[Multilingual Monday] Chinese character retrofit
One of the things that I've become fascinated by, is historical attempts to fit Chinese characters into very non-Chinese languages. Knowledge of Classical Chinese was considered, for centuries, to be socially desirable. Between other nations in China's sphere of influence had used Classical Chinese as means to communicate with other countries in that sphere. It's, therefore, no surprise that countries like Japan, Korea, and Vietnam all tried to adapt Chinese characters into their own languages.
Japanese, from the 600s on, began to be written in what is called Man'yougana, named after a series of poetry written in the style called Manyoushuu. Here almost all meaning of the characters is disregarded, and characters are sounded out by pronunciation, sounding out native Japanese words. Here you find semantically meaningless strings like 多太古要久礼婆, tada koekureba, "If you come across (something"), but the meanings of the characters here are "many, fat, old, need, longevity, politeness, old woman." Clearly this is SLIGHTLY different from the intended meaning. ^o^
Korean has Idu was a similar system, where parts of sentences would have characters picked -- again -- not for meaning, but for sound. In the sentence 必于七出乙犯爲去乃三不去有去乙, Pilok chilchwulul pem hokena sampwuke iskenul. The meaning is "Though there may be a violation of the 7 reasons for divorce, there are three reasons to not go." However, 必于, 爲去乃, and 有去乙 are native Korean words that are written in characters that need to be pronounced out in order to parse their meanings.
I'd love more examples of this! I'm sure there are plenty. ^o^
Japanese, from the 600s on, began to be written in what is called Man'yougana, named after a series of poetry written in the style called Manyoushuu. Here almost all meaning of the characters is disregarded, and characters are sounded out by pronunciation, sounding out native Japanese words. Here you find semantically meaningless strings like 多太古要久礼婆, tada koekureba, "If you come across (something"), but the meanings of the characters here are "many, fat, old, need, longevity, politeness, old woman." Clearly this is SLIGHTLY different from the intended meaning. ^o^
Korean has Idu was a similar system, where parts of sentences would have characters picked -- again -- not for meaning, but for sound. In the sentence 必于七出乙犯爲去乃三不去有去乙, Pilok chilchwulul pem hokena sampwuke iskenul. The meaning is "Though there may be a violation of the 7 reasons for divorce, there are three reasons to not go." However, 必于, 爲去乃, and 有去乙 are native Korean words that are written in characters that need to be pronounced out in order to parse their meanings.
I'd love more examples of this! I'm sure there are plenty. ^o^