Page:History of Corea, ancient and modern; with description of manners and customs, language and geography (1879).djvu/419

CHINESE SOUBCE. 389 It was during and after the Tang dynasty, about the period when Buddhism was introduced into China, that those Chinese influences began to penetrate the social and literary life of Corea, which have made the modem Chaosien as different from the Chaosien of Han, as Paris is different from the ancient court of the roving Franks. The immensely superior literature of the Chinese, and their higher civilisation, necessitated changes in, and additions to, the Corean language, which were most readily supplied by the language which revealed to the Corean people their deficiencies. These additions to and displacement of their ancient language, also shows what we learn from history, — ^that Corea became subject to the Chinese form of civilisation ages before the Mongols^ who received their civilisation directly from Buddhistic lands, and many more ages before the Manchus became the disciples of their subjects. And this addition remains in the Corean language as distinctly different from that language, as fossils in their older rocky bed, and cannot be disguised by the ancient pronunciation still retained, or by the affixed particles which represent punctuation, emphasis, declension, and conjugation.