英文摘要
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Chinese characters are no longer commonly used in contemporary Korean language, and the percentage that hanjaeo (Korean-Chinese characters) occupy in Korean language is getting lower. Despite that, Hanjaeos still account for more than 50% in Korean. Hanjaeos originated from Chinese, Korean and Japanese. This study first analyzed the linguistic pedigree of hanjaeos followed by the distribution of hanjaeos in various areas. Based on the over 50 categories of terminological hanjaeos in the Korean Dictionary published by the Society of Korean Language, results of statistical analysis showed most of the hanjaeos in Korean are Buddhist terms for up to 2030 words, accounting for 95% of Korean Buddhist terms. A majority of these words was derived from Chinese Buddhist manuscripts, and shared the highest similarity among Korea, Chinese and Japanese. A total of 1707 hanjaeos were found to belong to law, accounting for the highest percentage. Most of these words were adopted from Japanese-Chinese characters so about 80% of these words were the same or similar to Japanese-Chinese characters. Other hanjaeos, which were influenced by Japanese, were found in areas including politics, economics, education, social science, philosophy and so on. Only a small amount of hanjaeors were found in animals and plants, agriculture and forestry and architecture, whereas most words in these areas are Korean hanjaeos.
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