The resulting Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean and Sino-Vietnamese vocabularies now make up a large part of the lexicons of these languages.
During the Tang dynasty (618–907), Chinese writing, language and culture were imported wholesale into Vietnam, Korea and Japan.
With those pronunciations, Chinese words entered Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese in huge numbers.
[6] Japanese has two well-preserved layers and a third that is also significant:[7] In contrast, vocabulary of Chinese origin in Thai, including most of the basic numerals, was borrowed over a range of periods from the Han (or earlier) to the Tang.
[23] Old Japanese had only a two-way contrast based on voicing, while Middle Korean had only one obstruent at each point of articulation.
Sino-Vietnamese and Sino-Korean preserve all the distinctions between final nasals and stops, like southern Chinese varieties such as Yue.
Unlike northern Chinese varieties, Sino-Vietnamese places level-tone words with sonorant and glottal stop initials in the upper level (ngang) category.
To accommodate the Chinese loanwords, syllables were extended with glides as in myō, vowel sequences as in mei, geminate consonants and a final nasal, leading to the moraic structure of later Japanese.
[14][44] The influx of Chinese vocabulary contributed to the development of Middle Korean tones, which are still present in some dialects.
[20] Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts in a similar way to the use of Latin and Greek roots in English.
[46] Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts.
They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin was hidden by their written form.
[47] The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, scientific, abstract or formal language or registers.