The first authors to study these words assumed that, because these place names came from the territory of Goguryeo, they must have represented the language of that state. Lee and Ramsey offer the additional argument that the dual use of Chinese characters to represent the sound and meaning of the place names must have been done by scribes of Goguryeo, which would have borrowed written Chinese earlier than the southern kingdoms. They argue that the Goguryeo language formed a link between Japanese, Korean and Tungusic.