중국어 외래어를 원지음으로 표기해야할 이유

Abstract

This paper deals with the controversial arguments about wether Chinese loan words should be written in Sino-Korean pronunciations or Chinese pronunciations in Korean writings. Since any Chinese character can be read in Sino-Korean pronunciation, previous practice was to write Chinese proper names in Sino-Korean pronunciations. This tendency, however, contradicted to the language policy of Korea, which transliterates the loan words, including personal and place names, from any other languages in the original pronunciations in theory. In addition, this paper points out other problems of writing Chinese loan words in Sino-Korean. They can summarized as follows: a. Sino-Korean writing cannot be so convenient as much as what is expected because there are more than several thousands of Chinese characters to learn to write Chinese personal and place names in Sino-Korean pronunciations. This case may easily violate the policy of exclusive use of Korean alphabet in Korean writings. b. The main principle of writing foreign loan words in Korean is transliteration of original sounds. This principle should remain consistent regardless the original languages. Chinese proper nouns and loan words cannot be an exception to this principle. The language policies in Korea do not need to be identical with those in China. Thus, it has nothing to do with the fact that Chinese people call Korean proper names in their own pronunciations. c. Modern Sino-Korean pronunciations are far different from Modern Mandarin although it is true that Sino-Korean was derived mainly from Middle Chinese, which was the language of China approximately 1400 years ago. Accordingly, it is not so persuasive to claim that Sino-Korean is also depiction of modern Chinese sounds. d. Writing Chinese names in Sino-Korean often leads to make no distinction between Chinese and Korean names. Thus, writing Chinese names in Chinese pronunciations while Korean names in Korean pronunciations help the Koreans build up their cultural identity.