The impact of Chinese on Korean

Over the last 1500–2000 years, Chinese has had a significant impact on Korean. And, because this impact has come more recently than the Japanese influence, it’s also more obvious.

As we did with Japanese in the last post, we can appreciate the depth of the similarity between Korean and Chinese by looking at their sounds. Here are the consonants that occur at the beginnings and ends of words in Old Korean, Modern Korean, and Late Middle Chinese (the stage of Chinese spoken from around 900–1100 AD):

Old Korean (before 918 AD)
word-initial:
p, t, k, ch, s, m, n, r/l, h, w, y, Ɂ
word-final:
p, t, k, s, z, c, r/l, n, m, ng, h

Modern Korean
word-initial:
p, p’, pp, t, t’, tt, k, k’, kk, ch, ch’, chh, s, ss, m, n, (r/l), h, w, y, Ɂ
word-final:
p, t, k, m, n, ng, r/l

Late Middle Chinese (900–1100 AD)
word-initial:
p, p’, b, f, t, t’, d, tr, t’r, dr, k, k’, g, ts, ts’, dz, s, z, ch, ch’, j, sh, zh, m, n, nr, ng, l, ny, h, ɦ, Ɂ, w, y
word-final:
p, t, k, m, n, ng

We can see that Korean went from having roughly the same number in both positions, to having significantly more word-initial consonants than word-final ones. This makes it more similar to Late Middle Chinese (and Modern Chinese varieties as well).

Specifically, Korean went from having word-initial p, t, k, and ch to having three variants of each — plain (e.g. p), aspirated (e.g. p’), and tense (e.g. pp). Having three consonants with the same place of articulation (the place where airflow is obstructed) and manner (how it’s obstructed) is unusual when compared to most of the world’s languages. However, this makes Korean more similar to Late Middle Chinese, which has plain, aspirated, and voiced versions of p, t, k, ts, and ch. Korean also went from having just word-initial s to also having a tense variant (ss). This again brings it closer to Chinese, which has a voiced variant for s (z) and sh (zh). In all these cases, the main distinction between the variants is voice onset, or the point when the vocal chords start to vibrate relative to start of the airflow.

In the word-final position, Korean lost three consonsants, becoming almost identical to Late Middle Chinese. The consonants p, t, k also became checked and unreleased — this too is unusual among the world’s languages, but makes it similar to Chinese (at least the Chinese varieties that still have them). Interestingly, while Late Middle Chinese didn’t use to have r as a word-final consonant, it has become one in Northern Mandarin today.

The convergence between the sounds of Chinese and Korean is the result of a massive borrowing of Chinese vocabulary into Korean, particularly over the last thousand-plus years. Much of this vocabulary was adopted by scholars who systematically mapped the original Chinese pronunciations into Korean pronunciations as closely as possible. Over time, this has led to a transformation of the Korean sound system.