Sino-Japanese Vocabulary - Background

Background

China's large territory and advanced culture led Chinese to exert an enormous influence on Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and other East Asian languages throughout history, in a manner somewhat similar to Latin's preeminent position in European history. At the time of their first contact, the Japanese language had no writing system, while the Chinese had a written language and a great deal of academic information, providing new concepts along with Chinese words to express them. Chinese became the language of science, learning and religion. The earliest written language to be used in Japan was literary Chinese, which has come to be called kanbun in this context. The kanbun writing system essentially required every literate Japanese to be competent in written Chinese, although it is unlikely that many Japanese people were then fluent in spoken Chinese. Chinese pronunciation was approximated in words borrowed from Chinese into Japanese; this Sino-Japanese vocabulary is still an important component of the Japanese language, and may be compared to words of Latin or Greek origin in English.

Chinese borrowings also significantly impacted Japanese phonology, leading to many new developments such as closed syllables (CVC, not just CV) and Length becoming a phonetic feature with the development of both long vowels and long consonants – see Early Middle Japanese: Phonological developments.