The three have a common origin: the ancient Chinese script. Created 4,000 years ago, this pioneering type of oriental writing does not use letters of an alphabet, but so-called ideograms, symbols or signs that represent a concept or an idea – they can be concrete or abstract things, such as feelings. Writing with them is like putting the pieces of a puzzle together. For example, to write “dawn”, the Chinese use the ideogram that represents “sun” plus the ideogram that indicates “tree”. Chinese writing is still based on this system today. The Japanese, which received a lot of influence from China, is also born from this millennial root, but with some adaptations. In modern Japanese writing, kanji, Chinese ideograms are linked to each other by connectives, also created from Chinese ideograms. In a parallel with our language, it is as if the ideograms were the nouns (“hall” and “dance”, for example) and the connectives were the prepositions (the “of” that links “dance hall”). There was no mention of Korean. Korea absorbed Chinese customs until 1443, when King Sejong ordered the creation of an alphabet that represented the sound of the Korean language. That’s because, at that time, Koreans spoke one language, Korean, and wrote in another, Chinese. Three years later, the hunminjeongeum (something like “the correct sounds for the instruction of the people”), the only sound alphabet in the Far East, appeared. In this sense, Korean is more like Portuguese than Japanese or Chinese: it is the result of an assembly of sounds and not meanings.
– How did the Gutenberg press work?