Talk:Hanja

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[edit] Hap Ki Do vs. Ai Ki Do

On the page it lists "Hap Ki Do" as the Korean form of "Aikido" but this is not the case. I've taken both and they are very different martial arts and have different pages here. --Nachtrabe 18:50, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The two martial arts are totally different, that's true, but the meaning of hapkido in korean is equal to the meaning of aikido in Japanese. --Kbarends 15:33, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Chinese & Korean pronunciation

Korean and Chinese are completely different languages, no doubt that pronounciations are different. Is it meaningful to compare them in the article? wshun 20:28, 13 Sep 2003 (UTC)

When they borrowed the characters, they also borrowed some pronunciation. e.g., Daehan Min-guk is Dahan Min-guo in Chinese. --Menchi 20:36, 13 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Which dialect of Chinese? ;-) --Rschmertz 21:00, Sep 13, 2003 (UTC)
I used modern Mandarin Chinese to compare. But Mandarin has since the borrowing time dropped all final consonants except n & ng -- the finals are still visible in Cantonese Chinese: Daa-hon Man-gwok. --Menchi 21:54, 13 Sep 2003 (UTC)
I was going to say the same thing. In fact, I'm fairly sure that the pronunciation of every hanja comes from a foreign source, usually a dialect of Chinese, perhaps Japanese in some cases (not sure about that last part). I suspect the disparate pronunciation of the character for "woman" more likely arises from a different point of contact with Chinese culture at the time when Koreans were using Chinese characters to write Korean, as opposed to simply using Chinese directly as the language of writing. Don't forget, also, that languages evolve. A word borrowed five hundred years ago could have changed pronunciation in both languages by now. Yet the paragraph on Hanja#Pronunciation, as it is currently written, seems to imply that Koreans used Chinese characters in some cases for native Korean words, which I'm fairly sure has never happened (though I was never sure how to pronounce the "shin" character you sometimes see stamped on advertisements to indicate a product is new; "shin" by itself does not mean "new" in Korean). Rschmertz 20:55, Sep 13, 2003 (UTC)
  • The "woman" case is in fact due to divergent evolution (Lee and Ramsey, 73). I've corrected it.
    The original pronunciation of "woman" is revealed when it is a non-initial element, e.g. nam-nyeo (男女 "Men and women"). Likewise,
    • yeon (年 "year") = Chinese: nian; BUT, sin-nyeon (新年 "New Year") = Chinese: xin-nian
    • ik (匿 "hide") = Chinese: nì; BUT, un-nik (隱匿 "concealment") = Chinese: yin-ni
  • Native Korean pronunciation-Hanzi also fixed.
  • Do you shin (not with the Hanja 新) mean something else, or that shin (with the Hanja 新) does not mean "new" or "fresh" in Korean now?
--Menchi 21:54, 13 Sep 2003 (UTC)
Your sentence about "shin" is a little messed up, I'm afraid, so I'm not sure what you mean, but let me explain, though it is sort of difficult. The hanja "新" is pronounced "shin" in Korean. It means "new" in Korean in the same sense that "neo" means "new" in English. You can't say, "I think it's time to get a neo car", in English, but we use it to mean "new" in terms like "neo-conservative", "neologism", etc. Similarly, Koreans do not say "shin cha sasseo" for "I bought a new car"; they say "sae cha sasseo", "sae" in this case being a pure Korean word for "new" (and, totally off-topic, one of two adjectives I'm aware of in the Korean language that are not verbs). Nonetheless, they use the "新" hanja in advertisement-type literature -- not in a sentence where "sae" would normally be used, but all by itself. I don't remember if I ever asked a Korean how this should be pronounced; I suspect somehow that the answer is that it is not to be pronounced, just read.
You also see the characters for "small, middle, large" (小, 中, 太) used this way. Except the last character here is wrong; for some reason, my Korean input software crashes whenever I try to produce the hanja for 대, so I had to use the closest alternative :-P
Thanks for the fix on "yeo". BTW, I've edited your spelling of Korean a bit here. Hope you don't mind.--Rschmertz 08:01, Sep 14, 2003 (UTC)

I've actually seen both jeong-o and ojeong being used in Korean to mean "noon", and in fact I prefer the form jeong-o myself, as a native speaker. Should that be mentioned? --Iceager

Oh yeah, thanks for the info. I've added it. It's very relevant. I was under the impression that Koreans only used "ojeong". --Menchi 00:24, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

[edit] North Korean usage

I heard that in North Korea Hanja were almost completely wiped out, and nearly all korean texts were written entirely in Hangul. The article should make a mention of that --Anon

It does. Quote from article: "Officially, Hanja have not been in use in North Korea since 1949." --Menchi 06:08, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Hanja is Hancha in McCune-Reischauer.

Hanja, when it means Chinese character, is actually Hancha in McCune-Reischauer. It was written in the article that Hanja is

Often erroneously spelled as "Hancha" in McCune-Reischauer ["nch" gets assimilated to "nj" in that system]

This is incorrect. In McCune-Reischauer, pronunciation is followed (because "Pronunciation takes precedence over (1) spelling and (2) romanization rules", in this case (2) the n+ch = nj rule), i.e. "j" when voiced, and "ch" when unvoiced. When 한자 means Chinese character, the ㅈ is glottalised (and therefore becomes unvoiced) to the ㅉ sound, a change that doesn't follow usual glottalisation rules, but which is well documented in dictionaries. It is unvoiced, hence "ch" is used. When 한자 represents measure, the ㅈ is, as would usually be the case, voiced, and so in this case it is still "Hanja" in McCune-Reischauer. (Note that however it is not the glottalised romanisation that is used; hence 의과 ŭikwa, although it also has an exceptional glottalisation, so we don't write Hantcha.) Check these guidelines.

In Revised Romanization, of course, "ch" only represents the aspirated sound, so there is no such problem.

-- KittySaturn 07:31, 2005 Mar 1 (UTC)

[edit] Usage of "hanja"

We should decide on a uniform way to use "hanja" for the purposes of the article. Several questions:

1. Capitalize or not
2. Singular or plural (i.e. should the term "hanja" refer to an individual character, or the whole system?)

My personal inclination is not to capitalize, and to use hanja to refer to the whole system. Individual characters could just be called "characters." --Reuben 21:23, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

i agree it should refer to the system as a whole, as a collective noun. casual googling seems to indicate that it is generally capitalized, however. aren't the names of other script systems treated as capitalized proper nouns? Appleby 21:35, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

I don't think that's a general rule, unless they contain other proper nouns (e.g. Greek alphabet, Cyrillic). However, Wikipedia articles on other writing systems seem to be split. Some of them are general categories rather than specific writing systems, and therefore not capitalized: runes, abugida, alphabet, cuneiform. Some are lower case even when specific: hieroglyphics, kanji, hiragana. Some are capitalized: Bhijimol, Brahmi, Glagolitic. In summary: I can't find any general rule about it! If googling shows it mostly capitalized, let's go with that. --Reuben 04:50, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Pronunciation question

Can a Korean language expert help me with the Seolleongtang article? I'm trying to determine why, if the second hanja is pronounced "neong," the soup is pronounced "seolleongtang." Is this just a colloqualism or is it the correct/standard pronuncation. Any help would be great--please respond on the "Discussion" page of the Seolleongtang article. Badagnani 02:05, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] merger proposal

The person who proposed the merger has (incorrectly) posted this comment at the Sino-Korean talk page. I'm posting it here for reference:

I suggested a merge of this article into the Hanja article because:
1. Both this article and the Hanja article suggest or imply that "Hanja" and "Sino-Korean" are the same thing. In the Hanja article, the first sentence is, "Hanja, or hanmun, sometimes translated as Sino-Korean characters or just Chinese characters, are what Chinese characters (hànzì) are called in Korean", where "Sino-Korean characters" are linked to this article.
2. This article is too short to stand on its own.
It's been explained to me that Hanja and Sino-Korean are two different things. But it still remains that there's not much content on this article and I think it should be merged, as a section, into either the Hanja article or Korean language.
This was posted by Hong Qi Gong


support Appleby 05:06, 13 March 2006 (UTC) they are different things, but sino-korean could be adequately covered by a paragraph or short subsection here, removing much overlap and giving readers a more complete context for both topics. overall, i think we should be aiming to streamline, make consistent, & more logically organize the overlapping contents of Korean language, Hangul, Hanja, and Sino-Korean & all the hard-to-find sub-topic articles. this is a good first step. Appleby 04:34, 14 March 2006 (UTC)


