The language of the kingdom of

Baekje Baekje or Paekche (, ) was a Korean kingdom located in southwestern Korea from 18 BC to 660 AD. It was one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, together with Goguryeo and Silla. Baekje was founded by Onjo, the third son of Goguryeo's founder Jum ...

(4th to 7th centuries), one of the

Three Kingdoms of Korea Samhan or the Three Kingdoms of Korea () refers to the three kingdoms of Goguryeo (고구려, 高句麗), Baekje (백제, 百濟), and Silla (신라, 新羅). Goguryeo was later known as Goryeo (고려, 高麗), from which the modern name ''Kor ...

, is poorly attested, and scholars differ on whether one or two languages were used. However, at least some of the material appears to be variety of Old Korean.

Description in early texts

Baekje was preceded in southwestern Korea by the

Mahan confederacy Mahan () was a loose confederacy of statelets that existed from around the 1st century BC to 5th century AD in the southern Korean peninsula in the Chungcheong and Jeolla provinces. Gina Lee Barnes, 《State Formation in Korea: Historical and A ...

. The Chinese ''

Records of the Three Kingdoms The ''Records or History of the Three Kingdoms'', also known by its Chinese name as the Sanguo Zhi, is a Chinese historical text which covers the history of the late Eastern Han dynasty (c. 184–220 AD) and the Three Kingdoms period (220– ...

'' (3rd century) states that the language of Mahan differed from that of

Goguryeo Goguryeo (37 BC–668 AD) ( ) also called Goryeo (), was a Korean kingdom located in the northern and central parts of the Korean Peninsula and the southern and central parts of Northeast China. At its peak of power, Goguryeo controlled most ...

to the north and the other

Samhan Samhan, or Three Han, is the collective name of the Byeonhan, Jinhan, and Mahan confederacies that emerged in the first century BC during the Proto–Three Kingdoms of Korea, or Samhan, period. Located in the central and southern regions of t ...

('Three Han') to the east, Byeonhan and

Jinhan Jinhan () was a loose confederacy of chiefdoms that existed from around the 1st century BC to the 4th century AD in the southern Korean Peninsula, to the east of the Nakdong River valley, Gyeongsang Province. Jinhan was one of the Samhan (or "T ...

, whose languages were said to resemble each other. However, the ''

Book of the Later Han The ''Book of the Later Han'', also known as the ''History of the Later Han'' and by its Chinese name ''Hou Hanshu'' (), is one of the Twenty-Four Histories and covers the history of the Han dynasty from 6 to 189 CE, a period known as the Later ...

'' (5th century) speaks of differences between the languages of Byeonhan and Jinhan. Historians believe that Baekje was established by immigrants from

who took over Mahan, while Byeonhan and Jinhan were succeeded by Gaya and

Silla Silla or Shilla (57 BCE – 935 CE) ( , Old Korean: Syera, Old Japanese: Siraki2) was a Korean kingdom located on the southern and central parts of the Korean Peninsula. Silla, along with Baekje and Goguryeo, formed the Three Kingdoms of K ...

respectively. According to ''

Book of Liang The ''Book of Liang'' (''Liáng Shū''), was compiled under Yao Silian and completed in 635. Yao heavily relied on an original manuscript by his father Yao Cha, which has not independently survived, although Yao Cha's comments are quoted in seve ...

'' (635), the language of Baekje was similar to that of Goguryeo. Chapter 49 of the ''

Book of Zhou The ''Book of Zhou'' (''Zhōu Shū'') records the official history of the Xianbei-led Western Wei and Northern Zhou dynasties of China, and ranks among the official Twenty-Four Histories of imperial China. Compiled by the Tang dynasty historian ...

'' (636) says of Baekje: Based in this passage and some Baekje words cited in the Japanese history (720), many scholars, beginning with Kōno Rokurō and later

Kim Bang-han Kim Bang-han was a South Korean linguist. He proposed primitive Korean peninsula language theory. Primitive Korean peninsula language is a now-extinct non-Koreanic languages that some linguists believe were formerly spoken in central and southern p ...

, have argued that the kingdom of Baekje was bilingual, with the gentry speaking a Puyŏ language and the common people a Han language. The

Linguist List The LINGUIST List is a major online resource for the academic field of linguistics. It was founded by Anthony Aristar in early 1990 at the University of Western Australia, and is used as a reference by the National Science Foundation in the Unite ...

defined two codes for these languages, and these have been taken over into the

ISO 639-3 ISO 639-3:2007, ''Codes for the representation of names of languages – Part 3: Alpha-3 code for comprehensive coverage of languages'', is an international standard for language codes in the ISO 639 series. It defines three-letter codes for i ...

registry.

Linguistic data

There are no extant texts in the Baekje language. The primary contemporary lexical evidence comes from a few glosses in Chinese and Japanese histories, as well as proposed etymologies for old place names.

