Hundok

Hundok (), or Korean vernacular reading, is the practice of reading Chinese characters or Literary Sinitic through their meanings using corresponding Korean words rather than only their Sino-Korean pronunciations. The term belongs to a wider East Asian tradition of vernacular reading, and the Korean form is conventionally romanized hundok. In Japanese terminology, text-level vernacular reading of Literary Sinitic is called kundoku, whereas native Japanese readings assigned to individual kanji are called kun'yomi.

In Korean history, vernacular readings occur in systems that used Chinese graphs to write Korean before the creation of Hangul, including hyangchal and idu, and in the interpretive-reading form of gugyeol used to render Literary Sinitic in Korean word order and grammar. In modern South Korean Hanja education, each character is still assigned a Korean semantic gloss called a hun () or saegim (), but ordinary Hanja text is generally read with Sino-Korean pronunciations. Modern pedagogical labels called huneum (; "gloss and sound") must therefore be distinguished from historical texts in which a graph was actually read as a native Korean word.

Borrowed-character writing

Before Hangul, Korean was recorded partly through chaja (), the borrowing of Chinese graphs. One analysis used in Korean philology classifies a borrowed graph along two axes: whether its Chinese-derived sound or its Korean gloss was used, and whether the graph retained its semantic function. Their intersection produces four categories: sound-reading (), sound-borrowing (), gloss-reading (), and gloss-borrowing ().

A hundokja (; 訓讀字) retains the meaning of the graph and is read as the corresponding Korean word. A hungaja (; 訓假字), by contrast, borrows the sound of a graph's Korean gloss without retaining the graph's original meaning. Semantic-reading graphs often represent lexical words such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives, while phonographic graphs frequently represent endings, particles, or the final sound of a lexical word.

The pronunciation intended by a semantic graph cannot always be recovered from the graph alone. Writers sometimes added another borrowed graph to indicate the final consonant or syllable of the Korean word, a convention known as mareum cheomgi (; 末音添記). In , for example, 夜 supplies the meaning "night" and is read as (bam), while 音 indicates the final .

Examples

The following forms are cited in analyses of hyangchal material. They include Middle Korean forms and scholarly reconstructions based partly on final-sound notation; they are not the ordinary readings of the corresponding characters in modern Korean prose.

Written form Vernacular reading or gloss Meaning or explanation (bom) spring (bam) night; 音 indicates final (gil) road or path; 尸 indicates final (sireum) worry or sorrow; 音 participates in final-sound notation (amsyo) cow (bahoe) rock

Writing and reading traditions

Hyangchal used Chinese graphs to record complete Korean sentences. It generally combined semantically used reading graphs with phonographically used borrowing graphs for grammatical elements and the ends of words. Most surviving examples occur in the notation of hyangga, vernacular poems from the Silla and early Goryeo periods.

Idu likewise combined Sinitic elements with Korean grammatical elements and was used especially in administrative and other practical writing. Gugyeol added symbols or borrowed graphs to a Literary Sinitic text to guide its interpretation in Korean. Seokdok gugyeol (; 釋讀口訣, "interpretive-reading gugyeol") rearranged and supplemented a text so that it could be understood in a form approaching a complete Korean sentence. Sundok gugyeol (; 順讀口訣, "sequential-reading gugyeol") largely followed the original Sinitic order and pronunciation while inserting Korean function words.

After the creation of Hangul in the fifteenth century, the need to write entire Korean sentences through borrowed Chinese graphs declined. Borrowed-character systems were gradually displaced by Hangul, although some uses of idu and gugyeol continued into later periods.

Huneum in modern Hanja education

Modern South Korean dictionaries, textbooks, and Hanja proficiency tests often identify a character with a semantic gloss followed by its Sino-Korean reading, jointly called its huneum. The Hanja Proficiency Test administered by the Korean Association for Hanja Education Promotion lists recognition of huneum alongside reading and writing among the skills tested at successive levels. A South Korean high-school textbook gives examples such as the following:

Hanja Hun (semantic gloss) Eum (Sino-Korean reading) Full label 水 ("water") (su) (mul su) 家 ("house") (ga) (jip ga) 國 ("country") (guk) (nara guk)

The hun, also called a character gloss () or representative gloss (), links a graph to a Korean word that cues its meaning. Researchers have noted that a single standardized gloss cannot necessarily cover all of a character's meanings across different words and contexts, creating pedagogical problems when learners use it to interpret Sino-Korean vocabulary.

In a label such as , is normally a cue to the character's meaning, while is its pronunciation in ordinary Hanja text and Sino-Korean vocabulary. The label does not imply that every occurrence of 水 in modern Korean is read . Modern huneum thus uses the traditional concept of a gloss for lexicography and teaching, but differs from historical hundokja that were actually read as native Korean words.

Comparison with Japanese kun readings

Both Korean and Japanese traditions matched the meanings of Chinese graphs with vernacular words, but Japanese terminology distinguishes text-level kundoku from word-level kun'yomi. Japanese kun'yomi remain one of the ordinary ways of reading kanji, in contrast to on'yomi, and can combine with okurigana to show inflection. Japan's official List of jōyō kanji specifies principal on and kun readings for commonly used characters.

In Korean, hundok covers phenomena comparable to both levels: native-word readings of individual graphs in historical borrowed-character writing and text-level interpretation of Literary Sinitic. Hanja occurring in modern Korean text are generally read with their Sino-Korean pronunciations, while the native Korean hun taught with a character is primarily a semantic label. Korean hundok is therefore not simply a modern equivalent of Japanese kun'yomi, and modern Korean huneum does not constitute two parallel sets of everyday readings comparable to Japanese on and kun readings.

Hundok

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