A fair number of Westerners know that the Japanese writing system was influenced by written Chinese, but perhaps fewer realize that Chinese characters, what the Japanese call kanji, have had considerable impact elsewhere in Asia. The cultures of both Korea and Vietnam, like Japan, were greatly influenced by traditional Chinese civilization. The cultural impact included the Chinese language, even though Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese do not belong to the same language family as Chinese.
Throughout much of traditional East Asia, the educated classes could read and write classical Chinese, much as the elite of medieval Europe were conversant with Latin. Written Chinese reached Japan via Korea, but it seems to have arrived in Vietnam directly from China. The three languages apparently had no indigenous script, save possibly for some obscure petroglyphs.
Vietnam eventually adopted written Chinese and used it until the early twentieth century when Catholic missionaries developed a new script, called quoc ngu, based on the Latin alphabet. To this day, however, the Chinese influence is evident through the numerous loan words still used in the Vietnamese vernacular. These words are now written out phonetically using the Vietnamese alphabet. The country's name, "Vietnam," is a case in point. It means" [area] south of Yueh [a feudal state in southern China]" and derives from two Chinese characters pronounced in modern Mandarin as Yueh-nan.
The Japanese experimented over a long period of time with trying to represent Japanese phonetically by the use of Chinese characters. Finally, in the ninth century, the experimenters produced hiragana and katakana, two syllabaries comprised of a number of radically simplified Chinese characters. The first is used primarily for inflectional endings and certain native Japanese words. The latter was developed to handle Buddhist terms of Sanskritic origin, but it is now used to enable numerous English loan words to enter the Japanese language.
The Koreans took a third route. Korean, like Japanese, has highly disputed origins and is impossible to place in any other language family. It appears to have existed for several centuries before written Chinese was introduced sometime before A.D.18. It is said that a poem was written in Chinese by a Korean king who died in that year. When the Koreans, much like the Vietnamese, first adopted classical Chinese, it meant that educated Koreans spoke one language and wrote another.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of Korean mastery of written Chinese is the set of 81,258 woodblocks used to print the version of the Mahayana Buddhist Canon known as the Tripitaka Koreana or Palman Daejangkyong. The blocks, which also include some sections in Sanskrit and Chinese, were originally produced on Kanghwa Island (northwest of Inchon in the Yellow Sea) in the eleventh century in what legend says was an attempt to invoke the protection of the Buddha against foreign invaders. Ironically, the Mongols burnt the blocks when they invaded the country in the thirteenth century. A few years later another set of the same type was commissioned and can still be found today in "The Temple of the Reflection on a Smooth Sea" or Haeinsa. It is said that after nine years of preparatory work, the blocks took sixteen more years to carve and were all produced by a single man. A work of 6,791 volumes can be printed with the set of blocks.
For a number of reasons, Korean pronunciation of Chinese words is much closer to the Chinese sound than is the case with Japanese. For instance the character (東) meaning "east" is pronounced virtually the same in modern Korean and modern Mandarin (i.e., dong), while in Japanese it is pronounced either to or higashi, depending upon the context. Furthermore, in standard Korean there is normally only one monosyllabic reading per Chinese character, whereas in Japanese, a Chinese character can have two or more readings. Many of the multiple readings in Japanese stem from ancient attempts to represent native Japanese words with Chinese characters.
Although the Confucian literati of Korea were quite content with written Chinese, some Koreans longed for something else to satisfy their nationalistic feelings and their desire for a simpler system. The earliest known attempt to find an alternative resulted in the idu (吏讀) script or "clerk writing." Its purpose was to represent the sound and not the meaning of Chinese characters, but the system never really caught on and fell into disuse. The same fate befell another early Korean writing system called Kukyol (口訣).
Several centuries later, the famed monarch of the Yi Dynasty, King Sejong (r.1418-50), commissioned a group of scholars to devise a new writing system. The task took about three years, and the result was tested for another three years before it was officially approved. At first it was dubbed Humin Chongum or "The Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People." The name was soon changed to Hangul, a shorter term of purer Korean origins. In its current form, Hangul has a total of 37 letters compared to the 26 Roman letters used in English.
The new script was not an overnight success. Many members of Korea's scholar-gentry, whose power rested to some extent on Confucian learning, were adamantly opposed to the alphabet. They warned that relations with the Chinese Ming dynasty (1368-1662) would be harmed. And besides, only "barbarians" like Tibetans would use such a vulgar method of writing. This reaction was reinforced by the fact that Korean has a large number of homophones, and the use of a phonetic system like Hangul can cause considerable confusion. As a result, Hangul never completely replaced written Chinese. Although a number of books were written in Hangul during the Yi Dynasty, the alphabet gained more general acceptance when Christian missionaries began to publish religious tracts and bring the Western educational system to Korea around the turn of the twentieth century.
