History of Writing in a Cosmopolitan East Asia

3 points · University catalogue

This course examines the invention of writing in ancient China, and its spread across the continent to emerging cultures in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. We then examine how Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese societies adapted Sinitic writing to create new "vernacular" scripts for their own respective languages, and how these scripts and literary traditions coexisted alongside--and eventually eclipsed--Sinitic writing and language by the 20th century.