Re: Co-ordinated spelling

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:

> Well, if you pick up a Korean newspaper, a Chinese reader will be able to
> read some headlines and isolated characters (maybe with semantic shift,
> but I'd have to ask good ol' Mom about that) and not much else.
Mostly the semantic shift is in Chinese: Korean tends to retain old
interpretations, as for example "tang" (soup), which retains its old
meaning of "hot water" (Japanese "tou"/"yu", Korean "thang") outside
China.  Some compounds, though, like "tanmen" / "thangmyen", soup noodles,
have the new meaning.

> You only
> need about 100 Chinese characters for anything you're going to do in
> Korean, *unless* you're a historian pre-1800's (?  that's a very rough,
> and I'm not patient enough to scour Cumiings' _Korea's Place in the Sun_
> for it), in which case all the aristocracy's writings and documents are
> going to be in Chinese.
The Korean character set standard has about 4900 hanja, but I agree
that you need very few of those (or in the North, none at all)
for ordinary text.

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