Hanja

Hanja
Korean name
Hangul	한자
Hanja	漢字
Revised Romanization	Hanja
McCune–Reischauer	Hancha

Hanja is the Korean name for Chinese characters. More specifically, it refers to those Korean spoken language written using Chinese characters with their assigned Korean phonetics. Hanja-mal or hanja-eo refers to words which can be written with hanja, and hanmun (한문, 漢文) refers to Classical Chinese writing, although "hanja" is sometimes used loosely to encompass these other concepts.

Although once of great importance to scholarship in Korea, today hanja are not used to write native Korean words, and even words of Chinese origin — hanja-eo (한자어, 漢字語) — are usually written with the native hangul script.

History

A major impetus for the introduction of Chinese characters into Korea was the spread of Buddhism. The major Chinese text that introduced hanja to Koreans, however, was not a religious text but the Chinese text, Cheonjamun (Thousand Character Classic).

Koreans had to learn Classical Chinese to be properly literate for the most part, but there were some systems developed to use simplified forms of Chinese characters that phonetically transcribe Korean, namely, hyangchal (향찰; 鄕札), gugyeol (구결; 口訣), and idu (이두; 吏讀).

One way of adapting hanja to write Korean in such systems (such as Gugyeol) was to represent native Korean grammatical particles and other words solely according to their pronunciation. For example, Gugyeol uses the characters 爲尼 to transcribe the Korean word "hăni", "hani" in modern Korean, that means "does, and so". However, in Chinese, the same characters are read as the expression "wéi ní," meaning "becoming a nun." This is a typical example of Gugyeol words where the radical (爲) is read in Korean for its meaning (hă — "to do") and the suffix 尼, ni (meaning 'nun'), used phonetically.

Hanja was the sole means of writing Korean until King Sejong the Great promoted the invention of hangul in the 15th century. However, even after the invention of hangul, most Korean scholars continued to write in hanmun.

It was not until the 20th century that hangul truly replaced hanja. Officially, hanja has not been used in North Korea since June 1949 (and additionally, all texts become horizontally written instead of vertically), because Kim Il-sung considered it an artifact of Japanese occupation and an impediment to literacy.

Additionally, many words borrowed from Chinese have been replaced in the North with native Korean words. However, there are still a large number of Chinese-borrowed words in widespread usage in the North (although written in hangul), and hanja characters still appear in special contexts. They also still appear in recent North Korean dictionaries [1].

Character formation

Each hanja is composed of one of 214 radicals plus in most cases one or more additional elements. The vast majority of hanja use the additional elements to indicate the sound of the character, but a few hanja are purely pictographic, and some were formed in other ways.

Eumhun (sound and meaning)

To aid in understanding the meaning of a character, or to describe it orally to distinguish it from other characters with the same pronunciation, character dictionaries and school textbooks refer to each character with a combination of its sound and a word indicating its meaning. This dual meaning-sound reading of a character is called eumhun (음훈; 音訓; from 音 "sound" + 訓 "meaning," "teaching").

For example, the character 愛 is referred to in character dictionaries as sarang ae (사랑 애), where sarang is the native Korean word for "love" (the character's meaning) and ae is its sound. Similarly, the character 人 is read as referred to as saram in (사람 인), where "saram" means "person" and "in" is its sound. When these two example characters are put together to form the word 愛人, they are simply read as aein (애인), and denote the idea of a beloved or sweetheart ("love" + "person").

The word or words used to denote the meaning are often—though hardly always—words of native Korean (i.e., non-Chinese) origin, and are sometimes archaic words no longer commonly used. For example, the character 山 is referred to as me san or moe san (메산, pronounced "meh sahn"; or 뫼산, pronounced "moeh sahn"), where me or moe is an archaic word for "mountain," almost entirely supplanted by the Chinese-derived word san.

Education

Hanja are still taught in separate courses in South Korean high schools, apart from the normal Korean language curriculum. Formal hanja education begins in grade 7 (junior high school) and continues until graduation from senior high school in grade 12. A total of 1,800 hanja are taught: 900 for junior high, and 900 for senior high (starting in grade 10). Post-secondary hanja education continues in some liberal arts universities. The 1972 promulgation of basic hanja for educational purposes was altered in December 31, 2000, to replace 44 hanja with 44 others. The choice of characters to eliminate and exclude caused heated debates prior to and after the 2000 promulgation.

