Hanjapalooza: Hey China...Jealous?

Quick, what written characters did the Korean people invent? Anyone? Yes, you in the back there. Why yes they did indeed invent 한글...that's very astute of you. Anything else? Nobody? Well, they also invented some 漢字. Like this one!

畓(논 답)

"Wow...that's like totally awesome and stuff. What does it mean?"

It's water and a field...also known as a patty! Rocking! Let's check out some killer words we can make using this character why don't we? For starters check out:

답곡 (畓穀) - That's grain from paddy fields...rice! Awesome!
전답 (田畓) - Paddies and ordinary fields.
옥답 (沃畓) - Fertile fields.
문전옥답 (門前沃畓) - Fertile fields right in front of one's house!!! Outstanding!

You know what, this wasn't really that awesome. Unless you happen to be married to a farmer or a farmer's daughter or happen to live in the country chances are you're never going to use any of these words. But as a geek, it's still pretty awesome to learn that there are purely Korean 漢字. You say there's only one? We'll sorry friend, you're incorrect!

Turns out the Koreans made a whole slew of 漢字 for themselves. A great number of these new 漢字 simply took existing ones and added a 乙 or ㄱ to them to create characters for sounds that existed in Korean. Perhaps the most common of these is the character for 돌 which took the 漢字 for stone (石) and added 乙 (which looked like the 한글 letter ㄹ) to make the character 乭 (이름 돌). I guess this makes some sense since 돌 is the pure Korean word for stone, so they wrote it as a stone plus ㄹ. That's only a little bit awesome. Let's look at some other examples. Slightly more concrete examples.

下 (하) + 乙 (을 / ㄹ) = 乤 (할)
巨 (거) + 乙 (을 / ㄹ) = 乬 (걸)
甫 (보) + 乙 (을 / ㄹ) = 乶 (볼)
巨 (거) + ㄱ = 巪 (걱)

I could go on and on, but I'm not going to. If you want to see more examples of 漢字 my computer is unable to type (since they aren't really used anymore...yet still appear in more mighty 漢字 dictionaries), follow this here link. I never said this was going to be awesome did I? If I did, I apologize.