Thread:Cookiefonster/@comment-37513482-20181115042812

On your Twitter recently you made this statement:



Well, never fear my inquisitive boy, I've got your answer!

The Korean alphabet, or Hangul, was created in the 15th century by Sejong the Great. Before then Koreans wrote in classical Chinese along with other scripts.

Now, this was fine and all - except that it wasn't, because the Koreans spoke Korean, not Chinese! This meant that all they were writing in Chinese was a rough phonetic translation of Korean, and they had no real writing system for themselves!

To make matters more troublesome, the ability to write Chinese was viewed as a commodity which the lower-class could not afford, and this furthered the divide between Chinese and Korean people. So when Sejong the Great created Korean, he meant it to be a language that anyone could learn, regardless of prior education. To make the language easier to learn, he made the letters follow the shape of the mouth that would be required to pronounce these letters.

The "ㅇ" appears extensively in Korean because it is a placeholder letter like a silent "e" in English. That's another thing, Korean is actually similar to English because it has an alphabet too. It's just that the Korean letters are put together to form words that look like Chinese and Japanese characters, so you might mistakenly think the Korean language works the same as Japanese or Chinese when really it doesn't.

But to answer your question in a nutshell, those circle letters appear a lot in Korean because that's just the way the frequency distribution works out, like how someone Korean might go "what's with all these 'e' symbols in English?"

Now, I used multiple sources two of which were not wikipedia but fandom won't let me post links atm so you'll have to find those sources yourself. ;) If I got anything wrong I invite you to call me out on it so I can learn more about this.

But, if not then I think that answers your question! =D 