[KS] hangul to hanja conversion online

Werner Sasse werner_sasse at hotmail.com
Fri Jun 1 01:14:22 EDT 2012





Response to the following (sorry to be so late, I was travelling...), and sorry to be a little sketchy, but I am writing from memory...
 
>Prof. Harbmeier recently noted that most recently modernized languages despite sounding "native," are actually mirroring English concepts and >rhetoric, under the guise of native sound.  "나막신" appears to be just such an instance, only Chinese replacing English. It is puzzling that 나막 is >used instead of 나무 to calque "tree" 신 as "wear"?  "
 
==> 나막 is a fossilized form of an old Korean word. The development was 나막 > 남ㄱ (남기, 남ㄱaㄹ, 남ㄱaㅣ [a = arae-a]) . 나모 is the Middle Korean form without suffix and before -와. ModKor 나무 comes from the latter...鷄林類事 has 木曰南記dial. also 남구, 남게, 낭게, 낭기, 냉기... ==> 신 is Middle and Mod Korean for "shoe" No Chinese involved here Best wishesWerner Sasse 
 
Date: Mon, 28 May 2012 19:02:55 +0900
From: kc.kim2 at gmail.com
To: koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
Subject: Re: [KS] hangul to hanja conversion online

Yes indeed! Heaven forbid, that "ANY Korean word would be writable with Chinese characters."

There was a news item last year describing a wondrous program capable of making this automatic conversion from hangul to hanja.  Not surprisingly, Korean media's and the public's response can best be described as "so what," and "means nothing to me" and "does nothing for me."  All quite true!  While 92% may sound good, if you imagine that 8% of your text is gobbledy-gook, you really can not avoid ending up with gobbledy-gook.  Not surprising and quite necessary.  But looked at from another perspective, that is from the view of Chinese or Japanese students, wives, husbands, children, etc (the only two hanzi countries remaining), who must wrestle with Korean text, it could be a heaven-sent.  While the hanja to hangul is easy as cake, hangul to hanja is not a trivial problem and still looking for a solution.  It is also not so unimportant a problem as every translation software's accuracy is just as equally determined by the performance of hangul to hanja conversion.  Every time you look at the translate.google or any translator and wonder why the output is gobbledy-gook, this is always a large part of it.  


Prof. Harbmeier recently noted that most recently modernized languages despite sounding "native," are actually mirroring English concepts and rhetoric, under the guise of native sound.  "나막신" appears to be just such an instance, only Chinese replacing English. It is puzzling that 나막 is used instead of 나무 to calque "tree" 신 as "wear"?  Yoo Kwang-on shows prescience with his recent post about 지렁이 which he glossed as 地龍'이.


Altaic question?  Just how many words are we talking about here?  What percentage of modern Korean?

On Sun, May 27, 2012 at 12:02 PM,  <gkl1 at columbia.edu> wrote:

Hi List,



Admittedly a huge number of Chinese words and compounds have become part of Korean's vocabulary, just as a huge number of Greek and and Latin words have become a part of the vocabulary of English (and the other European languages too). But it's distressing to learn that people might think ANY Korean word would be writable with Chinese characters. If that were so, then Korean would be a language in the Sino-Tibetan family. It's hard enough to get scholarly agreement on what language family CAN claim Korean's ancestry, but any linguistic reference work would make it clear that it's not a Chinese-type language.




Gari Ledyard



Quoting Clark W Sorensen <sangok at u.washington.edu>:




Caren,



Namaksin is a native Korean word, so it doesn't have corresponding

Chinese characters. However, any of the on-line dictionaries will give

the characters for Korean words such as at naver.com. The problem is

you have to input the Korean in hangul.



Clark Sorensen



On Fri, 25 May 2012, Freeman, Caren (cwf8q) wrote:






I’m asking this question on behalf of a colleague who is a sinologist.  He asks:







“i want to see what chinese characters correspond to korean "Namaksin"  wooden clogs.  Namaksin (나막신)







Is there an online dictionary that gives the classic readings for korean words entered in pinyin type western alphabet?”







Many thanks for your recommendations,



Caren Freeman




























 		 	   		  
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