Re: Co-ordinated spelling

On Mon, 21 Aug 2000, John Cowan wrote:

> 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.
<delighted g>  So *that's* where tangsu and so on come from.

> > 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,
>
> 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.
I don't think even my parents know that many.  :-p

YHL