‘What’s the strange scribblings on the left-hand side of my banner?’ you might be saying.
Well, in short, they both say ‘Jeonnam Life’ though one is written in Hangeul, the native Korean script and the other in Hanja, Chinese characters used in Korea (which can vary somewhat compared to Chinese characters used in China and Japan, as some characters may have different meanings in different countries and since both China and Japan have reformed some characters whereas Korea has kept all characters in their traditional form).
The writing on the far left is in Hangeul, the indigenous alphabet of Korea created by King Sejong the Great back in 1443 (or thereabouts) to help improve literacy rates amongst the locals as previously only the upper-class or yangban were permitted to learn to read and write Hanja, the only script used at the time. It worked as South Korea now has one of the highest literacy rates in the world! Hangeul was also created to more accurately represent phonemes used in the Korean language, as Chinese characters – being derived from a foreign language – didn’t always succeed in doing so.
The characters to the right of the Hangeul are Hanja. I’ve always had somewhat of an interest in Chinese characters but, this interest grow once I came to Korea and encountered Hanja. Hanja was once used extensively in Korea alongside Hangeul but, its prominence has sharply declined in the last 20 to 30 years roughly coinciding with the increased prominence of the Roman alphabet, in particular English, in South Korea. Nowadays, Hanja is largely resigned to newspaper headings, official documents, monuments and to help avoid confusion as Hangeul contains many homonyms, or different words with the same spelling. Whereas South Korean schoolchildren are still required to learn around a thousand Hanja characters as part of their education, North Korea solely uses Hangeul in line with its isolationist stance.
I’m a bit of a language nerd with the plan of eventually mastering several languages. As such, from time to time I’ll be posting on Hanja and various other language tidbits, which no doubt will be of little interest to anyone but me!
Posted by elcanguro76 