oppose. Having read the two articles, it appears that there is considerable overlap. However, this appears to be due to a failure to make the important conceptual distinction between Hanja (meaning Chinese characters, i.e., the characters used to write the Korean language) and Sino-Korean vocabulary as a segment of the Korean vocabulary. In this sense, Sino-Korean is opposed to native Korean vocabulary (固有語). And as the "Vocabulary" section of the Hanja article explains, Sino-Korean vocabulary is not necessarily Chinese. In some cases it was borrowed from Japanese. What is more, Sino-Korean is not necessarily written with hanja. In fact, modern Korean makes very sparing use of Hanja, so that in fact much Sino-Korean vocabulary is written with hangul.

I would suggest that the section on "Vocabulary" should be moved to Sino-Korean. That would help make the conceptual difference clearer. And I think it is important to maintain the distinction; it is too easy to fall into the trap of equating characters to words and thus vocabulary. (This is a particularly seductive notion in Chinese because there is really no other way of writing Chinese than in characters, and characters are needed to tie the various dialects together. In fact, it's quite possible to have Sino-xxxx without using Hanja, Kanji, or Chinese characters at all. See, for instance, the article on Sino-Vietnamese, a huge segment of the Vietnamese vocabulary that is no longer written with characters at all.)

The proposal to merge the content to Korean language makes somewhat more sense, but even in this case I would suggest the vocabulary section would be better moved to the Korean language article. (If you read the Korean language article, you will find that there is, in fact, a clear distinction made between Sino-Korean and Hanja.)

Finally, I would suggest that the word 'Sino-Korean' should be removed from the definition of Hanja, as it seems to be causing some confusion. Bathrobe 03:45, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

In Korean:
  • jungguk-eo: chinese language
  • hanja: chinese characters, including those used in china (traditional & simplified), korea, japan
  • hanja-mal or hanja-eo: words consisting of chinese characters (written in hanja or hangul), used in china, korea, japan
  • hanmun: 1. chinese writing; 2. chinese classics studied in china, korea, japan Appleby 06:59, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

Appleby, if your definitions given here are correct, then the definition of Hanja as 'Sino-Korean characters' (which I've deleted in the meantime) was incorrect. Your definition suggests that Hanja should refer to all Chinese characters, regardless of language. This is useful information and probably should be mentioned in the article. In fact, kanji in Japanese refers to all Chinese characters, just as hanja does in Korean, but many people want to restrict the meaning to characters as used in Japanese (see Menchi's comment in the page history where he changed "kanji" to "hanzi" -- the thrust appears to be that kanji can't be used to refer to characters used in Chinese, and must refer only to Japanese).

The word 'hanja-mal' or 'hanja-eo': I am curious whether it includes all words written in Chinese characters in China, Korea, and Japan. The reason I ask is because there are many kun'yomi words in Japanese that are written in Kanji, although they would never be considered Sino-Japanese. Also, does this class of word include Chinese words that are not found in Korean or Japanese? An example that springs to mind is 洗衣機 (washing machine), which I know is not used in Japanese and I suspect is not used in Korean. Would this be considered 'hanja-eo'?

'Hanmun' in your definition is equivalent to the meaning of kanbun. You also give it the meaning 'Chinese writing'. If that is the case, then should it be removed as a synonym of "hanja" from the beginning of the Hanja article. I'm not quite clear on this one.

It seems that the article as it stands has a lot of problems. Bathrobe 07:23, 14 March 2006 (UTC)

those are the definition from general dictionaries, but i would like specialists/linguists to comment? you bring up good points, as whether hanja-mal/hanja-eo would encompass chinese words used exclusively in china. in common conversations, that would be referred to as "jungguk-eo," and probably not hanja-mal/hanja-eo, despite the dictionary definition. but i do agree the intro needs to be changed, as hanja definitely =/= hanmun. Appleby 07:29, 14 March 2006 (UTC)
I've made quite a few changes to both articles. One big change I made is to move "Vocabulary" from Hanja to Sino-Korean.
I appreciate that we are discussing whether or not to merge the articles and that this change may appear to be moving in the opposite direction. However, the reason for making the changes is to demonstrate how the two articles cover conceptually quite distinct notions. Naturally, if it is decided to merge the two articles, I am quite happy to see the information re-integrated into a single article. Even if it is decided to merge, however, I think there is a need to clarify the difference between hanja and hanjaeo (Sino-Korean).
Bathrobe

