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Replacing Sino-Korean words... | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| chucknorrisman Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5448 days ago 321 posts - 435 votes  Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French | Message 1 of 32 19 April 2010 at 5:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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There are quite a bit of Sino-Korean words (derived from Chinese) that are homophonic and can only be distinguished from either context or the usage of hanja (Chinese characters). But most Koreans don't want to learn it, and they mostly forget by the time they graduate from high school or college. In order to solve the homophone problem without having to clutter the Korean education with hanjas that people never even use, should we replace many of the Sino-Korean words with the native Korean words? Some sources for those words could be the Jeju dialect (which is said to have much more native words than the mainland Korean dialects), older forms of Korean, and so on.
For example, 유학 (遊學) means "studying abroad" while 유학 (儒學) means Confucianism. Without the hanjas I would not be able to tell between the two if there was no context. But, instead of studying the hanjas that we find difficult and useless, why not just replace them with new words that are hopefully of native Korean origin? For example the studying abroad 유학 can be changed into "나라밖배움" or something similar. Another example can be 인도, which can mean "pedestrian sidewalk" or "India" or "to lead" depending on the context. They are all written with different hanjas. "To lead" already has a native Korean counterpart 이끌다, so we can popularize that. The 인도 meaning pedestrian sidewalk can be changed to 사람길, leaving 인도 to just mean India (note that I am not proposing complete elimination of Sino-Korean vocabulary, but enough that the homophones are gone and the study of hanja would be unnecessary in order to be considered a highly educated Korean). What do you think? Is replacing the Sino-Korean words with the native Korean words the best way to solve the hanja problem? 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5960 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 2 of 32 20 April 2010 at 7:24am | IP Logged | |||||
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Considering how many Koreans end up learning Chinese characters through Japanese or Chinese anyway, I would say just learn them through Korean and start using Hanja more commonly.
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| chucknorrisman Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5448 days ago 321 posts - 435 votes Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French | Message 3 of 32 20 April 2010 at 6:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
Although there is the obvious advantage of learning Japanese later (for an advantage in Chinese one should learn the simplified counterparts which they do not teach as hanjas), it seems that Koreans are more into English than Chinese or Japanese. Either way, Koreans usually do not like to use hanjas in most common situations, and although they are used in the newspapers, they are used only to distinguish homophones. So I think the need for hanjas should be reduced, and it should be taught just to students who try to learn Japanese or Chinese. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5960 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 4 of 32 21 April 2010 at 6:54am | IP Logged | |||||
I would love it if Korean newspapers and other media started using Hanja more liberally again. It would make Korean more accessible for the millions of us who already know an East Asian language and make Japanese and Chinese more accessible for Koreans. More people would learn Korean and more Koreans would learn Japanese and Chinese. Everybody wins! 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| chucknorrisman Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5448 days ago 321 posts - 435 votes Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French | Message 5 of 32 22 April 2010 at 3:21am | IP Logged | |||||
Actually, knowing the Chinese characters wouldn't necessarily guarantee comprehension over all the countries. First of all, China uses the simplified characters, Japan uses many of its own versions of simplified characters, and Korea uses the traditional that have been used in China before, with a minuscule amount of its own made-up hanjas. Also, this Korean website (http://www.hangeul.or.kr/html/hnp/hs2002/hs360_01.htm) describes the misunderstandings that occur due to the characters and the words they form having different meanings. I don't have time to translate them for you just this moment, but I will try to get to them when I can. Anyways, these stories are examples that show that knowing the characters will not get you around in different countries. Anyways, my purpose in suggesting the idea of replacing Sino-Korean vocabularies with the Korean ones that don't need hanjas was to reduce the vocabulary difficulties homophone problems that arise from using too much hanja-based words. Replacing the hanja-based homophonic and academic words (which are unfortunately mostly Sino-Korean based) would allow the Koreans to understand the meanings easier without having to waste the time studying the characters that they do not use much in practical ways. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5960 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 6 of 32 22 April 2010 at 3:55am | IP Logged | |||||
I didn't make that argument. I only said that knowing Chinese characters from one East Asian language makes the other East Asian languages more accessible to you. In other words, more familiar and easier to learn. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ericspinelli Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5783 days ago 249 posts - 493 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Italian | Message 7 of 32 22 April 2010 at 4:19am | IP Logged | |||||
Doing so would make Korean more accessible to a select group of second-language learners at the cost of making it less accessible to Koreans themselves.
While I support such an endeavor, it is Koreans themselves who will have to be responsible for its implementation. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that the people (academics) in a position to do so on a broad scale and with authority are the people least likely to. I also have a feeling that the words whose characters cannot be easily replaced are the ones with the most difficult and obscure characters. I doubt use of characters can be completely eliminated using existing vocabulary alone. Edited by ericspinelli on 22 April 2010 at 4:19am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| chucknorrisman Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5448 days ago 321 posts - 435 votes Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French | Message 8 of 32 22 April 2010 at 10:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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"Doing so would make Korean more accessible to a select group of second-language learners at the cost of making it less accessible to Koreans themselves. "
I agree. The Korean language should serve the Koreans first and foremost. "Unfortunately, I have a feeling that the people (academics) in a position to do so on a broad scale and with authority are the people least likely to." You are right. For some reason, the Korean academic community seems to loathe using native Korean words in most cases, so they have coined the academic words with hanja words when they could have been used with the easier to understand Korean words. They've also replaced the already perfectly useful native Korean words in textbooks with hanja words. For example: Native Korean – Sino-Korean - English 세모 - 삼각형 (三角形) - triangle 네모 - 사각형 (四角形) - quadrilateral 염통 - 심장 (心腸) – heart 이름씨 – 명사 (名詞) – noun 그림씨 – 형용사 (形容詞) - adjective 움직씨 – 동사 (動詞) - verb 갓난애 – 신생아 (新生兒) – newborn baby 옮살이 - 동물 (動物) - animal 물뭍짐승 – 양서류 (兩棲類) – amphibian 피돌기 - 혈액순환 (血液循環) – blood circulation And so on. Koreans still seem to have some unreasonable prejudice against using the native words when they only make the language better by conveying the meanings easier to the Koreans. "I doubt use of characters can be completely eliminated using existing vocabulary alone." From what I've read, there actually seems to be a great amount of native words that are known that have been pushed out by hanja words. Just for an example, Korean has an obscure native word 새얼 meaning "culture," something that even other languages with more conservative vocabularies don't usually have. 새얼 had been replaced by "문화" （文化）. Of course, there are many more words than this, but I'm just showing an example. I think that the native words alone could probably do a good job expressing the academic and the much more abstract terms. Edited by chucknorrisman on 22 April 2010 at 11:06pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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