Tue 11 Oct 2022, Day 29/61, 4/5. We had to hand in all our possessions including phones and cameras, wear a hard hat & stoop much of the time to avoid hitting our heads.

Photo of end of tunnel: Korea Herald,
https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20171124000726

Tue 11 Oct 2022, Day 29/61. 3/5. We were taken underground & walked along 1 of 4 tunnels created to invade the South. This incomplete 3rd tunnel was discovered in 1978, 73m below ground, already extending 435m into the southern half of the DMZ, 44 km from Seoul.

Photo of tunnel: © 2017 OnedayKorea,
https://www.seoulkoreatour.net/places/korea-1/attraction/the-3rd-infiltration-tunnel/

Tue 11 Oct 2022, Day 29/61, 2/5. I’ve seen Koreans get emotional at the sight of this train. It ran between South & North but is now on show next to a sign: ‘A railroad train wants to run.’ Bombed & derailed in December 1950, it has over 1,000 bullet holes.

Photo of ruined train bombed in 1950

Tue 11 Oct 2022, Day 29/61, 1/5. A visit up close to North Korea. We had to show our passports to cross into a Civilian Control Zone south of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) which itself extends 2 km each side of the border, the Military Demarcation Line.

Map of Demilitarized Zone: Rishabh Tatiraju
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Mon 10 Oct 2022, Day 28/61. Nowadays technology enables us to type individual letters rather than whole syllable blocks, allowing software to sort the characters into blocks. Here is my iPad Korean keyboard.

Mon 10 Oct 2022, Day 28/61. I hadn’t realised there was debate until the late 20th century whether to write Hanguel in syllable-blocks (easier to read but I imagine harder to print). Here is the oldest (1934) Hanguel typewriter: each key types a syllable-block.

Mon 10 Oct 2022, Day 28/61. So today I visited the National Hanguel Museum. What did I learn? That Hanguel hadn’t become the official alphabet until 1894, just 16 years before the Japanese occupation, when Korean as a language was sidelined until 1945.

Mon 10 Oct 2022, Day 28/61. Hanguel is based on an analysis of the sounds used in the Korean language and the way the mouth, lips and tongue are shaped to make them. Similar sounds have similar symbols: b (ㅂ ) & p (ㅍ ); g (ㄱ) & k (ㅋ); d (ㄷ) & t (ㅌ).

Mon 10 Oct 2022, Day 28/61. Before Hanguel, Koreans used Chinese characters to write their own, different, language. King Sejong created Hanguel to enable literacy amongst those who did not know Chinese – which has a different character for each word.

Mon 10 Oct 2022, Day 28/61. The Korean alphabet, Hanguel, 한글, was unveiled 576 years ago yesterday, in 1446. This year’s Hanguel Day public holiday was moved from Sunday to today, Monday. How many countries have a public holiday to celebrate their alphabet?