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Organik
Diglot
Groupie
United States
Joined 5994 days ago
52 posts - 52 votes 
Speaks: English*, Japanese
Studies: Korean, Mandarin
| Message 33 of 116 04 September 2008 at 11:29pm | IP Logged |
ZanyHermit wrote:
| If you look closely you'll see that the Japanese Kan has 艸 for the top-right instead of the traditional 廿. Just one stroke difference but still simplification. |
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Actually, I do not know Chinese writing (only much kanji, and some hanja) so I would not have caught that. However, I am aware that simplified Chinese has a like character which is simplified to a greater extent.
To me, this simply underscores the fact that kanji is itself a system which is in many ways unique from Chinese writing (and therefore, I feel that the two systems should only be compared with a grain of salt).
Edited by Organik on 04 September 2008 at 11:32pm
1 person has voted this message useful
| Organik
Diglot
Groupie
United States
Joined 5994 days ago
52 posts - 52 votes
Speaks: English*, Japanese
Studies: Korean, Mandarin
| Message 34 of 116 04 September 2008 at 11:31pm | IP Logged |
orion wrote:
LuckyNomad wrote:
Why did they abandon Hanja? Because 99% of the people were farmers who couldn't sit around all day trying to master thousands of chinese characters. Most people still don't have that kind of time so I don't think anyone wants to go back to doing so when they've got a perfectly good writing system available.
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This is the best answer yet! Most Korean university students I have met in the US couldn't care less about Hanja. They learn them in school then quickly abandon them.
I often wonder if the Japanese will someday abandon kanji, in favor of pure kana. |
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Actually, it is in no way 'the best answer yet' because it consists merely of vast oversimplifications/exaggerations (99% farmers? common). Nonetheless, there are some somewhat relevant points present in the post.
Edited by Organik on 04 September 2008 at 11:33pm
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| orion
Senior Member
United States
Joined 7021 days ago
622 posts - 678 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: German, Russian
| Message 35 of 116 05 September 2008 at 12:45am | IP Logged |
Really? The Japanese orthography is an utter nightmare due to trying to make their completely unrelated language fit into the alien Chinese writing system. The Koreans were suffering the same fate until King Sejong and his advisers devised a better system. The hanzi are perfectly suited to Chinese languages, but trying to adapt them to other East Asian languages has been a 2000 year-old disaster. I applaud the Koreans (and Vietnamese) for cutting loose this unnecessary burden.
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| LuckyNomad
Groupie
Korea, South
Joined 6347 days ago
79 posts - 89 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Korean
| Message 36 of 116 05 September 2008 at 2:01am | IP Logged |
Okay, instead of saying 99% of the people were farmers, I should have said, 30-40% were slaves(obviously not studing Hanja), and 40-50% were farmers(also don't have the time to study Hanja). Of course there were soldiers, merchants, fisherman, and other jobs, but basically it was the male nobility and scholars who could sit around and master Hanja. So the point I was making is that it was too time consuming and complex to learn for most people.
1 person has voted this message useful
| Organik
Diglot
Groupie
United States
Joined 5994 days ago
52 posts - 52 votes
Speaks: English*, Japanese
Studies: Korean, Mandarin
| Message 37 of 116 05 September 2008 at 5:41am | IP Logged |
orion wrote:
Really? The Japanese orthography is an utter nightmare due to trying to make their completely unrelated language fit into the alien Chinese writing system. The Koreans were suffering the same fate until King Sejong and his advisers devised a better system. The hanzi are perfectly suited to Chinese languages, but trying to adapt them to other East Asian languages has been a 2000 year-old disaster. I applaud the Koreans (and Vietnamese) for cutting loose this unnecessary burden.
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LuckyNomad wrote:
| Okay, instead of saying 99% of the people were farmers, I should have said, 30-40% were slaves(obviously not studing Hanja), and 40-50% were farmers(also don't have the time to study Hanja). Of course there were soldiers, merchants, fisherman, and other jobs, but basically it was the male nobility and scholars who could sit around and master Hanja. So the point I was making is that it was too time consuming and complex to learn for most people. |
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We are trying to have a serious discussion on language here; these two posts contain so many inaccuracies and irrelevancies that I would not even know where to begin to address either. For one, Japanese writing 'is what it is' (for lack of a better phrase), and it has developed through history into its current state. Whether it is regarded as "a total nightmare" to some foreigners is entirely irrelevant to the topic of the orthography of the language.
I am far less qualified to comment on Korean than Japanese; however, I am well aware that the use of literary Chinese persisted in Korea long after the invention of hangul, and it is my understanding that hangul did not come into official usage until the 20th century (This information is derived from the Introduction of "A Guide to Korean Characters" by Bruce K. Grant).
