Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Hanja (Korean: 한자; Hanja: 漢字, Korean pronunciation: [ha(ː)ntɕ͈a]), alternatively known as Hancha, are Chinese characters used to write the Korean language.After characters were introduced to Korea to write Literary Chinese, they were adapted to write Korean as early as the Gojoseon period.
The Korean alphabet was designed not just to write Korean, but to accurately represent Chinese. Many Chinese words historically began with [ŋ] , but by Sejong's day this had been lost in many regions of China, and was silent when these words were borrowed into Korean, so that [ŋ] only remained at the middle and end of Korean words.
The next attested stage came from inscriptions on ... Chinese characters called kanji, and kana. Korean is written ... other Chinese language that is widely taught as ...
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.
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.
Core languages of the East Asian cultural sphere are predominantly Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, and their respective variants. These are well-documented to have historically used Chinese characters, with Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese each having roughly 60% of their vocabulary derived from Chinese.
In Korean, Chinese characters are referred to as hanja. Literary Chinese may have been written in Korea as early as the 2nd century BCE. During Korea's Three Kingdoms period (57 BCE – 668 CE), characters were also used to write idu, a form of Korean-language literature that mostly made use of Sino-Korean vocabulary.
The modern Korean language has its own pronunciations for Chinese characters, called Sino-Korean. [92] Although some Sino-Korean forms reflect Old Chinese or Early Mandarin pronunciations, the majority of modern linguists believe that the dominant layer of Sino-Korean descends from the Middle Chinese prestige dialect of Chang'an during the Tang ...