Languages Korean language Direction Left-to-right | Time period 1443 to the present ISO 15924 Kore, 287 | |
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Type Alternative – utilizes both logographic (hanja) and alphabetic (Hangul) characters | ||
Korean mixed script is a form of writing that uses both Hangul (an alphabetical script) and hanja (logo-syllabic characters).
Contents
The script has never been used for languages other than Korean. In North Korea, writing in mixed script was replaced by writing only in Hangul in the middle of the 20th century and has not been used since. In South Korea, the use of mixed script has slowly declined.
The script uses hanja to write Sino-Korean vocabulary, but never to write native Korean vocabulary.
History
From the 15th to the 20th century, the Korean mixed script usually used hanja whenever possible (that is, for all Sino-Korean words), and Hangul to write only grammatical suffixes and native Korean words.
Using Hangul to write Sino-Korean words became common in the 20th century. Up to the 1970s, many books and newspapers were written in mixed Hangul and hanja characters. However, as part of de-Sinicization efforts, then-president Park Chung-hee banned the use of hanja in elementary schools in the 1970s, and restricted their use in middle schools and high schools to special optional classes outside the main Korean language curriculum. Since then, the overwhelming majority of print publications are written in Hangul only. Modern texts – whether or not they contain a significant amount of native Korean vocabulary – rarely use hanja for all, or even most, of the Sino-Korean words in the text. Today, this development has reached the point at which most Korean texts are written in a form that can no longer be called mixed script, as hanja are either not used at all, or used very sparsely to disambiguate or to show the meaning of rare or newly coined words (Hanja disambiguation). Furthermore, the way in which hanja are used has changed: perhaps owing to a decline in hanja literacy, it has become common to provide both a term's hanja and Hangul at that term's first occurrence in a text – instead of writing it only in hanja as is done in traditional mixed script.
Hanja still appear in many newspapers' headlines, where they serve to both disambiguate and abbreviate, and to a lesser degree in some newspapers' texts, but not in magazines. They can also sometimes be found in academic literature. Mixed script making use of hanja wherever possible is still used for judicial texts such as the constitution (see example below).
Visual processing
When writing in Korean mixed script, semantic or content words were generally written in hanja, while grammatical or function words were written in Hangul. It is possible that this encoding of different types of information into different types of characters speeds up reading, allowing the reader to pass over function words and visually focus on content words, and this feature of Korean mixed script has been praised by some observers, as in the following comment by Insup Taylor:
"An optimal text for efficient visual and semantic processing may be one that uses mixed scripts to enhance visual distinction of semantically important and unimportant words."
This sort of advantage in mixed script is why the Japanese written language uses kanji and its native kana in conjunction to this very day. It also enables pure Chinese readers to get some faint gist of the meaning in a given Korean mixed script text from reading the Hanja alone.
Example
The text below is the preamble to the constitution of the Republic of Korea. The first text is written in Hangul; the second is its mixed script version.