Though North Korea rapidly abandoned the general use of hanja soon after independence, the number of hanja actually taught in primary and secondary schools is greater than the 1,800 taught in South Korea. Kim Il-sung had earlier called for a gradual elimination of the use of hanja, but by the 1960s, he had reversed his stance; he was quoted as saying in 1966, "While we should use as few Sinitic terms as possible, students must be exposed to the necessary Chinese characters and taught how to write them." As a result, a Chinese-character textbook was designed for North Korean schools for use in grades 5-9, teaching 1,500 characters, with another 500 for high school students. College students are exposed to another 1,000, bringing the total to 3,000.

In Korean language and Korean studies programs at universities around the world, a sample of hanja is typically a requirement for students. Becoming a graduate student in these fields usually requires students to learn at least the 1,800 basic hanja.

Current uses of hanja

Because many different hanja—and thus, many different words written using hanja—often share the same sounds, two distinct hanja words (hanjaeo) may be spelled identically in the phonetic hangul alphabet. Thus, hanja are often used to clarify meaning, either on their own without the equivalent hangul spelling, or in parentheses after the hangul spelling as a kind of gloss. Hanja are often also used as a form of shorthand in newspaper headlines, advertisements, and on signs. Some details of use follow.

Hanja in print media

In South Korea, hanja are used most frequently in academic literature, where they often appear without the equivalent hangul spelling. Usually, only those words with a specialized or ambiguous meaning are printed in hanja. In mass-circulation books and magazines, hanja are generally used rarely, and only to gloss words already spelled in hangul when the meaning is ambiguous. hanja are also often used in newspaper headlines as abbreviations or to eliminate the ambiguity typical of newspaper headlines in any language. In contrast, North Korea eliminated the use of hanja even in academic publications by 1949, a situation which has since remained unchanged. Hanja are often used for advertising or decorative purposes, and appear frequently in dictionaries and atlases; see below.

Hanja in dictionaries

In modern Korean dictionaries, all entry words of Sino-Korean origin are printed in hangul and listed in hangul order, with the hanja given in parentheses immediately following the entry word.

This practice helps to eliminate ambiguity, and it also serves as a sort of shorthand etymology, since the meaning of the hanja and the fact that the word is composed of hanja often help to illustrate the word's origin.

As an example of how hanja can help to clear up ambiguity, many homophones are written in hangul as 수도 (sudo), including:

1. 修道 — spiritual discipline
2. 受渡 — receipt and delivery
3. 囚徒 — prisoner
4. 水都 — 'city of water' (e.g. Hong Kong and Naples)
5. 水稻 — rice
6. 水道 — drain
7. 隧道 — tunnel
8. 首都 — capital (city)
9. 手刀 — hand-knife

Hanja dictionaries (Jajeon (자전, 字典) or Okpyeon (옥편, 玉篇)) are organized by radicals, like hanzi and kanji.

Hanja in personal names

Korean personal names have the hanja equivalent, although exceptions exist. On business cards, the use of hanja is slowly fading away. On business cards, most older people have their name in hanja with hangul, and most younger people have their name only in hangul. Some official documents still have people's names recorded in both hangul and in hanja. Generations after "generation x" no longer write names both hanja and hangul.

Hanja in place names

Due to standardization efforts during Goryeo and Joseon eras, native Korean placenames were converted to hanja, and most names used today are hanja-based. The most notable exception is the name of the capital, Seoul. Disyllabic names of railway lines, freeways, and provinces are often formed by taking one character from each of the two locales' names. For Seoul, the abbreviation is the hanja gyeong (京, "capital"). Thus,

• The Gyeongbu (京釜) corridor connects Seoul (gyeong) with Busan (bu);
• The Gyeongin (京仁) corridor connects Seoul with Incheon (in);
• The former Jeolla (全羅) Province took its name from the first characters in the city names Jeonju (全州) and Naju (羅州) ("Naju" is originally "Raju," but the initial "r/l" sound in South Korean is simplified to "n").

