Chinese is the official script of Corea, but the lower classes use a phonetic alphabet which, in the judgment of some authorities, is derived from a cursive form of the Nâgari script of India, having, so it is thought, been introduced by Buddhist teachers. Both past and present times afford striking examples of the influence of religion in the diffusion of alphabets, missionaries obviously making use of their own alphabet in the translation of their sacred books into the language of their converts. Whatever connection there may have been between Corean and Indian scripts is not, however, traceable, owing to the changes in the former. But in truth we know little about the matter, and there is something to be said in support of an old tradition that King Se-jo, who reigned five hundred years ago, commanded his chief grammarian, Song Sammun, to devise an alphabet that should supersede the cumbersome Chinese; whereupon that scholar took the Tibetan characters as foundation, but as those were only consonantal, he turned to the ancient Chinese and transformed six of its simplest radicals into the Corean vowels, naming the vowels and consonants "mother" and "child" respectively. The letters were "bunched together" so as to look like the Chinese characters (fig. 38), the purpose being "to facilitate the transliteration of the Chinese text in a parallel column." There is a curious tradition, reminding us of the Chinese legend of the origin of writing, that the Corean characters were suggested by the straight and oblique lattice-work of the native doors. [Illustration: Fig. 38.--Chinese and Tibetan Triglot] CHAPTER V CUNEIFORM WRITING Thus far curiosity alone gives the stimulus to acquaintance with ancient scripts--a feeling of aloofness attending all that we learn of Chinese, Maya, and other systems having no historical connection (for the derivation of Chinese from pre-Babylonian writing is not proved) with those from which our alphabet is probably derived. With the story of these the real interest begins, because within some of them lie the sources of the alphabets of the civilised world, while all of them have borne a share in the preservation of intellectual and spiritual treasures, the loss of which would have arrested the progress of the vigorous sections of mankind.