As for LuckyNomad, arguing over the historic professions of Koreans is beside the point; I was simply alluding to the general inaccuracies of your post. Again, while I am in no way qualified to comment on the history of hanja use, I will say that it is certainly the case that hanja were in common use up until relatively recent times; thus the historic professions of Koreans would seem to have little barring on the topic at hand.
A final note, all I can say is that it is better to read history than to conjecture it.
Edit: LuckyNomad, I do see the general point you were making that most commoners were too overburdened to have the time/need to learn the complex Hanja writing system.
Edited by Organik on 05 September 2008 at 2:17pm
1 person has voted this message useful
| ChrisWebb
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 6263 days ago
181 posts - 190 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Korean
| Message 38 of 116 05 September 2008 at 8:25am | IP Logged |
Organik wrote:
orion wrote:
Really? The Japanese orthography is an utter nightmare due to trying to make their completely unrelated language fit into the alien Chinese writing system. The Koreans were suffering the same fate until King Sejong and his advisers devised a better system. The hanzi are perfectly suited to Chinese languages, but trying to adapt them to other East Asian languages has been a 2000 year-old disaster. I applaud the Koreans (and Vietnamese) for cutting loose this unnecessary burden.
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LuckyNomad wrote:
| Okay, instead of saying 99% of the people were farmers, I should have said, 30-40% were slaves(obviously not studing Hanja), and 40-50% were farmers(also don't have the time to study Hanja). Of course there were soldiers, merchants, fisherman, and other jobs, but basically it was the male nobility and scholars who could sit around and master Hanja. So the point I was making is that it was too time consuming and complex to learn for most people. |
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We are trying to have a serious discussion on language here; these two posts contain so many inaccuracies and irrelevancies that I would not even know where to begin to address either. For one, Japanese writing 'is what it is' (for lack of a better phrase), and it has developed through history into its current state. Whether it is regarded as "a total nightmare" to some foreigners is entirely irrelevant to the topic of the orthography of the language.
I am far less qualified to comment on Korean than Japanese; however, I am well aware that the use of literary Chinese persisted in Korea long after the invention of hangul, and it is my understanding that hangul did not come into official usage until the 20th century (This information is derived from the Introduction of "A Guide to Korean Characters" by Bruce K. Grant).
As for LuckyNomad, arguing over the historic professions of Koreans is beside the point; I was simply alluding to the general inaccuracies of your post. Again, while I am in no way qualified to comment on the history of hanja use, I will say that it is certainly the case that hanja were in common use up until relatively recent times; thus the historic professions of Koreans would seem to have little barring on the topic at hand.
A final note, all I can say is that it is better to read history than to conjecture it. |
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You are right, Hanja remained in widespread use until quite recently but you seem unaware of why that was the case. It was the elite classes that kept Hangul from wide takeup, even going so far as to make it illegal for a time. Hanja was a useful means of exclusion that allowed them to maintain their position by denying literacy to others, this is probably part of the reason why the nominally communist North went as far as to ban it. Hangul of course always thrived amongst the common people even during the official attempts to ban it.
In modern times the elites no longer hold the power/influence they once had and given the opportunity the mass of the Korean populace have adopted Hangul to the point that Hanja is now quite rare in day to day life. LuckyNomad's point is in fact accurate even if Hanja survived the initial invention of Hangul under King Sejong for what are essentially political reasons.
Edited by ChrisWebb on 05 September 2008 at 9:19am
1 person has voted this message useful
| Erubey
Triglot
Groupie
United States
Joined 6230 days ago
82 posts - 92 votes
Speaks: Spanish*, English, Japanese
Studies: Mandarin
| Message 39 of 116 05 September 2008 at 10:05am | IP Logged |
I invite anyone to read Japanese at an above intermediate level without Chinese Characters.
Quote:
Why Kanji?
Some people feel that the system of using separate, discrete symbols instead of a sensible alphabet is out-dated and overly complicated. In fact, it might not have been a good idea to adopt Chinese into Japanese since both languages are fundamentally different in structure. But the purpose of this guide is not to debate over the decisions made thousands of years ago but to explain why you must learn kanji in order to learn Japanese. And by this, I mean more than just saying, "That's how it's done so get over it!".
