The Josean Emperor

Back in the 7th Century AD, The Josean Emperor was looking at the Chinese signs on his palace and said "It's so wrong that we use the script from another nation.  We need to have our own." and so went off and in a single afternoon came up with an entirely new phonetic alphabet that is so logical, scientific and so language-representational that it's not just still used today, but also beloved of language experts the world over AND also has become the alphabet of choice for those people who have no written language of their own - like the tribes of Sulawesi in Indonesia - who are worried about the loss of their own tongue and want a record of it before it disappears forever.

Naturally, Keith and I had a great argument over this.  It blew me away that a person, an Emperor, who had grown up learning pictographic script was able to even image phonetics. Think about it: how subtle would your mind have to be that you could think so far "outside the square" as to come up with a phonetic alphabet?  Most Chinese I know cannot even get their mind around the idea of phonetics and simply refuse to believe that the English alphabet is based on sounds, insisting that each of our words is actually a picture of something. Honestly!  Yet this Emperor did it.  Oh my, what a hero!

On the other hand, Keith was saying that Sanskrit is phonetic and if they were in contact with the Hindu world - and I do believe they were - I even have proof - the idea of a phonetic alphabet wasn't new to them.  However, I've always believed that Sanskrit was ideographic and not phonetic ... and so we went on and on about it.