The Samhan are known from Chinese histories. Chapter 30 of the
Records of the Three Kingdoms (late 3rd century) and Chapter 85 of the
Book of the Later Han (5th century) contain parallel accounts, apparently based on a common source, of peoples neighbouring the
Four Commanderies of Han in northern Korea. The Chinese histories describe the Samhan as culturally significantly different from the peoples of the northern part of the peninsula. They state that Jinhan had a different language from Mahan, listing some Jinhan words said to be shared with the Chinese state of
Qin, from which the Jinhan claimed to be refugees (a claim discounted by most historians). The two accounts differ on the relationship between the languages of Byeonhan and Jinhan, with the
Records of the Three Kingdoms describing them as similar, but the
Book of the Later Han referring to differences. The
Records of the Three Kingdoms also gives phonographic transcriptions in Chinese characters of names of settlements, 54 in Mahan and 12 each in Byeonhan and Jinhan. Some of these names appear to include suffixes: • Six of the Mahan names include a suffix , which has been compared with the common element 'town' in later
Baekje placenames and
Late Middle Korean 'town'. • Two of the Byeonhan names and one of the Jinhan names include a suffix , which has been compared with Late Middle Korean and
Proto-Japonic , both meaning 'base, bottom' and claimed by
Samuel Martin to be cognate. • One of the Byeonhan names ends with , which is commonly identified with Proto-Japonic 'mountain'. The
Gwanggaeto Stele (414) lists
Goguryeo and Han villages, without subdividing the latter. In the 4th century,
Baekje, the
Gaya confederacy and
Silla arose from Mahan, Byeonhan and Jinhan respectively. Linguistic evidence from these states is sparse and, being recorded in
Chinese characters, difficult to interpret. Most of these materials come from Silla, whose language is generally believed to be ancestral to all extant Korean varieties as a result of the
Sillan unification of most of the peninsula in the late 7th century. Apart from placenames, whose interpretation is controversial, data on the
Baekje language is extremely sparse: • The
Book of Liang (635) states that the language of Baekje was the same as
that of Goguryeo. • The
Book of Zhou (636) states that the Baekje gentry and commoners have different words for 'king'. • According to the
Samguk sagi, the kingdom of Baekje was founded by immigrants from Goguryeo who took over Mahan. • The Japanese history
Nihon Shoki, compiled in the early 8th century from earlier documents, including some from Baekje, records 42 Baekje words. These are transcribed as
Old Japanese syllables, which are restricted to the form (C)V, limiting the precision of the transcription. About half of them appear to be
Koreanic. A single word is directly attributed to the
Gaya language in the
Samguk sagi (1145). It is the word for 'gate', and appears to resemble the
Old Japanese word for 'gate'. == Interpretations ==