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The dust settled on the South Korean election, and South Korea's new president, Yoon Seok-yue, was born. However, the Rice Bureau is very interested in one thing, that is, Chinese characters.
Yin Xiyue had 8 Chinese character banners appear at the back of his speech, that is, "If you must live, you will die, and if you die, you will live." He was also slapped on the palm of his hand many times to write a "king" word, and was questioned by netizens: Is the president the king? Is he still alive in the Joseon Dynasty? Write a spell in the palm of your hand, and then it's time to jump the big god?
This makes people wonder why Korea, which abolished Chinese characters for 52 years, still uses Chinese characters.
01 Koreans abolished the status of Chinese character use after independence
Everyone knows the dominance of English in the world, even in East Asia. In ancient times, however, Chinese characters and Chinese were also popular and dominant languages in the world. Chinese characters were influential in ancient Korea, Japan and Vietnam, Mongolia, and Central Asia.
Ancient Korea, like the Vietnamese region, was directly and indirectly ruled by the Central Plains civilization, so their Chinese character culture is also very long.
At the end of the Han Dynasty, Koreans began to use Chinese characters for education. During the Sixteen Kingdoms period, Chinese characters once again poured into the Korean Peninsula through Buddhist scriptures, and Chinese characters gradually became the common script of the Korean Peninsula. During the Tang Dynasty, the Korean Peninsula entered the era of unified Silla, and Chinese characters developed into the official script of the Korean Peninsula.
The Koreans, like ancient China, adopted the imperial examination system, and all of them used Chinese characters in correspondence and historical records. But after all, the language of Koreans is different from ours, so children have noble Chinese characters, and there are relatively few folk meetings.
During the Ming and Qing dynasties, most of the Korean intellectuals who traveled to and from China could only communicate with Chinese by writing, and the elite was still like this, let alone the common people. North Koreans have invented various methods of reading Chinese characters, such as oral skills, official reading, and township codes, but until now Koreans can only spell Chinese characters in the way they are accustomed to.
In order for commoners to learn Chinese characters, in 1443, King Sejong of Joseon promulgated the "Training of the People's Zhengyin", inventing proverbs to be used together with Chinese characters, but many of them still have traces of former officials reading characters. However, the promotion effect of hundreds of years is very bad, because for readers, "Training People's Zhengyin" is a cottage goods, far less noble than Chinese characters. Therefore, li Qi, a reader, also has an opinion. From this point of view, I have to say that the three views of the ancient Koreans are still relatively positive.
The Korean Peninsula's willingness to use proverbs was the role of Japan's aggression, and the Japanese forced Koreans to use Japanese with Chinese characters, which actually aroused the patriotic enthusiasm of the Korean nation and actively studied proverbs. After the establishment of the Independent State of Korea, it began to promote proverbs in large quantities.
Park Chung-hee and Park Geun-hye
In the 1970s, Park Chung-hee led South Korea's economic rise, and the growing national self-confidence prompted Koreans to want to abandon Chinese language education. Park Chung-hee wrote well, but he tended to abolish Chinese characters, and in 1970 he issued a declaration of abolition of Chinese characters. The chinese character education in general education was completely abolished.
Although South Korea today prohibits the use of Chinese characters in formal situations and has stopped teaching Chinese characters in primary and secondary schools (but since 2011, the Lee Myung-bak government in South Korea has decided to reintroduce Chinese characters into the curriculum of primary and secondary schools), but Chinese characters continue to be used in the folk and can be written according to personal habits, but fewer and fewer Koreans can write beautiful Chinese characters today.
The change of Seoul to Seoul by the Lee Myung-bak government is also a manifestation of de-Sinicization and de-Chinese characterization.
Friends who watch Korean film and television dramas know that chinese characters appear very rarely in Korean film and television dramas, which is the role of abolishing Chinese characters. But Koreans are still inseparable from Chinese characters.
02 Why Koreans can't do without Chinese characters
Due to the influence of Chinese culture in 2000, Koreans cannot actually completely eliminate the influence of Han culture.
Let's start with the cultural level:
For example, Korean history books are written entirely by literary and linguistic documents, and if you don't understand Chinese characters, you can't read Korean history books at all. For example, all the historical monuments in Korea, including the Seoul Royal Palace, are all Chinese character plaques and Chinese character stone tablets, which modern Korean young people can't understand at all, which has caused a division of history and culture.
From the perspective of life:
Nearly 60% of the Korean words are Kanji words, and it is difficult to use proverbs to understand the context of the text. In addition, abstract academic terms that do not use Chinese characters are very difficult to understand correctly. The proverb itself is designed to match the appearance of Chinese, so it is not as perfect as the expression of English and other languages, so there will be a lot of ambiguity in the proverb.
For example, 99% of Korean ID cards need to be marked with Chinese characters to explain clearly. Due to the large number of Kanji words used in Korean/Korean and the serious phenomenon of stress, Kanji is still used when rigorous expression is required. Although personal names, company names, etc. are usually written in Korean, most personal names and company names have their corresponding Kanji names. The absence of Chinese characters in the commercial and administrative fields will cause a lot of trouble.
In fact, South Korea did not completely abolish Chinese characters, as North Korea and Vietnam did, but adopted a policy of parallel Han-Han. Before the 1970s, except for the vocabulary and auxiliary words inherent in the Han Chinese, the rest of the Chinese characters were directly represented by square characters. Because when the Xunmin Zhengyin was created in those years, it was stipulated that a Korean character corresponded to multiple Chinese characters (syllables as units), so the literature and art expressed in the Korean alphabet had a homophonic disagreement.
The life of words is chaotic. Later, the use of Chinese characters was gradually restored, and the Chinese character ability test was added, and it was stipulated that middle and high school students must master as many Chinese characters as possible.
So in the late 1990s, a generation of people who were completely illiterate of Chinese characters had just formed, and in their own personal experience and a series of satires, the call for the resurrection of Chinese characters was getting higher and higher.
After the 1990s, as China increasingly became South Korea's largest trading partner, South Korea had to re-emphasize the role of Chinese characters. Because, even if they look at the face of the renminbi, they are not willing to ignore it.
In 1998, then-South Korean President Kim Dae-jung issued a declaration on the resurrection of Chinese characters. This time, under the direction of the president, the road signs and the station (the KNK National Railways began to mark the station name in Kanji) and the Kanji of the bus station were memorized. Now on the streets of Seoul, Chinese characters are already common. Similarly, most scenic spots in China are pasted with the word Korean. This is the role of economic and cultural exchange.
On the other hand, there are also Koreans who affirm the international competitiveness brought about by Chinese character education. If you can write Chinese characters, you can communicate with the mainland, Taiwan Province, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore. To throw away the Common East Asian script, the Chinese character, is tantamount to reducing international competitiveness.
Historically, the Korean Peninsula has used Chinese characters, and culturally they have not been able to separate their close relationship with Chinese culture. The abolition of Chinese characters amounts to a denial of history. At this point, the Attitude of the South Koreans is not as resolute as that of North Korea, and it has decided that the abolition of Chinese characters is a farce after all.
With the increasing prosperity of China, I believe that one day, whether it is the Korean Peninsula or Vietnam and other regions, Chinese characters will return to their former positions again.
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