Day 9 — The Linguistic Root of Korean and Japanese Vocabulary
It is common to see Korean people on the internet, capable of reading Japanese. Several local Japanese people have even come up to me to ask about the similarities between the two languages. Let us analyze why there are so many commonalities between Japanese and Korean. The most striking similarities come from the influence of the Chinese language and the use of Kanji(in Japanese) or Hanja(in Korean).
The modern Chinese script traces its roots all the way back to around 1200 B.C from the Oracle Bone script (jia gu wen), a collection of over 50,000 inscriptions of text on animal bones. Over the years, the writing systems have transformed into two commonly used forms of Chinese writing, categorized in English as the ‘simplified’ and ‘traditional’ scripts.
During the Tang dynasty(618–907 A.D), China strengthened its foreign relations with nearby countries — Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, to name a few, through active cultural exchange. This move was the creation of the East Asian cultural sphere(漢字文化圈)
Once the Chinese script was introduced to Japan and Korea, it began to undergo transformations to meld better with the local cultures and languages. In Korea, the hyangchal(鄕札) script was created by Buddhist monks which used a simplified version of Chinese characters to write scripts and poetry. Similarly, in Japan, manyogana(万葉仮名), the first ‘kana’ script was used as long back as the 7th century. Manyogana also uses a simplified version of the Chinese script where each character represents a sound derived from the pronunciation of the same word in Middle Chinese.
To make the complex logographic writing system of China more accessible and easier to learn for a wider audience, Korean and Japanese took slightly different approaches to develop phonetic systems. In Japan, the old manyogana transformed into the current hiragana(平: Common 仮: Fake 名: Text). While in Korea, a group of scholars during the reign of King Sejong developed hunminjeongeum as a new phonetic system for the masses. Also, hanja(漢字), or the traditional Chinese writing system known in Korea, was referred to as jinseo(真名 literally, ‘real text’) during the Joseon period. It is similarly called mana(真名) in Japanese.
Let us take the word below written in the Chinese script and see how they are read in the two languages to understand further the similarities and differences between modern Japanese and Korean.
The above word can be read by speakers of all three languages and use very similar sounds to pronounce them. Korean language has a system called eumhun (音訓), which similar to the Japanese concepts of onyomi (音読み) and Kunyomi (訓読み) is the term for the possible different readings for any given Chinese character. Both languages maintain a dichotomy between the pronunciation/sound (音) and the interpretation/meaning (訓) due to the conversion of the script’s ideographic roots to their own phonetic alphabets.
Here’s another example.
To summarize, there are several common areas between Japanese and Korean scripts, especially due to the strong influence of Chinese culture spread through their history. It is not a reach to state that an individual who learns how to read characters in the Chinese script can learn how to read and speak a lot of vocabulary in Japanese and Korean as well. To read them accurately, they would only need to learn how certain sounds are morphed to suit the local people in the three languages. Even by using combinations of traditional Chinese characters that might have fallen out of practice, it is quite possible to communicate a general intention and meaning behind them as the skill to read them is common in all three countries.
The appearances of Japanese and Korean languages have nothing in common. However, they share the same root, the same grammar, and the same linguistic foundation. Learning about the history of East Asian languages will help one understand the system better.
This article is part of the HENNGE Advent Calendar 2020. An Advent calendar is a special calendar used for counting down the days till Christmas. HENNGE Advent Calendar 2020 presents one article by one HENNGE member per day for 25 days until Christmas, 2020.
