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
Another letter composed of two elements to represent two regional pronunciations, now obsolete, was ㅱ, which transcribed the Chinese initial 微. This represented either "m" or "w" in various Chinese dialects, and was composed of ㅁ plus ㅇ. In ’Phags-pa, a loop under a letter, ꡧ, represented after vowels, and Ledyard proposes this rather than the null symbol was the source of the loop at the bottom, so that the two components of ㅱ reflected its two pronunciations just as the two components of ㆁ "ng" did. The reason for suspecting that this derives from ’Phags-pa ꡧ "w" is that the entire labio-dental series of both ’Phags-pa and the Korean alphabet6, used to transcribe the Chinese initials 微非敷 "w, v, f," have such composite forms, though in the case of ’Phags-pa these are all based on the letter ꡜ "h" (ꡤ "etc."), while in Hangul, which does not have an "h" among its basic consonants, they are based on the labial series ㅁ "m," ㅂ "b," ㅍ "p."