width	120px
hangul	한자/한문한자
hanja	漢字/韓文漢字
rr	Hanja
mr	Hancha }}

Name	Hanja
Type	Logographic
Languages	Korean
Fam1	Oracle Bone Script
Fam2	Seal Script
Fam3	Clerical Script
Fam4	Regular script
Sisters	Kanji, Zhuyin, Simplified Chinese, Chu Nom, Khitan script, Jurchen script
Iso15924	}}

Hanja is the Korean name for the Chinese characters ''hanzi''. More specifically, it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation. ''Hanja-mal'' or ''hanja-eo'' refers to words which can be written with hanja, and ''hanmun'' (, ) refers to Classical Chinese writing, although "hanja" is sometimes used loosely to encompass these other concepts. Because hanja never underwent major reform, they are almost entirely identical to traditional Chinese and ''kyūjitai'' characters. Only a small number of hanja characters are modified or unique to Korean. By contrast, many of the Chinese characters currently in use in Japan (''kanji'') and Mainland China have been simplified, and contain fewer strokes than the corresponding hanja characters.

Although a phonetic Korean alphabet, now known as hangul, had been created by a team of scholars commissioned in the 1440s by King Sejong the Great, it did not come into widespread use until the late 19th and early 20th century. Thus, until that time it was necessary to be fluent in reading and writing hanja in order to be literate in Korean, as the vast majority of Korean literature and most other Korean documents were written in hanja. Today, hanja plays a different role. Scholars who wish to study Korean history must study hanja in order to read historical documents. For the general public, learning a certain number of hanja is very helpful in understanding words that are formed with them. Hanja are not used to write native Korean words, which are always rendered in hangul, and even words of Chinese origin — ''hanja-eo'' (한자어, 漢字語) — are written with the hangul alphabet most of the time.

History

A major impetus for the introduction of Chinese characters into Korea was the spread of Buddhism. The major Chinese text that introduced hanja to Koreans, however, was not a religious text but the Chinese text, ''Cheonjamun'' (''Thousand Character Classic'').

Koreans had to learn Classical Chinese to be properly literate for the most part, but there were some systems developed to use simplified forms of Chinese characters that phonetically transcribe Korean, namely, hyangchal (향찰; 鄕札), gugyeol (구결; 口訣), and idu (이두; 吏讀).

One way of adapting hanja to write Korean in such systems (such as Gugyeol) was to represent native Korean grammatical particles and other words solely according to their pronunciation. For example, Gugyeol uses the characters 爲尼 to transcribe the Korean word "hăni", in modern Korean, that means "does, and so". However, in Chinese, the same characters are read as the expression "wéi ní," meaning "becoming a nun." This is a typical example of Gugyeol words where the radical (爲) is read in Korean for its meaning (hă — "to do") and the suffix 尼, ni (meaning 'nun'), used phonetically.

Hanja was the sole means of writing Korean until King Sejong the Great promoted the invention of hangul in the 15th century. However, even after the invention of hangul, most Korean scholars continued to write in hanmun.

It was not until the 20th century that hangul truly replaced hanja. Officially, hanja has not been used in North Korea since June 1949 (additionally, all texts are now written horizontally instead of vertically).

Additionally, many words borrowed from Chinese have been replaced in the North with native Korean words. However, there are a large number of Chinese-borrowed words in widespread usage in the North (although written in hangul), and hanja characters still appear in special contexts, such as recent North Korean dictionaries .

Character formation

Each hanja is composed of one of 214 radicals plus in most cases one or more additional elements. The vast majority of hanja use the additional elements to indicate the sound of the character, but a few hanja are purely pictographic, and some were formed in other ways.

''Eumhun'' (sound and meaning)

To aid in understanding the meaning of a character, or to describe it orally to distinguish it from other characters with the same pronunciation, character dictionaries and school textbooks refer to each character with a combination of its sound and a word indicating its meaning. This dual meaning-sound reading of a character is called ''eumhun'' (음훈; 音訓; from 音 "sound" + 訓 "meaning," "teaching").

The word or words used to denote the meaning are often—though hardly always—words of native Korean (i.e., non-Chinese) origin, and are sometimes archaic words no longer commonly used.

Education

Hanja are still taught in separate courses in South Korean high schools, apart from the normal Korean language curriculum. Formal hanja education begins in grade 7 (junior high school) and continues until graduation from senior high school in grade 12. A total of 1,800 hanja are taught: 900 for junior high, and 900 for senior high (starting in grade 10). Post-secondary hanja education continues in some liberal arts universities. The 1972 promulgation of basic hanja for educational purposes was altered on December 31, 2000, to replace 44 hanja with 44 others. The choice of characters to eliminate and exclude caused heated debates prior to and after the 2000 promulgation.

Though North Korea rapidly abandoned the general use of hanja soon after independence, the number of hanja actually taught in primary and secondary schools is greater than the 1,800 taught in South Korea. Kim Il-sung had earlier called for a gradual elimination of the use of hanja, but by the 1960s, he had reversed his stance; he was quoted as saying in 1966, "While we should use as few Sinitic terms as possible, students must be exposed to the necessary Chinese characters and taught how to write them." As a result, a Chinese-character textbook was designed for North Korean schools for use in grades 5-9, teaching 1,500 characters, with another 500 for high school students. College students are exposed to another 1,000, bringing the total to 3,000.

