Korean mixed script

Infobox Writing system
name=Korean mixed script
_ko. 韓國語의 國漢文混用
languages=Korean language
type = Alternative
typedesc = – utilizes both logographic (hanja) and alphabetic (Hangul) characters
time = 1443 to the present
sample=Hunmin jeong-eum.jpg
iso15924=Kore

Infobox Korean name
hangul=한자 혼용 / 국한문 혼용
hanja=漢字混用 / 國漢文混用
rr=Hanja honyong / Gukhanmun honyong
mr=Hancha honyong / Kukhanmun honyong|

Korean mixed script is a form of writing that uses both Hangul (an alphabetical script) and hanja (Chinese characters).

The script has never been used for languages other than Korean. In North Korea, writing in mixed script was replaced by writing only in Hangul in the middle of the 20th century and has not been used since.Fact|date=August 2008 In South Korea, the use of mixed script has slowly declined.

The script uses hanja to write Sino-Korean vocabulary, but never to write native Korean vocabulary.Fact|date=August 2008 This distinguishes Korean mixed script (and hanja in general) from modern Japanese writing, whose kanji may be used not only to write Sino-Japanese, but also native Japanese vocabulary.

History

From the 15th to the 20th century, the Korean mixed script usually used hanja whenever possible (that is, for all Sino-Korean words), and Hangul to write only grammatical suffixes and native Korean words; therefore, early texts may look similar to Literary Chinese as they consisted only of Sino-Korean vocabulary, interspersed with few auxiliary verbs and word endings (written in Hangul) to ease understanding the sentences' structure.Fact|date=August 2008

Using Hangul to write Sino-Korean words only became common in the 20th century. Up to the 1970s, many books and newspapers were written in mixed Hangul and hanja characters. Since then, however, the overwhelming majority of print publications are written in Hangul only. Modern texts – whether or not they contain a significant amount of native Korean vocabulary – rarely use hanja for all, or even most, of the Sino-Korean words in the text. Today, this development has reached the point at which most Korean texts are written in a form that can no longer be called mixed script, as hanja are either not used at all, or used very sparsely to disambiguate or to show the meaning of rare or newly-coined words (see Hanja disambiguation. Only a few people still write in the mixed script.Fact|date=August 2008 Furthermore, the way in which hanja are used has changed: perhaps owing to a decline in hanja literacy, it has become common to provide both a term's hanja and Hangul at that term's first occurrence in a text – instead of writing it only in hanja as is done in traditional mixed script.

Hanja still appear in many newspapers' headlines, where they serve to both disambiguate and abbreviate (for example, _ko. 日 "il" for _ko. 日本 "ilbon" “Japan”), and to a lesser degree in some newspapers' texts, but not in magazines. They can also sometimes be found in academic literature. Mixed script making use of hanja wherever possible is still used for judicial texts such as the constitution (see example below).

Visual Processing

When writing in Korean mixed script, semantic or "content" words were generally written in hanja, while grammatical or "function" words were written in hangul.: _ko. 전문: _ko. 유구한 역사와 전통에 빛나는 우리 대한 국민은 3·1 운동으로 건립된 대한민국 임시 정부의 법통과 불의에 항거한 4·19 민주 이념을 계승하고, 조국의 민주 개혁과 평화적 통일의 사명에 입각하여 정의·인도와 동포애로써 민족의 단결을 공고히 하고, 모든 사회적 폐습과 불의를 타파하며, 자율과 조화를 바탕으로 자유 민주적 기본 질서를 더욱 확고히 하여 정치·경제·사회·문화의 모든 영역에 있어서 각인의 기회를 균등히 하고, 능력을 최고도로 발휘하게 하며, 자유와 권리에 따르는 책임과 의무를 완수하게 하여, 안으로는 국민 생활의 균등한 향상을 기하고 밖으로는 항구적인 세계 평화와 인류 공영에 이바지함으로써 우리들과 우리들의 자손의 안전과 자유와 행복을 영원히 확보할 것을 다짐하면서 1948년 7월 12일에 제정되고 8차에 걸쳐 개정된 헌법을 이제 국회의 의결을 거쳐 국민 투표에 의하여 개정한다.: _ko. 1987년 10월 29일