[5] Though he enrolled in Dongnae General High School (동래고등보통학교) in the same year, he took a one-year leave of absence due to illness.
From 1943 to 1945, Hur worked as a clerk at a private training center in Changwon to avoid military conscription by the Imperial Japanese Army.
Most notably, Hur was a co-founder of the Department of Korean Language and Literature in Pusan National University, where he held a teaching position as an assistant professor from 1947 to 1954.
During his time as the president and chairman, Hur played a crucial role in the Korean language-only movement by opposing Sino-Korean education in elementary schools, confronted the mixing of Sino-Korean and English loanwords within certain Korean vocabularies, fought against the exclusion of Hangul Day from national holidays, and the Hanja Education Promotion Act.
[1] On January 26, 2004, Hur Woong passed away at the age of 87 at the Seoul National University Hospital, Bundang Branch.
[9] Though theoretical systems for linguistics were already well-known and practiced in Europe and the United States, Hur's work was the first to do so for the Korean language.
For us, it is desirable to build general linguistics on the solid foundation of the study of the Korean language.
"[5] Hur is credited to have been a key figure in the movement that resulted in the Korean language being recognized by linguists outside of Korea.
Ha ChiKeun, the chairman of the Korean Language Society from 2007 to 2019, states that Hur's efforts led Hangul to garner much more attention from linguists around the world.
Gimhae News states that "Hur not only devoted himself wholeheartedly to his research and his writings, but also to nurturing great successors.
"[6] Though largely praised for his contributions to the overall development of Korean linguistics as a field of study, Hur Woong was criticized posthumously for "having a long-term rule without raising any successors"[13] as he concurrently served as both the president and chairman of the Korean Language Association for more than three decades.
Song Hyun, the co-chairman of the Gathering of People Dedicated to Hangeul and the Korean Language Society (한글과 한글학회를 사랑하는 사람들의 모임), stated, "It's not just wrong that Hur Woong was in power for more than 30 years , but it's very wrong," adding, "If he had turned over his position to his successors after a decade, how much could his successors have grown?