mimicked nearly exactly by the Hangul and it made no sense to her either. But, she could read it and we both said the same exact verbal noises even though we read different alphabets. She thought it was funny too."
Hangul is great, but don't try to use it for English. Try writing "Larry really loves the zoo very much". You get "Raeri ri-a-ri reo-beu-seu da joo bae-ri meo-chi".
In other words, you lose the L/R and V/B differences, and words like "much" can't end on consonants, so you get "Muchi".
Hangul has no sounds corresponding to "V, F, R-L, Th, and 'woo'".
Following Korean spelling rules, yes, but when I was a kid I had a slightly adapted Hangul that I used for English all the time. It was a brilliant secret code and only took a couple of days to master it. All I did was add a couple of characters borrowed from Hiragana and put a floating bar above T and S to make TH and SH. I can still more or less remember it and read it 30 odd years later.
The simplicity of Hangul is partly because of the simplicity in the Korean syllables. It will be much harder to derive a simple writing system for a complex-sounding language like Vietnamese or English.
Btw, for the 3 countries, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, that were influenced by Chinese writing deeply, each of them has a different approach.
Korean came out with its Hangul writing system. Japanese came out with hiragana and katakana (together with Kanji). Vietnamese came out with Chu Nom ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chu_nom) , a logographic script that is even more complex than Chinese characters.
It must be noted that most Korean people can read the Latin alphabet, because they get taught English. Now, it is not necessarily the case that they _learn_ English, but they get taught English.
Also, the orthography is not perfectly regular. 합니다, if it were regular, would be spoken "hapnida", but for phonetic convenience in the Seoul dialect it is spoken "hamnida". Something similar goes on for things like 학년.
It remains a legitimate focal point for the pride of the Korean people, however.
"Ever seen the Korean alphabet? It’s called Hangul and it is probably the most advanced alphabet humans have right now while also being simpler than most of them at the same time. It can be stacked like Chinese characters, but it’s also built more like ours with an ability to construct unusual vowel sounds. Get this, it was invented in about 1443 AD and even mimicks the way the mouth is constructed. That’s right, the characters actually look like how the mouth, jaw, and glottis form to make the sound. It’s brilliant and a gorgeous piece of work that demonstrates how something simple can also have incredible complexity lurking under the surface.
Did you know that Hangul is so good at mimicking other language constructs that some anthropologists want to use it to record near-extinct languages? It takes an average person about 3 days to learn it, whether they speak Korean or not, and they can use it to write down their own language even if it’s completely different from Korean. It’s that universal. Imagine being able to get native speakers of dying languages to actually write down how their language is pronounced. Now that’s power.
I’ll give you a great example. I was walking around Seoul one day and drinking this soda call “Pocari Sweat” (said so in English on the side). Yeah, it says it’s got sweat in it but damn it was good. I turn to a Korean woman, point at the Hangul on the side of the can, and ask in bad Korean, “Can you say this?” She reads each character of Hangul as:
“poh car ee sw et”
That’s right, the English on the can was mimicked nearly exactly by the Hangul and it made no sense to her either. But, she could read it and we both said the same exact verbal noises even though we read different alphabets. She thought it was funny too."
http://zedshaw.com/essays/fortune_favors_big_turds.html