Asia's Orthographic Dilemma

3. Korean

48 3. Korean On the continuum from full use of Chinese characters to no use, Korean occupies an intermediate position. It can optionally be expressed in a mixed character-phonetic script, as is done for some types of writing in the South. Or the language can be written in a phonetic alphabet entirely, which is the practice for most nontechnical works in South Korea and for all writing in the North. Unlike the Japanese, who also use a mixed character-phonetic script, Koreans, when they want to at all, use Chinese characters only to represent Sinitic vocabulary; indigenous words must be written in the hangul alphabet. Korean thus has moved further away from characters and closer to full phonetic writing than Japanese, which uses characters for both borrowed and native vocabulary, and when the convention calls for it, does so obligatorily. Although Koreans in the South and the North still rely to some degree on a latent knowledge of Chinese characters to distinguish the language’s many Sinitic terms, most Koreans feel no attachment to the characters and would just as soon be rid of them entirely. I begin the present chapter by describing the linguistic factors that enabled Korean to break the association with characters more completely than Japanese, despite the fact that the two languages historically had similar conventions for character use. I will then explain the cultural dynamics that shaped Koreans’ attitudes toward writing reform and gave the movement its unique focus. Finally, I will delineate and compare the steps taken in the two Koreas to eliminate Chinese characters in favor of all-phonetic writing. Thanks to the efforts of linguists in both parts of the country, Korean is well on its way to becoming East Asia’s second major language, after Vietnamese, to free itself from the Sinitic paradigm. Relationship of Chinese Characters to Korean Korean language and writing are finally getting the attention they deserve. I recall in 1979 looking at a world map at an institute for Korean studies outside Seoul. The institute, which was tasked with promoting worldwide inter- Korean 49 est in Korean culture, had put pins on the map to mark places outside Korea where the Korean language was being taught. I did not embarrass my hosts by counting them, but it wouldn’t have taken long. Our interpretations, in any case, were quite different: the Koreans running the institute were clearly proud that non-Koreans were learning the language, while I was mildly appalled that the numbers were so few. This gap between the number of people who were studying Korean and the number who, by every statistical measure, should have been studying it presented a unique career opportunity for me and real incentive to work at learning the language. My expectations have not been disappointed. Korean language programs have proliferated in the United States in the past few years, encouraged by Republic of Korea government funding, community support, the availability of first-rate teaching materials and, most important, South Korea’s own economic success. Korean ranks among the world’s ten most common languages, and is worth learning for that reason alone. Other people are attracted to the language for its value in linguistic studies. Like Japanese , Korean borrowed most of its so-called learned vocabulary from Chinese, giving it a superficial similarity to Chinese that is reinforced—in the South—by the use of Chinese characters in technical works, university textbooks, and other types of nonfiction writing. But Korean has no genetic affiliation with Chinese. It is, like Japanese and Mongolian, an “Altaic” language, with typological features characteristic of that hypothetical family , including subject-object-verb word order, agglutinative morphological affixes, postpositions, and a core vocabulary of indigenous morphemes of varying syllable length. Although its genetic relationship to Japanese remains uncertain, the two languages are so similar structurally that a sentence translated from one of the languages to the other often can be superimposed on the original without disrupting the morpheme sequence. Phonologically, however, the similarities between Korean and Japanese disappear almost entirely. The latter has a restricted inventory of about one hundred different syllables of the vowel (V) or consonant-vowel (CV) type,1 enriched by a few morphophonemic sound changes that operate between some syllables within a word. Korean has many times that number of syllables, with V, VC, VCC, CV, CVC, and CVCC configurations , and a complex system of cross-syllable sound change rules. Although only a part of the Korean syllable inventory is available...