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East Asia Language
Chinese characters’ meanings are always similar in Koreans and Japanese although their pronunciation differs. Japanese and Chinese simplified their characters so that they would be easier to write by altering their appearance but Koreans never simplified their character system. The Chinese characters used in all languages are therefore similar but have different appearance and pronunciation. It is worth noting that most of the Asian languages are written in Chinese characters and Japanese seems to use a good number of them. Interestingly, Japanese and Korean languages are linguistically unconnected to Chinese.
Chinese writing contains booth supranational and supradialectal function that makes the East Asian languages and dialects to communicate without each other’s speech. It is exciting to note that character literate Chinese, Japanese and Koreans can read documents written in almost all the three languages due to the characters’ functional independence from sound as much as the symbols may be differently produced. Indigenous structure of both Japanese and Korean do not lend itself to the representation by Chinese characters. The compatibility is brought about by function of changes driven either directly or indirectly by the writing itself. Chinese characters symbolize ideas in a broad sense and at times oriented to a general sound embodied in them. The Chinese character is so strong in its logographic as well as semantic features which make written materials to be generally integrated in the East Asia. These characters have undergone numerous variations in both shapes and meanings which are designed to the local language convention.
It is therefore obvious that the Chinese character script widely influenced writing in her closest neighbors’’ language including Japan and Korea. To date, some of the Chinese characters are still used in a number of Japanese and Korean words. Effort put by the Japanese people to develop a set of written characters to substitute Chinese characters failed. The Japanese could have taken longer time to change the characters and it would also take at least a generation. The Chinese characters characterized Japan’s relationship with china thus leading to upholding integrity involved in preservation of the ancient written Chinese characters. Most writings in Japanese particularly to record native poetry and later led to hiragana and katakana which are major syllabaries that constitute the modern Japanese writing system. use of kanji writing system is currently treated as part of the Japanese cultural heritage simply because of the Chinese influence.
Use of Chinese writing system which was basically designed to express Chinese thought amongst the Koreans whose thoughts are unique is really interesting. Almost half of the Korean lexicon originates from the Chinese language and they continued writing in their text in Chinese writing system to date. Chinese language and writing system was established around 108 BC and by 5th century AD, Koreans began writing in classical Chinese. There were systems put in place to simplify the use of Chinese characters so that it would phonetically transcribe Korean.
A huge percentage of Chinese characters borrowed by the Koreans are widely used in Korean writing. Use of Chinese characters in the written language of Japan and Korean may be sharpened due to the inability of the younger generations to understand the classics or traditional culture. Another force that may help in shaping the future of Chinese characters is the rise of China as a regional and worldwide power as well as enhancement of the Northeastern Asian integration.
