Marco Cimarosti wrote:

>
> I have some questions about the usage of hanja (Chinese characters) in
> Korean.
>
> 1) Is it correct to say that hanja are only used for words derived from
> Chinese, and never for genuninely Korean words?

I'm pretty sure this is so.

> 2) Is it true that hanja have been abolished in North Korea? When did this
> happen?

When was North Korea invented?

> 3) How often are hanja used today, however? (All the Korean web pages I come
> across are totally in hangul, including
> http://www.unicode.org/unicode/standard/translations/korean.html).

A linguistics professor friend of mine at SUNY Stony Brook reports that
Korean immigrant students rarely know any characters at all -- sometimes
not even the characters for their own name -- unless they didn't leave
South Korea until after high school. Characters are almost completely
dead in the South, too, but it has been claimed that you still need to
know characters in order to understand the Sino-Korean vocabulary, but
that seems pretty fishy.

> 4) How do Koreans input hanja on computers?

I can't say how Koreans do it, but I do it with the Macintosh Korean
Language Kit just about the same way as the Japanese Langauge Kit works
-- type hangul/kana and tell it to convert, then choose the right
character if necessary.

(All the Mac Language Kits are included in OS 9. I had to buy them
separately to use with System 7.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...