''Nihon Shoki''

The Japanese history , compiled in the early 8th century from earlier documents, including some from Baekje, records 42 Baekje words. These are transcribed as

Old Japanese is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language, recorded in documents from the Nara period (8th century). It became Early Middle Japanese in the succeeding Heian period, but the precise delimitation of the stages is controversial. Old Jap ...

syllables, which are restricted to the form (C)V, limiting the precision of the transcription. Early Japan imported many artifacts from Baekje and the

Gaya confederacy Gaya (, ) was a Korean confederacy of territorial polities in the Nakdong River basin of southern Korea, growing out of the Byeonhan confederacy of the Samhan period. The traditional period used by historians for Gaya chronology is AD 42–53 ...

, and several of the above matching Old Japanese forms are believed to have been borrowed from Baekje at that time. Such borrowing would also explain the fact that words such as 'father', 'fortress', 'district' and 'hawk' are limited to Western Old Japanese, with no cognates in Eastern Old Japanese or

Ryukyuan languages The , also Lewchewan or Luchuan (), are the indigenous languages of the Ryukyu Islands, the southernmost part of the Japanese archipelago. Along with the Japanese language and the Hachijō language, they make up the Japonic language family. Al ...

. Moreover, for some words, like 'father' and 'mother', there are alternative words in Old Japanese that are attested across the Japonic family ( and respectively). Bentley lists these words, as well as 'bear' and 'village', as loans into Old Japanese from Baekje.

Alexander Vovin Alexander (Sasha) Vladimirovich Vovin (russian: Александр Владимирович Вовин; 27 January 1961 – 8 April 2022) was a Soviet-born Russian-American linguist and philologist, and director of studies at the School for Adv ...

argues that the only Baekje words from the ''Nihon Shoki'' found throughout Japonic, such as island and 'bear', are those also common to Koreanic.

Other histories

The Middle Korean text transcribes the name of the old Baekje capital 'Bear Ford' as , closely matching two of the words from the . Chapter 49 of the Chinese ''

'' (636) cites three Baekje words: * () 'king' (used by the gentry) * () 'king' (used by commoners) * () 'queen' These may be the same words as 'king', 'ruler' and 'queen' respectively, found in the . Chapter 54 of the ''

'' (635) gives four Baekje words: * () 'ruling fortress' * () 'settlement' * () 'short jacket' * () 'pants' None of these have Koreanic etymologies, but Vovin suggests that the first might be cognate with Old Japanese 'enclose', and the second with Old Japanese 'house' + 'circle'. He views this as limited evidence for Kōno's two-language hypothesis, and suggests that the language of the commoners may have been the same

Peninsular Japonic The Peninsular Japonic languages are now-extinct Japonic languages that most linguists believe, based on traces in ancient texts, were formerly spoken in the central and southern parts of the Korean Peninsula. The most-cited evidence comes from ...

language reflected by placename glosses in the ''Samguk sagi'' from the northern part of Baekje captured by Goguryeo in the 5th century. The Baekje placenames in chapter 37 of the are not glossed, but several of them include the form , which has been compared with later Korean 'plain'.

Wooden tablets

Wooden tablets dated to the late Baekje era have been discovered by archaeologists, and some of them involve the rearrangement of

Classical Chinese Classical Chinese, also known as Literary Chinese (古文 ''gǔwén'' "ancient text", or 文言 ''wényán'' "text speak", meaning "literary language/speech"; modern vernacular: 文言文 ''wényánwén'' "text speak text", meaning "literar ...

words according to native syntax. From this data, the word order of Baekje appears to have been similar to that of Old Korean. Unlike in Silla texts, however, no uncontroversial evidence of non-Chinese grammatical morphemes has been found. Compared to Silla tablets, Baekje tablets are far more likely to employ conventional Classical Chinese syntax and vocabulary without any native influence. The tablets also give the names of 12 locations and 77 individuals. A total of 147 phonographic characters have been identified from these proper nouns, but this is insufficient to allow a reconstruction of the phonology. A tablet found in the Baekje-built temple of

Mireuksa Mireuksa was the largest Buddhist temple in the ancient Korean kingdom of Baekje. The temple was established in 602 by King Mu and is located 36.012083 N, 127.031028 E, modern Iksan, North Jeolla Province, South Korea. The site was excavated in ...

