Middle Korean is the period in the history of the Korean language succeeding Old Korean and yielding in 1600 to the Modern period. The boundary between the Old and Middle periods is traditionally identified with the establishment of Goryeo in 918, but some scholars have argued for the time of the Mongol invasions of Korea (mid-13th century). Middle Korean is often divided into Early and Late periods corresponding to Goryeo (until 1392) and Joseon respectively. It is difficult to extract linguistic information from texts of the Early period, which are written using adaptations of Chinese characters. The situation was transformed in 1446 by the introduction of the Hangul alphabet, so that Late Middle Korean provides the pivotal data for the history of Korean.
Until the late 19th century, most formal writing in Korea, including government documents, scholarship and much literature, was written in Classical Chinese. Before the 15th century, the little writing in Korean was done using cumbersome adaptations of Chinese characters such as idu and hyangchal. Thus Early Middle Korean, like Old Korean before it, is sparsely documented.[1] This situation changed dramatically with the introduction of the Hangul alphabet in 1446.[2]
Before the 1970s, the key sources for EMK were a few wordlists.
The Jilin leishi (1103–1104) was a Chinese book about Korea. All that survives of the original three volumes is a brief preface and a glossary of over 350 Korean words and phrases.[3] The Korean forms were rendered using characters whose Chinese sound provides a necessarily imprecise approximation of the Korean pronunciation.[4]
The Cháoxiǎn guǎn yìyǔ (朝鮮館譯語, 1408) is another Chinese glossary of Korean, containing 596 Korean words.[5][6]
The Hyangyak kugŭppang (朝鮮館譯語鄕藥救急方, mid-13th century) is a Korean survey of herbal treatments. The work is written in Chinese, but the Korean names of some 180 ingredients are rendered using Chinese characters intended to be read with their Sino-Korean pronunciations.[7]
The Japanese text Nichū Reki (二中曆, believed to be compiled from two works from the early 12th century), contains kana transcriptions of Korean numerals, but is marred by errors.[7]
In 1973, close examination of a Buddhist sutra from the Goryeo period revealed faint interlinear annotations with simplified Chinese characters indicating how the Chinese text could be read as Korean. More examples of gugyeol ('oral embellishment') were discovered, particularly in the 1990s.[8][9] Many of the gugyeol characters were abbreviated, and some of them are identical in form and value to symbols in the Japanese katakana syllabary, though the historical relationship between the two is not yet clear.[10] An even more subtle method of annotation known as gakpil (각필, 角筆 'stylus') was discovered in 2000, consisting of dots and lines made with a stylus.[11] Both forms of annotation contain little phonological information, but are valuable sources on grammatical markers.[12]
The introduction of the Hangul alphabet in 1446 revolutionized the description of the language.[2] The Hunminjeongeum ('Correct sounds for the instruction of the people') and later texts describe the phonology and morphology of the language with great detail and precision.[13] Earlier forms of the language must be reconstructed by comparing fragmentary evidence with LMK descriptions.[2]
These works are not as informative regarding Korean syntax, as they tend to use a stilted style influenced by Classical Chinese. The best examples of colloquial Korean are the translations in foreign-language textbooks produced by the Joseon Bureau of Interpreters.[2]
Script and phonology
Hangul letters correspond closely to the phonemes of Late Middle Korean. The romanization most commonly used in linguistic writing on the history of Korean is the Yale romanization devised by Samuel Martin, which faithfully reflects the Hangul spelling.[14]
The tensed stops pp, tt, cc and kk are distinct phonemes in modern Korean, but in LMK they were allophones of consonant clusters.[16] The tensed fricative hh only occurred in a single verb root, hhye- 'to pull', and has disappeared in Modern Korean.[17]
The voiced fricatives /β/, /z/ and /ɣ/ occurred only in limited environments, and are believed to have arisen from lenition of /p/, /s/ and /k/, respectively.[18][19] They have disappeared in most modern dialects, but some dialects in the southeast and northeast retain /p/, /s/ and /k/ in these words.[20]
The affricates c, ch and cc were apical consonants, as in modern northwestern dialects, rather than palatals as in modern Seoul.[21]
Late Middle Korean had a limited and skewed set of initial clusters: sp-, st-, sk-, pt-, pth-, ps-, pc-, pst- and psk-.[17][22] It is believed that they resulted from syncope of vowels o or u during the Middle Korean period. For example, the Jilin leishi has *posol (菩薩) 'rice', which became LMK psól and modern ssal.[23] A similar process is responsible for many aspirated consonants. For example, the Jilin leishi has *huku- (黒根) 'big', which became LMK and modern khu.[22]
The precise phonetic values of these vowels are controversial.[24] Six of them are still distinguished in modern Korean, but only the Jeju language has a distinct reflex of o.[24] In most other varieties it has merged with a in the first syllable of a word and u elsewhere.[25] An exception is found in the Yukchin dialect in the far northeast and dialects along the south coast, where first-syllable o has merged with wo when adjacent to a labial consonant.[26]
Yin and yang vowels could not occur in the same word, but could co-occur with the neutral vowel.[25][28] The phonetic dimension underlying vowel harmony is disputed. Lee Ki-Moon suggested that LMK vowel harmony was based on vowel height.[28] Some recent authors attribute it to advanced and retracted tongue root states.[29]
Loans from Middle Mongolian in the 13th century show several puzzling correspondences, in particular between Middle Mongolian ü and Korean u.[30] Based on these data and transcriptions in the Jilin leishi, Lee Ki-Moon argued for a Korean Vowel Shift between the 13th and 15th centuries, consisting of chain shifts involving five of these vowels:[31]
y > u > o > ʌ
e > ə > ɨ
William Labov found that this proposed shift followed different principles to all the other chain shifts he surveyed.[32] Lee's interpretation of both the Mongolian and Jilin leishi materials has also been challenged by several authors.[33][34]
A y on-glide could precede four of the vowels, indicated in Hangul with modified letters: yaㅑ[ja], yeㅕ[jə], ywoㅛ[jo] and ywuㅠ[ju].
