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Hanja's language of origin, Chinese, has many homophones, and Hanja words became even more homophonic when they came into Korean, since Korean lacks a tonal system, which is how Chinese distinguishes many words that would otherwise be homophonic.
The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the spoken Chinese language dates back approximately 4500 years, [1] while examples of the writing system that would become written Chinese are attested in a body of inscriptions made on bronze vessels and oracle bones during the Late Shang period (c. 1250 – 1050 BCE), [2] [3] with the very oldest dated to c. 1200 BCE.
Chinese influence on Korean culture can be traced back as early as the Goguryeo period; these influences can be demonstrated in the Goguryeo tomb mural paintings. [1]: 14 Throughout its history, Korea has been greatly influenced by Chinese culture, borrowing the written language, arts, religions, philosophy and models of government administration from China, and, in the process, transforming ...
Sino-Korean vocabulary includes words borrowed directly from Chinese, as well as new Korean words created from Chinese characters, and words borrowed from Sino-Japanese vocabulary. Many of these terms were borrowed during the height of Chinese-language literature on Korean culture. Subsequently, many of these words have also been truncated or ...
In the 1st millennium AD, Chinese culture came to dominate East Asia, and Classical Chinese was adopted by scholars and ruling classes in Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. As a consequence, there was a massive influx of loanwords from Chinese vocabulary into these and other neighboring Asian languages.
Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters, but later replaced with the hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ Nôm script. However, these were limited to popular ...
The Korean alphabet is a featural alphabet written in morpho-syllabic blocks, and was designed for both the Korean and Chinese languages, though the letters specific to Chinese are now obsolete. [4] Each block consists of at least one consonant letter and one vowel letter.
According to Samguk yusa, Dangun Joseon was the first state that represented Korean cultural identity. [1] Although controversial, a legend tells that in around 1100 BC a Chinese sage named Jizi (Gija) and his intellectuals fled from the Shang dynasty to avoid political turmoil and sought asylum in Gojoseon, and active cultural trades ensued after.