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 The Song dynasty (; ; 960–1279) was an imperial dynasty of China that began in 960 and lasted until 1279. The dynasty was founded by Emperor Taizu of Song following his usurpation of the throne of the Later Zhou. The Song conquered the rest ...

embassy to

Goryeo Goryeo (; ) was a Korean kingdom founded in 918, during a time of national division called the Later Three Kingdoms period, that unified and ruled the Korean Peninsula until 1392. Goryeo achieved what has been called a "true national unificat ...

. The original work is lost, but fragments reproduced in later Chinese works provide vital information about

Early Middle Korean 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 91 ...

. The original work is believed to have consisted of three volumes covering the customs, government and language of Korea, with various historical documents as appendices. All that survives is excerpts quoted in the two Chinese encyclopedias, the ''Shuō fú'' (說郛) from the

Ming dynasty The Ming dynasty (), officially the Great Ming, was an imperial dynasty of China, ruling from 1368 to 1644 following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. The Ming dynasty was the last orthodox dynasty of China ruled by the Han peo ...

and the ''

Gujin Tushu Jicheng The ''Gujin Tushu Jicheng'' (), also known as the ''Imperial Encyclopaedia'', is a vast encyclopedic work written in China during the reigns of the Qing dynasty emperors Kangxi and Yongzheng. It was begun in 1700 and completed in 1725. The wor ...

'' (1726). The original Ming work was itself lost, and survives in 1647 and 1925 editions, whose compilers had access to the original. The surviving fragment of the ''Jilin leishi'' consists of a brief introduction dealing with Korean customs and government, and a glossary of over 350 Korean words and phrases, grouped in 18 semantic categories. For example, the first entry is

天曰漢捺

This indicates that the Korean word for 'sky, heaven' (Chinese ) has a pronunciation similar to the Chinese characters . The sounds of Song Chinese are poorly understood, but are approximated by the

Late Middle Chinese Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the ''Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The S ...

of Chinese

rhyme table A rime table or rhyme table () is a Chinese phonological model, tabulating the syllables of the series of rime dictionaries beginning with the ''Qieyun'' (601) by their onsets, rhyme groups, tones and other properties. The method gave a significa ...

s, in which these characters may be read as ''han-nat''. The Late Middle Korean form of this word is ''hanólh''. The Chinese transcription is imprecise, because the Chinese coda ''-t'' was used for several Korean dental consonants. The Chinese coda ''-k'' sometimes corresponds to Late Middle Korean ''-k'', and sometimes to no final consonant. However, the Chinese coda ''-p'' consistently represented Korean ''-p''.

References

Cited works * * *

External links

* * {{commons-inline, list= ** Scan of ''Gujin Tushu Jicheng'' section 8, chapter 25 ** Scan of ''Shuo fu'', chapter 55 (from ''Siku Quanshu''). The ''Jilin leishi'' excerpt starts on page 103. History of the Korean language Song dynasty literature 12th-century Chinese books