# How Hangul Supplanted Chinese Characters



## samanthalee

cheshire said:


> Is it true that over half of Korean vocabulary is recognizable as Chinese?
> 
> http://forum.wordreference.com/showpost.php?p=2561027&postcount=5


The answer is both a yes and a no.

The situation with Korean is the same as with Japanese. Ancient Korean texts are written totally in Chinese characters. In the effort to improve literacy rate, Korean phonetic characters were created (same concept as Japanese Hiragana). A few years back, there were efforts to replace all Chinese characters in Korean with their Korean phonetic equivalence.

I'm not really sure about the current situation, but it seems that the Koreans have realised that Korean texts are rendered virtually unreadable without bits of Chinese characters sprinkled about (As with the Japanese situation where they are stuck with 3 different writing systems, Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji). So they have re-think their decision to wipe out Chinese characters from their writing.



Moderator Note:

This thread has been branched from here since the original question has developed/veered into another topic.

The following points are explored to promote a better understanding of Chinese characters being supplanted by hangul in Korean:
To what extent replacing Chinese characters with hangul has been successful; what implications it has to the language; what were the reasons of this success, if any, compared to similar attempts in different languages.


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## cheshire

> I'm not really sure about the current situation, but *it seems that the Koreans have realised that Korean texts are rendered virtually unreadable without bits of Chinese characters sprinkled about* (As with the Japanese situation where they are stuck with 3 different writing systems, Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji). So they have re-think their decision to wipe out Chinese characters from their writing.


Could you give me some examples?


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## I_like_my_TV

samanthalee said:
			
		

> I'm not really sure about the current situation, but it seems that the Koreans have realised that Korean texts are rendered virtually unreadable without bits of Chinese characters sprinkled about


This is not true, past or present. Otherwise, Korean just couldn't so easily dispose of Chinese characters. This situation is very similar to Vietnamese disposing of Chinese characters.

However, there have been many times both Chinese and Japanese wanted to do the same but they couldn't, due primarily to the smaller number of sounds (= less differentiating features) in these two languages.


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## vince

I_like_my_TV said:


> However, there have been many times both Chinese and Japanese wanted to do the same but they couldn't, due primarily to the smaller number of sounds (= less differentiating features) in these two languages.



What do you make of this:

http://zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org

The fact is, any language that can be spoken and understood without ambiguity can also be written phonetically without ambiguity. Is Korean literature less eloquent now that they use Hangul instead of Hanja? No, it just looks different on paper.

Your oversimplification of Chinese into a single "language" glosses over the diversity of tones ( 8 ) and syllables in Min Nan.


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## I_like_my_TV

vince said:
			
		

> The fact is, any language that can be spoken and understood without ambiguity can also be written phonetically without ambiguity.


If you want to believe so, it's fine.



			
				vince said:
			
		

> Your oversimplification of Chinese into a single "language" glosses over the diversity of tones ( 8 ) and syllables in Min Nan.


Unless the context indicates otherwise, "Chinese" is usually meant the official language of China: Mandarin.


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## samanthalee

vince said:


> The fact is, any language that can be spoken and understood without ambiguity can also be written phonetically without ambiguity.





I_like_my_TV said:


> If you want to believe so, it's fine.


 
Vince is right about the "ambiguity" issue. The problem with doing away with Hanja is that it slows down the speed of reading, not because of "ambiguity".

We read based on recognising the shape of the words, not on the "sound" of the words. That's why both Hiragana and Hangul being phonetic-based characters have to be complemented with Chinese Characters


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## Flaminius

vince said:


> The fact is, any language that can be spoken and understood without ambiguity can also be written phonetically without ambiguity.


Oral communication can be impeded with ambiguity arising from  homophones.  I wonder if Sino-Korean words have phonological differences in the original Chinese words well enough to avoid too many homophones.  For a comparison, Japanese pronunciation kōshō has more than 20 homophones.  If Chinese phonological differences are mapped sufficiently different in Korean, Chinese characters should become redundant.


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## vince

It only poses a problem if you are considering words in isolation. Obviously, asking, "what does (insert Sino-Korean word) mean?" without context is a much more ambiguous question than asking "what does (insert English word) mean"?

The question is, do Korean people have to stop and think everytime they see a Sino-Korean word in Hangul? ("Hmm, 'jae' means many things, what does it mean here?") If not, then why can't Kanji be eliminated from Japanese?


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## I_like_my_TV

Homophones (and ambiguity) are a fact of life in ALL languages but what makes Japanese & Chinese highly dependent on Chinese characters is the large number of homophones in them (Flaminius has already touched on the case of Japanese. I'd like to add that it's possible to write sentences in Chinese using just the sound "shi"!).  



