Hanja
Hanja, alternatively spelled Hancha, are Chinese characters used to write the Korean language. After characters were introduced to Korea to write Literary Chinese, they were adapted to write Korean as early as the Gojoseon period.
refers to Sino-Korean vocabulary, which can be written with Hanja, and refers to Classical Chinese writing, although Hanja is also sometimes used to encompass both concepts. Because Hanja characters have never undergone any major reforms, they more closely resemble traditional Chinese and traditional Japanese characters, although the stroke orders for certain characters are slightly different. Such examples are the characters and, as well as and. Only a small number of Hanja characters were modified or are unique to Korean, with the rest being identical to the traditional Chinese characters. By contrast, many of the Chinese characters currently in use in mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore have been simplified, and contain fewer strokes than the corresponding Hanja characters.
Until the contemporary period, Korean documents, history, literature and records were written primarily in Literary Chinese using Hanja as its primary script. As early as 1446, King Sejong the Great promulgated Hangul through the Hunminjeongeum. It did not come into widespread official use until the late 19th and early 20th century. Proficiency in Chinese characters is, therefore, necessary to study Korean history. Etymology of Sino-Korean words is reflected in Hanja.
Hanja were once used to write native Korean words, in a variety of systems collectively known as idu, but, by the 20th century, Koreans used hanja only for writing Sino-Korean words, while writing native vocabulary and loanwords from other languages in Hangul, a system known as mixed script. By the 21st century, even Sino-Korean words are usually written in the Hangul alphabet, with the corresponding Chinese character sometimes written next to it to prevent confusion if there are other characters or words with the same Hangul spelling. According to the Standard Korean Language Dictionary published by the National Institute of Korean Language, approximately half of Korean words are Sino-Korean, mostly in academic fields. Other dictionaries, such as the Urimal Keun Sajeon, claim this number might be as low as roughly 30%.
History
Introduction of literary Chinese to Korea
There is traditionally no accepted date for when literary Chinese written in Chinese characters entered Korea. Early Chinese dynastic histories, the only sources for very early Korea, do not mention a Korean writing system. During the 3rd century BC, Chinese migrations into the peninsula occurred due to war in northern China and the earliest archaeological evidence of Chinese writing appearing in Korea is dated to this period. A large number of inscribed knife money from pre-Lelang sites along the Yalu River have been found. A sword dated to 222 BC with Chinese engraving was unearthed in Pyongyang.From 108 BC to 313 AD, the Han dynasty established the Four Commanderies of Han in northern Korea and institutionalized the Chinese language. According to the Samguk sagi, Goguryeo had ' from the beginning of its existence, which starts in 37 BC. It also says that the king of Goguryeo composed a poem in 17 BC. The Gwanggaeto Stele, dated to 414, is the earliest securely dated relic bearing ' inscriptions. ' became commonplace in Goguryeo during the 5th and 6th centuries and according to the Book of Zhou, the Chinese classics were available in Goguryeo by the end of the 6th century. The Samguk sagi mentions written records in Baekje beginning in 375 and Goguryeo annals prior to 600. Japanese chronicles mention Baekje people as teachers of '. According to the Book of Liang, the people of Silla did not have writing in the first half of the 6th century but this may have been only referring to agreements and contracts, represented by notches on wood. The Bei Shi, covering the period 386–618, says that the writing, armour, and weapons in Silla were the same as those in China. The Samguk sagi says that records were kept in Silla starting in 545.
Some western writers claimed that knowledge of Chinese entered Korea with the spread of Buddhism, which occurred around the 4th century. Traditionally Buddhism is believed to have been introduced to Goguryeo in 372, Baekje in 384, and Silla in 527.
Another major factor in the adoption of ' was the adoption of the, copied from the Chinese imperial examination, open to all freeborn men. Special schools were set up for the well-to-do and the nobility across Korea to train new scholar officials for civil service. Adopted by Silla and Goryeo, the ' system was maintained by Goryeo until after the unification of Korea at the end of the nineteenth century. The scholarly elite began learning the hanja by memorizing the Thousand Character Classic, Three Character Classic and Hundred Family Surnames. Passage of the ' required the thorough ability to read, interpret and compose passages of works such as the Analects, Great Learning, Doctrine of the Mean, Mencius, Classic of Poetry, Book of Documents, Classic of Changes, Spring and Autumn Annals and Book of Rites. Other important works include the Art of War, Selections of Refined Literature, etc.
