최만리의 훈민정음 반포 반대 논리에 세종도 반박이 쉽지 않았던 이유

AI Translated Image

He basically used his concerns as a Neo-Confucian scholar as his main argument.

Summary of Choi Man-ri’s petition: 1. Hangul is easy to learn. I'll give you that. 2. Once Hangul spreads and everyone uses it, people will start doing everything in Hangul. 3. If that happens, Hanja (Chinese characters), which is inconvenient, won't be able to compete and will die out. 4. If Hanja dies out, people won't be able to understand the original Confucian texts. They'll either give up or won't be able to study properly without knowing the source material. Conclusion: This is way too dangerous for a Neo-Confucian state.\n\nHe accurately predicted what would happen to Hanja in the future. And now that even Neo-Confucianism is gone, even the minimum requirement for Hanja is basically toast.

In fact, by the mid-to-late Joseon period, there were tons of cases of people roasting 'lazy scholars' for only knowing Eonmun (Hangul) and not Hanja, saying they can mumble the words but can't interpret the scriptures for shit.

Honestly, in academia, translations can have mistranslations and the translator's bias is inevitable. So the standard is to only use translations as a reference and study the original text whenever possible.

Sejong was struggling to find a good comeback to this logic, but then...