Hanja

In an earlier post I talked about the Korean alphabet, hangeul. So now it's time to talk about Chinese characters, and the role they play in Korean writing, and then we can take another look at some of the signage in the Korean subway.

But before we talk about writing, we have to talk a bit about the history of the Korean language, and that means getting a bit of background about language history in general.

1. Borrowed vocabulary

The set of words that exist in a language is always changing. Over time, some words fall out of use, become obsolete, and eventually disappear. New words enter the language. A language's lexicon (a technical term for vocabulary) is like a palimpsest, reflecting the historical changes that have taken place over preceding centuries and millennia.

Where do new words come from? Simply put, there are two basic sources: internal and external. New words can be created internally by repurposing what is already in the language -- the words, roots, prefixes, suffixes, etc. -- to create new words. In English, a new verb to impact was created from the previously existing noun impact. The new word internet was formed from the existing prefix inter- and the existing root word net. And so on.

New words can enter a language externally, too. Often when a society encounters a new animal, plant, food, artifact, or cultural concept, it will borrow an existing word for that thing from another language, and incorporate it into its vocabulary. The English words raccoon, sushi, khaki, coup d'état, and schadenfreude are all words that entered English from other languages (Algonquian, Japanese, Hindi, French, and German respectively).

But it's not always the case that borrowed words enter a language piecemeal like this, attached to individual objects or ideas. When the speakers of one language are in close contact with speakers of another language over an extended period of time, large numbers of words can be borrowed from one language to the other, forming what linguists call a layer of vocabulary. This is precisely what happened to English in the centuries following the Norman conquest, during which the ruling class of England was French-speaking. English ended up borrowing thousands of words from French. In many cases these were words for things for which words already existed in English. As a result, modern English has many pairs of words like the following:

get : acquire
watch : observe
land : nation*
brotherhood : fraternity

We might call the words on the left "native English"; they are descended from words that have been in English throughout its known history. The words on the right might be called "Franco-English"; they are anglicized words of French origin that entered the language following contact between English and French speakers. Usually, but not always, the Franco-English words seem fancier, more formal, more learned, or more prestigious than the native English equivalents.

2. Native Korean and Sino-Korean

You can probably tell where this is going.

The relationships between Korean and Chinese on the one hand, and between English and French on the other, are parallel in many respects. For most of its history, Chinese culture has had a tremendous influence on Korean society. Many fundamental Korean cultural elements (in religion, philosophy, government, literature, etc.) were borrowed from, or deeply influenced by, China. On top of that, before the invention of hangeul, it was nearly impossible to put the spoken Korean language into written form. Literate people in Korea wrote and read in the Chinese language, using Chinese characters.

As a result of all this, the Korean language borrowed thousands of Chinese words beginning over 1000 years ago. Many of these words were related to the many concepts and artifacts that came from China, but many were not. And just as Franco-English words were anglicized, by which I mean that they were given English-like pronunciations, these Chinese words were Koreanized, acquiring Korean-like pronunciations.

In modern Korean, the words that are of Chinese origin are called Sino-Korean words, and those whose history predates contact with the Chinese are called native Korean words. (That doesn't cover all of the vocabulary. For example, there are also words in modern Korean that are borrowed from English and Japanese.)

So, just as in English we have land and nation (the latter of French origin), in Korean we have nara 나라 and guk 국. Both mean "country", but the former is native Korean and the latter is Sino-Korean.†

3. Chinese characters

It will be helpful before we go on to set out a few basic facts about Chinese characters as they are used in writing the Chinese language.

a. Each Chinese character writes a single syllable of the spoken language, and each spoken syllable is represented in writing by a single Chinese character.**

b. All syllables in Chinese are meaningful.*** So we can say that Chinese characters write meaningful syllables. If two syllables are pronounced the same but have different meanings, they will be written with different characters. (This is a bit like the way we write some English words differently even though they have the same pronunciation, like two vs. too vs. to, or pear vs. pair vs. pare.****)

When Chinese words entered Korean and became Sino-Korean words, they all remained one syllable long.

4. Sino-Korean and Chinese characters

Even after hangeul became a standard alphabet for writing the Korean language, it was still common practice to write the Sino-Korean vocabulary with Chinese characters.

The Chinese word for country is written with the character 國. The Sino-Korean word that originates in this Chinese word, guk, could therefore also be written 國 (using the same Chinese character), as well as 국 (using the hangeul alphabet).

