Perhaps it was 1981 when I went to a dinner gathering and met a couple from South Korea who were at that time students at University of Texas. I've long remembered a conversation with them, where they helped me to understand how Korean writing worked. The writing process was both very logical, and beautiful to the eye. The young man demonstrated how their written language combined both phonetics (information about how the word sounds) and ideograms (pictures conveying meaning) within every box-shaped symbol.

I looked it up tonight, and realize that what he was demonstrating was Korean mixed script, combining the phonetic system devised in Korea in the 1440s (hangul), and the Chinese pictogram system (known in Korea as hanja).

The mixed script approach however has become relatively short-lived. North Korea used hangul by law since 1949. South Korea has slowly moved in that direction as well, dropping the mixed-script that was in usage at the time of the dinner party, although here and there adding a hanja for greater clarity.

Hangul has a phonetic alphabet of 24 letters, and each block of writing includes 2 to 5 letters to spell out a syllable. (If this were applied in English, for example, for the word 'contest', it would be spelled with two blocks, the first with the c-o-n sounds, the second with t-e-s-t.) Vowel letters are shaped differently than consonants, so they stand out. There has been speculation that hangul speeds up reading and comprehension because the brain can so quickly grasp the content.

The phonetic system of hangul brought reading and writing to the masses. For ancient Korea, writing prior to hangul was based on the Chinese origin hanja, the thousands of little ideograms, and ancient Korean historical documents are all written in hanja. Hanja was for the fortunate scholars, requiring great effort to learn and practise, requiring more memorization than the future systems of hangul and mixed-script. Hanja are still taught in high school and college in the current-day Koreas as a separate writing system. The hanja vary some from one country to the next.

This is the best I could glean from an hour or two of browsing and deciphering, and forgive me if there are some inaccuracies. Meanwhile, I remain fascinated by the Koreans' mixed-script written language as demonstrated at dinner some thirty years ago.