Hangul supremacy
Hangul supremacy is the belief, most widespread in Korea, that the Hangul alphabet developed by King Sejong the Great's Hall of Worthies in 1443 is the simplest, most logical, most beautiful and most scientific of the world's writing systems. In its extreme form, the belief holds that Hangul is in fact best suited for the expression of sounds in all languages.
Origin of Hangul
Although the "Hunmin jeong-eum haerye" (hereafter "Haerye)" explains the design of the consonantal letters in terms of articulatory phonetics, it also states that Sejong adapted them from the enigmatic 古篆字 ""Gǔ" Seal Script". The identity of this script has long been puzzling. The primary meaning of the character 古 "gǔ" is "old", so 古篆字 "gǔ zhuānzì" has traditionally been interpreted as "Old Seal Script", frustrating philologists, because the Korean alphabet bears no functional similarity to Chinese 篆字 "zhuānzì" seal scripts. However, Gari Ledyard, Sejong Professor of Korean History Emeritus at Columbia University, notes that the character 古 "gǔ" also functions as a phonetic component of 蒙古 "Měnggǔ" "Mongol". Indeed, records from Sejong's day played with this ambiguity, joking that "no one is older (more 古 "gǔ)" than the 蒙古 "Měng-gǔ"". Ledyard deduces from palace records that 古篆字 "gǔ zhuānzì" was a veiled reference to the 蒙古篆字 "měnggǔ zhuānzì" "Mongol Seal Script", that is, a formal variant of the Mongol ’Phags-pa alphabet of the Mongolian-origin Chinese Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) that had been modified to look like the Chinese seal script, and which had been an official script of the empire. There were ’Phags-pa manuscripts in the Korean palace library from the Yuan Dynasty government, including some in the seal-script form, and several of Sejong's ministers knew the script well. If this was the case, Sejong's evasion on the Mongol connection can be understood in light of the political situation in the contemporary (ethnically Chinese) Ming Dynasty. The topic of the recent Mongol domination of China, which had ended just 75 years earlier, was politically sensitive, and both the Chinese and Korean literati regarded the Mongols as barbarians with nothing to contribute to a civilized society.