Hangul jamo issues - (OT) Usage of HAN in Korea

[Yangwoo Ko]

Soobok Lee wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 02, 2007 at 02:07:22PM -0500, John C Klensin wrote:
>> I have no way to know whether it is true, but it has been widely
>> reported that CJK characters have been completely eliminated
>> from the writing system for the Korean language in the North, so
>> we might assume it is possible to do without them. 
> 
> That effort was in the early 1950~60s only in north korea. The leaders
> in north korea once denounced CJK as "legacies of old feudal system",
> and even they once stopped teaching CJK  in schools.

Wrong. Use of "hangul only" was established as law since 1948 when South 
Korean government was founded. But, Han characters had been widely used 
because, you know, it is hard to change the legacy.

The most dramatic change has happened due to the wide deployment of 
computers in 1980s. Korean people found that it is very cumbersome to 
enter Han characters while hangul is very easy and quick to enter.

> 
> But,that changed.
> 
> Middle/highschool students began to learn CJK characters very hard.

This is somewhat different story. As far as I can tell, this new 
phenomenon is mostly due to the quick rise of China as a 
market/competitor of Korean economy.

> North Korean national charset has thousands of CJK characters now.
> 
> As many english words have latin origin, many hangul words have CJK
> origin. Those hangul words is just the pronuciation of CJK one.
> That is why CJK cannot be separated from hangul words completely.
> CJK is part of korean word and so language.

Learning roots is a good way to understand more about words. But, this 
does not imply that we should invite old root forms into our common life.

Regards