What is the incompatibility between the Chinese Writing System and the Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese languages? Spoken Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese are linguistically unrelated to Chinese. Japanese and Korean are probably both members of the Altaic language family and are both agglutinative. As for Vietnamese, it belongs to the Austro-Asiatic language family. All three languages are considered by linguists to be “l(fā)anguage isolates.” On the other hand, the Chinese language, with its many “dialects”, belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family which is largely monosyllabic and tonal language. While the application of the logogram nature of the Chinese writing system to the Chinese language itself is rather straightforward, to the Vietnamese and especially to agglutinative Japanese and Korean languages it presents linguistic nightmares. The difficulties meant the Chinese writing system was historically adopted by these countries in various capacities. These capacities included borrowing of complete Chinese characters, the invention of new Chinese-like characters and rendering the native script using Chinese characters. Knowledge of classical Chinese, however, was always exclusive to the elites. The majority of the population was illiterate or they would rely on a mixed script consisting of Chinese characters and some sort of phonetically-based script either developed indigenously or derived from Chinese characters used for their pronunciations. |