I doubt you’ll meet a K-pop star. Maybe if you work at a fancy hotel or on a fancy airline you will, or maybe you’ll meet one at a film festival, but usually people spend time around others of similar fame, similar wealth.
K-pop is famous enough in Romania and Romanians are falling for scams by people pretending to be K-pop stars. And the scammers usually end up in jail, or worse. But the victims not only lose their money, they lose their pride. It must be difficult to admit that you’re a victim of such a hoax.
But yeah the entertainment industry probably has the most scammers of any industry on earth. Some are not only greedy, but dangerous too. Well, the most scammers apart from Bitcoin, health, construction, and real estate. Even if you never fall for one of the scams, scam artists can waste a lot of your time.
That said, you’ll probably meet some good Koreans some day. I’ve met Koreans in Tae Kwon Do class, on buses, at youth hostels, and in summer schools, among other places. I can’t say for sure none went on to be pop stars, but I think most just worked normal jobs. The same kinds of jobs I worked at the time.
Okay, so what does this have to do with Hangeul Day? Hangeul Day celebrates the invention of the Korean alphabet.
Koreans have been speaking for thousands of years. How old is the Korean Language? Perhaps as old as Chinese. Like Romanian used to be written with the Cyrallic alphabet, Korean used to be written with the Chinese alphabet.
(If you are hired to star in a Korean film, you probably already know the Korean alphabet, and have a Korean agent, and are a resident in Korea.)
Both Korean and Romanian are more phonetic than many others not because the languages are new, they are ancient, but because the alphabets are new.
In the 1840s, Europe was undergoing a series of changes. Hungarian, Estonian, and Romanian were undergoing linguistic reforms, as political movements were linked to literary ones.
English has long been a kind of anarchistic language, writers and printers just wrote by their own rules, if by any at all. That’s why sometimes even the best dictionaries can get things wrong, the language changes naturally, and the linguists merely observe it. Well, with Romanian and Hangeul, the recent alphabets have political as well as practical origins.
In asserting independence, the countries of central Europe shed old alphabets, and even shed words that didn’t sound as authentic. Romanian writers adopted the Latin alphabet. They also tried to make things look as they sound. This made it easier for people to read and write. By 1860, the language was flourishing with a Latin alphabet. By 1905 or so, the alphabet was pretty much what we read today. Official changes from a central body (the Romanian Academy) govern what is taught in schools and used in official correspondence.
Hangeul was a practical implementation. Although many Koreans were able to write in Chinese characters, it was difficult for the majority to learn to read and write with such a complex system.
But that isn’t the entire story. While Chinese has simple grammar, Chinese words don’t have many suffixes. Meanwhile, Korean has a more complex grammar, like Hungarian or Romanian, with different word endings indicating grammatical states. The Chinese alphabet seems to have been built for Chinese, but not for Korean.
It was so difficult to learn to read Korean with the Chinese alphabet, that only a select few had time to learn it.
So, a king of Korea adopted a new alphabet, and presented it to the people on 9th of October 1443. This new alphabet. Sejong the great.
Vowels were based on three elements, human, the sun or heaven, and the earth, and had three simple shapes to represent that. Consonants, on the other hand, were based on the shape the mouth makes to produce the sound. The alphabet was created not based on hieroglyphs with mystic meanings, or a foreign alphabet, but on the sounds of the Korean language.
The phonetic nature of the Hangeul alphabet made it easier for Koreans to learn to read and write, and literacy went up. “A wise man could learn it in a morning. A fool, in ten days.” I guess that only applies to native speakers? In any case, Hangeul has helped Koreans read and write for over six centuries, even when it was banned by tyrants.
(Note on the video. See how he describes the first vowel? That vowel is a lot like the î or â in Romanian.)
So, Hangeul is much older than Romanian. Therefore, some might think it is no longer entirely phonetic. Some of the double consonant clusters at the end of syllables are now pronounced as single consonants.
However, both languages are generally phonetic. You can read unfamiliar words in Korean or Romanian and be confident that you are pronouncing them correctly. (That is, if you know how to pronounce them. Both Korean and Romanian might present a challenge for non-native speakers.)
If you listen carefully, and you speak Hungarian, you might recognise similarities between the Korean and Hungarian words for “father” and the Korean and Hungarian (and Estonian) words for “mother.” Well, most languages have similar words for these, but Korean and Finno – Ugric languages tend to drop the first consonant (or have a placeholder, silent consonant.)
In any case, the introduction of the alphabet was such a life-changing event that the day people learned about it is now a national holiday. That’s great. It’s also interesting, it shows a strong cultural affinity to literacy, and might explain the strong work ethic Koreans are known for in every field from high tech to martial arts to entertainment.
Other people also created their own alphabets to match existing languages. The most famous case is Sequoya, who created a syllabary for Cherokee. Sequoya was an illiterate trader who was discouraged by his family and neighbours and by the poverty that developing a writing system caused him, while King Sejong was much more financially stable and very learned. Yet, Sequoya was able to pull it off. So those haters who say King Sejong couldn’t have invented Hangeul alone are probably wrong.
But yeah, anyone who you meet on the internet claiming to be King Sejong or Sequoya, or to be their heirs, is probably a con artist.
Happy Hangeul Day!