Before importation of the Chinese ideographs, none of these three countries seems to have had a written language. Most proper nouns were rendered into Chinese and pronounced in the dialects of the disseminators. Although those who carried the characters abroad came from various parts of China and many of those who went to Japan were Koreans, the pronunciations of the four peoples are close even today. The difference is perhaps not greater than among the dialects of China.
The following comparison of sounds is taken from the Chinese translation of The Chinese Language, An Essay on Its Nature and History by Bernhard Karlgren, a Swedish Sinologist (phonetic symbols are those of the International Phonetic Association):
Place Sounds
歌 多 羅
(song) (many) (netting)
Canton ko to Lo
Foochow ka ta La
Shanghai ku tu Lu
Peiping kə to Lo
(Mandarin)
Kaifeng kЫ to Lo
Korea ka ta na
Japan ka ta ra
Vietnam ka da La
Etymologically, Chinese characters are estimated to constitute more than 50 per cent of all Korean words. The Japanese percentage is believed to exceed 40 and Vietnamese to be at least 33. The pronunciation of a number of Chinese terms currently used in China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan is shown in the accompanying table.
When rendering their native tongues into Chinese ideographs, the Koreans, Annamese and Japanese have encountered a common problem. Some proper nouns and most participles had no Chinese equivalents and had to be transliterated. But transliteration was apt to cause confusion. As a consequence, they created their own systems of writing to transcribe these nouns and particles.
The Chinese system of writing supposedly was taken to Korea in 1122 B.C. when the Shang-Yin, China's second dynasty of record, was overthrown by King Wu of the Chou dynasty. In that year, a young noble of the Shang court named Chi-tzu, known in Korea as Kija, is said to have refused to serve the new dynasty and to have emigrated to the Korean peninsula with 5,000 followers. The second exodus of Chinese took place in 108 B.C. when the Emperor Wu of the' Han established four commanderies-Lolang, Chenfan, Lintun and Hsuantu-in northern Korea. Though the Chinese colonizers subsequently were expelled by the natives, they had a considerable civilizing influence on the Koreans. Many proper nouns were Sinicized, place names were transliterated into the Han characters and Chinese customs and manners were adopted. In 372 A.D., when Korea was divided into the three kingdoms of Koguryo in the north and Silla and Paekche. in the south, Koguryo imported Buddhism from China and established the first Chinese-style "university" to teach the children of aristocrats Confucianism and Chinese history.
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The earliest writing system of Korea known today is the idu. It is believed to have been invented by Sol Ch'ong, a scholar-official of Silla, in the late 7th century. A derivative of the Han characters and resembling the katakana of Japan, idu was used primarily as phonetic symbols to help students read the Chinese classics.
Idu was not extensively used as an auxiliary written language. To enable ordinary people to write their spoken language, Sejong, the fourth monarch. of the Yi dynasty, sponsored the creation of a new phonetic system in 1443. The project was undertaken by Chong In-ji, Song Sam-mun, Sin Suk-chu and other members of the Wise Men's Hall, an academic research group set up at the Imperial Palace. In 1446, the system was promulgated as Hunmin Chongum, literally, "teaching people proper sounds", for official use. In his preamble to the Hunmin Chongum, King Sejong said: "The spoken language of this country is different from that of China and does not correspond with what is written in the Chinese characters. Many of the uneducated are unable to express in writing what they want to say. Out of regard for them, we have created 28 letters that may be mastered by all our subjects with ease for convenient daily use."
Despite the Imperial Decree, this system of phonetic writing was not used in official correspondence, primarily because aristocrats and scholars were Confucianists and learned in Chinese. The 28-character system was used mainly in publications for the lower classes and in correspondence between women or between those of minimal education. It was also called onmun-vernacular writing. In 1504, the use of onmun was banned by the government after the Kapja Revolt.
With the introduction of Western science, linguists and grammarians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries tried to standardize the Korean language through the use of onmun. Their efforts came to an end when Korea was absorbed by Japan in 1910.
