Life In 19x19

My wife is Taiwanese (and in no way particularly knowledgeable about Koreans) but it is her impression that Koreans actually have a Chinese version of their name.

That is to say, when I see Cho Chikun's name written here in traditional Chinese ( 趙治 勲 as on the book in front of me now) (the same as the Japanese version of his name), it is her idea that I am not seeing a name that was given to him after his fame as a sort of sound equivalent in the Chinese language, but is actually a name he would have had even from before he left Korea.

I would like to know if this true or not from people who are more conversant with Korean culture.

Also, is it possible that it's a practice in certain circles but not completely widespread?


[edited to remove a stray apostrophe]

About 60% of Korean language is based off of Chinese character. So many words you see, have Chinese character behind them. For example, "Korea" is 한국. That's using the phonetic Korean alphabet. But it is based off of Chinese characters (韓=한, 國=국). So there are many Korean words that use Chinese characters.

When a Korean person is born, they are given Chinese characters for their name - each character has sound and meaning. Typically, there are three characters (one for last name, two for given name). But you can write the characters using phonetic Korean alphabet.

So basically, Korean names are typically composed of Chinese characters (usually 3), but each character has Korean pronunciation. Same is true between Japanese and Chinese. In many cases Chinese characters have similar meaning across all three countries, but have different pronunciation. In Korean, they just hide these characters behind the purely phonetic alphabet (hangul).

It's for this reason that you'll sometimes see different pronunciations of the same professional player between the countries, even though they have the same characters.

So to answer your question directly, when a Korean person signs their name, for example, they might often use the Chinese characters they were born with. But they can also write the same thing using Hangul, the phonetic alphabet. Kind of like how you can write the same thing in cursive or printing when writing in English.

So I guess the takeaway is, if you want to learn Chinese, Korean, or Japanese, then Chinese characters are key

Thanks! Great explanation.

globulon wrote:Thanks! Great explanation.

No problem. I guess your wife was basically right