No other scholars have discussed the superioty of Hangeul more than Korean scholars, and after ?Hunmin-Jeongeum?(?Haerye-bon?: A version of Explanations and Illustrations of Hunmin-Jeongeum) was found, Korean scholars have insisted on its superiority at the top of their voices. However, their arguments were in fact more sentimental praise rather than scientific verification, and due to the stereotyped explanation they were not convincing. Thus, although from a Korean point of view it is quite natural to insist on the superiority of Hangeul,it must also be said that Korean scholars themselves are partly responsble for the fact that the merits of Hangeul were not recognized in the international community of linguistic scholars for a long time.

It was not until the beginning of the 1960's that the originality and superiority of Hangeul became recognized in international scholastic circles, especially in the European and American world. At first a collaborative book (1960) by E. O. Reischauer and J. K. Fairbank greatly contributed to this trend. In Chapter 10 Reischauer, in discussing the Korean culture in the 15th century, remarked: “Hangeul is perhaps the most scientific system of writing in general use in any country (p.435).”

Four years later Professor Frits Vos of Leiden University in the Netherlands read three papers on the history of Korean letters (including Hyang-ga, Idu, and Hangeul) and the history of the Korean language. These papers were collected in memoirs (Papers of the CIC Far Eastern Language Institute: edited by Yamagiwa, 1964) gathering papers on the subject of languages and letters of China, Japan, and Korea.They were released at a summer seminar in 1963 by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation(CIC), whose members were eleven universities in Central America. In the paper ‘Korean Writing: Idu and Hangeul’ Vos observed, “They invented the world's best alphabet!”(page 31) This was a very audacious remark considering the atmosphere of the European and American academic circle. The introduction of an exclamation mark and the absence of the word ‘perhaps’ attracts our attention.

This remark might have been buried without any repercussion, as the above mentioned memoirs were known to an extremely restricted number of linguists interested in Oriental languages and writing. Unexpectedly, however, it evoked a small gust of wind. Professor J. D. McCawley wholly agreed with Vos in reviewing the memoirs in a periodical of the American Linguistic Association, Language (volume 42-1, 1966) read by all the linguists in the world, including American linguists. There he argued: Vos's use of the superlative has much justification, since the Hangeul anticipates by over 400 years the idea of Alexander Melville Bell's ‘Visible Speech’. He thought highly that Hangeul was a prominent alphabet creatively invented, being based upon articulatory and acoustic analysis on a considerably high level, though Hangeul was not so thorough as Bell's visible speech in visualizing phonetic distinctions of each phone.3)

Finally, he took notice that Hangeul Day had been appointed as a national holiday. He himself took it a rule to spend Hangeul Day as his personal holiday. The author is anxious to know how he is doing in these days when Hangeul Day is no longer a national holiday.