Christianity in Korea
Hangul, a phonemic Korean alphabet invented around 1446 by scholars in the court of Sejong the Great, was little used for several centuries because of the perceived cultural superiority of Classical Chinese (a position similar to that of Latin in Europe). However, the Catholic Church became the first Korean religious organization to officially adopt Hangul as its primary script. Bishop Siméon-François Berneux mandated that all Catholic children be taught to read it. Christian literature printed for use in Korea, including that used by the network of schools established by Christian missionaries, mostly used the Korean language and the easily learned Hangul script. This combination of factors resulted in a rise in the overall literacy rate, and enabled Christian teachings to spread beyond the elite, who mostly used Chinese. As early as the 1780s, portions of the Gospels were published in Hangul; doctrinal books such as the "Jugyo Yoji" (주교요지) appeared in the 1790s and a Catholic hymnal was printed around 1800.
Origin of Hangul
Although several of the basic concepts of the Korean alphabet were inherited from Indic phonology through the ’Phags-pa script, such as the relationships among the homorganic consonants and, of course, the alphabetic principle itself, Chinese phonology played a major role. Besides the grouping of letters into syllables, in functional imitation of Chinese characters, according to Ledyard it was Chinese phonology, not Indic, that determined which five consonants were basic, and were therefore to be retained from ’Phags-pa. These included the plain stop letters, ꡂ "g" for ㄱ "g" , ꡊ "d" for ㄷ "d" , and ꡎ "b" for ㅂ "b" , which were basic to Chinese theory, but which represented voiced consonants in the Indic languages and were not basic in the Indic tradition. The other two letters were the plain sibilant ꡛ "s" for ㅈ "j" (ㅈ was pronounced in the fifteenth century, as it still is in North Korea) and the liquid ꡙ "l" for ㄹ "l" .