Since the end of World War II, onmun has been called hangul-Korean letters-and is the official written language of Korea. In commemoration of the invention of this phonetic alphabet, October 9 is observed as Hangul Day.
The 28 letters promulgated by King Sejong included 11 vowels and 17 consonants. Of these, a vowel and three consonants eventually were merged into others because their phonetic values were more Chinese than Korean. Additionally, there are 11 double vowels and 5 double consonants, as shown in the accompany list.
Generally speaking, Korean words have from one to four syllables. Those of two and three syllagles constitute 70 per cent of the hangul thesaurus. In morphology, hangul is more syllabic than alphabetic because its vocalization was based mainly on the principles of Chinese phonology. Each syllable is written from left to right and from top to bottom.
Edwin O. Reischauer, co-originator of the McCune-Reischauer Korean Romanization system, has said that hangul is "perhaps the most scientific system of writing" in the world today because "the advantage of an alphabetic script and a syllabary (in which each symbol represents a whole syllable) are combined by bunching the individual letters into syllabic groups".
The northern part of present-day North Vietnam was known to the Chinese as early as the 3rd century B.C. At that time, Kwangtung, Kwangsi and the area around Haiphong were called Nanyueh, meaning "southern Yueh land", presumably because present-day Chekiang north of Kwangtung was called Yueh in Chou times. The First Emperor of the Ch'in is said to have been interested in the rhinoceros horn, ivory, jadeites and pearls of that southern land and to have sent an 'expeditionary force of 500,000 there around 221 B.C. Seven years later, the Ch'in government set up three commanderies - Nanhai in Kwangtung, Kweilin in Kwangsi and Hsiang in North Annam. In 111 B.C., Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty expanded the boundary of Hsiang commandery to Hue.
The modern name "Vietnam" is a reversal of the ancient Chinese name "Nanyueh". In Chinese word order, the noun is preceded by the adjective. In Vietnamese terms of Chinese origin, however, some adjectives come after nouns. This is analogous to such French expressions as tableau noir for the English "blackboard", ecole normale for "normal school" and les Etats-Unis for "the United States".
The historical name "Annam" was used for the first time in 220 A.D. when the Emperor Hsien of the Latter Han gave Lu Tai the title of "Annam General". Chinese rule lasted until 968 when Ding Bo Lanh, an Annamese general, revolted and named his new state Dai Co Viet.
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In 1407, the Emperor Ch'eng Tsu of the Ming regained Annam and made it a province - Chiaochih-which later was known as "Cochin" in the West. In 1428, General Le Loi rebelled against the Ming and founded a new dynasty. Despite separatist movements and the invention of a new writing system called chu nom in the 14th century, written Chinese was used as the official language of Annam until the French conquest at the end of the 19th century.
Chu nom means "vernacular characters". The system was invented by Nguyen Thuyen, a scholar-official of the Tran court, to transcribe native sounds. Employing two of the six principles for the formation of the written Chinese language-hui i, compound ideographic characters, and hsing sheng, phonetic compounds-Nguyen Thuyen used the existing radical components of the Chinese ideographs to form new characters. The character for "sky" may serve as an hui i example. It is written, a combination of two Chinese characters- 天 (sky) and 上 (above). A typical example for the employment of hsing sheng is the character 巴彡(ba) for "three". The left-hand component 巴 (pronounced pa in Mandarin Chinese) is for the Annamese sound ba and the right-hand component 三 for the idea of "three".
Although a sizable number of literary works was written in the "vernacular characters", chu nom was never recognized as an official written language because, as in Yi-dynasty Korea, influential officials and scholars were predominantly Confucian and learned in Chinese. In the 17th century, Alexandre Rhode, a Portuguese Catholic priest, Romanized spoken Annamese. This system, subsequently known as quoc ngu, was substituted for the Chinese characters during French rule.
