Chinese impacts on the Korean language Ho-Min Sohn At present, the Korean alphabet, called Hankul, is the main writing system used by all Koreans to represent native, Sino-Korean, and loan words, while Chinese characters are optionally used to represent only Sino-Korean words. The Itwu (lit. ‘Clerk Reading’) script which was derived from Chinese characters is a historical relic. Romanization systems are mainly for those who are not familiar with the Hankul system or for publications written in English. 1.1 Chinese characters The Chinese script was created to represent (Classical) Chinese, a language which is not related to Korean either genetically or typologically. Genetically, Korean is viewed as belonging to the Altaic language family, whereas Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family, along with Tibetan and Burmese. Typologically, Korean is a language with agglutinative and inflectional morphology, Subject‒Object‒Verb syntax, and polysyllabic-word phonology, whereas Chinese is an isolating language with Subject‒Verb‒Object syntax, non-inflectional morphology, and monosyllabic-word phonology. Moreover, the Chinese script was, and still is, an ideographic writing consisting of approximately 50,000 different characters, each being composed of one to thirty-two strokes. Basically there is one symbol per morpheme. Due to the virtual lack of grammatical affixes and nominal particles in Chinese, accordingly, there are no symbols to represent such grammatical concepts. Thus, the grammatical meanings carried by a wide variety of Korean affixes and particles cannot be represented by Chinese characters. In short, Korean and Chinese are completely different, not only in sound patterns but also in morphological, syntactic, and semantic structure. This makes the ideographic Chinese script unfit to represent the sounds and structure of native Korean affixes, words, and sentences. Despite the structural disparities between Chinese and Korean, Koreans have long been using Chinese characters. Although, at present, Chinese characters are used only to represent imported as well as coined Sino-Korean words, they were also employed as glossograms and phonograms to represent native words and affixes, as will be observed 1.2. 1.1.1 Introduction of Chinese characters Before the nineteenth century when Western cultures began to permeate East Asia, China had long been the centre of East Asian culture and civilization. Thus, Chinese culture and civilization were propagated to neighbouring countries mainly through written Chinese based on Chinese characters. As a result, the Chinese script has long been an integral part of the writing systems of Koreans, and was the only system before the creation of Hankul in 1446. Since Chinese characters were used mostly by upper-class people, commoners were devoid of any means of daily written communication before 1446. It is not known exactly how and when Chinese characters were introduced into Korea. As stated before, practical knowledge of the Chinese script in Korea, however, is assumed to date back to the second century BC, when Wiman from Yen in China founded a primitive Korean