bathrobe, thanks for putting in the work to improve these articles. my concern was that the non-expert reader be able to easily find and get the gist of the big picture, and proper context for each sub-topic, without a lot of overlapping, hard-to-find sub-articles. my feeling, as of now, is that hanja/hanmun/hanja-eo/sino-korean can be better discussed in one well-organized, cleanly-written article. i could be wrong, though. Appleby 17:42, 15 March 2006 (UTC)

Appleby, I think we need input from someone with expertise in Korean linguistics. You yourself are (I presume) Korean, but you say you are not an expert. I'm not a speaker of Korean at all, although I'm familiar with Chinese and Japanese. The person who suggested the merger, Hong Qi Gong, is Hong Kong Chinese, and I think the Chinese (or Cantonese) way of looking at this may be slightly different from the Korean way of doing so. Do we have any people on Wikipedia with expertise in this area?
Bathrobe 05:46, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

I've already asked for input at hangul & korean language article talk pages, but nobody's biting. guess it's slow season. I am fully fluent in korean, but I'm no linguist, so I wouldn't be confident about detailed scholarly usage, & don't have a strong opinion on the merger, just sounded like a good idea to me. please don't feel like I'm holding you back from working on the articles. (but I do know hanja & hanmun are different things) Appleby 06:28, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm inclined to support this merger, as providing a better basis for a good article. Some info on the matter of hanja vs. Chinese characters:

  • Writers on Korean language education often distinguish between hanjagwon learners (those from Taiwan, China, and Japan) and non-hanjagwon learners. The term hanja, in this context, clearly refers to Chinese characters in general.
  • The couple of Korean-Korean dictionaries I have at hand just now concur in defining hanja as "중국어를 표기하는 중국 고유의 문자," which pretty strongly indicates that the word's scope is not restricted to Sino-Korean, and is in fact synonymous with Chinese character.

In sum, it seems like the distinction between hanja and (traditional) Chinese characters has been adopted by English speakers, but is (generally) not present in Korean. This makes a bit of sense, since a) there is nothing quite comparable to the kanji/hanzi distinction in Korean, and b) English speakers would never think of referring to non-Korean uses of the characters as "hanja." I think this makes a fairly strong case for considering that "hanja" does not constitute an independent topic outside of Sino-Korean. -- Visviva 05:29, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Like most everyone else here, I'm no linguist, and my Korean is still very shaky. Initially I was absolutely opposed to the merge, as hanja and sino-korean vocabulary are clearly distinct concepts. My biggest concern is that many articles link to hanja in the sense of the characters exclusively, and they have nothing to do with linguistics. Think about the reader who has no knowledge of East Asian languages, looking up topics like Hyundai or Kim Jong-Il. I also think there needs to be some expansion, on the subject of archaic uses of hanja - specifically, that before the promulgation of hangeul, hanja could be used to write native vocabulary in addition to sino-korean (much like Japanese kun'yomi). I do agree with some of the points above, though, namely that in a modern context, for the English-language reader, hanja is inextricably linked with sino-korean words. I'm still going to have to oppose; but if this merge does go through, at the least, the merged article should include a link at the very top of the article to Chinese character. AKADriver 16:24, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


Don't confuse language and script. 漢字 are characters, and used in many languages. Sino-Korean is 漢字語, Korean words built from 漢字. Koreans will use the word "漢字" to designate the characters used in any of the language that uses them. -- dda

  • Oppose & removing the "merge" tag - The Sino-Korean article forms a triplet, together with Sino-Vietnamese and Sino-Japanese, and is important for non-Korean people trying to learn the Korean language.--Endroit 19:29, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] On-line Hangul-Hanja automatic converter

I would like to ask if any one knows any available on-line Hangul-Hanja automatic converter.--Jusjih 17:02, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

Although a Hanja-Hangul converter could be easily implemented, I'm not sure the other way around would be so simple to create, depends on how good the AI would be to interpret common vocabulary and syntax in a sentence. (Allegedly, similar systems work quite well for Japanese.) 惑乱 分からん 01:22, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
Yahoo! Korea has an online encyclopedia/dictionary you can use to convert hangul to hanja, but it only works on words. Enter your query and click on "사전". --KJ 00:20, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Naver.com has something like that too (actually most Korean search engine (Daum, Paran) have one). --Kbarends 15:31, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Proportion?

