중국 유입 한자어의 분류와 독음 표기

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to classify Sino-Korean words and to analyze how those phonetic transcriptions have written in the Korean language policy. Sino-Korean words are grouped in accordance with their linguistic features as Koreanized common nouns, Chinese proper nouns, new conceptual words in the Chinese way, and idiomatic words by transliteration. Among them, Koreanized common nouns are pronounced in Sino-Korean sounds (namely in Korean), and proper nouns and new conceptual words are pronounced according to proper Chinese orthography. The reason why this discrepancy occurs is by the use of Chinese characters in Korea. Korean people used Chinese characters as written forms before the invention of Hangul, so every Chinese character has come to have its own pronunciation in Korean. But these days, Koreans do not usually use Chinese Characters, and new Sino-Korean words are considered as foreign words. Moreover, as Chinese pronunciation totally changed over time, Sino-Korean sounds and Chinese have become completely different. From this point of view, this paper analyzes the phonetic transcriptions of Sino-Korean words by paying careful attention to distances among them. This should be an important criterion for the phonetic transcriptions of Sino-Korean words.