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Hanja
Hanzi (traditional).svg
Korean name
Hangul한자
Hanja漢字
Revised RomanizationHanja
McCune-ReischauerHancha
Korean writing systems
Hangul
Hanja
Mixed script
Korean romanization
Chinese characters
Precursors
Traditional Chinese
Variant characters
Simplified Chinese
Simplified Chinese (2nd-round)
Traditional/Simplified (debate)
Kanji
Hanja
Hán tự
East Asian calligraphy
Input methods

Hanja is the Korean name for Chinese characters. The Revised Romanization of Korean is the official Korean language Romanization system in South Korea. McCune-Reischauer romanization is one of the two most widely used Korean language Romanization systems along with the Revised Romanization of Korean, which This article is mainly about the spoken Korean language See Hangul for details on the native Korean writing system Hyangchal (literally vernacular letters or local letters) is an archaic writing system of Korea and was used to transcribe the Korean language Gugyeol is a system for rendering texts written in Classical Chinese into understandable Korean. Idu is an archaic Writing system which represents the Korean language using Hanja. Korean mixed script is a form of writing that uses both Hangul (an alphabetical script and Hanja (Chinese characters Korean romanization is a system for representing the Korean language using the Roman alphabet The Revised Romanization of Korean is the official Korean language Romanization system in South Korea. McCune-Reischauer romanization is one of the two most widely used Korean language Romanization systems along with the Revised Romanization of Korean, which The Yale romanizations are four systems created during World War II for use by United States military personnel. A Chinese character, also known as a Han character ( is a Logogram used in writing Chinese (hanzi Japanese ( Neolithic signs At a range of Neolithic sites in China, small numbers of symbols of either pictorial or simple geometric nature have been unearthed which were Variant Chinese characters ( are Chinese characters that can be used interchangeably The second round of Chinese character simplification was an aborted orthography reform officially promulgated on 20 December 1977 by the People's The debate on Traditional Chinese characters and Simplified Chinese characters (繁簡之爭 more recently 正簡之爭 a are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system along with Hiragana (ひらがな 平仮名 Katakana is an ancient Writing system which employs Chinese characters to represent the Japanese language. Idu is an archaic Writing system which represents the Korean language using Hanja. Hán tự ( {{IPA|/han˦˥ tɯ˨/}}; 漢[[wikt 字|字]] meaning " Chinese character " or chữ Nho ( {{IPA|/tɕɯ˧˨˧ ɲɔ/}} Chữ Nôm ( IPA: /cɨ3ˀ5 nom33/ chữ Nôm in Unicode: 字[[wikt 喃|喃]]/ 𡨸 喃/ 𡦂 喃 chữ Nôm in Unicode The art of Calligraphy is widely practiced and revered in the East Asian Civilizations that use or used Chinese characters. Oracle bone script ( refers to incised (or rarely brush-written ancient Chinese characters found on Oracle bones which are animal bones or turtle shells used in Chinese Bronze inscriptions are writing in a variety of Chinese scripts on Chinese bronze artifacts such as zhōng bells and dǐng tripodal cauldrons Seal script ( Chinese: Simplified 篆书 篆書 Pinyin: zhuànshū is an ancient style of Chinese calligraphy. The clerical script ( pinyin lìshū; Japanese 隷書体 Reishotai; formerly also chancery script is an archaic style of Chinese calligraphy which The regular script or standard script, or in Chinese kaishu ( and Japanese kaisho, also commonly known as standard regular Semi-cursive script is a partially cursive style of Chinese calligraphy. Cursive script ( simplified草书 erroneously translated as Grass script is a style of Chinese calligraphy. Since the Chinese language uses a logographic script — that is a script where one or more " characters " corresponds roughly to one "word" or This article is mainly about the spoken Korean language See Hangul for details on the native Korean writing system A Chinese character, also known as a Han character ( is a Logogram used in writing Chinese (hanzi Japanese ( More specifically, it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean phonetics. This article is mainly about the spoken Korean language See Hangul for details on the native Korean writing system Phonetics (from the Greek φωνή ( phonê) "sound" or "voice" is the study of the physical sounds of human speech 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. Sino-Korean or hanja-eo refers to the set of words in the Korean language vocabulary that originated from or were influenced by the Chinese language. Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of Written Chinese based on the Grammar and Vocabulary of ancient Chinese Because hanja never underwent major reform, they are almost entirely identical to traditional Chinese and kyūjitai characters. Kyūjitai (in Shinjitai: ja 旧字体 in Kyūjitai 舊字體 meaning "old character form" is the traditional form of the Japanese Kanji used before Only a small number of hanja characters are modified or unique to Korean.

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 alphabet.

