A Comparative Study Of Chinese Characters In Chinese And Korean

Chinese characters have originated from ancient China. From early days, the ancient characters of South-East Asian nations spread far and wide, and the nations which have been influenced by Chinese traditional culture and Chinese letters are called Sino-sphere. The Chinese characters had been recorded not only for Chinese but also for other non-Chinese languages. This paper intends to compare the basic structure of Chinese characters used in China and Korea.The paper consists of five parts.The first part is the introduction which describes the contents, methods and significance of this research. It is followed by the explanation of database of the Chinese-Korean characters in common use.The second part is the comparison of Chinese and Korean-Chinese orthographic. By the comparative study on traditional characters, simplified characters, normative characters, variant characters, new character forms, and old character forms, the paper finds that the simplified characters in China are distinctive with the traditional Chinese characters used in other Chinese cultural areas.The third part is the comparison in phonetics of Chinese and Korean-Chinese characters.By comparing the contrastive correspondences and consonantal differences in terms of initial and final consonants of Chinese characters and initial,medial and final consonants of Korean-Chinese characters.It is concluded that 1)initial sounds correspondence of Chinese and Korean-Chinese is simple,2)the contrast between Chinese final consonants and Korean-Chinese’s medial and final consonants is vast,revealing distinctive features of the single vowels,diphthongs,consonants and final consonants in simplified Chinese and traditional Chinese letters,4)modern Chinese consonants have been immensely simplified in comparison to ancient Chinese,and 5)Korean-Chinese still has complete final consonantal aspects of ancient Chinese for‘非组’to be read in‘重唇’,‘精组’to be read in‘尖音’,‘见组’to be read in‘牙音’(velar),and consonant ends in‘阳声韵’and‘入声韵’.The fourth part shows the comparison of Chinese and Korean semantics. There are certain semantic differences between Korean and Chinese because of newly produced and added forms and meanings of Chinese. In addition, the semantic differences are caused by different interpretations of the Chinese characters. Polysemy in Chinese characters is ascribed to abundant words classifications and meanings. Korean-Chinese includes meanings which are not available in modern Chinese language. The distinctive features of Chinese characters meanings in the past and the present refers to the semantic comparison of ‘Shuowen Jiezi’(An Dictionary of the Ancient Chinese Characters).Finally, the last part is the conclusions of the paper.