Korea is one of the countries that adopted the writing of the Chinese for a prolonged period. King Sejong developed the Korean alphabet which became popular as a Korean vernacular writing system. This system swept away the Chinese writing because the population of the Koreans was in the increase and this greatly contributed to the king’s invention of the Korean vernacular. This ensured that the Koreans became formalized with the learning process since they could easily understand their own vernacular. Chinese was a formal writing and this limited the systems to informal writing and traditional stories copying (Kim-Renaud, 46). This lead to King Sejong reforming the whole system so as to accommodate even the administration official papers which were to adopt Korean to ensure communication to the people is correctly done.
As much as the Korean vernacular was developed it still had some Chinese characters which covered almost half of the words in the scripts. The formation of the Korean language greatly depended on the Chinese words which would be prominent in simplified Chinese. The native Chinese language has evolved and developed over the years due to innovation and this resulted to improved Korean language. Variations in pronunciations and forms of the nationals influenced character formation since a word would be formed for the simple understanding of everyone even the women and commoners in the country (Kim-Renaud, 65).
Different qualities of the reverberations and use of open-closed difference influenced formation of the characters used in the Korean language; this distinguished it from Chinese language. Translation of situations and circumstances so as to suite the Koreans equally or for their better performance was a great influence. In general the better understanding of the Chinese greatly contributed to the birth of the Korean characters thus the Korean language.
Work cited
Kim-Renaud, Young-Key. The Korean Alphabet: Its History and Structure. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawai'i Press, 1997. Print.