If I pick up a newspaper in South Korea, what proportion of characters will be Hanja? How about in a normal novel, an academic journal or a code of law? Thanks, AxelBoldt 06:44, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Newspaper: depends on the newspaper. In the "tabloid press", as you might call it, the percentage is probably 1% or less; in whatever their equivalent of the WSJ is, could go as high as 50% (I'm really just guessing here -- I'm sure it would have been that high or higher 20-30 years ago, but not sure now). Normal novel: 0%. Academic journal/code of law: probably similar to the "WSJ"-type newspaper. I'm not in Korea, so I don't have access to these sorts of things to check out, but you can trust me about the normal novel and tabloid newspapers. --Rschmertz 06:26, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Non-Chinese hanja

In light of my recent revert, it'd be great if we could give a better idea of just how many (current use) Hanja were invented in Korea, and how many are imported from Japan. The recently added Hanja#Korean Hanja is a start, but perhaps the scope could be widened. --Rschmertz 06:18, 22 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Replacement by hangul

The last paragraph of the intro (IIRC) mentions when Hangul really began to replace Hanja. Then the rest of that paragraph is about its use (or non-use) in North Korea. What about South Korea? Kind of an unbalanced paragraph as it is. --Rschmertz 07:26, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Retention of labial codas in syllables with labial onsets

Hairwizard: why is my edit wrong? It is true that Korean retained labial codas in syllables with labial onsets. -- ran (talk) 20:15, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Where did you see it? I must check them. ㅂ is not the pronunciation of p

I'm using the Revised Romanization of Korean. Is there some reason why I should not use it? -- ran (talk) 20:20, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Here's how the labial codas work: in Classical Chinese, the 凡 rime, consisting of characters like 泛 凡 帆 範 犯 梵 法 乏, were pronounced with labial onsets and labial codas. These were lost in Chinese: even in the most conservative varieties like Cantonese and Minnan, the labial codas were changed to dental codas. But in Korean, the labial codas were kept. -- ran (talk) 20:23, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

I have copied the sentence from where you have mentioned.
Unlike McCune-Reischauer, aspirated consonants (ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, ㅊ) have no apostrophe: k, t, p, ch. Their unaspirated counterparts (ㄱ, ㄷ, ㅂ, ㅈ) are written with letters that are voiced in English: g, d, b, j.

Keep reading the same article:

However, all consonants that are pronounced as unreleased stops (which basically means all except ㄴ, ㄹ, ㅁ, ㅇ that are not followed by a vowel or semivowel) are written as k, t, p, with no regard to their morphophonemic value: 벽 → byeok, 밖 → bak, 부엌 → bueok (But: 벽에 → byeoge, 밖에 → bakke, 부엌에 → bueoke)

-- ran (talk) 20:26, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Do you have any more questions about my edits? -- ran (talk) 20:41, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

That is weird romanization. You have correctly edited. ^^

[edit] chinese characters

they are not only used in china, korea, and japan, but also in singapore, hk, taiwan.

[edit] Hanja=Han language in Turkish and Turkic languages

It fits perfectly since it is the writing system of Han Chinese. Could it be just coincidence, or does anyone know the connection?

Interesting, but the "ja" in Hanja comes from the Chinese character meaning "character" or "letter," not language. --Reuben 07:04, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Retention of labial codas for syllables with labial onsets

Regarding this quote:

In other aspects, the pronunciation of Hanja is more conservative than most 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 Chinese varieties today, except conservative southern varieties like Cantonese and Min.

Not sure about Min, but it's definitely not true for Cantonese. There are no Cantonese syllables which retain a labial initial consonant and a labial final consonant. There are 泵 and 乓 (read bam1), but I'm pretty confident neither of those had a labial initial + labial final in Middle Chinese. I double-checked CUHK's Cantonese pronunciation database [1] on initials b, m, p, w, and even f (a labiodental rather than a labial) to make sure; those two characters I mentioned are the only examples of this kind of pronunciation. Anyone know better for Min? cab 13:38, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

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