Eps 4: Action to abolish Korean Chinese characters

Asian inspection

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Content creation: GPT-3.5,

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Michele Franklin

Michele Franklin

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Apart from moral support for Kim, Beijing's only financial support at the time was to send some 14,000 Chinese Koreans to Korea to serve in the PLA.8 However, three subsequent events dramatically changed Beijing's attitude. In October 1950, Chinese troops called the Chinese People's Volunteer Army crossed the Yalu River to aid the North Korean armies and entered the Korean War in an offensive manner after US forces crossed the 38th parallel.
Instead, the Korean War broke out between the North of North Korea, supported by the Soviet Union and China, and the United States and the South, backed by the United States. After the Korean War, South Korea became a free and democratic country and tried to eliminate the remnants of Japanese rule.
After Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910, the economy was restructured to serve Japan's interests, and attempts to achieve cultural assimilation eventually went so far as to ban the use of the Korean language in schools, publications, and documents. When the Japanese occupied Korea in the early 1900s, they banned the use of Kungmun as part of a program to destroy Korean culture. It also became a crime to teach history from unapproved texts, and the authorities burned more than 200,000 Korean historical documents, effectively wiping out Korea's historical memory.
The colonial authorities used their school system as a tool to assimilate Korea into Japan, with a focus on teaching Japanese and excluding subjects such as Korean and Korean history from the curriculum. The Japanese built nationwide transportation and communication networks and created a new monetary and financial system. They also promoted Japanese trade in Korea by prohibiting Koreans from engaging in similar activities. The colonial government issued a land exploration order that forced landowners to report the size and area of ​​their land.
About 100,000 Japanese families took the land they acquired to settle in South Korea; they cut down millions of trees and planted non-native species, turning familiar landscapes into things that many Koreans did not recognize. The historian Donald N. Clarke explained that the colonial government forced South Koreans to "worship the gods of the Japanese Empire, including the late emperor and the souls of war heroes who helped them conquer Korea at the turn of the century." Like the historian Hijung Kannotes, the imperial government also tried to protect the treasures of Korean art and cultural history, but then used them to enhance the image of the Japanese Empire as a civilized and modern power.
During the two thousand years of cultural assimilation and adaptation, there is undoubtedly a relatively short period of belligerence, such as the conquering of China and Korea by the Mongols in the 12th century, and the subsequent two failed attempts to conquer Japan led by the Chinese. Chinese. North Korean army. From 1894 to 95, Japan defeated China in the war to control Korea, and ten years later, it decisively defeated Russia in the exploitive war between North Korea and Manchuria in northeastern China. Although North Korea made many resistances during the Japanese occupation, they did not defeat the overwhelming Japanese military force until Japan was defeated in 1945. In South Korea, many Japanese economic and military strategists believe that China in the decades before World War II is their only hope for survival in a hostile and racist world.
Therefore, the Japanese and Koreans created a reading and writing system completely different from that of the Chinese. In the process of learning Chinese, the first thing you have to learn is how to write hieroglyphs. You need to learn each of the 7000 Chinese characters one by one in order to browse the Chinese world effectively.
Along with these are kana, vowel-syllabic characters that include 46 hiragana, also derived from Chinese characters, but KonMaried in their most minimalist forms, and 46 katakana . No, these are not the names of the Three Musketeers translated into Japanese, but the names of logograms, symbols that symbolize a phrase or word, respectively, in Japanese, Korean and Chinese.
Linguistically, Korean is not related to Chinese and is similar to but different from Japanese. Although Korean has borrowed many words from Chinese over the centuries and seems grammatically similar to Japanese, its phonetic system is completely different. Korean is not a tonal language like Chinese and Vietnamese, where tonal change can change the meaning of words. When teaching Hanji spelling, students are taught to memorize the native Korean pronunciation for the meaning of the hanji and the Sino-Korean pronunciation for each hanji, respectively, so that the students know which syllable ... and the meaning is for a particular hanji.
Today, Korean is no longer used to write original Korean words that are always presented in Korean, and even words that originated from China-hanja-eo -are mostly written in Korean letters. , Sometimes the corresponding Chinese characters are written next to it to avoid confusion with other characters or words with the same pronunciation. In this era, people living on the Korean Peninsula have their own language, which is different from the language used in ancient China. Since this era, Koreans have adopted the ancient Chinese Korean language and wrote in the ancient Korean spoken language at that time. Pre-modern Koreans have a long history of using Chinese characters to record their ideas.
It reminded me that simplified Chinese characters may seem like a truly "foreign" language to South Koreans, while traditional Chinese characters and unique "Korean" Chinese characters are part of South Korea's traditional cultural heritage. Ancient Korean and Japanese texts were written exclusively in Classical Chinese and Chinese characters for centuries studied only by the elite of both countries, in fact, they were read in the language of each country according to the same grammatical rules that we know today. Nineteenth century Western scholars have proposed a number of theories linking Korean to the Uralic Altai, Japanese, Chinese, Tibetan, Ainu, Dravidian, Indo-European, and other languages.
In the 7th century, the Silla Kingdom conquered the Baekje Kingdom in southwest Korea and the Goguryeo Kingdom in the north, and the Silla dialect became the dominant language on the peninsula. By accepting Hanbok, Koreans can not only communicate with ancient Chinese people, but also have cultural exchanges with them. Therefore, Chinese characters are derived from characters already used by the Chinese at that time.
However, a large number of words borrowed from Chinese are still widely used in the north , and Chinese characters still appear in special contexts, such as the recent Korean dictionary. Although Chinese characters were produced by China's centuries-old rule and cultural influence in Korea, it is not entirely Chinese. According to him, this is a "Korean" Chinese character, which means it is only created and used in Korea. Another complication is that simplified characters are used in mainland China , while traditional characters have been widely used in the Korean Peninsula for hundreds of years and are still in use today. in Korea. Official and official occasions.