The religious sentiment is perhaps less developed than among any other Asiatic people. Buddhism, introduced about 380 A.D., never took root, and while the _literati_ are satisfied with the moral precepts of Confucius, the rest have not progressed beyond the nature-worship which was the ancient religion of the land. Every mountain, pass, ford or even eddy of a river has a spirit to whom offerings are made. Honour is also paid to ancestors, both royal and domestic, at their temples or altars, and chapels are built and dedicated to men who have specially distinguished themselves in loyalty, virtue or lofty teaching. Philologists now recognise some affinity between the Korean and Japanese languages, both of which appear to be remotely connected with the Ural-Altaic family. The Koreans possess a true alphabet of 28 letters, which, however, is not a local invention, as is sometimes asserted. It appears to have been introduced by the Buddhist monks about or before the tenth century, and to be based on some cursive form of the Indian (Devanagari) system[658], although scarcely any resemblance can now be traced between the two alphabets. This script is little used except by the lower classes and the women, the _literati_ preferring to write either in Chinese, or else in the so-called _nido_, that is, an adaptation of the Chinese symbols to the phonetic expression of the Korean syllables. The _nido_ is exactly analogous to the Japanese _Katakana_ script, in which modified forms of Chinese ideographs are used phonetically to express 47 syllables (the so-called _I-ro-fa_ syllabary), raised to 73 by the _nigori_ and _maru_ diacritical marks.