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

Sim-Platonic Papers, 27 (August 3 1,199 1)
suffixes to a morpheme's root, The two processes furnish Korean with emugh
"word-building power" (chot$k)
(g, 1974a: 52).
to satisfy most of the language's needs
C
If pure-Korean roots have more potential than they are usually credited
with, Sinitic morphemes have a good deal less. True, they readily combine
with other Sinitic roots because they are monosyllabic, and identifiable
through the characters. But these canbinations are not necessarily words,
if intelligibility in speech is a criterion. Nor is it fair to say that
because the meaning of a combination can be plausibly reconstructed from
the manings of its individual mrphmes (depicted through Chinese
characters), the canbination itself has currency as a word. In Ch'oe's
view, this whole l@e of reasoning is nonsense. Sinitic dinations do
nut always refer to the logical sum of their constituent morphemes--whatever
that is. Rather, their meaning is established by conventim, and it matters
little how that convention was arrived at (1970:40).
This applies to forming new mrds. What about learning them? .Here
again, the notion that Wnese characters allow one $0 identify the meaning
of a whole through its parts is largely illusory. ' In fact, what hints
the characters do give can be misleading. Worse still, they can interfere
with learning, since one is ccmpelled by one's knowledge of the characters
to supply a -lqical connection -between -the whole and parts, which may not
exist (Ch'oe, 1970:73), Even where valid connections do exist, what
relevance do they have for a synchronic user? Words, according to Chloe,
are used for what they man today (1970:31). Drcept for a few specialists,
no one thinks about a word's etymology when using it, which is probably
good, since this information would just clutter our thought processes,
Reading is another area where the characters enjoy an undeserved
reputation for an ability to evoke concepts directly without sound, which
mrds written in hangul supposedly lack. If this claim is based on the
similarity of symbol to referent, however, it is absurd, because characters
have undergone numerous changes in shape and meaning. The original
connections we, in any case, often far-fetched, What supporters of
Chinese characters really mean is that the meanings of characters are
obvious (directly accessible) only after repeated use. But this is also
true of words in hangul, which likewise have fixed shapes, and fixed
meanings that users learn to access directly (Ch'oe, 1970:54; HE, 1974a:54).
Assume, however, that the characters, lacking reliable clues to
pronunciation, are more likely to be processed directly without recourse
to sound, while hangul lends itself to gecoding simply because so much
phonetic information is patently available. Then by mixing the tm systems
together, the reader is forced to shift back and forth from one mde of
processing to the other, causing difficulty and confusion (Ch'oe, 1970:175).
Both Chloe and HE concede that reading all-hangul texts can be difficult
for those who have spent their lives using Chinese characters, This is
to be expected. Reading the mixed hangul-character script, one becomes
habituated to lexical and stylistic conventions that differ from what is
needed for all-hangul, It is inadmissible therefore for the older