Limited borrowing from Chinese into Vietnamese and Korean occurred during the
Han dynasty. During the
Tang dynasty (618–907), Chinese writing, language and culture were imported wholesale into Vietnam, Korea and Japan. Scholars in those countries wrote in
Literary Chinese and were thoroughly familiar with the
Chinese classics, which they read aloud in systematic local approximations of
Middle Chinese. With those pronunciations, Chinese words entered Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese in huge numbers. The plains of northern Vietnam were under Chinese control for most of the period from 111 BC to AD 938. After independence, the country adopted Literary Chinese as the language of administration and scholarship. As a result, there are several layers of Chinese loanwords in Vietnamese. The oldest loans, roughly 400 words dating from the
Eastern Han, have been fully assimilated and are treated as native Vietnamese words. Sino-Vietnamese proper dates to the early Tang dynasty, when the spread of Chinese
rime dictionaries and other literature resulted in the wholesale importation of the Chinese lexicon. Isolated Chinese words also began to enter Korean from the 1st century BC, but the main influx occurred in the 7th and 8th centuries after the unification of the peninsula by
Silla. The flow of Chinese words into Korean became overwhelming after the establishment of
civil service examinations in 958. Japanese has two well-preserved layers and a third that is also significant: •
Go-on readings date to the introduction of Buddhism to Japan from Korea in the 6th century. Based on the name, they are widely believed to reflect pronunciations of
Jiankang in the lower Yangtze area during the late
Northern and Southern dynasties period. However, this cannot be substantiated, and Go-on appears to reflect an amalgam of different Chinese varieties transmitted through Korea. •
Kan-on readings are believed to reflect the standard pronunciation of the Tang period, as used in the cities of
Chang'an and
Luoyang. It was transmitted directly by Japanese who studied in China. •
Tōsō-on readings were introduced by followers of
Zen Buddhism in the 14th century and are thought to be based on the speech of
Hangzhou. } 'one' In contrast, vocabulary of Chinese origin in
Thai, including most of the
basic numerals, was borrowed over a range of periods from the Han (or earlier) to the Tang. Since the pioneering work of
Bernhard Karlgren, these bodies of pronunciations have been used together with modern
varieties of Chinese in attempts to reconstruct the sounds of Middle Chinese. They provide such broad and systematic coverage that the linguist
Samuel Martin called them "Sino-Xenic dialects", treating them as parallel branches with the native Chinese dialects. The foreign pronunciations sometimes retain distinctions lost in all the modern Chinese varieties, as in the case of the
chongniu distinction found in Middle Chinese
rime dictionaries. Similarly, the distinction between grades III and IV made by the Late Middle Chinese
rime tables has disappeared in most modern varieties, but in
kan-on, grade IV is represented by the
Old Japanese vowels and while grade III is represented by and . Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese scholars later adapted the Chinese script to write their languages, using
Chinese characters both for borrowed and native vocabulary. Thus, in Japanese, Chinese characters may have both Sino-Japanese readings () and native readings (). Similarly, in the script used for Vietnamese until the early 20th century, some Chinese characters could represent both a Sino-Vietnamese word and a native Vietnamese word with similar meaning or sound to the Chinese word, but would often be marked with a diacritic when the native reading was intended. However, in the
Korean mixed script, Chinese characters (
hanja) are only used for Sino-Korean words. The character-based Vietnamese and Korean scripts have since been replaced by the
Vietnamese alphabet and
hangul respectively, although Korean does still use Hanja to an extent. == Sound correspondences ==