Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

Schnfrfesestschriji: &says in Honor of John &Francis
misconstruing one mrd for another is nearly zero. Hangul, on the other
hand, identifies sounds, Because of the many homonyms and near-homonyms
in the Sinitic vocabulary, hangul texts are said to be inherently ambiguous
since there are instances when the reader does not know which word is
intended.
There is some truth to this argument, especially as it concems texts
written in the mixed hangul-character script and translated directly,
syllable for syllable, into all-hangul. However, such texts were written.
originally with the understanding that the characters' own redundancy would
canpemate for the text's "terseness". Materials written as hangul texts,
by contrast, take the need for more serial redundancy ins account, and
expand overall context so that homonyms can be readily distinguished, as
in English and other languages (5, 1974b:218).
The problem with this remedy is that Chinese characters have let too
many words into the language that never had to stand on their own
phonetically. While context will disambiguate many of them, the problem
is so acute that no tricks effected outside the word boundary will allow
some mrds to be identified in hangul. But do such words qualify as Korean?
HG claims they do not (1 974a: 1 04), adding that for all-hangul to succeed,
writers must give up their habit of using (or making up) obscure expressions
that are not really words, and are intelligible only in characters. Put
another way, if hangul had to be used, these ambiguities in time would
be eliminated, whereas Chinese characters only perpetuate the problem
(Ch'oe, 1946:65). In the interim, Chloe suggests (1) using indigemus
Korean substitutes where they can be found, (2) agreeing that in certain
environments a sound will always depict only one of sever* possible, or
(3) dcing changes to the shape of the word itself (1970~47).
aloe sees the homonym "problem" as a reflex of a broader social
problem, namely, Korean worship of foreign culture. Had it not been for
Koreans ' sonry habit of revering China and slighting everything indigenous,
there would have been no massive influx of Sinitic loanwords, and no problem
with phonetic indistinctiveness (1946:44; 1970:193). Instead, Koreans
could have maximized use of their own rich stock of morphemes, which have
mre phonetic shapes and unlike Qlinese can be polysyllabic. At minimum,
there would be a better balance between the indigenous part, and Sinitic
part of the lexicon which accounts for 75% of present-day Korean. HE goes
even f w to claim that this "unnatural" phenomenon hinders the
development of Korean thought (1974b:124).
Advocates of all-hangul writing do not reject all Sinitic words, only
those which, when spoken or written in hangul, cannot be understood given
a reasonable amount of context (Chloe, 1970:104). Sinitic morphemes will
continue to be used to form new words. But without characters, the results
will have to be intelligible phonetically, Pbreover, since the distinction
between Sinitic and indigenous roots is less visible in hangul, Koreans
will lose their reluctance to coin new terms from the native stock (HG,
1971 :26). Pure Korean not only sports a host of "compound words". There
are also thousands of "derivative words" formed by adding prefixes and