			
				Flaminius said:
			
		

> If Chinese phonological differences are mapped sufficiently different in Korean, Chinese characters should become redundant.


Korean has a number of final consonants and this helps to reduce homophones (There're also other factors).  For the same reason, it's conceivable that modern Cantonese can function without Chinese characters but not modern Mandarin.

PS: Beware that a false sense of patriotism unfortunately sometimes stops some people from distinguishing between facts and fictions! (Just a general warning and I hope the warning doesn't apply in this thread  )


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## Kwunlam

vince said:


> The fact is, any language that can be spoken and understood without ambiguity can also be written phonetically without ambiguity. Is Korean literature less eloquent now that they use Hangul instead of Hanja? No, it just looks different on paper.


 
I do agree that Chinese people can converse well with each other in spoken language.  But, in my opinion, the presupposition is that they must *first* mastered the Chinese characters.  

I do not know the case for the Korean language, the Vietnamese language and the Japanese language.  But what I want to say is that the Chinese characters help to further differentiate different meanings and senses which is *not* achievable merely through sounds.


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## Outsider

For those who are familiar with the two languages, would you say that there are more homophones in Japanese than Korean? If so, that could explain why Japanese holds on to Kanji, while the Vietnamese and the North Koreans have been able to do without Chinese characters altogether...


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## samanthalee

Outsider said:


> For those who are familiar with the two languages, would you say that there are more homophones in Japanese than Korean? If so, that could explain why Japanese holds on to Kanji, while the Vietnamese and the North Koreans have been able to do without Chinese characters altogether...


 
I know more about Japanese than Korean. But I shall attempt to answer.
Japanese Hiragana characters are like alphabets, there are 45 of them. Words are formed by placing the hiragana "alphabets" according to how the words are pronounced. Alphabet-based languages (English, German, Russian etc) works without Chinese characters because they have something on their keyboards called "the spacebar". Imagine writing like this:
aquickbrownfoxjumpoverthelazydog.Canyoureadthis?

That's how hiragana is written. As we read, we have to mentally decide how to group the hiragana characters together to form coherent words. Of course there are helping clues, such as the "n" character "ん" can only be the last character in a word, and the particle "o" character "を" is always a particle.

Korean Hangul characters on the other hand works more like Chinese characters. Although also phonetic-based, their "alphabets" are actually radicals that are used to build each characters... They will not run into the "how to group the characters together to form words" problem.

They only have homophone problem. For example, the words for "Hanja" and "Hangul" both contains the same Hangul "Han" character built with the "ha" and "n" radicals. In Hanja, however, one "Han" refers to Korea "韓", the other "Han" refers to China's Han Dynasty "漢"(also the largest Chinese ethnic group: the Han people)

Which is probably why "Korean characters" are called Hangul, meaning "the written language of Han". Logically speaking, the characters should be referred to as "words", not "written langauge". But they can't call them "words" because this will be confused with the "Chinese characters" which are called Hanja, meaning "the words of Han"


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## indigoduck

samanthalee said:


> The answer is both a yes and a no.
> 
> The situation with Korean is the same as with Japanese. Ancient Korean texts are written totally in Chinese characters. In the effort to improve literacy rate, Korean phonetic characters were created (same concept as Japanese Hiragana). A few years back, there were efforts to replace all Chinese characters in Korean with their Korean phonetic equivalence.
> 
> I'm not really sure about the current situation, but it seems that the Koreans have realised that Korean texts are rendered virtually unreadable without bits of Chinese characters sprinkled about (As with the Japanese situation where they are stuck with 3 different writing systems, Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji). So they have re-think their decision to wipe out Chinese characters from their writing.
> 
> 
> 
> Moderator Note:
> 
> This thread has been branched from here since the original question has developed/veered into another topic.
> 
> The following points are explored to promote a better understanding of Chinese characters being supplanted by hangul in Korean:
> To what extent replacing Chinese characters with hangul has been successful; what implications it has to the language; what were the reasons of this success, if any, compared to similar attempts in different languages.


 
Sorry, this is a very old thread.

Well, Hangul and the limited uses of Hanja would be good for everyday use, but for the purposes of Chinese Medicine and the names of the tons of medicines, you don't want to get those wrong or confused with something else, would you ?

For Korean, I think Hanja will always be indispensable in Chinese medicine and specialized fields of study just like the way in English how we can't just get rid of Latin names for science and medicine.


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