I saw the sign for this museum on one of my walks. National Museum of World Writing Systems? That’s pretty much catnip for someone who’s spent most of his career thinking about the names of things. So I went for a visit on my final morning in Korea. What a cool building! The picture above is of a postcard I bought showing the whole thing from a drone’s-eye view.

The first thing you see as you descend into the exhibit hall is this massive assemblage of speakers, entitled “The Tower of Babel”. This was confirmation that I belonged there, as I and most other people in my field have included Tower of Babel references in our slide decks since, well, forever. As you walk inside, an audio track of noises plays… some animal and bird sounds, some mechanical clicks and hisses, and some almost recognizable as words. It’s not a soul-destroying barrage of incomprehensibility, but still soft reminder of the inbuilt desire to make sense of what we hear. Way cool.

The temporary exhibit was dedicated to the life and work of Gustave Doré. I couldn’t have dredged his name out of my memory, but a lot of his illustrations were familiar to me. Puss in Boots, The Ancient Mariner, Dante’s Inferno, and so on. I don’t specifically remember reading these illustrated books… but somehow they seeped into my consciousness. The exhibit argued for the huge impact Doré had on the whole idea of illustration in books, and that certainly seems true.

The permanent exhibition was dedicated , as you’d expect, to how we write things down. From cuneiform and hieroglyphics to kanji to various alphabets, it tried to tell the whole story. Very interesting. I especially liked learning how the Korean Hangul alphabet was invented because the king decided Chinese pictographs were just too hard to learn. Makes sense to me!

I exited through the gift shop, of course.