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From: deb5@kimbark.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese and Chinese literacy
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Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 07:40:21 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu sci.lang:51198 sci.lang.japan:32892

In article <4h4sd5$n1c@keknews.kek.jp>, Ben Bullock <ben@theory4.kek.jp> wrote:
>Blaine Erickson (erickson@Hawaii.Edu) wrote:
>
>>   In North Korea and Vietnam, however, Chinese characters have been
>> eliminated from use, and in Vietnam, at least, literacy rates are
>> much higher now than they were when characters were in use.  I
>> suspect the same for North Korea, but who can get reliable
>> information out of The Hermit Kingdom?
>
>In fact south Korea also has more or less discarded the use of Chinese
>characters.  These characters never actually penetrated the Korean
>language in the way that they did the Japanese one.  In fact Korean
>did not have any writing system at all until the 14th century or so,
>and the Koreans would simply write in Chinese, using Chinese grammar.
>Since this is basically equivalent to writing in a very complicated
>foreign language, of course the literacy rate was tiny.

	This is misleading.  The earliest extant Korean texts are the 
so-called Hyangga or "native songs" from the Silla period.  They are
written in a script called "Idu" which consists of Chinese characters
used strictly for their phonetic value.  A simplified version of this
was later used to annotate Chinese texts, much in the way that kana
were originally used in Japanese.

	However, the Koreans did not follow the same path as the
Japanese and develop a commonly-used syllabary.  Instead, in the latter
half of the 16th century, a team of scholars under King Sejong created
an alphabet basically from scratch.  Like hiragana, han'gul was also
disparagingly called "women's characters" (one of the names for it 
was amk'ul or "female [i.e. impractical, useless] learning" and little 
used until after the fall of the monarchy.  The name "han'gul", in fact, 
is an early 20th century neologism.

>In Korea, after Hangul (a phonetic script which is actually based
>around pictographs of the tongue and mouth's movement) was invented,
>the Korean people became able for the first time to write their own
>language in their own script.  Chinese characters are still used
>somewhat in South Korea, mostly for writing newspapers, but their use
>in most areas is very limited and in some fields, such as for writing
>school textbooks, it is banned.  Note that anyway they are only used
>for writing Chinese and Japanese loan words, and they only have one
>pronunciation for each character.

	They are ubiquitous in newspapers, especially in headlines,
and are still heavily used in some fields, notablly history.  It is
also not strictly true that each character has only one reading; as 
is the case with Hanzi, many have two readings and a tiny fraction
have more.  Also, morphophonological processes can produce striking
contrasts between the readings of compounds and those of characters
in isolation.  For example, <tok> and <lip> together become tongnip 
"independence", but <lip> and <lon> yield imnon "argument".  (Similar
processes operate in Japanese, but with less regularity.)




-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
