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

SchnJtJstschriifi: fisay in Honor of John &Francis
of written cation. However, for reasons as much social as
linguistic, this brief experiment with all-phonetic writing was supplanted
by the government I s sanction of another. hybrid system that had since come
into use, which ccmbined hangul and Chinese characters in the same text.
Known 'as "mixed hangul-hanja (Chinese character) " writing, it is one of
two styles endorsed by the South Korean government today, and the sine
qua non for higher education. It is typically used for documents of
stricter content, including most scientific and academic works where the
proportion of Sinitic loanwords is high. The other style, of course, is
all-hangul, used in novels, popular magazines, the local pages of newspapers
and most informal types of writing. In North Korea, it is the only style
used.
A mitical difference between the mixed hangul-character script, the
old Idu convention, and Japan's kana--character script is that the last
two systems can use Chinese characters for indigenous vocabulary, while
Korea's present system does not. Chinese characters when used in Korean
today represent Sinitic words only, Moreover, there is no formal
requirement that these words be in characters, even when using the mixed
script, Korean writers can and often do just spell the Sinitic mrd out
in hangul, Amther important difference is that unlike Idu (and modem
Chinese), characters are never used for their sound value alone, e.g.,
in onomatopoeia and transliterations. The Korean mixed script employs
a strict division of labor: if the word is Sinitic in origin, it may be
written in characters. Everything else must be in hangul,
One result of restricting Chinese characters to Clhinese loanwords is
that Koreans, as a rule, do not consider the characters their own. Another
is that the Sinitic words themselves can becoane targets for replac-t
by indigenous words, real or contrived, in the language purification
campaigns that periodically surface, Chinese has no tried and universally
accepted alternative to its character writing system to which its users
feel emotionally attached. For better or - worse, they. are stuck with the
characters at present. Japanese, for its part, thomghly assimilated
the characters by virtue of assigning kun readings. Despite the complexity
of these associations, the characters are so entrenched in Japanese language
and culture that -st no me predicts their impending demise. Koreans,
however, have no such feelings about the characters, and can hardly be
said to lack a suitable replacement. Why then are they still used, and
are the justifications for their use valid?
If utility and tradition are two grounds for the use of a writing
system, then in the former case at least there are some fairly obvious
reasons why Koreans would want to abandon characters, Unlike hangul whose
24 letters designate a finite set of sounds, mese characters represent
morphemes, the building blocks of words, Hence they number in the
thousands, So that each unit can be distinguished from others, they are
also quite complex, containing twelve strokes on average. Because there
are no predictable relationships between what the characters look like,