Koreanic languagesKoreanic is a small language family consisting of the Korean and Jeju languages. The latter is often described as a dialect of Korean, but is distinct enough to be considered a separate language. Alexander Vovin suggests that the Yukjin dialect of the far northeast should be similarly distinguished. Korean has been richly documented since the introduction of the Hangul alphabet in the 15th century. Earlier renditions of Korean using Chinese characters are much more difficult to interpret.
Chữ NômChữ Nôm (, t͡ɕɨ˦ˀ˥ nom˧˧) is a logographic writing system formerly used to write the Vietnamese language. It uses Chinese characters (chữ Hán) to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and some native Vietnamese words, with other words represented by new characters created using a variety of methods, including phono-semantic compounds. This composite script was therefore highly complex and was accessible to less than five percent of the Vietnamese population who had mastered written Chinese.
HallasanHallasan is a shield volcano on Jeju Island in South Korea. Its summit, at , is the highest point in the country. The area around the mountain is a designated national park, the Hallasan National Park (한라산국립공원, 漢拏山國立公園). Hallasan is commonly considered to be one of the three main mountains of South Korea, along with Jirisan and Seoraksan. Hallasan is the highest mountain in South Korea and is worshipped by people as they believe that gods and spirits live on the mountain.
GugyeolGugyeol, also kwukyel, is a system for rendering texts written in Classical Chinese into understandable Korean. It was chiefly used during the Joseon Dynasty, when readings of the Chinese classics were of paramount social importance. Thus, in gugyeol, the original text in classical Chinese was not modified, and the additional markers were simply inserted between phrases. The Korean reader would then read the parts of the Chinese sentence out of sequence to approximate Korean (SOV) rather than Chinese (SVO) word order.
Korean phonologyThis article is a technical description of the phonetics and phonology of Korean. Unless otherwise noted, statements in this article refer to South Korean standard language based on the Seoul dialect. Morphophonemes are written inside double slashes (⫽ ⫽), phonemes inside slashes (/ /), and allophones inside brackets ([ ]). Korean has 19 consonant phonemes. For each plosive and affricate, there is a three-way contrast between unvoiced segments, which are distinguished as plain, tense, and aspirated.
Korean languageKorean (South Korean: , hangugeo; North Korean: , chosŏnmal) is the native language for about 80 million people, mostly of Korean descent. It is the official and national language of both North Korea and South Korea (geographically Korea). The two countries have established standardized norms for Korean, and the differences between them are similar to those between Standard Chinese in mainland China and Taiwan, but political conflicts between the two countries have highlighted the differences between them.
Christianity in KoreaThe practice of Christianity in Korea is marginal in North Korea, but significant in South Korea, where it revolves around two of its largest branches, Protestantism and Catholicism, accounting for 8.6 million and 5.8 million members, respectively. Catholicism was first introduced during the late Joseon Dynasty period by Confucian scholars who encountered it in China. In 1603, Yi Gwang-jeong, a Korean diplomat, returned from Beijing carrying several theological books written by Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit missionary to China.
HanjaHanja (Hangul: ; Hanja: , ha(ː)ntɕ͈a), alternatively known as Hancha, are Chinese characters () used in the writing of Korean. Hanja was used as early as the Gojoseon period under the first Korean kingdom. Hanja-eo (한자어, ) refers to Sino-Korean vocabulary, which can be written with Hanja, and hanmun (한문, ) refers to Classical Chinese writing, although Hanja is also sometimes used to encompass both concepts.
Aegukga"Aegukga" (; ɛːɡuk͈ːa; "Patriotic Song"), often translated as "The Patriotic Song", is the national anthem of the Republic of Korea. It was adopted in 1948, the year the country was founded. Its music was composed in the 1930s and arranged most recently in 2018; its lyrics date back to the 1890s. The lyrics of "Aegukga" were originally set to the music of the Scottish song "Auld Lang Syne" before Ahn Eak-tai composed a unique melody specifically for it in 1936.
Chinese charactersChinese characters are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. Chinese characters are the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world. By virtue of their widespread current use throughout East Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as their profound historic use throughout the Sinosphere, Chinese characters are among the most widely adopted writing systems in the world by number of users. The total number of Chinese characters ever to appear in a dictionary is in the tens of thousands, though most are graphic variants, were used historically and passed out of use, or are of a specialized nature.
