Hangul is a marvel of an alphabet, especially when you realize it was created from scratch six centuries ago.

Korean is the correct answer for world language. Revive the hangul triangle and other characters to represent sounds not present in Korea and you're good! Highly efficient. Beautiful. Calligraphy is art.

I have heard that hangul and Mongolic script are related, which might explain how the king was able to create a fully featured beautiful script like that in one go.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul

"However 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". 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 ʼPhags-pa alphabet of the 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."

Might be true, might be not. Still interesting to see. And the Mongols themselves mostly stopped using their script to write in Cyrillic and Hanzi (?) now so.

We have another example of such great men creating a new script by himself after exposure to another script. Cherokee by Sequayah.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

There are three really great, logical and legible writing systems known to me.

First is, of course, tengwar, but no real spoken language uses it.

Second if hangul, which is great overall and has an easy structure [2], with just a few historic warts.

Third, there's Cree syllabary. Just look at the logic: [3].

[1]: https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Tengwar#Spelling_and_pronunciat... [2]: https://sites.google.com/site/hangulanationallanguage/photo-... [3]: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/plains-cree-syllabics-tr...

If constructed scripts are fair game, there are plenty of options - they just happen to be even more obscure than Tengwar. But, for example:

https://jackhumbert.github.io/zbalermorna/write-up/

By the king!

Reminds me of Peter the Great's influence on Russian Cyrillic. Among other contributions, he happened to like the shape of the Latin letter R, so he just bunged a backwards one into the alphabet where it represents the sound 'ya'.

Hangul is far less capricious, though, a marvel of careful design.

> Reminds me of Peter the Great's influence on Russian Cyrillic. Among other contributions, he happened to like the shape of the Latin letter R, so he just bunged a backwards one into the alphabet where it represents the sound 'ya'

Do you have a source on that? As a Bulgarian (where Cyrillic comes from) i had never heard anything of the like, and a short Google, in Bulgarian or Russian, found nothing.

IDK about Я, but Peter I definitely reshaped, along the European typesetting guidelines, some letters like lowercase a (which traditionally looked more like the Greek alpha, α), and most drastically the t (т) which for the best part of 17th century looked like Latin m. (This shape still remains in Cyrillic cursive.)

He didn't invent those shapes, though; just picked the preferred ones. In particular, the m/т distinction is still present across different Slavic scripts even in non-cursive form, because they standardized on different variants:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2_(%D0%BA%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%...

sometimes when I visit twitter, browser or whatever starts to think that Russian twits are actually Bulgarian, and this changes shape of some Cyrillic letters, making text looking somewhat funny to russian eye. T is one of them, IIRC.

Я evolved from the letter Ѧ, the pronunciation of which happened to match that of Ꙗ (that is, a digraph IA, representing the iotated A sound) in Eastern Slavic languages very early on. Its handwritten cursive version looked like this:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%AE%D1%81_%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%B...

From there the transformation into "Я" is obvious. And it happened gradually over time long before Peter; he just happened to look at various different shapes already in use during his time, picked the one that looked the simplest and the most appealing to him, and (sometimes) did further minor tweaks to simplify.

It has absolutely nothing to do with the shape of the letter "R".