Northeast Asia witnessed the birth and development of multiple long-standing cultures and peoples, each of which spoke its own language. Chinese, Koreans, numerous Manchurian peoples, Japanese, and a vast array of steppe populations lived, traded, and occasionally made war on one another since before the dawn of recorded history. But beginning around 1200 BC, it was the Chinese who, at least in this region, first attempted to capture sounds in writing.
Language in northeast Asia
Early Chinese script featured the simplest of pictographs, similar in usage to Egyptian hieroglyphics where a single symbol or character represented a single word. This early development continued over the next couple of millennia. By the early fifteenth century AD, Chinese characters captured not only individual words and actions but also ideas and feelings. That said, written Chinese remained, even to this day, pictographic in nature.
