Specifiably I need the congi (sic) or calligraphy version of the word. Mrs gerb wants to
embroider/ crochet it on a pillow.
I believe it’s “sarang.”
사랑
I’m not what you’d call a Korean speaker though, so if someone could also chime in that’d be great.
Vision of Love is correct. The 한국말 word for love is 사랑. That’s pronounced sa rang as the ‘r’ is in the second syllable.
It could be more complex, if you wish. For words using the 한문/한자, the translation is 愛 (pronunciation: 애 ay {as in hay}).
Disclaimer: I’m not Korean either. I just live here.
Korean Doper chiming in to say yes, it is 사랑.
Here it is in a somewhat fancy script.
The more complex character Monty posted above is prettier, imo, but it’s classic Chinese and not Korean.
It is Korean; it’s just used when a part of compound words which have Chinese roots, thus my inclusion of the qualifying comment “for words using” in my post above. Here’s one: 애국자 (patriot), which can be written in 한문/한자. Chinese characters have fallen out of favor 100% in North Korea and almost 100% in South Korea. It’s seeing a revival in South Korea, though. I’m not sure how I feel about that revival. When I first learned Korean, one had to learn the Chinese characters also but that does make it more difficult to learn the writing.
愛 is not a *Korean * character, is what I meant, although yes, it is used in certain compound words with Chinese roots. It’s a common enough Chinese character that most Koreans will recognize it - but it’s not Korean.
What are you on about? Korea uses two sets of characters in the written language. There is the native Han-geul set and the borrowed Chinese set. Han-Mun (aka Han-Ja) is Korean. It’s used. It’s a part of the Korean written language. To assert that it’s not Korea is akin to asserting that the letters of the English written language are not English; they’re just commonly recognized Latin. The English letters are borrowed from Latin, yes, but they’re still English.
As another Korean, I’m gonna have to go with HazelNut. I don’t think the comparison to Latin and English is entirely correct, considering that there is a separate Korean alphabet that is rather different from the Chinese it’s derived from.
I think I’ll go with the evidence of my eyes here in Korea. Everywhere I go, I see the language written with mostly Han-Geul and some Han-Ja. When I lived in Seoul back in the 1970s, the language was written with mostly Han-Ja and some Han-Geul. The simple fact of the matter is that Korean is written, in South Korea, with both Han-Geul and Han-Ja.
Actually, I think Monty is right - that is a Korean character. It pre-dates hangul, and is borrowed from Chinese, but it is a proper Korean character. Similarly, kanji in Japanese are in large part Chinese in origin, but are now thoroughly Japanese.
However, in my experience, Koreans and Japanese are both in the habit of calling them “Chinese” characters, even though they were used, modified and adapted to the native tongue for more than a thousand years.
I think I’ll go with the fact that I’m Korean, Korean is the first language I learned, and that I attended 10 years of Korean school (middle/high school and undergrad).
Honestly, I find it amazing that you are arguing with native Korean speakers about this issue. The Korean language can be written in both hanja and hangeul, but hanja are still Chinese characters, not Korean. 애국자 and 愛國子 are both Korean words - they’re the same word, obviously - but if someone asks me to write down “patriot” in Korean, I’m going to write down the former. There’s a reason why hanja is a seperate subject in school. It’s not Korean. It’s what we had to use before we had our own alphabet, and it’s something we still learn because it’s an important part of understanding our language (much faster to look at 신信 and 신身 instead of looking at just plain 신 and trying to figure out whether the writer means trust or body). But hanja is still a borrowed set of characters from classical Chinese.
If you are a Korean language scholar who can give me some kind of evidence that Korean people think hanja is Korean, then please, help me fight my ignorance. But I think it’s somewhat arrogant of you to tell me that I don’t know my own language properly.
I find it amazing, too, but then, I get conflicting info from Koreans day-to-day. My understanding is that hanja is used today for names, mostly. In Korea, you can use hanja (Chinese pictographs) to write your name, or you can use hanguel. If your drive around Koreatown in L.A., you won’t see any hanja on store signs.
Also, Koreans don’t use hanja (kanji)–Chinese characters–semantically, as the Japanese still do. They just use it for sounds. They see a Chinese pictograph and understand what it means, but they just speak it in Korean…but a majority of Korean vocabulary has come from Chinese. The grammar, however, is completely different, and more similar to Japanese grammar. At least, this is my understanding.
All I see are question marks.
Is there anyone who can direct me to a program that will allow me to type in hanguel? I don’t have the original installation disk of Windows XP (it got lost), so I can’t do it “officially.”
That’s because so much of the vocabulary of Korean comes from Chinese–up to 75%. (The grammar, though, is very different.) When King Sejong commissioned a bunch of what at that time constituted linguists, they came up with an amazingly systematic writing system, that made literacy possible for the “masses” because it wasn’t as esoteric as the Chinese charaters, and it was phonologically oriented.
I think Koreans use the Chinese characters today more out of a sense of tradition than anything else. Koreans really like tradition.