Contents

History

A major impetus for the introduction of Chinese characters into Korea was the spread of Buddhism. A Chinese character, also known as a Han character ( is a Logogram used in writing Chinese (hanzi Japanese ( Korea is a geographic area composed of two sovereign countries a civilization and a former state situated on the Korean Peninsula in East Asia. Korean Buddhism is distinguished from other forms of Buddhism by its attempt to resolve what it sees as inconsistencies in Mahayana Buddhism The major Chinese text that introduced hanja to Koreans, however, was not a religious text but the Chinese text, Cheonjamun (Thousand Character Classic). The Thousand Character Classic (千字文 is a Chinese Poem used as a primer for teaching Chinese characters to children

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). Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of Written Chinese based on the Grammar and Vocabulary of ancient Chinese Phonetics (from the Greek φωνή ( phonê) "sound" or "voice" is the study of the physical sounds of human speech Hyangchal (literally vernacular letters or local letters) is an archaic writing system of Korea and was used to transcribe the Korean language Gugyeol is a system for rendering texts written in Classical Chinese into understandable Korean. Idu is an archaic Writing system which represents the Korean language using Hanja.

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. In Linguistics, the term particle is a word lacking a strict definition but has the function of changing the relation of the parts of the sentence to one another and is therefore For example, Gugyeol uses the characters 爲尼 to transcribe the Korean word "hăni", 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. North Korea is the commonly used short form name for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (or DPRK) a State located in East Asia, Kim Il-sung ( 15 April 1912 – 8 July 1994) was the leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea from its founding in early Korea under Japanese rule refers to the period between 1910 and 1945 when Korea was forcibly annexed by the Japanese Empire.

Additionally, many words borrowed from Chinese have been replaced in the North with native Korean words. However, there are 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, such as 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. This disambiguation page differentiates the various historical uses of the term radical in the context of Chinese characters 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. Education in South Korea is seen as the most important key to success and competition is consequently very heated and fierce 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). [1] Post-secondary hanja education continues in some liberal arts universities. The term liberal arts refers to a particular type of educational Curriculum broadly defined as a Classical education. A university is an institution of Higher education and Research, which grants Academic degrees in a variety of subjects [2] The 1972 promulgation of basic hanja for educational purposes was altered in December 31, 2000, to replace 44 hanja with 44 others. Events 406 – Vandals, Alans and Suebians cross the Rhine, beginning an invasion of Gallia. 2000 ( MM) was a Leap year that started on Saturday of the Common Era, in accordance with the Gregorian calendar. 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,[3] the number of hanja actually taught in primary and secondary schools is greater than the 1,800 taught in South Korea. [4] Kim Il-sung had earlier called for a gradual elimination of the use of hanja,[5] 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. Kim Il-sung ( 15 April 1912 – 8 July 1994) was the leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea from its founding in early "[6] 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. [7] College students are exposed to another 1,000, bringing the total to 3,000. [8]

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. See also Postgraduate Training in Education Postgraduate education (synonymous in North America with graduate education, and sometimes described

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. [9] In contrast, North Korea eliminated the use of hanja even in academic publications by 1949, a situation which has since remained unchanged. [10] 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. Hong Kong ( officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, is a territory located on China 's south coast on the Pearl River Delta, and borders Naples ( Napoli, Neapolitan: Nàpule) is a historic City in southern Italy, the Capital of the Rice is a Cereal foodstuff which forms an important part of the diet of many people worldwide and as such it is a staple food for many A tunnel is an underground passageway The definition of what constitutes a tunnel is not universally agreed upon This disambiguation page differentiates the various historical uses of the term radical in the context of Chinese characters

Hanja in personal names

Korean personal names generally use hanja, although exceptions exist. A Korean name consists of a Family name followed by a Given name, as used by the Korean people in both North Korea and South Korea On business cards, the use of hanja is slowly fading away. On business cards, most older people have their name in hanja, but not hangul, and most younger people have their name in hangul, but not hanja. Korean personal names usually consist of a one-character family name (seong, 성, 姓) followed by a two-character given name (ireum, 이름). There are a few 2-character family names (eg 南宮, Namgung), and the holders of such names — but not only them — tend to have one-syllable given names. Traditionally, the given name in turn consists of one character unique to the individual and one character shared by all people in a family of the same sex and generation (see Generation name). Generation name, variously zibei or banci, is one of the characters in a traditional Chinese name, and is so called because each member of a generation Things have changed, however, and while these rules are still largely followed, some people have given names that are native Korean words (popular ones include "Haneul" — meaning "heaven" or "sky" — and "Iseul" — meaning "dew"). Nevertheless, on official documents, people's names are still recorded in both hangul and in hanja (if the name is composed of hanja).

