If I were given a research grant to conduct a linguistic study on Korean language and culture, I would investigate the history of the Korean language in relation to other languages and cultures. I would start with a brief overview of how Korean as a language changed over time. And I want to specifically focus on how Korean adopted other languages into it. We talked about language trees in class. I want to see how other languages have influenced Korean and what are their relationships with Korean in the tree. Chinese characters arrived in Korea together with Buddhism during the Proto-Three Kingdoms era in the 1st century BC. It was adapted for Korean and became known as Hanja, and remained as the main script for writing Korean through over a millennium. Mainly privileged elites were educated to read and write in Hanja. However, most of the population was illiterate. In the 15th century, King Sejong the Great personally developed Hangul to replace Hanja. I can see that Korean adopted Chinese characters partly because of the cultural influence of Buddhism. And later the push to replace Hanja is to reduce inequalities in society and improve most people’s lives. Today people in Korea rarely use Hanja/sino-Korean even though there are still lots of roots in Korean words that are from Hanja.
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It's really fascinating how much religion can play a role in language development! I would also love to learn more about this area!
This sounds really interesting! I also did some research on how Korean language was influenced by Chinese and English. And I learned that historically Chinese was once the official writing language in Korea. But I didn't know that it had something to do with Buddhism. So it would be great to look for current Korean words that have their roots in Chinese!