A w on-glide could precede a or e, written with a pair of vowel symbols: waㅘ[wa] and weㅝ[wə].
A y off-glide could follow any of the pure vowels except i or any of the six onglide-vowel combinations, and was marked by adding the letter i⟨ㅣ⟩. In modern Korean the vowel-offglide sequences have become monophthongs.
Early Hangul texts distinguish three pitch contours on each syllable: low (unmarked), high (marked with one dot) and rising (marked with two dots).[37] The rising tone may have been longer in duration, and is believed to have arisen from a contraction of a pair of syllables with low and high tone.[38] LMK texts do not show clear distinctions after the first high or rising tone in a word, suggesting that the language had a pitch accent rather than a full tone system.[39][40]
Vocabulary
Although some Chinese words had previously entered Korean, Middle Korean was the period of the massive and systematic influx of Sino-Korean vocabulary.[41] As a result, over half the modern Korean lexicon consists of Sino-Korean words, though they account for only about a tenth of basic vocabulary.[42]
Classical Chinese was the language of government and scholarship in Korea from the 7th century until the Gabo Reforms of the 1890s.[43] After King Gwangjong established the gwageo civil service examinations on the Chinese model in 958, familiarity with written Chinese and the Chinese classics spread through the ruling classes.[44]
Korean literati read Chinese texts using a standardized Korean pronunciation, originally based on Middle Chinese. They used Chinese rhyme dictionaries, which specified the pronunciations of Chinese characters relative to other characters, and could thus be used to systematically construct a Sino-Korean reading for any word encountered in a Chinese text.[45] This system became so entrenched that 15th-century efforts to reform it to more closely match the Chinese pronunciation of the time were abandoned.[46]
The prestige of Chinese was further enhanced by the adoption of Confucianism as the state ideology of Joseon, and Chinese literary forms flooded into the language at all levels of society.[47] Some of these denoted items of imported culture, but it was also common to introduce Sino-Korean words that directly competed with native vocabulary.[47] Many Korean words known from Middle Korean texts have since been lost in favour of their Sino-Korean counterparts, including the following.
Middle Korean words later displaced by Sino-Korean equivalents[48]
Chinese is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China. Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language.
Korean is the native language for about 81 million people, mostly of Korean descent. It is the national language of both North Korea and South Korea.
Hanja, alternatively known as Hancha, are Chinese characters used to write the Korean language. After characters were introduced to Korea to write Literary Chinese, they were adapted to write Korean as early as the Gojoseon period.
The languages of East Asia belong to several distinct language families, with many common features attributed to interaction. In the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, Chinese varieties and languages of southeast Asia share many areal features, tending to be analytic languages with similar syllable and tone structure. In the 1st millennium AD, Chinese culture came to dominate East Asia, and Classical Chinese was adopted by scholars and ruling classes in Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. As a consequence, there was a massive influx of loanwords from Chinese vocabulary into these and other neighboring Asian languages. The Chinese script was also adapted to write Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese, though in the first two the use of Chinese characters is now restricted to university learning, linguistic or historical study, artistic or decorative works and newspapers, rather than daily usage.
Sino-Koreanvocabulary or Hanja-eo refers to Korean words of Chinese origin. Sino-Korean vocabulary includes words borrowed directly from Chinese, as well as new Korean words created from Chinese characters, and words borrowed from Sino-Japanese vocabulary. Many of these terms were borrowed during the height of Chinese-language literature on Korean culture. Subsequently, many of these words have also been truncated or altered for the Korean language.
Japonic or Japanese–Ryukyuan, sometimes also Japanic, is a language family comprising Japanese, spoken in the main islands of Japan, and the Ryukyuan languages, spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. The family is universally accepted by linguists, and significant progress has been made in reconstructing the proto-language, Proto-Japonic. The reconstruction implies a split between all dialects of Japanese and all Ryukyuan varieties, probably before the 7th century. The Hachijō language, spoken on the Izu Islands, is also included, but its position within the family is unclear.
