A Dartmouth grad's contribution to the development of Hangul

The current issue of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine includes an article by Karl Schutz and Jun Bum Sun that made me sit bolt upright:

"The Chosŏn One:  The influence of Homer Hulbert, class of 1884, lives on in a country far from his home" (Jul-Aug, 2015).

Homer Hulbert was the great-great-grandson of Eleazar Wheelock (1711-1779), who founded Dartmouth College in 1769.  Hulbert went to Seoul in 1886 to help set up an English language school, the first in the country.

Once in Korea, Hulbert dedicated himself to learning the country’s language and history. He found the simplicity of its phonetic alphabet, Hangul, extraordinary. While the country’s elite at the time wrote exclusively in Chinese characters, commoners used Hangul, which was created in the 1400s during the Chosŏn Dynasty. Hulbert believed that Hangul’s accessibility could improve literacy and empower the people.

As part of his belief in the democratizing power of Hangul, in 1895 Hulbert published Samin P’ilchi, a gazetteer of the world, the first textbook written entirely in the Korean alphabet. Ten years later, in 1905, he published in English his History of Korea, the first comprehensive history book on Korea written by a foreigner with direct access to Korea’s imperial archives. (Original copies of both books are available in Rauner.)

Hulbert also proposed certain grammatical conventions that became important components of today’s Korean writing system: spaces between words, commas, periods and writing from left to right. One of his students, Ju Si-Gyeong, would go on to become a great modernizer of the Korean language, adapting many of Hulbert’s ideas to his mother tongue. Hangul went on to replace Chinese characters during the 20th century.

Just as Homer Hulbert helped in the establishment of Hangul as the official orthography of Korea, perhaps another son of Dartmouth will make a contribution to the realization of digraphia in China.