Sino-Xenic - Background

Background

There had been borrowings of Chinese vocabulary into Vietnamese and Korean from the Han period, but around the time of the Tang dynasty Chinese writing, language and culture were imported wholesale into Vietnam, Korea and Japan. Scholars in those countries wrote in Literary Chinese and were thoroughly familiar with the Chinese classics, which they read aloud in systematic local approximations of Middle Chinese. With these pronunciations, Chinese words entered Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese in huge numbers.

The plains of northern Vietnam were under Chinese control for most of the period from 111 BC to 938 AD, resulting in several layers of Chinese loanwords in Vietnamese. The oldest loans, roughly 400 words dating from the Eastern Han, have been fully assimilated and are treated as native Vietnamese words. Sino-Vietnamese proper dates to the early Tang dynasty, when the spread of Chinese rhyme dictionaries and other literature resulted in the wholesale importation of the Chinese lexicon.

Isolated Chinese words also began to enter Korean from the 1st century BC, but the main influx occurred in the 7th and 8th centuries after the unification of the peninsula by Silla. The flow of Chinese words into Korean became overwhelming after the establishment of the civil service examinations in 958.

Japanese, in contrast, has two well-preserved layers and a third that is also significant:

• Go-on readings date to the introduction of Buddhism to Japan from Korea in the 6th century. They are believed to reflect pronunciations of the lower Yangtze area in the late Southern and Northern Dynasties period.
• Kan-on readings are believed to reflect the standard pronunciation of the Tang period, as used in the cities of Chang'an and Luoyang.
• Tōsō-on readings were introduced by followers of Zen Buddhism in the 14th century, and are thought to be based on the speech of Hangzhou.

Since the pioneering work of Bernhard Karlgren, these bodies of pronunciations have been used together with modern varieties of Chinese in attempts to reconstruct the sounds of Middle Chinese. They provide such broad and systematic coverage that the linguist Samuel Martin called them "Sino-Xenic dialects", treating them as parallel branches with the native Chinese dialects. The foreign pronunciations sometimes retain distinctions lost in all the modern Chinese varieties, as in the case of the chongniu distinction found in Middle Chinese rhyme dictionaries. Similarly the distinction between grades III and IV made by the Late Middle Chinese rime tables has disappeared in most modern varieties, but in Kan-on grade IV is represented by the Old Japanese vowels i₁ and e₁, while grade III is represented by i₂ and e₂.

Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese scholars also later each adapted the Chinese script to write their languages, using Chinese characters both for borrowed and native vocabulary. Thus in the Japanese script Chinese characters may have both Sino-Japanese readings (on'yomi) and native readings (kun'yomi). Similarly in the Chữ nôm script used for Vietnamese until the early 20th century, a Chinese character could represent both a Sino-Vietnamese word and a native Vietnamese word with similar meaning or sound to the Chinese word, though in such cases the native reading would be distinguished by a special mark. However in Korean characters typically have only a Sino-Korean reading.