Hanja

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Hanja (Hangul, 한자; Hanja, 漢字; McCune-Reischauer, hancha; literally, “Han characters”), sometimes translated as Sino-Korean characters, is the name given to the sinograms (Traditional Chinese 漢字; Simplified Chinese 汉字; pinyin, hànzì) in Korean but, more specifically, it refers to Chinese characters that Koreans borrowed and incorporated into their language, changing its pronunciation. Unlike Japanese kanji characters, some of which have been simplified, most hanja are identical to traditional Chinese hanzi, although some differ slightly from the traditional form in stroke order (for example, the characters Chinese 教 and 研 are written 敎 and 硏, respectively, in hanja). Hanja-mal or hanja-eo are the words that can be spelled with hanja, while hanmun (in Hangul, 한문; in hanja, 漢文) refers to the writing of the Classical Chinese, although hanja is sometimes loosely used as a synonym for these other concepts.

Today, hanja is not used to write words of native origin, nor of Chinese origin.

History

A major impetus for the introduction of Chinese characters into Korea was the spread of Korean Buddhism. The main Chinese text that introduced the hanja to Korea, however, was not a religious text, but the Chinese text, Cheonjamun.

There were other systems, devised earlier, in order to use simplified Chinese characters to transcribe Korean phonetically:

• Hyangchal (in hangul, in hanja, )
• Gugyeol (in hangul, Đ in hanja, ▪)
• Idu (in hangul, rogain hanja, )

Hanja was the only means of writing Korean until King Sejong of Joseon invented the Hangul alphabet in the 15th century. However, even after the invention of hangul, most Korean scholars continued to write using the hanmun.

It wasn't until the 20th century that Hangul largely supplanted the use of hanja. Officially, hanja has not been used in North Korea since June 1949 (and, additionally, all text is written horizontally instead of vertically), because Kim Il-sung considered it a consequence of the Japanese occupation and a nuisance to the ability to read and write. Also, many loanwords from Chinese have been replaced with words of native origin.

Character formation

Each hanja is made up of one of 214 radicals and sometimes one or more supplementary elements. The vast majority of them use supplementary elements to indicate the pronunciation of the character, but some hanja than another is purely pictographic and is pronounced differently.

Meaning and sound

In modern Korean, when a hanja appears in a word or as a full-fledged word, it is always pronounced the same way. However, to help include the characters, character dictionaries and school books refer to each character not only by its appearance, but also by its meaning. Such a reading, which gives the meaning and sound of the characters, is called eumhun (음훈;音訓; according to 音"sound" + 訓"meaning", "learning").

Hanja in dictionaries

In modern Korean dictionaries, all entries for words of Sino-Korean origin in Hangul are printed and sorted in Hangul order; the immediately following hanja form in parentheses (a similar practice is found in Japanese dictionaries). This helps prevent ambiguities and also serves as an etymology, since the meaning of hanja and the fact that the word is made up of hanja often help to include the origin of the word.

Examples of how hanja can help clear up the ambiguities of numerous homonyms that are spelled 수도 (sudo) in Hangul:

1. ン“spiritual discipline”
2. ;“reception and surrender”
3. "priest"
4. Русский“water city” (e.g. Suzhou and Venice)
5. У水“arroz”
6. traction"alcantarilla"
7. ン“Tunnel”
8. 都“capital”
9. ▸"pocket knife"