furcafe
Veteran
Yes, China played a cultural role in East Asia similar to that of the Hellenic & Roman empires in the West. Thus, the Koreans, Japanese, & Vietnamese all used Chinese characters for their written languages, just like the Russians adopted the Greek alphabet & the Latin alphabet was adopted by the countries succeeding the Western Roman empire.
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capitalK
Warrior Poet :P
Roger Hicks
Veteran
Can o' worms here. SS Cyril and Methodius drew heavily on the Greek alphabet for Cyrillic (wouldn't Methodical have been a nicer term?) but hardly adopted it wholesale, and Tibetan letters seem (very loosely) based on Sanskrit, as do those of a number of Indian languages. I don't know enough to comment on the relative influence of Sanskrit on other Asian alphabets, but I do know that any claim the Chinese can make for superiority, suzerainty or dominion, they do, regardless of historical justification.
I'm 99% sure you're right about Korean but I'm at least a little suspicious of Viernamese. Not saying you're wrong; just that I never trust the Chinese! (Or, to be fair to my Chinese friends, their governments.)
Cheers,
R.
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furcafe
Veteran
I was making no claims of Chinese (or Greek & Roman) cultural "superiority," nor was I trying to say that the Greek alphabet was adopted wholesale by the Russians, et al.; I was merely attempting to draw an analogy to Western examples of linguistic borrowing/imperialism. FWIW, I don't believe there is any dispute that the Vietnamese, Korean, & Japanese all used Chinese characters (or variations on those characters) to represent their written languages (& the Koreans & Japanese still use them on occasion), though Japan & Korea later developed their own scripts & modern Vietnam uses a variation on Latin script promulgated by the French. My understanding is that the use of Chinese characters was mostly imposed on the Vietnamese by direct imperial rule (though retained for centuries after they regained independence), but was voluntarily adopted by the Korean & Japanese kingdoms (along w/Confucianism, models of gov't, etc.).
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Rayt
Nonplayer Character
Don't let hatred blind you. The current Chinese government is only 60 years old, a mere pimple in the vast 3000 years of recorded Chinese history.
Interesting to stumble across this thread four weeks later.
I have a Korean friend working as a city official at Bucheon City Hall (Bucheon city is located just to the east of Seoul), and he is required to write official documents using Chinese characters. He said that while there was previously an effort to faze out the use of Chinese characters in government work, they're making a comeback because documents written only in Korean Hangul characters end up being too vague because Hangul characters only represent sounds (pretty sure that's what he said). Causes lots of problems if you have two different words that are pronounced the same! Same problem happens in Japanese, too.
In the case of Vietnam, Vietnam was under Chinese rule for about 1,000 years from 111BC to 938AD, during which time they adopted Chinese characters. They kept using Chinese chracters until some time after the French came along in 1859.
I have a Korean friend working as a city official at Bucheon City Hall (Bucheon city is located just to the east of Seoul), and he is required to write official documents using Chinese characters. He said that while there was previously an effort to faze out the use of Chinese characters in government work, they're making a comeback because documents written only in Korean Hangul characters end up being too vague because Hangul characters only represent sounds (pretty sure that's what he said). Causes lots of problems if you have two different words that are pronounced the same! Same problem happens in Japanese, too.
In the case of Vietnam, Vietnam was under Chinese rule for about 1,000 years from 111BC to 938AD, during which time they adopted Chinese characters. They kept using Chinese chracters until some time after the French came along in 1859.
noimmunity
scratch my niche
Just for the record, it says 大韓國人 which is transcribed as Dae Han Kook In. The sinic characters are a kind of florid way of writing "a Korean" -- obviously to emphasize the fact that An, who put an end to Japanese rule (a time when Koreans were nominally considered Japanese), was a true Korean.
I agree it is a starkly beautiful camera.
As for talking about the relation between imperial languages and premodern empires and modern highly standardized national languages and modern nation-States, let's just say there is a lot of myth enshrined in the national histories of each nation. It wasn't until the modern period that rulers or governments started to care which language the common people spoke (courts and kings and emperors only regulated the language of the nobles). Usually what is left out in the history of the creation of modern national languages are the untold stories of minority languages (dialects) and minority populations that got gradually incorporated in a more or less unjust and violent process. The birth of modern French is a good example.
hans voralberg
Veteran
Just wanna add in that since 1920s Vietnam have completely switched to using the Roman alphabet.