Talk:Hanja

message: The first sentence of the History section ("A major motivation for the introduction of Chinese characters into Korea was the spread of Buddhism.") conflicts with Adoption_of_Chinese_literary_culture#Korea and the sources with in. In particular, in https://books.google.com/books?id=pfb2QHJtw54C&pg=PA23#v=onepage&q&f=false, we see that "Chinese graphs ... must be used in Korea as early as the first century BC" well before the large scale spread of Buddhism in Korea in the 4th century CE (see Korean_Buddhism#Historical_overview_and_development).  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 140.180.132.127 (talk) 17:24, 13 July 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't see a conflict between both statements. It doesn't the "the only", but "a major". Prior to the 4th century, Chinese writing was not as extensively used in Korea as later, not on a large scale, and apparently more in the north than in the south. Similarly, Latin-based writing has been used in Korea for centuries, mostly by Europeans, but that doesn't mean that Latin-based literacy was ever introduced on a large scale. These are two completely different situations, and therefore assertions, so there is no contradiction. I've removed the tag. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 12:06, 13 December 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: What you say is true about the word "major". My bigger issue is with the use of the word "introduction", because, as you've alluded to, it can mean introducing the script to the masses or literacy to a small group of literate elites. Given that this statement has no source nor does it clarify this distinction, I had put the tag there. If you still disagree, we can leave it off. Either way I would like to have a good source for such a sweeping opening statement.--140.180.132.127 (talk) 22:01, 14 September 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Introduction of Written Chinese 

message: In response to the sentence in the pronunciation section of the article that "One obvious difference is the complete loss of tone from Korean while most Chinese dialects retain tone", there's a comment from June 2011 marking this as dubious, stating, "It is questionable whether Old Chinese had a tone system in 2nd–1st century BC, when the importation of hanja started. The notion of losing something that doesn't exist is absurd."
I've slightly edited the article by adding "standard" to "Korean" and removing "complete". There are two different things going on here: first, although it's true that Old Chinese wasn't tonal, that misses the point because that's orthogonal to whether Korean was tonal such that it "lost" tone. It's well accepted that Middle Korean was tonal (or at least had a pitch accent), and so it is accurate to say that Korean lost tone -- at least standard Korean, since some modern Korean dialects remain tonal (and this is setting aside whether the modern Seoul dialect, on which standard Korean is based, is becoming tonal again, as some have argued). Second, the importation of Hanja was not a one-off event. Old Chinese wasn't tonal, but Middle Chinese most certainly was, along with modern varieties of Chinese. So something that used to exist was indeed lost when modern standard Korean lost tone. Talu42 (talk) 19:44, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Dubious" comment in pronunciation section 

message: I have again reverted a change of the Languages field of the infobox from "Korean, Classical Chinese" to "Korean, Jejuan" to match the article contents: Hanja were used in Korea to write both Korean and Chinese, and there is no mention of (or source for) the Jeju language being written using Hanja. Kanguole 13:04, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Languages 

message: At the end of the second paragraph, it currently reads: 
This looks like too much off-topic detail here, especially for the lede. It is of course important to say that due to the PRC-spelling reform, many Hanja characters are different from the ones that are now used by most Chinese speakers, but the information about Japan and Singapore is an unnecessary diversion IMHO, since this article is about Hanja, and not about what happened to traditional Chinese characters in the entire Sinosphere. Austronesier (talk) 17:38, 22 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Off-topic material in the lede 

message: The original text states that During the 3rd century BC, Chinese migrations into the peninsula occurred due to war in northern China and the earliest archaeological evidence of Chinese writing are dated to this period. But it seems wrong. 梦随飞絮 (talk) 13:27, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: The original was correct. The first archaeological evidence of Chinese characters in Korea dates from the 3rd century BC. The first evidence in China is a millennium earlier, in the late Shang. There is a tradition of Shang migrations to Korea, but it hasn't been substantiated historically. Kanguole 14:42, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  About my edit