Chinese Scripts - Adaptations For Other Languages

Adaptations For Other Languages

The Chinese script was for a long period the only writing system in East Asia, and was also hugely influential as the vehicle of the dominant Chinese culture. Korea, Japan and Vietnam adopted Chinese literary culture as a whole. For many centuries, all writing in neighbouring societies was done in Classical Chinese, albeit influenced by the writer's native language. Although they wrote in Chinese, writing about local subjects required characters to represent names of local people and places. Later they sought to use the script to write their own languages. Chinese characters were adapted to represent the words of other languages using a range of strategies, including

• representing loans from Chinese using their original characters,
• representing words with characters for similar-sounding Chinese words,
• representing words with characters for Chinese words with similar meanings, and
• creating new characters using the same formation principles as Chinese characters, especially phono-semantic compounds.

The principle of representing one monosyllabic word with one character was readily applied to neighbouring languages to the south with a similar analytic structure to Chinese, such as Vietnamese and Zhuang. The script was a poorer fit for the polysyllabic agglutinative languages of the north-east, such as Korean, Japanese and Mongolic and Tungusic languages.