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 Goryeo Dynasty ( 918 - 1392) (also spelled Koryŏ was a Sovereign state established in 918 by Taejo Wang Kon. Toponymy refers to the scientific study of place-names ( toponyms) their origins meanings use and Typology. The most notable exception is the name of the capital, Seoul. Seoul ( soʊl is the Capital and largest City of South Korea. 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,

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. Korean mixed script is a form of writing that uses both Hangul (an alphabetical script and Hanja (Chinese characters [11] 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. Sino-Korean or hanja-eo refers to the set of words in the Korean language vocabulary that originated from or were influenced by the Chinese language. [12] 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. [13]

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 (Gi, an old name of the Kumgangsan). Seongju County ( Seongju-gun) is a county in North Gyeongsang Province South Korea.

Some hanja characters have simplified forms (yakja 略字) that can be seen in casual use. An example is , which is a cursive form of 無. Some of them are similar to Japanese shinjitai (new character forms). Shinjitai (in Shinjitai ja [[wikt新字体 新字体]] in Kyūjitai: ja [[wikt新字體 新字體]] meaning "new character form" are the forms of

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). Shanghainese (上海閒話 in Shanghainese sometimes referred to as the Shanghai dialect, is a dialect of Wu Chinese spoken in the city of Shanghai 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). Tone is the use of pitch in Language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is to distinguish or inflect words 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. Labials are consonants articulated either with both lips ( bilabial articulation or with the lower lip and the upper teeth ( labiodental articulation In Phonology, a syllable coda comprises the Consonant sounds of a Syllable that follow the nucleus, which is usually a Vowel Labials are consonants articulated either with both lips ( bilabial articulation or with the lower lip and the upper teeth ( labiodental articulation In Phonetics and Phonology, a syllable onset is the part of a Syllable that precedes the Syllable nucleus. Middle Chinese ( or Ancient Chinese as used by linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern

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. South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea and often referred to as Korea ( Korean: 대한민국 tɛː

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. is an ancient Writing system which employs Chinese characters to represent the Japanese language. 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. is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system along with Hiragana (ひらがな 平仮名 Katakana are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system along with Hiragana (ひらがな 平仮名 Katakana are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system along with Hiragana (ひらがな 平仮名 Katakana

See also

References

Notes

  1. ^ Hannas (1997). This is a list of articles on Korea -related people places things and concepts Sino-Korean or hanja-eo refers to the set of words in the Korean language vocabulary that originated from or were influenced by the Chinese language. A Chinese character, also known as a Han character ( is a Logogram used in writing Chinese (hanzi Japanese ( Korean mixed script is a form of writing that uses both Hangul (an alphabetical script and Hanja (Chinese characters are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system along with Hiragana (ひらがな 平仮名 Katakana {{{title}}}, p. 71.  “A balance was struck in August 1976, when the Ministry of Education agreed to keep Chinese characters out of the elementary schools and teach the 1,800 characters in special courses, not as part of Korean language or any other substantitive curricula. This is where things stand at present” 
  2. ^ Hannas 1997: 68-69
  3. ^ Hannas (1997). {{{title}}}, p. 67.  “By the end of 1946 and the beginning of 1947, the major newspaper Nodong sinmun, mass circulation magazine Kulloja, and similar publications began appearing in all-hangul. School textbooks and literary materials converted to all-hangul at the same time or possibly earlier (So 1989:31)” 
  4. ^ Hannas (1997). {{{title}}}, p. 68.  “Although North Korea has removed Chinese characters from its written materials, it has, paradoxically, ended up with an educationa program that teachers more characters than either South Korea or Japan, as Table 2 shows. ” 
  5. ^ Hannas (1997). {{{title}}}, p. 67.  “According to Ko Yong-kun, Kim went on record as early as February 1949, when Chinese characters had already been removed from most DPRK publications, as advocating their gradual abandonment (1989:25)” 
  6. ^ Hannas (1997). {{{title}}}, p. 67.  
  7. ^ Hannas (1997). {{{title}}}, p. 67.  “Between 1968 and 1969, a four-volume textbook appeared for use in grades 5 through 9 designed to teach 1,500 characters, confirming the applicability of the new policy to the general student population. Another five hundred were added for grades 10 through 12 (Yi Yun-p'yo 1989: 372)” 
  8. ^ Hannas 2003: 188-189
  9. ^ Brown 1990: 120
  10. ^ Hannas 1997: 67
  11. ^ Brown 1990: 119-121
  12. ^ Taylor and Taylor 1983: 90
  13. ^ Brown 1990: 119

Sources

External links

Dictionary

hanja

-noun

  1. The Han character script used to write Korean, particularly in classical literature. Compare hangeul, the Korean phonetic script.
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