[KS] hangul to hanja conversion online

Kye C Kim kc.kim2 at gmail.com
Mon May 28 06:02:55 EDT 2012


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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