Standing on the tram on my way to work, I noticed the girl beside me was watching Korean TV on her mobile device. I was very surprised to see that the subtitles were in mixed script (hanja and hangul). Pretty much every line/sentence had one or more simple characters mixed in with the hangul.
The channel was SBS and the show was a kind of reality light entertainment show featuring stunts like trying to fit as many people as possible into a small car.
In a brief search online I haven’t been able to find any other examples of mixed script used in subtitles - it’s all exclusively hangul. So why was this show different? How unusual is it?
I have never seen it. I don’t know much of the following background info is redundant but anyway: Mixed script writing, called geukhanmunhonyong or country-China-writing-mixed-use (from Chinese) was a standard for ‘learned’ writing until recent decades in South Korea, in a modern form standardized I believe in the late 19th/early 20th century, though going back to similar systems from the development of the alphabet in the 15th century. Sino-Korean words* are written in Chinese characters, indigenous words and grammatical particles are written in the alphabet.
Mixed script is pretty rare now though. It continued in high brow newspapers till fairly recently, but the internet seems to be the final thing making hangul-only writing virtually universal in South Korea (and the diaspora), while NK has more actively avoided using Chinese characters, in most cases, for longer**. Now you see Chinese characters in popular publications parenthetically to disambiguate Sino Korean homonyms, and there are some affected uses of them by the media for particular things, like North Korea being referred to as 北 for ‘north’. Also for example recently I’ve seen Trump’s travel ban written as 反이민 for ‘against immigrant’ in some SK media stories, with no particular apparent reason why 반 is written with the Chinese character rather than just 반, or ‘immigrant’ isn’t (another Sino Korean word). Also some more formal books written at least fairly recently have tables of contents and chapter headings in Chinese characters. But full texts of mixed script are now rare.
IME a typical younger South Korean would not fully understand a heavy text of mixed script. You mentioned ‘simple characters’. I don’t know if you meant simplif*ied * characters, use of which would mean it was not proper mixed script which uses the traditional character set. But that would make the text at least partly decipherable to Chinese readers who knew those characters, as would be the case for using traditional characters with Chinese readers who still know those. Likewise mixed script Korean is partially intelligible to Japanese (using traditional characters that is), less so than it was during the Japanese colonial period because the Japanese also simplified characters after WWII, but the modern Japanese ones aren’t as different from the old ones as PRC simplified is. I’d guess the people most likely to understand better, albeit a relatively small group, would be people in the Korean autonomous region of the PRC, who are more ‘character oriented’ than modern Koreans (north, south or diaspora) but many of whom still also know Korean.
*according to modern convention. Some of those words were coined in Korea or Japan and in any case not necessarily the word commonly used in modern Chinese, so in that sense also not automatically recognizable to modern Chinese readers. And OTOH quite a few ‘indigenous’ Korean words are from Chinese but don’t have a formal Chinese character equivalents by modern convention because the pronunciation of the characters and the word in Korean have diverged.
**the main exception is ‘friendship’ oriented stuff related to the PRC.
Thanks for the excellent reply, CorryEl.
By simple characters, I didn’t mean simplified characters as used in the PRC, but “basic” or non-obscure characters like 一人 (alone, 1 person) or 道 (road).
I was surprised to see it so I did wonder if what I was seeing was hangul syllables written in a funky style to look like hanja (and I didn’t want to stare too much at someone else’s screen) but I am pretty sure it wasn’t.
I can’t understand or read any Korean at all so from my point of view these characters stood out in a sea of otherwise incomprehensible text.
Based on your explanation, it’s still a mystery.