, originally thought to be a list of personal names, appears to record native numerals, possibly a series of dates. Although the tablet is dated to the early

Later Silla Unified Silla, or Late Silla (, ), is the name often applied to the Korean kingdom of Silla, one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, after 668 CE. In the 7th century, a Silla–Tang alliance conquered Baekje and the southern part of Goguryeo in the ...

period, postdating the 660 fall of Baekje, its orthography differs from conventional Old Korean orthography. In the extant Silla texts, a native numeral is written by a logogram-phonogram sequence, but in this tablet, they are written entirely with phonograms (both phonetically and semantically adapted). Lee Seungjae thus suggests that the tablet is written in Baekje numerals. The numerals appear Koreanic, with a suffix that may be cognate to the Early Middle Korean ordinal suffix . {, class="wikitable" , +Potential Baekje numerals , - ! Number !! Wooden tablet word !! Reconstruction !! Middle Korean , - , one , , , , , , , - , two , , , , , , , - , three , , , , , , , - , five , , , , , , , - , rowspan="2" , seven , , , , , , rowspan="2" , , - , 二 ��邑 , , {{IPA, *ni up , - , rowspan="2" , eight , , {{lang, und-Hani, 今毛邑 , , {{IPA, *jeterəp , , rowspan="2" , {{transl, okm, yetúlp , - , ��?��邑{{efn, The identity of the first character is uncertain because the bottom half is illegible. , , {{IPA, * e?əp

Notes

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References

{{reflist, 24em

Works cited

{{refbegin, 35em, indent=yes * {{citation , title = Koguryo, the Language of Japan's Continental Relatives , surname = Beckwith , given = Christopher , author-link = Christopher I. Beckwith , publisher = BRILL , year = 2004 , isbn = 978-90-04-13949-7 , postscript = . * {{citation , surname = Bentley , given = John R. , title = A new look at Paekche and Korean: data from the ''Nihon shoki'' , journal = Language Research , volume = 36 , number = 2 , year = 2000 , pages = 417–443 , hdl = 10371/86143 , hdl-access = free , postscript = . * {{citation , surname = Bentley , given = John R. , author-mask = 3 , title = ''A Descriptive Grammar of Early Old Japanese Prose'' , location = Leiden , publisher = Brill , year = 2001 , isbn = 978-90-04-12308-3 , postscript = . * {{citation , surname = Kim , given = Nam-Kil , chapter = Korean , pages = 765–779 , editor-given = Bernard , editor-surname = Comrie , title = The World's Major Languages , location = London , publisher = Routledge , edition = 2nd , year = 2009 , isbn = 978-0-415-35339-7 , postscript = . * {{citation , surname = Kōno , given = Rokurō , title = The bilingualism of the Paekche language , journal = Memoirs of the Research Department of the Toyo Bunko , volume = 45 , year = 1987 , pages = 75–86 , postscript = . * {{citation , surname1 = Lee , given1 = Ki-Moon , surname2 = Ramsey , given2 = S. Robert , title = A History of the Korean Language , publisher = Cambridge University Press , year = 2011 , isbn = 978-1-139-49448-9 , postscript = . * {{citation , surname = Lee , given = Seungjae , title = Mokgan-e girokdoen Godae Hangugeo , script-title = ko:木簡에 기록된 古代韓國語 , lang = ko , trans-title = The Old Korean Language Inscribed on Wooden Tablets , location = Seoul , publisher = Iljogag , year = 2017 , isbn = 978-89-337-0736-4 , postscript = . * {{citation , author = Linguist List , author-link = Linguist List , title = Ancient and Extinct languages , year = 2010 , url = http://linguistlist.org/forms/langs/GetListOfAncientLgs.cfm , archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20100724010221/http://linguistlist.org/forms/langs/GetListOfAncientLgs.cfm , archive-date = 2010 , postscript = . * {{citation , surname = Nam , given = Pung-hyun , chapter = Old Korean , pages = 41–72 , title = The Languages of Japan and Korea , editor-first = Nicolas , editor-last = Tranter , publisher = Routledge , year = 2012 , isbn = 978-0-415-46287-7 , postscript = . * {{citation , surname = Vovin , given = Alexander , author-link = Alexander Vovin , title = Koguryŏ and Paekche: different languages or dialects of Old Korean? , journal = Journal of Inner and East Asian Studies , year = 2005 , volume = 2 , number = 2 , pages = 107–140 , postscript = . * {{citation , surname = Vovin , given = Alexander , author-mask = 3 , title = Korea-Japonica: A Re-Evaluation of a Common Genetic Origin , location = Honolulu , publisher = University of Hawaii Press , year = 2010 , isbn = 978-0-8248-3278-0 , postscript = . * {{citation , surname = Vovin , given = Alexander , author-mask = 3 , title = From Koguryo to Tamna: Slowly riding to the South with speakers of Proto-Korean , journal = Korean Linguistics , year = 2013 , volume = 15 , issue = 2 , pages = 222–240 , doi = 10.1075/kl.15.2.03vov , postscript = . * {{citation , surname = Vovin , given = Alexander , author-mask = 3 , chapter = Origins of the Japanese Language , doi = 10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.277 , doi-access = free , title = Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics , publisher = Oxford University Press , year = 2017 , isbn = 978-0-19-938465-5 , postscript = . {{refend {{Koreanic languages {{authority control {{DEFAULTSORT:Baekje Language Baekje Extinct languages of Asia History of the Korean language Languages of Korea Han languages