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The Thousand Character Classic has its own form in representing the Chinese characters. For each character, the text shows its meaning (Korean Hanja: 訓; saegim or hun) and sound (Korean Hanja: 音; eum). The vocabulary to represent the saegim has remained unchanged in every edition, despite the natural evolution of the Korean language since then.
In the contemporary era, Sino-Korean vocabulary has continued to grow in South Korea, where the meanings of Chinese characters are used to produce new words in Korean that do not exist in Chinese. By contrast, North Korean policy has called for many Sino-Korean words to be replaced by native Korean terms.
However, in the Korean mixed script, Chinese characters are only used for Sino-Korean words. [20] The character-based Vietnamese and Korean scripts have since been replaced by the Vietnamese alphabet and hangul respectively, although Korean does still use Hanja to an extent.
In addition to the Han-Han Daesajeon, in 1966, Dankook University completed the "Dictionary of Korean Chinese Characters." Composed of 4 volumes with more than 4,410 pages, this dictionary "catalogs Chinese characters made and used only by our Korean ancestors (182 characters) as well as examples of Chinese words with Korean usages (84,000 words)."
The texts would either have different characters used, new lines, or different ordering. The most common variant of the Three Character Classic in Vietnam has 30 lines that are different from the Chinese edition. [10] There are also two lines in the Vietnamese version that do not exist in the Chinese version.
For instance, the hanja ' 爲 ' was used for its native Korean gloss whereas ' 尼 ' was used for its Sino-Korean pronunciation, and combined into ' 爲尼 ' and read hani (하니), 'to do (and so).' [15] In Chinese, however, the same characters are read in Mandarin as the expression wéi ní, meaning 'becoming a nun'.
The parts of the Chinese sentence would then be read in Korean out of sequence to approximate Korean rather than Chinese word order. A similar system for reading Classical Chinese is still used in Japan and is known as kanbun kundoku. Gugyeol is derived from the cursive and simplified style of Chinese characters.
In a typical hanja-honyong texts, traditionally all words that were of Sino-Korean origin, either composed from Chinese character compounds natively or loan words directly from Chinese, were written in hanja although particularly rare or complicated hanja were often disambiguated with the hangul pronunciation and perhaps a gloss of the meaning ...