recently saw a couple of videos about how koreans, even educated ones, get confused when it comes to same-sounding words with different meanings derived from different han characters
much like japanese, korean has both native vocabulary and lots of words of chinese origin, and a simpler sound system than mandarin or other spoken chinese languages, and as a result, lots of chinese-derived words sound similar or the same in korean
historically, both korean and japanese were written using a combination of han (chinese) characters (called "hanja" in korean and "kanji" in japanese) and native phonetic writing (hangul and hiragana respectively), but by the 20th century, both koreas almost completely switched to hangul, whereas japanese kept using a mix of systems
even more historically, before the languages invented either native system, the way to write them was to either just write in chinese, or to write in chinese, but with slight adjustments based on differences in grammar
the situation korean is in right now is relatively new, there are a lot of people living there who remember hanja
i wonder how it'll get resolved in the future
it could be that they go back to writing hanja in more occasions, like to resolve homophones
or perhaps, like in other languages, some meanings of words with similar pronunciations will become rarer and rarer until they practically disappear or become perfectly clear based on context, or new words will be created to resolve the confusion
japanese, after all, can also be written exclusively with hiragana and katakana, usually by also adding spaces between words, but this is in practice only done for stuff targeted at really young children or to overcome technological limitations (example: some old console games), especially since the homophone problem would be even worse there than in korean
#korean #japanese #language
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