Some people feel that Japanese should have just switched from Chinese to romaji to do away with all the complicated characters that was bewildering the foreign white devils. In fact, Korean has adopted their own alphabet to greatly simplify their written language to great success. So why didn't it work for Japanese? And I ask this in the past tense because I believe that the government did attempt to replace kanji with romaji shortly after the second world war with little success. I think anyone who has typed at any length in Japanese can easily see why this did not work. At any one time, when you convert typed hiragana into kanji, you are presented with almost always at least two choices (two homophones) and sometimes even up to ten. (Try typing kikan). The 46 or so character alphabet of set sounds in Japanese makes it hard to avoid homophones. Compare this to the Korean alphabet which has 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Any of the consonants can be matched to any of the vowels giving 140 sounds. In addition, a third and sometimes even fourth consonant can be attached to create a single letter. This gives over 1960 sounds that can be created theoretically. (The sounds that are actually used is actually much less than that, though I don't know the exact number.)
Since you want to read at a much faster rate than you talk, you need some visual cues to instantly tell you what each word is. You can use the shape of words in English to blaze through text because most words have different shapes. Try this little exercise: Hi, enve thgouh all teh wrods aer seplled icorrenctly, can you sltil udsternand me?" Korean does this too because it has enough characters to make words with distinct and different shapes. However, because the visual cues are not distinct as kanji, spaces needed to be added to remove ambiguities. (This presents another problem of when and where to set spaces.)
With kanji, we don't have to worry about spaces and much of the problem of homophones is mostly resolved. Without kanji, even if spaces were to be added, the ambiguities and lack of visual cues would make Japanese text much more difficult to read. |
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From Tae Kim's Guide. Who knows both Korean and Japanese.
2 persons have voted this message useful
| Organik
Diglot
Groupie
United States
Joined 5994 days ago
52 posts - 52 votes
Speaks: English*, Japanese
Studies: Korean, Mandarin
| Message 40 of 116 05 September 2008 at 11:14am | IP Logged |
ChrisWebb wrote:
Organik wrote:
orion wrote:
Really? The Japanese orthography is an utter nightmare due to trying to make their completely unrelated language fit into the alien Chinese writing system. The Koreans were suffering the same fate until King Sejong and his advisers devised a better system. The hanzi are perfectly suited to Chinese languages, but trying to adapt them to other East Asian languages has been a 2000 year-old disaster. I applaud the Koreans (and Vietnamese) for cutting loose this unnecessary burden.
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LuckyNomad wrote:
| Okay, instead of saying 99% of the people were farmers, I should have said, 30-40% were slaves(obviously not studing Hanja), and 40-50% were farmers(also don't have the time to study Hanja). Of course there were soldiers, merchants, fisherman, and other jobs, but basically it was the male nobility and scholars who could sit around and master Hanja. So the point I was making is that it was too time consuming and complex to learn for most people. |
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We are trying to have a serious discussion on language here; these two posts contain so many inaccuracies and irrelevancies that I would not even know where to begin to address either. For one, Japanese writing 'is what it is' (for lack of a better phrase), and it has developed through history into its current state. Whether it is regarded as "a total nightmare" to some foreigners is entirely irrelevant to the topic of the orthography of the language.
I am far less qualified to comment on Korean than Japanese; however, I am well aware that the use of literary Chinese persisted in Korea long after the invention of hangul, and it is my understanding that hangul did not come into official usage until the 20th century (This information is derived from the Introduction of "A Guide to Korean Characters" by Bruce K. Grant).
As for LuckyNomad, arguing over the historic professions of Koreans is beside the point; I was simply alluding to the general inaccuracies of your post. Again, while I am in no way qualified to comment on the history of hanja use, I will say that it is certainly the case that hanja were in common use up until relatively recent times; thus the historic professions of Koreans would seem to have little barring on the topic at hand.
A final note, all I can say is that it is better to read history than to conjecture it. |
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You are right, Hanja remained in widespread use until quite recently but you seem unaware of why that was the case. It was the elite classes that kept Hangul from wide takeup, even going so far as to make it illegal for a time. Hanja was a useful means of exclusion that allowed them to maintain their position by denying literacy to others, this is probably part of the reason why the nominally communist North went as far as to ban it. Hangul of course always thrived amongst the common people even during the official attempts to ban it.
In modern times the elites no longer hold the power/influence they once had and given the opportunity the mass of the Korean populace have adopted Hangul to the point that Hanja is now quite rare in day to day life. LuckyNomad's point is in fact accurate even if Hanja survived the initial invention of Hangul under King Sejong for what are essentially political reasons. |
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I am not unaware of those things, though I surely could not have stated them as succinctly as you. In any case, the notion that hanja were replaceed because of King Sejong's invention of hangul still seems like a vast oversimplification to me, considering the historic course which the written Korean language has taken.
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