section_path: Vocabulary and adaptation
section_name: Vocabulary and adaptation
paragraph_text: Vocabulary and adaptation
  
  Writing first emerged during the historical stage of the Chinese language known as Old Chinese. Most characters correspond to morphemes that originally functioned as stand-alone Old Chinese words. Classical Chinese is the form of written Chinese used in the classic works of Chinese literature between roughly the 5th century BCE and the 2nd century CE. This form of the language was imitated by later authors, even as it began to diverge from the language they spoke. This later form, referred to as "Literary Chinese", remained the predominant written language in China until the 20th century. Its use in the Sinosphere was loosely analogous to that of Latin in pre-modern Europe. While it was not static over time, Literary Chinese retained many properties of spoken Old Chinese. Informed by the local spoken vernaculars, texts were read aloud using literary and colloquial readings that varied by region. Over time, sound mergers created ambiguities in vernacular speech as more words became homophonic. This ambiguity was often reduced through the introduction of multi-syllable compound words, which comprise much of the vocabulary in modern varieties of Chinese.
  
  Over time, use of Literary Chinese spread to neighbouring countries, including Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. Alongside other aspects of Chinese culture, local elites adopted writing for record-keeping, histories, and official communications, forming what is sometimes called the Sinosphere. Excepting hypotheses by some linguists of the latter two sharing a common ancestor, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese each belong to different language families, and tend to function differently from one another. Reading systems were devised to enable non-Chinese speakers to interpret Literary Chinese texts in terms of their native language, a phenomenon that has been variously described as either a form of diglossia, as reading by gloss, or as a process of translation into and out of Chinese. Compared to other traditions that wrote using alphabets or syllabaries, the literary culture that developed in this context was less directly tied to a specific spoken language. This is exemplified by the cross-linguistic phenomenon of brushtalk, where mutual literacy allowed speakers of different languages to engage in face-to-face conversations.
  
  Following the introduction of Literary Chinese, characters were later adapted to write many non-Chinese languages spoken throughout the Sinosphere. These new writing systems used characters to write both native vocabulary and the numerous loanwords each language had borrowed from Chinese, collectively referred to as Sino-Xenic vocabulary. Characters may have native readings, Sino-Xenic readings, or both. Comparison of Sino-Xenic vocabulary across the Sinosphere has been useful in the reconstruction of Middle Chinese phonology. Literary Chinese was used in Vietnam during the millennium of Chinese rule that began in 111 BCE. By the 15th century, a system that adapted characters to write Vietnamese called chữ Nôm had fully matured. The 2nd century BCE is the earliest possible period for the introduction of writing to Korea; the oldest surviving manuscripts in the country date to the early 5th century CE. Also during the 5th century, writing spread from Korea to Japan. Characters were being used to write both Korean and Japanese by the 6th century. By the late 20th century, characters had largely been replaced with alphabets designed to write Vietnamese and Korean. This leaves Japanese as the only major non-Sinitic language typically written using Chinese characters.