So we have to draw a distinction between a Chinese character writing a Chinese word in the Chinese language, and a Chinese character writing a Sino-Korean word (i.e. of Chinese origin) in the Korean language. Both look exactly the same: 國. But the pronunciation will be different. In modern Mandarin, the word written with 國 is pronounced guó. In modern Korean, it is pronounced guk.

A reasonable analogy is the written form nation. When writing French, this sequence of six letters writes a word pronounced something like nah-see-OHN. When writing a Franco-English word in modern English, the same sequence of letters is pronounced something like NAY-shun.

In isolation, it's impossible to say whether the Chinese character 國 is writing Chinese or Korean. In the same way, it's impossible to say whether nation is writing French or English. But in context, of course, it is clear what word in what language is being written, and thus what the pronunciation should be. Even out of context, without knowing the language or the pronunciation, the meaning is apparent to anyone who is literate in one of the two languages involved.

As I said, it used to be common practice to write all Sino-Korean words using Chinese characters instead of hangeul. Why? Well, it's complicated, but to simplify things, we can identify at least two reasons. One, many different Sino-Korean words have the same pronunciation. These homonyms look the same if written in hangeul, and ambiguity can result. But they look distinct if written using the appropriate Chinese characters. Second, it seemed more proper to write the words this way, reflecting the knowledge that literate intellectuals had of written Chinese, and continuing the tradition of Chinese writing that predated the invention of hangeul.

So let's go back to the example sentence I used in my previous post to illustrate hangeul:

한국 민속촌은 서울에서 30분 거리에 있으며 365일 언제든지 관람 하실 수 있습니다.

Some of the words are Sino-Korean. Here I've bolded them:

한국 민속촌은 서울에서 30분 거리에 있으며 365일 언제든지 관람 하실 수 있습니다.

The rest of the sentence is made up of Korean words and grammatical suffixes.

It's possible to write the sentence using Chinese characters to represent all the Sino-Korean words, like so:

韓國 民族村은 서울에서 30分 거리에 있으며 365日 언제든지 觀覽 하실 수 있습니다.

Regardless of how the sentence is written, it gets pronounced the same. (And note that whichever way it's written, you gentle reader -- even without any knowledge of Korean -- can identify exactly how many syllables are being written. Each Chinese character writes one syllable, and each hangeul block writes one syllable.)

By the way, our by-now familiar character 國 can be seen writing the second syllable of the first word in the sentence. You'll recall from the previous post that that word is Hanguk, "Korea". The sentence means "Korean Folk Village is 30 minutes from Seoul and can be visited any day of the year".

Now, you may well ask, why bother with these crazy characters at all? Why should Koreans learn thousands of complicated Chinese characters and write Sino-Korean words using them, when they've got a perfectly serviceable alphabet?

The first answer is that using Chinese characters can be very helpful in distinguishing homophonous Sino-Korean words. The Korean syllable il 일 could mean 'day', 'one', or 'thing'. The first two are Sino-Korean, the last is native Korean. Writing all three as 일 is potentially confusing. But writing them as 日, 一, and 일 respectively distinguishes them nicely.

But the second answer is that in most cases there really isn't a good reason to write these words in Chinese characters, and that's why Korean hardly ever do so anymore. Usually context is sufficient to differentiate the different words. So in modern Korean, Chinese characters are hardly ever used in everyday writing. It's only where context is insufficient (as in newspaper headlines or shop signs) or where the writer wants to convey a learned, old-fashioned, traditional, or sophisticated feeling, that Chinese characters are still seen. And because they are so rarely used now, most Koreans don't even know how to write many of them any more.

5. Subway signage

This post has already gotten too long, so I'll review the subway signage in a future post. Yes, I know, I promised at the top of this entry that I'd talk about it. But I've just realized that I need to take some better pictures to do it right. And besides, you might not have read all this stuff if you didn't think it was leading up to some pictures.

But here's a teaser:


See the two Chinese characters to the right of the English words "Way Out"? Are they writing Korean or Chinese? Or something else?


*You might think that "country" is the native English equivalent of "nation", but in fact "country" is of French origin as well.

†A note for the linguists among you: Strictly speaking, Sino-Korean elements are actually morphemes, not words. Many, like guk, are bound. But I'll use 'word' instead of 'morpheme' throughout the post.

**There are a very small number of exceptions to this rule. Probably fewer than half a dozen.

***Again, this is a generalization. There are dozens of exceptions.

****The two situations aren't really analogous when you look at the historical reasons for these different spellings in English. This analogy is for illustrative purposes only! Morever, English doesn't do this consistently. Many homophonous but distinct words are spelled exactly the same way, like trip and trip.