RE: Q.'s about hanja

From: Marco Cimarosti (marco.cimarosti@europe.com)
Date: Tue Nov 07 2000 - 11:11:48 EST


SoHee Kim wrote:
> > 1) Is it correct to say that hanja are only used for words
> derived from
> > Chinese, and never for genuninely Korean words?
>
> What do you mean by genuinely Korean words?

It was just a poor expression. I meant "Korean words that were not derived
from Chinese".

(Of course, all words in a language are "genuine", whether or not they are
loans from other languages.)

> We had our own words even before Hangul was made. But this
> doesn't mean these
> words are derived from Chinese. Before King SeJong made
> Hangul at 1446, since
> we didn't have other characters to write, we used Hanja.
> There are Korean words that can be written in Hangul or
> Hanja. And there are some that can be written only in Hangul.

What I actually wanted to ask is: "Are there any Korean words, *not* derived
from Chinese, that can be written with hanja?"

I know that this is the case for Japanese: kanji are used both for writing
Chinese loanwords (called "on" reading) and Japanese words not known to be
taken from other languages (called "kun" reading).

So what I meant is: does Korean has something like this?

> http://korea.insights.co.kr/korean/sejong600/english/hangul.html

Nice. Thanks!

> > 2) Is it true that hanja have been abolished in North
> Korea? When did this
> > happen?
>
> I am not sure about this.

Karlsson Kent told me privately that they haven't been abolished.
Maybe they simply are not very commonly used.

> > 3) How often are hanja used today, however? (...)
>
> As far as I know some newspapers still use Hanja in order to
> convey the meaning clearly. Same at books.
>
> > 4) How do Koreans input hanja on computers?
>
> We don't. No need to do so.

Aren't these two answers slightly contraddictory? I think that newspapers
and books are probably composed on computers in today's Korea. So at least
publishers (if not common people) must have some way of typing hanja...

Thank you.
Marco

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