Most atlases of Korea today are published in two versions: one in hangul (sometimes with some English as well), and one in hanja. Subway and railway station signs give the station's name in hangul, hanja, and English, both to assist visitors and to disambiguate the name.

Hanja usage

See also: Korean mixed script

Opinion surveys show that the South Korean public do not consider hanja literacy essential, a situation attributed to the fact that hanja education in South Korea does not begin until the seventh year of schooling. Hanja terms are also expressed through hangul, the standard script in the Korean language. Some studies, however, suggest that hanja use appears to be in decline. In 1956, one study found mixed-script Korean text (in which Sino-Korean nouns are written using hanja, and other words using hangul) were read faster than texts written purely in hangul; however, by 1977, the situation had reversed. In 1988, 80% of one sample of people without a college education "evinced no reading comprehension of any but the simplest, most common hanja" when reading mixed-script passages.

Korean hanja

A small number of characters were invented by Koreans themselves. Most of them are for proper names (place-names and people's names) but some refer to Korean-specific concepts and materials. They include 畓 (논 답; non dap; "paddyfield"), 乭 (Dol, a character only used in given names), 㸴 (So, a rare surname from Seongju), and 怾 (Ki, an old name of the Kumgangsan).

Some hanja characters have simplified forms (yakja) that can be seen in casual use. An example is , which can be used instead of 無. Some of them are similar to Japanese Shinjitai (new character forms).

Pronunciation

Each hanja character is pronounced as a single syllable, corresponding to a single composite character in hangul. The pronunciation of hanja in Korean is not identical to the way they are pronounced in Chinese, particularly Mandarin, although some Chinese dialects and Korean share similar pronunciations. For example, 印刷 "print" is yìnshuā in Mandarin Chinese and inswae (인쇄) in Korean, but it is pronounced insue in Shanghainese (a Wu Chinese dialect). In some cases the pronunciation of hanja in Korean has simplified more than any variety of Chinese, such as in the complete loss of tone from Korean (in contrast, all Chinese dialects retain tone). In other aspects, the pronunciation of hanja is more conservative than most Chinese dialects, for example in the retention of labial consonant codas in characters with labial consonant onsets, such as the characters 法 (법 beop) and 凡 (범 beom); the labial codas existed in Middle Chinese but do not survive intact in most Chinese varieties today, including conservative southern varieties like Cantonese and Min.

Due to divergence in pronunciation since the time of borrowing, sometimes the pronunciation of a hanja and its corresponding hanzi may differ considerably. For example, 女 ("woman") is nǚ in Mandarin Chinese and nyeo (녀) in Korean. However, in most modern Korean dialects (especially South Korean ones), 女 is pronounced as yeo (여) when used in an initial position, due to a systematic displacement of initial n's followed by y or i.

Additionally, sometimes a hanja-derived word will have altered pronunciation of a character to reflect Korean pronunciation shifts, for example mogwa 모과 木果 "quince" from mokgwa 목과.

Hanja analogs

There are historical similarities in the development of the hanja and kanji, which is the analog used in Japan, and there are also similarities in application between hanja and kanji. The archaic Japanese man'yōgana system of reading is similar to gugyeol. The Japanese on and kun readings of kanji, whereby a character may be read according to its Chinese-derived sound (on) or its native Japanese meaning (kun), is similar in concept to eumhun.

References

Sources

• Brown, R.A. (1990). "Korean Sociolinguistic Attitudes in Japanese Comparative Perspective". Journal of Asia Pacific Communication. 1: 117–134.
• DeFrancis, John (1990). The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1068-6.
• Hannas, William. C. (1997). Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1892-X (paperback); ISBN 0-8248-1842-3 (hardcover).
• Hannas, William. C. (2003). The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0-8122-3711-0.
• Taylor, Insup (1983). The psychology of reading. New York: Academic Press. ISBN 0-1268-4080-6. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

See also

• List of Korea-related topics
• Sino-Korean vocabulary
• Chinese character
• Korean mixed script

External links

• Hanja Hangul Convert Project
• Hanja (Chinese characters)