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Hanja were once used to write native Korean words, in a variety of systems collectively known as idu, but by the 20th century Koreans used hanja only for writing Sino-Korean words, while writing native vocabulary and loanwords from other languages in Hangul, a system known as mixed script. By the 21st century, even Sino-Korean words are usually ...
Sino-Korean vocabulary or Hanja-eo (Korean: 한자어; Hanja: 漢字 語) refers to Korean words of Chinese origin. Sino-Korean vocabulary includes words borrowed directly from Chinese, as well as new Korean words created from Chinese characters , and words borrowed from Sino-Japanese vocabulary .
In a typical hanja-honyong texts, traditionally all words that were of Sino-Korean origin, either composed from Chinese character compounds natively or loan words directly from Chinese, were written in hanja although particularly rare or complicated hanja were often disambiguated with the hangul pronunciation and perhaps a gloss of the meaning.
Each character of Hanja conveys more information than each letter of Hangul as there are still many more Hanja characters than Hangul letters. The fact that Hanja conveys more information than Hangul has ramifications in the semantic meaning of each character. The word "일", for example, is composed of three Hangul letters ㅇ, ㅣ, and ㄹ.
Idu (Korean: 이두; Hanja: 吏讀; lit. 'official's reading') is an archaic writing system that represents the Korean language using Chinese characters ("hanja"). The script, which was developed by Buddhist monks, made it possible to record Korean words through their equivalent meaning or sound in Chinese.
Since removal of Hanja would result in much ambiguity, it was proposed that Chinese words would be replaced by words of Korean origin (compare linguistic purism in Korean). The new alphabet, made by famous Koreanist Aleksandr Kholodovich , who would later make a system of transcribing Korean words into Russian, looked like this:
The term gugyeol (Hanja: 口訣) can be rendered as "phrase parting" and may refer to the separation of one Chinese phrase from another.This name is itself believed to originate from the use of hanja characters to represent the Middle Korean phrase ipgyeot (입겿), with a similar meaning.
Hunminjeongeum (Korean: 훈민정음; Hanja: 訓民正音; lit. 'The Correct/Proper Sounds for the Instruction of the People') is a 15th-century manuscript that introduced the Korean script Hangul.