Korean Han Words Compared With Chinese Vocabulary

Adjectives in Korean and Chinese differ in both form and meaning, which makes it quite difficult for Chinese students to learn Korean adjective. The synonymy and polysemy of Korean adjectives makes their meanings rich and complex. Therefore, adjectives in Korean, as an important part of parts of speech in Korean, deserve comprehensive academic study. The amount of adjectives in Korean that have homographs in Chinese is only second to nouns and verbs, whereas studies on adjective homographs by academics are not so ample. Based on previous studies, this thesis discusses and compares adjective homographs in Korean and Chinese from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives.The author first selected1411Korean adjectives from the Yonsei Korean Dictionary and then selected corresponding Chinese homographs from Modern Chinese Dictionary. After further statistical analysis,637pairs of words are finally adopted as the study objects of this thesis.This thesis mainly covers two parts. In the first part, the author conducts a synchronic comparison and analysis of the637words and gets the classification as follows. First, a detailed comparison between the adjective characters in Korean and Chinese is conducted, which results in the similarities and differences between them. The author classifies the similarities and differences in detail. Then words with the same meanings are further grouped into words with all these meanings the same, words with the similar basic meaning and different parts of speech, words with similar basic meaning and different collocation meanings, words with similar basic meaning and different style meanings, and words with similar basic meaning and different emotion meanings, according to their basic meaning, part of speech, collocation meaning, style meaning and emotion meaning. After the grouping, words with different meanings are also further grouped into words with totally different meanings and words with meanings the same in part, depending on whether their meanings are overlapped. Words with the meanings the same in part are then divided into words with wider use in Chinese than in Korean, words with wider use in Korean than in Chinese, and words with different uses in Chinese and in Korean, the division of which is conducted when the overlapped meaning is not taken into consideration.In the second part, this thesis compares homographs which are barely identical in meaning in order to understand sort out their development, based on consulting the ancient, modern and contemporary dictionaries and related literatures.