In Korean language and Korean studies programs at universities around the world, a sample of hanja is typically a requirement for students. Becoming a graduate student in these fields usually requires students to learn at least the 1,800 basic hanja.

Current uses of hanja

Because many different hanja—and thus, many different words written using hanja—often share the same sounds, two distinct hanja words (''hanjaeo'') may be spelled identically in the phonetic hangul alphabet. Thus, hanja are often used to clarify meaning, either on their own without the equivalent hangul spelling, or in parentheses after the hangul spelling as a kind of gloss. Hanja are often also used as a form of shorthand in newspaper headlines, advertisements, and on signs, for example the banner at the funeral for the sailors lost in the sinking of ROKS Cheonan (PCC-772).

Hanja in print media

In South Korea, hanja are used most frequently in academic literature, where they often appear without the equivalent hangul spelling. Usually, only those words with a specialized or ambiguous meaning are printed in hanja. In mass-circulation books and magazines, hanja are generally used rarely, and only to gloss words already spelled in hangul when the meaning is ambiguous. Hanja are also often used in newspaper headlines as abbreviations or to eliminate the ambiguity typical of newspaper headlines in any language. In formal publications, personal names are also usually glossed in hanja in parentheses next to the hangul. In contrast, North Korea eliminated the use of hanja even in academic publications by 1949, a situation which has since remained unchanged. Hanja terms are also expressed through hangul, the standard script in the Korean language. Some studies suggest that hanja use appears to be in decline. In 1956, one study found mixed-script Korean text (in which Sino-Korean nouns are written using hanja, and other words using hangul) were read faster than texts written purely in hangul; however, by 1977, the situation had reversed. In 1988, 80% of one sample of people without a college education "evinced no reading comprehension of any but the simplest, most common hanja" when reading mixed-script passages.

Korean hanja

A small number of characters were invented by Koreans themselves. Most of them are for proper names (place-names and people's names) but some refer to Korean-specific concepts and materials. They include 畓 (논 답; ''non dap''; "paddyfield"), 乭 (''Dol'', a character only used in given names), 㸴 (''So'', a rare surname from Seongju), and 怾 (''Gi'', an old name of the Kumgangsan).

Further examples include 媤 시 /si/, 曺 조 /jo/, 㕦/夻 화 /hwa/, 巭 부 /bu/, 娚 남 /nam/, 頉 탈 /tal/, 囍 희 /hui/, 䭏 편 /pyeon/, and 哛 뿐 /ppun/.

Compare to the parallel development in Japan of , of which there are hundreds, many rarely used – these were often developed for native Japanese plants and animals.

Yakja

Some hanja characters have simplified forms (약자, 略字, ''yakja'') that can be seen in casual use. An example is 20px, which is a cursive form of 無 (meaning "nothing").

Pronunciation

Each hanja character is pronounced as a single syllable, corresponding to a single composite character in hangul. The pronunciation of hanja in Korean is not identical to the way they are pronounced in modern Chinese, particularly Mandarin, although some Chinese dialects and Korean share similar pronunciations for some characters. For example, 印刷 "print" is ''yìnshuā'' in Mandarin Chinese and ''inswae'' (인쇄) in Korean, but it is pronounced ''insue'' in Shanghainese (a Wu Chinese dialect). One obvious difference is the complete loss of tone from Korean while all Chinese dialects retain tone. In other aspects, the pronunciation of hanja is more conservative than most northern and central Chinese dialects, for example in the retention of labial consonant codas in characters with labial consonant onsets, such as the characters 法 (법 ''beop'') and 凡 (범 ''beom''); the labial codas existed in Middle Chinese but do not survive intact in most northern and central Chinese varieties today.

Due to divergence in pronunciation since the time of borrowing, sometimes the pronunciation of a hanja and its corresponding hanzi may differ considerably. For example, 女 ("woman") is ''nǚ'' in Mandarin Chinese and ''nyeo'' (녀) in Korean. However, in most modern Korean dialects (especially South Korean ones), 女 is pronounced as ''yeo'' (여) when used in an initial position, due to a systematic elision of initial ''n'''s when followed by ''y'' or ''i''.

Additionally, sometimes a hanja-derived word will have altered pronunciation of a character to reflect Korean pronunciation shifts, for example mogwa 모과 木瓜 "quince" from mokgwa 목과.

See also

Basic hanja for educational use

List of Korea-related topics

Sino-Korean vocabulary

Chinese character

Korean mixed script

Kanji (Japanese equivalent)

Hantu (Vietnamese equivalent)

References

Notes

Sources

External links

open okpyŏn (open-source hanja dictionary)

Hanja Hangul Convert Project

Hanja (Chinese characters)

Hanja Dictionary for learners of Korean

One out of Five Korean Students Couldn't Write Their Own Names (in hanja)

Category:Writing systems Category:Logographic writing systems Category:Korean language Category:Korean writing system Category:Chinese characters

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