the war diaries

[velvet inkbrush of YiSoonShin]

i find it interesting that the admiral chose to write his diary using the official Chinese lettering as opposed to the more easily read hangul (which had been established for over a century already). I can understand why his memorials to court would have been written in Chinese as these were official documents and the king and other scholars would read them. But as far as I can tell, from reading his diary, the informal nature of the entries lead me to believe that he wrote them largely for himself. So in that case why not use the hangul?

Lady Haegyon, wife of the unfortunate prince Sado, wrote her memoirs about her troubled and turbulent life in hangul (this was in the 19th century I think) and this resulted in the enormous popularity of the work.

if anyone has any ideas, please do share.

[skinz]

Maybe since he was a high military official, he mostly wrote in chinese. There's a lot of countries that have the "street" language,in this case hangul, and the official language that the higher ups use. One of my friends told me that in the country of Haiti, all of the country speak creole, but government officials speak only french. How they understand each other is beyond me

[TifosoDiCorea]

I suppose the Admiral was more comfortable using Chinese characters since he was constantly having to read and write court correspondence. Or maybe he intends to translate it into Hangul later on...but of course, he did not survive to confirm this.