A number of Korean dialects are spoken on the Korean Peninsula. The peninsula is very mountainous and each dialect's "territory" corresponds closely to the natural boundaries between different geographical regions of Korea. Most of the dialects are named for one of the traditional Eight Provinces of Korea. Two are sufficiently distinct from the others to be considered separate languages, the Jeju and the Yukjin languages.
Old Japanese is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language, recorded in documents from the Nara period. It became Early Middle Japanese in the succeeding Heian period, but the precise delimitation of the stages is controversial. Old Japanese was an early member of the Japonic language family. No genetic links to other language families have been proven.
The Goguryeo language, or Koguryoan, was the language of the ancient kingdom of Goguryeo, one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea. Early Chinese histories state that the language was similar to those of Buyeo, Okjeo and Ye. Lee Ki-Moon grouped these four as the Puyŏ languages. The histories also stated that these languages were different from those of the Yilou and Mohe. All of these languages are unattested except for Goguryeo, for which evidence is limited and controversial.
Sino-Xenic vocabularies are large-scale and systematic borrowings of the Chinese lexicon into the Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages, none of which are genetically related to Chinese. The resulting Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean and Sino-Vietnamese vocabularies now make up a large part of the lexicons of these languages. The pronunciation systems for these vocabularies originated from conscious attempts to consistently approximate the original Chinese sounds while reading Classical Chinese. They are used alongside modern varieties of Chinese in historical Chinese phonology, particularly the reconstruction of the sounds of Middle Chinese. Some other languages, such as Hmong–Mien and Kra–Dai languages, also contain large numbers of Chinese loanwords but without the systematic correspondences that characterize Sino-Xenic vocabularies.
Old Korean is the first historically documented stage of the Korean language, typified by the language of the Unified Silla period (668–935).
The Northeast Dialect, sometimes called the Hamgyong Dialect, is a dialect of the Korean language used in most of North and South Hamgyŏng and Ryanggang provinces of northeastern North Korea, all of which were originally united as Hamgyŏng Province. Since the nineteenth century, it has also been spoken by Korean diaspora communities in Northeast China and the former Soviet Union.
The Korean language, known for its unique phonetic system, comprises 19 distinct consonant phonemes that exhibit a rich variety of articulatory features. Unlike many languages, Korean consonants are categorized into three main types: plain, tense, and aspirated, each contributing to the language's distinctive soundscape. Also, Korean phonology is characterized by a complex system of classification and pronunciation rules that play a crucial role in the language's phonetic and phonological structure.
The traditional periodization of Korean distinguishes:
The Chinese Korean language is the variety of the Korean language spoken by Koreans in China who have Chinese nationality, primarily located in Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning.
Koreanic is a small language family consisting of the Korean and Jeju languages. The latter is often described as a dialect of Korean but is distinct enough to be considered a separate language. Alexander Vovin suggested that the Yukjin dialect of the far northeast should be similarly distinguished. Korean has been richly documented since the introduction of the Hangul alphabet in the 15th century. Earlier renditions of Korean using Chinese characters are much more difficult to interpret.
The Yale romanization of Korean was developed by Samuel Elmo Martin and his colleagues at Yale University about half a decade after McCune–Reischauer. It is the standard romanization of the Korean language in linguistics.
The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Hangeul in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern writing system for the Korean language. The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs used to pronounce them. They are systematically modified to indicate phonetic features. The vowel letters are systematically modified for related sounds, making Hangul a featural writing system. It has been described as a syllabic alphabet as it combines the features of alphabetic and syllabic writing systems.
The Jilin leishi was a Chinese book about Korea written in 1103–1104 by Sūn Mù (孫穆), an officer of the Chinese Song dynasty embassy to Goryeo. The original work is lost, but fragments reproduced in later Chinese works provide vital information about Early Middle Korean.
The Yukjin dialect is a variety of Korean or a separate Koreanic language spoken in the historic Yukjin region of northeastern Korea, south of the Tumen River. Its phonology and lexicon are unusually conservative, preserving many Middle Korean forms. Thus, Alexander Vovin classified it as a distinct language.
Sohn, Ho-min (2012), "Middle Korean", in Tranter, Nicolas (ed.), The Languages of Japan and Korea, Routledge, pp.73–122, ISBN978-0-415-46287-7.
——— (2015), "Middle Korean and Pre-Modern Korean", in Brown, Lucien; Yeon, Jaehoon (eds.), The Handbook of Korean Linguistics, Wiley, pp.439–458, ISBN978-1-118-35491-9.
Whitman, John (2013), "A History of the Korean Language, by Ki-Moon Lee and Robert Ramsey", Korean Linguistics, 15 (2): 246–260, doi:10.1075/kl.15.2.05whi.
——— (2015), "Old Korean", in Brown, Lucien; Yeon, Jaehoon (eds.), The Handbook of Korean Linguistics, Wiley, pp.421–438, ISBN978-1-118-35491-9.
Yong, Heming; Peng, Jing (2008), Chinese lexicography: a history from 1046 BC to AD 1911, Oxford University Press, ISBN978-0-19-156167-2.
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