<story><title>The Oldest Cookbook in Korean</title><url>https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/first-korean-cookbook</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>supernova87a</author><text>I think it took me a while to understand (after being told by native speakers) that Korean and Japanese are a bit of a linguistic evolutionary puzzle, especially if you thought that because their characters look like Chinese, their spoken languages are related to Chinese.&lt;p&gt;They are not.  The languages must have come first &amp;#x2F; evolved independent of China, and then a wave of foreign commerce &amp;#x2F; scholarly &amp;#x2F; government influence over centuries propagated Chinese writing to them.&lt;p&gt;So the spoken language uses Chinese based characters to record the sounds in writing, but it may not necessarily have relation to what the sounds are in Chinese if someone were to read the characters as if Chinese.  And the spoken language is not at all related to Chinese (aside from some imported words).  As if someone encountered English alphabet words being spoken with totally different sounds assigned to them.&lt;p&gt;That was very interesting to finally understand -- if I&amp;#x27;ve even gotten it all correct...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bane</author><text>A close analog to the place Chinese has with Koreans and Japanese speakers is the place ancient Latin and Greek have today with English speakers. Lots of loan words, many of which aren&amp;#x27;t even recognized as such by native speakers, and uses in prestige modes like philosophy, science, etc.&lt;p&gt;One difference is that Rome fell and the Normans brought a highly changed Romance language with them into England. While Korea and China had an ongoing relationship going back millennia. As Chinese changed over time different words from different eras also crept in to the language.&lt;p&gt;On top of that, Korean itself also changed, harmonized dialects, dropped and added sounds and features and other things. The Korean written in the first book on Hangul by King Sejong the Great is both not only not pronounceable by modern Koreans, but less understandable than Chaucer might be to modern English speakers.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Oldest Cookbook in Korean</title><url>https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/first-korean-cookbook</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>supernova87a</author><text>I think it took me a while to understand (after being told by native speakers) that Korean and Japanese are a bit of a linguistic evolutionary puzzle, especially if you thought that because their characters look like Chinese, their spoken languages are related to Chinese.&lt;p&gt;They are not.  The languages must have come first &amp;#x2F; evolved independent of China, and then a wave of foreign commerce &amp;#x2F; scholarly &amp;#x2F; government influence over centuries propagated Chinese writing to them.&lt;p&gt;So the spoken language uses Chinese based characters to record the sounds in writing, but it may not necessarily have relation to what the sounds are in Chinese if someone were to read the characters as if Chinese.  And the spoken language is not at all related to Chinese (aside from some imported words).  As if someone encountered English alphabet words being spoken with totally different sounds assigned to them.&lt;p&gt;That was very interesting to finally understand -- if I&amp;#x27;ve even gotten it all correct...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>magicsmoke</author><text>Take all the west European languages and how they&amp;#x27;re littered with loan words from Roman Latin or from French&amp;#x2F;Spanish&amp;#x2F;Italian which are descended from Latin. Now imagine if French&amp;#x2F;Spanish&amp;#x2F;Italian were all still called Latin and the Roman empire existed into the modern era. That&amp;#x27;s the influence Sinitic has on East Asian languages.&lt;p&gt;European, Language, Littered, Roman, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, Descended, Imagine, Empire, Existed, Modern, Era, Influence, Sinitic, Asian&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;Roman&amp;quot; terms in modern day English.</text></comment>