According to the Kojiki, "Record of Ancient Matters", and the Nihon Shoki, "History of Japan", both of which are believed to have been compiled in the early years of the 8th century, the Chinese characters were introduced to Japan in 285 A.D. by Wang In (Wa-ni in Japanese), a Paekche Sinologist. Wang In is said to have presented a copy of the Ch'ien-tzu Wen, "One Thousand Character' Classic", and 10 copies of the Lun Yu, "Analects of Confucius", as a tribute to the Emperor Ojin.
In recent years, the date of introduction has been in controversy among historians and linguists. Some assert the time was a few centuries later because the Ch'ien-tzu Wen was compiled by Chou Hsing-szu between 502 and 549 during the reign of the Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty. Others defend the traditional date on the ground that the Ch'ien-tzu Wen of Wang In was different from the one compiled by Chou Hsing-szu.
The kana syllabaries, consisting of katakana and hiragana, are phonetic symbols derived from the Chinese characters. Creation of the katakana is traditionally attributed to Kibi-no Makibi (695-775), one-time deputy ambassador to the T'ang court, and that of hiragana to Kukai (774-835), founder of the Shingon (True Words) sect of Buddhism in Japan. More recently, scholars have agreed that neither of the syllabaries was invented by a single person and that they were developed around the 10th century during the Heian period.
Kana originally was pronounced karina. It was corrupted to kanna and later to kana. The term literally means "false" or "borrowed letters" and constitutes the antonym of mana or "substantive letters", meaning the Chinese characters.
Katakana and hiragana actually are the same syllabary written in different styles. Both have five vowels, nine consonants and two diacritical marks in the following order:
Vowels: a, i, u, e and 0
Consonants: k, s, t, n, h, m, y, r and w
Diacritical marks: A double dot "丶丶 ", added to such surds as k, s, t and h to form the sonants g, z, d and b; and a small circle "o", added to the surd h to form the sonant p.
Each of the five vowels constitutes an independent syllable. The nine consonants are invariably suffixed by a vowel to form such syllables as ka, ki, ku, ke. ko, sa, shi, su, se, so, etc., as shown in the accompanying table. The table is called gojuonzu or the "chart of 50 sounds". In addition to the 50 sounds, there is an independent consonant n, which may be suffixed to any syllable in such combination as kanbun (Chinese writing), kin (gold) and Michiko-san (Miss Michiko). This nasal consonant exclusively for use as a suffix did not exist in ancient Japan and is said to have been imported from China along with the Chinese ideographs.
A katakana syllable is formed by a part or the whole of a Chinese character. For example, the syllable ア (pronounced a) is the simplified form of the left-hand radical of the character 阿 (also pronounced a in Chinese), イ(i) is the left-hand radical of the character 伊 (also i in Chinese), and ウ (u) is the super-incumbent radical of the character 宇 (Yu in Chinese). This system of writing probably was originated by Buddhist monks and Confucian scholars to annotate Sinicized Indian sutras and Chinese classics.
The hiragana syllabary essentially is the cursive writing or ts'ao shu (sosho in Japanese) of the Chinese characters. For example, the syllable あ (a) is an abbreviated form of the character 安 (an in Chinese), い(i) that of 以 (also i in Chinese), and ら (u) that of 宇 (yu in Chinese). This syllabary formerly was called onnade or "female hands" because, like the hangul alphabet of Korea in the 15th century, it was used mainly by women.
This is the hangul alphabet of today: 10 vowels, 14 consonants, 11 double vowels and 5 double consonants
How the Korean letters are combined. "e" stands for consonant and "V" for vowe. (File Photo)
Despite the invention of these two syllabaries, the Chinese characters have been used as the main tool of written communication by the Japanese people. The syllabaries have been employed as auxiliary letters to denote grammatical inflections, transliteration of foreign sounds and onomatopoeias of animal cries, and exclamations. Until the written language reform of 1946, all imperial decrees and legal as well as official documents were written in a combination of the Chinese ideographs and katakana. Since 1947, katakana has been used mainly for transliteration, telegraphic communication and functions resembling the italics of Western languages. Most publications of today are printed in fewer than 1,850 characters and hiragana. The exclusive use of hiragana is rare except in juvenile literature.