|
 |
Vietnamese, Korean ’Chinese Characters’ | ||
Tags: Korean | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| delectric Diglot Senior Member China Joined 7181 days ago 608 posts - 733 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: German | Message 1 of 21 30 December 2007 at 4:18am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Just saw the post asking if Japanese people can understand Chinese texts. Well I have a few burning questions about the Chinese character set myself.
1) What was the Chinese script used in Vietnam like? I take it, it was the old character set but what about the grammar. Could a Chinese person understand it? I would think that as Vietnamese is so close to Mandarin that it would be understandable. 2) What about in Laos? What are the conditions like here? Do they still use the Chinese script? Did they ever? A Chinese friend told me that you can go to Laos today and even speak Mandarin. 3) Lastly what about Korea? Would the Chinese script they used here be understandable to the Chinese people? As the language is more akin to Japanese I wonder if the writing system that used Hanzi would be understandable to Mandarin speakers? So was the grammar used in writing Korean with Chinese characters based on Mandarin/Chinese grammar or Korean. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6294 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 2 of 21 30 December 2007 at 8:21am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
I'm about to hit the sack but you may find this useful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chu_nom 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ElfoEscuro Diglot Senior Member United States cyworld.com/brahmapu Joined 6289 days ago 408 posts - 423 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English* Studies: Japanese | Message 3 of 21 30 December 2007 at 5:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well, there were 2 logographic systems employed by the Vietnamese. Hán tự or chữ nho was used exclusively for writing classical Chinese & Sino-Vietnamese words. Chữ nôm was used for native Vietnamese words. Vietnamese & Mandarin are not close. In fact, they belong to 2 completely separate language families: Vietnamese being an Austro-Asiatic language & Mandarin being a Sino-Tibetan language. However, because classical Chinese was used in old Vietnam, many inscriptions on old Vietnamese landmarks written in chữ nho are understandable to Chinese speakers.
Not once throughout Lao history has there ever been a use of Chinese characters to write their language. The modern Lao language is written with it's own script, which is ultimately derived from the ancient Brāhmī script. One can not communicate with unilingual Lao speakers by using Mandarin (or any Chinese language). The Lao language is almost as distant from Chinese as is Vietnamese.
Chinese characters as used in old Korea are understandable to Chinese speakers. For the most part, the Koreans used classical Chinese as their written language so they used Chinese grammar. There were a few systems for writing native Korean words with Chinese characters but none were ever popular. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6294 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 4 of 21 30 December 2007 at 7:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Unfortunately, the Wikipedia entry for Idu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idu is much less complete than the one for chữ nho.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6294 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 5 of 21 30 December 2007 at 8:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
There are tons of Korean historical documents in classical Chinese that are readily accessible. (if you are in Korea or near a good research library). Hope you aren't too attached to punctuation because it is the real deal that you will find in the research library. Ugh. Edited by jimbo on 30 December 2007 at 8:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| furyou_gaijin Senior Member Japan Joined 6386 days ago 540 posts - 631 votes Speaks: Latin* | Message 6 of 21 04 January 2008 at 7:39am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
I recently visited an old Russo-Japanese prison in the North of China where some of the inscriptions were in parallel
Chinese/Japanese/Korean-with-characters versions (would make great parallel reading practice!). It is amazing how closely the Korean version followed the Japanese text: the same characters in the same order separated by very similar chunks of the Hangul script or kanas. I took some pictures and can post them here if anyone explains how to do it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Jee Senior Member Australia Joined 6309 days ago 105 posts - 105 votes Studies: English | Message 7 of 21 04 January 2008 at 8:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Russo-Japanese prison in the North of China ？
ok. is the city named Dalian, I am from there, and I know the prison,..... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| SpaceCakeGirl Groupie United States Joined 6206 days ago 51 posts - 50 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 8 of 21 04 January 2008 at 12:41pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
When I was in Japan visiting tourist-y places it was very common to have signs written in Japanese, English, Chinese, and Korean. Very interesting. 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
