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I call myself studying Chinese now, and I'm fascinating and just how much of the vocabulary is in Japanese. It's a very hard to to study the history of both Jap
by offtop5 5y ago
I call myself studying Chinese now, and I'm fascinating and just how much of the vocabulary is in Japanese. It's a very hard to to study the history of both Japanese and Korean since as far as I can tell these languages existed for a very long time before importing writing from China. Did any writing systems exist in Korea or Japan before this ?
- sova 5y agoFrom what I understand, Korea and Japan got their first writing systems from Kanji. Japanese aristocratic ladies were the first to transform kanji into Hiragana, it is very flowy and round. In Korea, a leader got some scholars together and invented Hangul which is a brilliant writing system where multiple sound effects placed in the same block on blockpaper are one syllable. I'm not aware of any evidence of earlier writing systems in either Korea or Japan. In the Jomon period of Japan a lot of pottery with intricate rope weaving and patterns was made, and ancient pottery typically indicates a need to mark things, but it seems like marking got an all-at-once makeover when kanji started spreading. Kanji took hundreds of years to become anything resembling a standardized collection, and typically you did not need standardized writing systems unless you had something really important to write down -- holy scripture such as Buddhist sutras.
- offtop5 5y agoI actually really like the Hangul writing system. Actually speaking Korean is a whole different story, but to be completely fair I've been trying to learn Japanese at various points for 15 years. In an alternative history where Japan adopted latin script like Vietnam, it would probably be the world's easiest language. Right now Chinese appears to be the most practical as I have some plans to visit friends in the future.