Chapter 35 Section 2 The Influence of Chinese Characters on Some Foreign Languages

Historically, Chinese characters have also had a huge impact on China's neighbors such as North Korea, Vietnam, Japan and other countries. According to legend, China and North Korea had contacts in the period of King Wu of the Western Zhou Dynasty more than 3,000 years ago.Before the 1st century AD, Koreans had come into contact with Chinese characters.Around the 5th century AD, Chinese characters have been used as Korean characters.At first, it was only used by the aristocratic class, but it was widely used in the society in the seventh and eighth centuries.In the process of using Chinese characters, they created a written form that borrowed the sound and meaning of Chinese characters to mark Korean, called "official reading".Until the 15th century A.D., the Koreans created their own language—Hangul.But for a long time, these two kinds of characters are mixed.

Before Qin Shihuang unified China, Vietnam and China had already had contact.Chinese characters were introduced into Vietnam around the time of Qin and Han Dynasties.For a long time, Vietnam has been using Chinese characters.In the 13th century, the Vietnamese roughly imitated the Chinese character "Liu Shu" to create a character called "Zi Nan" (meaning "Southern characters") with Chinese radicals.For example, "(天下上)" is a knowing character, which is composed of two Chinese characters "天" and "上", meaning "heaven". "(Ba Shang San)" is a phonetic character, pronounced "Ba", meaning "three". After the 1960s, Vietnam implemented the reform of writing, and then replaced Chinese characters and Zi Nan with phonetic writing.

According to historical records, during the Taikang period of Emperor Wu of the Western Jin Dynasty (280-289 AD) in the 3rd century AD, some Chinese classics such as "Thousand Characters" had been introduced to Japan.This is the beginning of the introduction of Chinese characters into Japan.The Japanese imitate the pronunciation of Chinese Chinese to pronounce and read Chinese characters, which is called "Yindu", and also use the pronunciation of Japanese to read and read Chinese characters, which is called "Xundu". The Japanese alphabet was created using Chinese characters, called "Kana", which was created around the eighth or ninth century AD.The use of pseudonyms was originally regarded as an expedient measure; in contrast, Chinese characters are called "real names" and are used to write formal articles.

Kana is divided into "Katakana" and "Hiragana". "Katakana" is written in Chinese regular script, using the radicals of handwritten regular script, such as: "Hiragana" is the cursive writing using the whole kanji, such as: A kana is a syllable. It is said that it can be used to spell and record all the words in Japanese as a syllable agglutinant language. However, there are many homonyms in Japanese. If all kana are used, it will be difficult to recognize, so only kana can be used The use of Chinese characters makes the current Japanese characters roughly a semi-pinyin language.

In addition, the Japanese also created some characters based on Chinese characters, called "Japanese characters", such as "tsuji", which means "street, crossroads"; "hata", which means "dry field" and so on.