During the final years of the nation's tragic Japanese colonial period (1910-45), the spoken Korean language along with Hangul was suppressed. In reaction to this, after World War II the young republic in the southern part of the Korean peninsula declared that October 9th would be observed as "Hangul Day." South Korea may well be the only country in the world which has a holiday for an alphabet.
Despite the immense fondness many Koreans feel for their alphabet, modern Korean usage often mixes Chinese characters with Hangul. There are a number of reasons for this practice. One of them is the homophone problem. If writers think their readers will not understand certain Sino-Korean expressions in texts written solely in Hangul, they will add the relevant Chinese characters. But there is a distinct lack of agreement as to what is and is not clear in many cases. This is quite different from Japanese usage, where Chinese characters are much more a basic ingredient of the written text.
In South Korea, writers, scholars, and lawyers are probably the most frequent users of Chinese characters, followed by journalists. But some South Korean newspapers avoid the use of Chinese characters altogether. Poets and novelists also tend to use only Hangul.
Another practical reason for continuing to use Chinese characters is that they allow for cross-cultural communication. For example, the so-called "E-D Card," issued by Korean immigration officials to visitors entering the country, is written in two languages: English and in a special style of Korean which maximizes the use of Chinese characters. This is done so that tourists from Japan, Taiwan, and elsewhere can easily fill out the card by themselves. The number of characters used in such a situation can be quite large since an estimated 60 percent of the Korean vocabulary comes from Chinese. As South Korea increases its contacts with other Asian nations, more instances of this use of Chinese characters may well occur.
Because of the Chinese elements in their language, Koreans are able to learn Chinese and Japanese more quickly than other foreigners. Japanese is especially easy for Koreans and is the most widely studied foreign language after English. As a final practical reason, it should be noted that Chinese, like German, can readily generate new words to accommodate evolving technology, making it possible to limit the adoption of foreign loan words. Pure Korean is not very strong in this respect.
There are also more sentimental reasons for using Sino-Korean characters. For instance, Korean family and given names operate along much the same lines as their Chinese counterparts. Family names are composed of a single Chinese character and most given names are made up of two characters. The most popular family names in Korea are Kim (金), Lee (李, also pronounced Rhee or Yi), and Park (朴).
Likewise virtually all Korean place names are Sino-Korean instead of pure Korean. Pusan (釜) and Taegu (大邱) are but two examples. Seoul is always written in Hangul and is an old Korean word meaning "capital," yet some scholars maintain that the name derives from the ancient Indian place name Sravasti and was brought to Korea via Buddhism.
Finally, Korea's spiritual heritage has many traditional links with China. Buddhism and Confucianism have had centuries of influence on Korean thinking and behavior. Taoism's influence, while not as great, can be seen on South Korea's flag, which prominently features a symbol of the Taeguk or Great Absolute (太極). The flag also has diagrams from the Chinese classical text, the Book of Changes (易經). And despite the pro-Hangul views of many Christians, the earliest Bibles in Korea were Chinese translations. As a result, numerous theological terms are still expressed in Sino-Korean.
Ever since the days of King Sejong, there has been considerable debate as to the proper role of Chinese characters in relationship to Hangul. The communist regime of North Korea completely eliminated the use of Chinese characters a number of years ago. Whether inadvertently or by design, the move has served to cut North Koreans off from their own past as well as from communication with the outside world via Chinese characters. In addition, some Chinese loan words, even in their Hangul form, have been eliminated in favor of artificial "Korean" terms.
In 1970, the Ministry of Education in South Korea tried to phase out the use of Chinese characters in middle and high school textbooks. But in 1972, the ministry did a policy about-face and attempted to settle the issue by directing that 1,800 frequently-used characters, the so-called Sangyong Hanja (常用漢字) be taught nationwide. Teachers were also allowed to add up to about 200 more Chinese characters if they wished.
This action may have influenced the Japanese Ministry of Education, which roughly five years later came up with a similar list of 1,900 frequently-used characters, or joyo Kanji (also 常用漢字). Forty-five more characters were added in 1981.
The near future will probably see the language status quo continue in Korea. The Sangyong Hanja appear to have been a good compromise. A possible change could be the increased simplification of Chinese characters. Currently, whenever Koreans use Chinese characters, they generally use their traditional full form. There are some exceptions such as the frequent use of the eight-stroke version instead of the eleven-stroke version of the Sino-Korean for "nation," guk (国versus 國). But certain simplifications are never used, such as the abbreviated character for "horse." Koreans use the full form (馬) instead of the corresponding three-stroke form (馬). The word is pronounced ma in Mandarin and mal in Korean.
In fact, the position of Sino-Korean characters might actually be improved now that the average Korean is legally able to go abroad as a tourist. As more Koreans travel around Asia, they will be reminded of the value of being able to read Chinese characters.—Damien P. Horigan, a native of Honolulu, is a freelance writer and has been working in Seoul since 1986.