I think you’re being quite silly about it. Whether you like it or not–and you apparently don’t–the Korean writing system for, get this, Korean includes two systems: 1-Hanja which is what was originally used to write it and 2-Hangeul which is what the majority of the language is written in. It’s part of the Korean writing system and therefore part of written Korean.
Nowhere did I tell you that you don’t know your language. What I am telling you is that you’re talking out of your hat when you say that Hanja ain’t Korean. They are, they’re just the Chinese character part of written Korean.
I am not Korean, I am not a linguistics scholar.
However, I will point out the following (which you surely know):
- Hanja have been in constant use in Korea for longer than any other system.
- The native Korean system, hangul, while created around 1444 did not come into common use until the late 19th century.
- About 65% of contemporary Korean vocabulary is of Chinese origin.
This is strictly IMHO, but I think the rejection of hanja as “not Korean” is misplaced nationalism. While adopted from another culture, hanja were an integral part of Korean culture, up to this day. You said yourself that “aekukja” is Korean. However, this word, unlike “sarang”, is an import from China, just like the hanja that can be used to write it. Why would one be more Korean than the other?
I am not arguing the fact that some words are “more Korean” than others - although there has been a movement in Korea to start using “pure” Korean words rather than words taken from Chinese (like the N. Koreans do). I don’t care either way. Maybe thinking of hanja as not Korean is misplaced nationalism (although that’s a bold claim) but I’m not arguing about that - I’m arguing that most Korean people WILL NOT think of hanja as Korean.
I am pretty sure that if you show any Korean person a Chinese character and ask, “Is this Korean?” that they will answer “No, it’s Hanja.” That’s just how the concept of Hanja is for Koreans. It was integrated into the Korean writing system a long time ago, yes - and if for you (Monty), that means it’s become part of Korean, then yes, it has. All I’m trying to get across is that most Koreans probably do not see it that way. If you are going to argue that Koreans as a people are a nationalistic lot who are “talking out of their hats,” then fine. (Most of the times they are.)
I don’t appreciate the condescending comments, though (such as “What are you on about” and that I’m “being silly” about this). I am expressing a perfectly legitimate point of view from the perspective of a native speaker, so there’s no need to treat me as if I’m simply being obstinate without knowing what the hell I’m talking about.
If you don’t want condescending comments, refrain from them. I see no reason why I shouldn’t tak umbrage at being called arrogant when I’m relaying well-supported facts. If you take “What are you on about” as condescending, then I’ll refrain from using it in my future encounters with you.
Of course, if one were to show a Korean speaker one Hanja, they’d say it’s Chinese. The same would go if one were to show one Kanji (excepting certain Kanji that were developed in Japan) to a Japanese speaker. If you were to show the character in context–written as part of a sentence in Korean, there’s no doubt the Korean speaker would say, “Hey, that sentence is written in Korean!” instead of, “Hey, that sentence is written in two languages!”
What you’re missing in my posts is that I wasn’t talking about one solo character standing all by itself on a page. Perhaps you’d care to re-read the posts where I clearly indicated that I’m talking about certain compounds.
FWIW: I, personally, like seeing Korean written in what’s called Mixed Script here. I have a copy of the Bible written in “Easy Mixed Script” and I find it more enjoyable to read that than the edition just written in Hangeul. Maybe that’s because I’m getting up in years and like tradition more as a result.
If you look at post #4, you’ll see that Hazelnut said that the more complex character is chinese, not korean. He was taking that single character in isolation, not in context. You’re the one that made a big deal about it by saying that it was korean. If you had recognized and said this to begin with, you would have prevented a lot of headache.
It is true that a Korean sentence using a chinese character is not using two “languages,” but this is due to the borrowing of words, not grammatical structures. It is a Korean sentence that uses a chinese character. It is chinese. No one said anything about it being an entirely different language. I think the person who saw the sentence w/ hanja would say, “Hey, that’s a Korean sentence with a chinese character.” You’ll see words like “taco,” “resume,” “curriculum vitae” in an English dictionary as entries, but as far as I can tell, you won’t see hanja as entries. Of course, it’s all over the place in any standard dictionary, but you can’t look up the word ? in a Korean dictionary.
Obviously, before Hangul was invented, that’s (?) what everyone used, but that was for the priveleged few who could read/write. That is, of course, the purpose of Hangul. Hanja is used primarily to clarify certain homonyms in Hangul, for shorthand of some words (like in newspaper headlines) and technical publications. For example, the “Han” in Hanja means Chinese, but the “Han” in Hangul means “Korean.” How do you tell the difference? Look at the Hanja. It is indeed helpful.
By the way, for those interested, ? is pronounced more like the ‘e’ in bed, or led. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s much closer than the ‘a’ in hay.
Ok, for some reason, the korean and chinese writing I used isn’t displaying (at least on my computer). The first two question marks is the word love written in chinese, and the last one is written in Korean.
I did say that at the beginning. Why don’t you take your own advice and read the post again? Try to focus on the word compound.
And your comment about the pronunication depends on which dialect the person is using.