The Korean scholars were very proficient in literary Chinese. The craftsmen and scholars of Baekje were renowned in Japan, and were eagerly sought as teachers due to their proficiency in '. Korean scholars also composed all diplomatic records, government records, scientific writings, religious literature and much poetry in , demonstrating that the Korean scholars were not just reading Chinese works but were actively composing their own. Well-known examples of Chinese-language literature in Korea include Samguk sagi, Samguk yusa, Kŭmo sinhwa, The Cloud Dream of the Nine, Akhak gwebeom, Hong Gildong jeon and Domundaejak.
Adaptation of ''hanja'' to Korean
The Chinese language, however, was quite different from the Korean language, consisting of terse, often monosyllabic words with a strictly analytic, SVO structure in stark contrast to the generally polysyllabic, very synthetic, SOV structure, with various grammatical endings that encoded person, levels of politeness and case found in Korean. Despite the adoption of literary Chinese as the written language, Chinese never replaced Korean as the spoken language, even amongst the scholars who had immersed themselves in its study.The first attempts to make literary Chinese texts more accessible to Korean readers were ' passages written in Korean word order. This would later develop into the gugyeol or 'separated phrases,' system. Chinese texts were broken into meaningful blocks, and in the spaces were inserted hanja used to represent the sound of native Korean grammatical endings. As literary Chinese was very terse, leaving much to be understood from context, the insertion of occasional verbs and grammatical markers helped to clarify the meaning. 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 , 'to do.' In Chinese, however, the same characters are read in Mandarin as the expression, meaning 'becoming a nun'. This is a typical example of Gugyeol words where the radical is read in Korean for its meaning, whereas the suffix , , is used phonetically. Special symbols were sometimes used to aid in the reordering of words in an approximation of Korean grammar. It was similar to the kanbun system developed in Japan to render Chinese texts. The system was not a translation of Chinese into Korean, but an attempt to make Korean speakers knowledgeable in hanja to overcome the difficulties in interpreting Chinese texts. Although it was developed by scholars of the early Goryeo Kingdom, was of particular importance during the Joseon period, extending into the first decade of the twentieth century, since all civil servants were required to be able to read, translate and interpret Confucian texts and commentaries.
The first attempt at transcribing Korean in hanja was the idu, or 'official reading,' system that began to appear after 500 AD. In this system, the hanja were chosen for their equivalent native Korean gloss. For example, the hanja '不冬' signifies 'no winter' or 'not winter' and has the formal Sino-Korean pronunciation of '부동', similar to Mandarin. Instead, it was read as '안들' which is the Middle Korean pronunciation of the characters' native gloss and is the ancestor to modern '않는다', 'do not' or 'does not.' The various conventions were developed in the Goryeo period but were particularly associated with the jung-in, the upper middle class of the early Joseon period.
A subset of ' was known as hyangchal, 'village notes,' and was a form of ' particularly associated with the hyangga the old poetry compilations and some new creations preserved in the first half of the Goryeo period when its popularity began to wane. In the or 'village letters' system, there was free choice in how a particular hanja was used. For example, to indicate the topic of Princess Seonhwa, a daughter of King Jinpyeong of Silla was recorded as '善化公主主隱' in ' and was read as, seonhwa gongju-nim-eun where '善化公主' is read in Sino-Korean, as it is a Sino-Korean name and the Sino-Korean term for 'princess' was already adopted as a loan word. The hanja '主隱,' however, was read according to their native pronunciation but was not used for its literal meaning signifying 'the prince steals' but to the native postpositions '님', the honorific marker used after professions and titles, and '은', the topic marker. In mixed script, this would be rendered as '善化公主님은'.
Hanja was the sole means of writing Korean until King Sejong the Great invented and tried to promote Hangul in the 15th century. Even after the invention of Hangul, however, most Korean scholars continued to write in ', although Hangul did see considerable popular use. ' and its ' variant were mostly replaced by mixed-script writing with hangul although ' was not officially discontinued until 1894 when reforms abolished its usage in administrative records of civil servants. Even with , most literature and official records were still recorded in literary Chinese until 1910.