[KS] Hanja - Hanmun

[Werner Sasse]

Dear Everyone
somewhere in the latest interesting discussion there was some mix-up (which mirrors a funny usage in Korean. When I use an English word in Korean sentences, sometimes I am asked to say that in Hangu*l......)
 
Hanja refers to written characters, in this case "sino-Korean characters" or "sino-Korean script", or the like
Hanmun is a written language, and I am not sure that the variety written by Koreans was so markedly different from the similar one which used to be written in Japan or China to make it necessary to call it "sino-Korean".  After all the border between "dialect" and "different language" is anyway not a very clear one.
 
The point is that Hanja, Chinese characters, have markedly different pronunciations and very often semantic peculiarities, and therefore "sino-Korean" makes sense. 
But Hanmun...? Why not forget "sino-Korean" and use "Hanmun" as a distictive group of texts?
 
Best, Werner
 		 	   		  
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