The Character 的

Today during my Korean class, our instructor was introducing everyone to Korea’s use of Chinese characters, or 한자. It was a welcome respite since I usually don’t understand about half of what the instructor is saying. Chinese characters, on the other hand, I feel much more comfortable with. At one point in the discussion our instructor introduced us to the character for 적(的) which we first found use for in a vocabulary word for this week 인상(印象). When you put the two together you can say that something was impressive, or left an impression (as you can in Japanese and Chinese with this same word).

Our instructor then made the most remarkable claim, “This character was invented by the Koreans, and doesn’t exist in any other language.” That is an interesting thing to say about a character which is the most frequently used character in the Chinese language. In Japanese, it is also very often used, especially in the creation of adjectives.

The character 的 is the #1 most frequent character in Chinese, according to the two frequency lists found in James Dew’s 6000 Chinese Words: A Vocabulary Frequency Handbook and from an old 1980 sample it is again #1 with 83,0302 hits out of a total sample size of 21,629,376 (I found this in Yin Binyong’s Modern Chinese Characters).

Anyways, my instructor backed off when two of us mentioned that the Chinese and Japanese languages also use the character but he still claimed that, “The Koreans invented the character, and perhaps the Chinese imported it.” That is really interesting! There are certainly lots of Chinese characters that the Japanese invented (国字 or 和製漢字) See the large and small online dictionaries of such characters for some examples. So surely there are Chinese characters that the Koreans invented?

First thing I did was check my two classical Chinese dictionaries (古汉语常用字字典 and 古代汉语词典) neither of which have an entry for 的 with the most common modern pronunciation of “de” but do have entries for “di” which is used, among other things in the character’s other meaning of “target” (まと in Japanese). Both dictionaries list it, with a number of different meanings, including 明，鲜明, which is found in Confucian classics like the Doctrine of the Mean and the Book of Rites. There are also some half a dozen other definitions and their references in various classics. Similar list in the massive 辞海 dictionary. In the classical Japanese 古語辞典 I have there are two entries which include 的：的然 (found in 太平記) and 的伝 (found in in some book I can’t even write). Its meaning as target is also listed.

Also by searching for 的 in the 大辞林 dictionary at Asahi.com, all of the major definitions, including its primary use in Japanese for creating adjectives (「名詞およびそれに準ずる語に付いて、形容動詞の語幹をつくる」) are said to have come from sayings found in Song and Yuan (Mongols) period China, later to develop its use as the english “-tic” in the Meiji period. (「もと中国、宋・元の俗語で「の」の意味を表す助辞であったものを、明治以降、英語の -tic を有する形容詞の訳語に用いたことに始まる」） Now we are getting close to a claim that the Japanese took one use of it from Chinese (the use which corresponds to の which is now the most common use of it in Chinese) and then adopted this use of it to form the “-tic” of English in the Meiji period. If this is true, we are getting closer to a claim that the Japanese introduced it to Korea in or after the Meiji period…as they did hundreds of other nouns like phone, rights, and countless other compounds. Unless, of course, the Koreans did the same independently.

Well, I haven’t looked into any of the library’s professional dictionaries, since I just wanted a short 1 hour break from my history reading and made use of what I had on the shelf and online. But it seems likely that the character was not invented by the Koreans, and instead of being imported from Korea, its adjectival use may have been imported by Korea from Japan. Anyone know for sure what the story on this is?

Well, whatever the case is, I’m still interested in finding out about Chinese characters that the Koreans did invent. The Chinese wikipedia mentions the fact that the Koreans made some of their own characters in the entry for 韓文漢字. Then in the “notes” of the Japanese entry for the same, I found reference to a few of these characters and also a reference by someone to something called 吏読 (which doesn’t look like new Chinese characters when I found its definition in 大辞林:「ハングルがつくられる以前に朝鮮で行われた、漢字の音訓による朝鮮語の表記法の総称。狭義には、朝鮮語の構文に合わせて書き下ろした、漢文の漢字語に添える朝鮮語の部分の表記をいう。新羅の神文王の時に薛総(せつそう)の創案したものといわれ、公文書をはじめ金石文・歌謡の記述などにも用いられた。りとう。」)

Does anyone who can really read Korean know where we might find a list of the characters that Korea really did create? Apparently one of these characters is 돌(乭).

Update:There is a site where you can view all the characters which were created in Korea here. Thanks to Anton for emailing me this link.