When was Hangul invented?
Origin of Hangul
Various fanciful speculations about the creation of Hangul were put to rest by the discovery in 1940 of the 1446 Hunmin jeong-eum haerye "Explanation of the Hunmin Jeong-eum with Examples". This document explains the design of the consonant letters according to articulatory phonetics and the vowel letters according to Confucian principles such as the yin and yang of vowel harmony (see below).