Can the Chinese script be used to record non-Chinese languages?

Question

I know of at least 3 countries in the Sinosphere that have historically used the Chinese script (or scripts derived from it) - Vietnam, Korea, and Japan.

So how did it work? Did they use it to read and write their native languages phonetically, or did they just read and write in Chinese instead of their native language?

Edit - Also another thing - did the nature of the Chinese script lead to massive vocabulary borrowing from spoken Chinese to spoken Korean/Japanese, which would not have otherwise happened had it been a phonetic script?

Answer 1

Apart from the three languages you named, I know of at least three additional major languages that have used the Chinese script; which are, Thai, Zhuang, and Mongolian. Several minor ones that have also used it include Miao, Yao, Bouyei, Kam, Bai, and Hani.

Thai used to use the Chinese script until the 13th century, when it was abandoned in favor of an Indian Brahmi-family script. Aparently, it used the Chinese characters to mean what they meant in Chinese, but they were pronounced in Thai, in a similar way to Vietnamese.

Zhuang used the Chinese-based characters in the same way, which in Zhuanh is called Sawndip and which means "immature characters". Just like in Vietnamese, Zhuang uses many characters which were created especially for Zhuang, according to the models that the rest of the Chinese characters are built after. The characters which are the same in Chinese and Zhuang mean the same, but in Zhuang they are read using the Zuang words. Sawndip is still used to write Zhuang, along with the official pinyin-style Latin alphabet.

As for Mongolian, the story is markedly different. Mongolian is likely the winner of the title of the language that used to use the greatest number of different writing systems over the course of its history. The most significant book in Mongolian is "The Secret History of the Mongols", written in the 14th century in Chinese characters used solely in their phonetic reading for transcribing the Mongol text, irrespective of their meaning.

Apart from Mongolian, which used the Chinese script to read and write their native languages phonetically, the rest of the languages that used it used to use each character of that script to mean roughly the same it means in Chinese, only they pronounced it the way the concept was named in their language.

There is a rather good Wiki article, "Chinese family of scripts" that can serve as an introduction into this area.

Answer 2

Of course it can be used to record lots of other languages and you can find the complete list here

For Vietnamese a new type of script called chữ nôm based on Chinese characters is created. There are many ways to construct the new characters:

1. Borrow the whole Chinese character and meaning with its Sino-Vietnamese reading. Sometimes it's also used to represent a Vietnamese reading, in this case a diacritic is written to indicate that it should be read with the Vietnamese sound.
2. Create completely new characters. Most will consist of a radical for meaning and a radical for the Vietnamese sound, just like how most Chinese characters are formed. For example the character for number 3 𠀧 ("ba") is composed of 巴 for the phonetic part and 三 (three) for meaning. Some characters are created by combination of multiple characters like the character 𡗶 (giời/trời "sky", "heaven"), which is made from the Chinese character for sky 天 and 上 ("upper"). Some others are simplication forms of the Chinese version.

You must know Chinese before learning chữ nôm, which make it even more complex than Chinese characters, hence less people can understand it.

In the below example which means "My mother eats vegetarian food at the temple every Sunday", the newly created Nom characters are written in brown whereas characters borrowed directly from Chinese are shown in green. The blue ones are the modern Vietnamese alphabet.

Answer 3

For Japanese at least, both happened: sometimes the characters are used semantically, others phonetically - either according to their Chinese pronunciation (which can come from either a Northern or Southern, earlier or recent form of Chinese) or to the Japanese reading.

For instance, one of the Chinese readings of the char. "origin/beginning/birth" is "hon". Now then, the Japanese word for "book" is also "hon" (don't know if its native or a Chinese/Korean borrowing). So instead of adopting the Chinese char. for "book", the Japanese use "birth/start" phonetically most of the times when they want to write "book".

When char. for "now, immediately, contemporaneity" appears right before the char. for "sun/day", that specific case is a semantic usage: both together are meant to be read "kyô" (today).

That for isolated chars. themselves. Japanese nowadays uses the chars. according to its own structure (SOV), in the very first examples of Japanese writing there's vascilation between trying to follow the S-V-O structure of Chinese or the native one. There's a lot of vacillation also regarding how to phonetically encode words in the vernacular.

In A. C., Moorhouse's book "History of the alphabet" I read that something similar happened when Babylonians adopted cuneiform writing from the Summers, and then again when the Hittites adopted cuneiform from the Babylons. So, in a Hittite sample of writing, a set of chars. can be read in Hittite, in Babylon or in Sumerian, depending on context!!!

Answer 4

I'm not sure if I should really call this an "answer", but I've conducted thought experiments in the past on rendering English in an ideographic writing system. The strategy I used was to break up words into morphemes, and use one character per morpheme (and a lot of morphemes of the same meaning were collapsed into single characters, e.g. -tion, -ment, etc.; morphemes were often also collapsed into normal words with similar meaning). As English has a lot of agglutinative tendencies (particularly in derivation), this was generally very straightforward. For the sake of efficiency, though, I chose not to represent nonessential morphemes, such as verb agreement conjugates. I also chose to not have any orthographic contrast between contractions and their full forms. In any case, this strategy requires a bunch of simple characters for derivative and inflectional morphemes, as there can be many of them per word; Chinese characters could be used, but would be cumbersome due to the number of strokes.

To pull a few random words from this post and how they would be represented (I actually would often use words to represent morphemes, but you get the idea):
Really: real -ly
Conducted: conduct -ed
Morphemes: morph element -s
Agglutinative: agglutinate -ive
Nonessential: non- essence -al
Their: they -'s
Inflectional: in- flex -tion -al