Sino-Korean or Hanja-eo (Hangul: 한자어; Hanja: 漢字語) refers to the set of words in the Korean language vocabulary that originated from or were influenced by hanja. The Sino-Korean lexicon consists of both words loaned from Chinese and words coined in the Korean language using hanja.
Contents
Sino-Korean words are one of the three main types of vocabulary in Korean. The other two are native Korean words and foreign words imported from other languages, mostly from English. Roughly speaking, it can be further divided into two layers: traditional Sino-Korean words that are either derived from classical Chinese or invented in Korea before modern times, and words that are imported from Japanese in modern times (especially during Korea under Japanese rule).
Sino-Korean words today make up about 60% of the Korean vocabulary, though in actual speech (especially informally) native words are vastly more common.
Some Korean words are considered "native" even though they are ultimately derived from Sino-Korean words. Examples include 짐승 (jimseung "beast") from 중생 (jungsaeng 衆生: a Buddhist term for the living world), or 사냥 (sanyang "hunt") from 산행 (sanhaeng 山行 "going to the mountains, a mountain outing"). In modern Korean, because their etymology is far from obvious, these words behave as "native" words: for example, they usually don't combine with Sino-Korean affixes, and they are never written using Hanja.
Terms Differences
Sino-Korean words are derived mainly from literary Chinese, and many from modern Sino-Japanese.
The formulae of (日/月/火/水/木/金/土)+曜日 in Korean and Japanese stem from an ancient Chinese usage in its horoscope, which is now considered obsolete in Modern Chinese.
Native Japanese Words in Sino-Korean Vocabulary
Some Sino-Korean words derive from Japanese kun'yomi words, that is, native Japanese words written in Chinese characters. When borrowed into Korean, the characters are given Sino-Korean pronunciations. (Note that in Japanese, these words are not considered to belong to the Sino-Japanese part of the vocabulary as they are native Japanese words.)