Comment by fenomas
3 hours ago
Agreed, I think that's a close analogy and it's wild to me how recently Korean dropped kanji. But I imagine having a lot more vowel sounds made it a lot easier. I've wondered whether the two interacted - e.g. if there were word pairs that had previously used the same vowel sounds, but changed after the switch to Hangul to be distinguishable. Do you know by any chance?
Sino-Korean words are different from Sino-Japanese words in that the sounds are very "rigid": most Chinese characters have one canonical sound, and it is pronounced that way regardless of where it appears (modulo some mostly predictable sound change rules). So, you can't just take a Sino-Korean word and "tweak" its sound to disambiguate - when such a word changes its sound it will no longer be perceived as Sino-Korean at all, which actually happened for some examples such as 산행 (san-haeng, 山行, "mountain + go" = "hike on a mountain") which gave birth to 사냥 (sanyang, "hunting"), a separate word.
What did happen was that we lost obscure words that could only be understood by looking at Chinese characters (because they're used so rarely, or because they sound the same as another more common word) - you could still use them if you wanted to, but unless you also write them in Hanja, it would be confusing, and if you mix gratuitous Hanja into your writing just because you like those words, most young readers will find it pretentious, and I fear, mostly unreadable.
I can't say we lost much by losing these words. Rather, I think it actually forced writers to select less ambiguous words, which is usually a good thing.
(Also, these days most Koreans know much more English than Classical Chinese, so English loanwords can sometimes fill the gap. It helps that most English (or other Western) loanwords sound different from native or Sino-Korean words, so there's less chance of collision.)