Babelfish wrote:I'm interested to know for what purposes Hanja are used in Modern Korean, and roughly how often. I couldn't find much information in Wikipedia and such, and then it occurred to me Unilang should be a good place to ask
I've read that Hanja are used "often" to clarify ambiguities, and also that in North Korea they're no longer used, but that's pretty much all. I wonder whether they might be encountered in (modern!) literature, newspapers, fancy restaurant titles, occasionally in text
instead of Hangeul (maybe in fixed expressions?), stuff like that.
I would say "often" is an overstatement.
Here's the homepage of Dong-A Ilbo, one of the bigger South Korean newspapers. The only hanja I can find on it are "韓日" and "美", all of which are abbreviations for the names of countries: 韓 for 大韓 (South Korea), 日 for 日本 (Japan--hence 韓日 is something like "Koreo-Japanese"), and 美 for 美國 (USA). That's pretty typical, in my experience.
I have a pre-war novel in Korean (《태평천하》) which was serialised in a newspaper. I don't know if the edition I have is modernised or not, but there are maybe two hanja in the entire text. More recent novels have none at all. In fact, the only literary texts I have which make liberal use of them are mediaeval/early modern
sijo (a native poetic form which generally incorporated a few orotund Literary Chinese phrases for stylistic reasons back in those days).
About the only time I see them with any frequency is in the same contexts where I saw Traditional characters on the Mainland, namely branding. One of the most popular brands of soju, for instance, is called 참 이슬 ("true dew") and the label design interweaves the native name in han'geul with the Literary Chinese equivalent in hanja, 眞露 (which also happens to be the name of the parent company,
Jinro, now part of the HITE brewery conglomerate). Most of the "traditional" alcoholic beverages we've bought do this--the logo of Saan Soju, for instance, is a primitive version of the character 山 ("mountain", pronounced /san/ in Korean). Names of other businesses, like restaurants and bakeries, will do this, too, but they almost always have han'geul as well. (See
here for another example, and note that once again the hanja are in an archaic format, namely seal script; they're for decoration, not disambiguation.)
Babelfish wrote:Thanks! (謝謝?)
Not quite: 感謝합니다!
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons