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Koreans and Chinese are always at odds with each other when it comes to debating who owns what in history and culture. Think of Xinqi (otherwise known as Kimchi) for example versus Paocai.The veggies have caused a heated debate in the past, prompting Korea to apply for Xinqi to be inscribed as a UNESCO Intangible Heritage in 2013, making the dish a proud “cultural symbol of Korea.”Now for a country that is always proud of and claims uniqueness in its culture, it is rather unfathomable to imagine how they would react when questioned "Why is your constitution partly written in Chinese?"▲Excerpt of the Korean Constitution (Note: there are some Chinese characters in the text.)The question first appeared on a global Q&A platform Quora.Even some Chinese people who were not aware of this were surprised, but they rejoiced as their Korean counterparts were taken aback because they never thought the characters were Chinese, they said, adding that the characters are "Han", period.But just like Kanji in the Japanese language, a person who can read Chinese characters would also be able to guess and understand what is written using Hanja (Hanzi characters in Korean) but would not be able to guess the sound.For example, "大韓民國 _ 民主共和國" in Chapter 1, Article 1 of the Korean constitution can easily be understood that it means the "Great Republic of Korea _ a democratic republic."What's even more interesting is that Korea also uses Korean characters and Hanzi to write names on its citizens' ID cards (shown above).Angelmo Chun wrote "Technically speaking, it is not Chinese, but it's Han Characters..."Angelmo made great points in her response, except that what she described as Han characters, are simply just traditional Chinese characters.▲A Korean text, a mixture of Korean characters and Hanja (Hanzi)A Chinese reader who saw Angelmo's reply was not thrilled and replied to Angelmo as follows:Another Korean user was not convinced by the reply and made a post explaining further:
And there you have it, the man admitted to the use of Chinese characters but said it is Korean, which "makes sense". But another user, Cris Leon, provided his perspective on this matter.
So, the question is: why do they use them?Before 1443, Korea did not have its own writing system, only members of the upper class and educated people were able to use Chinese characters to communicate through written documents.In fact, Koreans began using Hanzi as far back as the Gojoseon period, about 400 BCE.
However, Chinese characters (known as Hanja in Korean) proved difficult to learn for common people, and this made it tough for them to pass down written ideas among themselves and complaints to the king.To solve this, King Sejong the Great, started creating a simplified writing system in 1443, he called it Hangul.Hangul was not widely accepted though, it became widely used in the 18th or 19th century. It is slowly replacing the Hanzi in the Korean written language, but it will take a long time before it completely replaces all characters.However, due to the fact that Hangul characters are based on pronunciation, words with different meanings can be written in the same way, which can lead to ambiguity. This is why Hanja is always written in the brackets after the person's name to avoid mispronunciation.The same applies to the Constitution, there is no room for ambiguousness in the Constitution, so where there is a need for a specific, concise meaning, Hanzi is used instead of Hangul.References: STKSJ, Korea.net, Quora, CNN, 90DayKorean, Arcgis
*The opinions expressed in the article are solely those of the author.* Follow Us
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