Middle Korean
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Middle Korean is the period in the history of the
Korean language Korean ( South Korean: , ''hangugeo''; North Korean: , ''chosŏnmal'') is the native language for about 80 million people, mostly of Korean descent. It is the official and national language of both North Korea and South Korea (geographic ...
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 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 ...
in 918, but some scholars have argued for the time of the
Mongol invasions of Korea A series of campaigns were conducted between 1231 and 1270 by the Mongol Empire against the Goryeo dynasty of Korea. There were seven major campaigns at tremendous cost to civilian lives, the last campaign made Goryeo a vassal state of the Y ...
(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 Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji ...
. The situation was transformed in 1446 by the introduction of the
Hangul The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, . Hangul may also be written as following South Korea's standard Romanization. ( ) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The le ...
alphabet, so that Late Middle Korean provides the pivotal data for the
history of Korean The traditional periodization of Korean distinguishes: * Old Korean (, to 918), the earliest attested stage of the language, through to the fall of Unified Silla. Many authors include the few inscriptions from Silla in the Three Kingdoms period. ...
.


Sources

Until the late 19th century, most formal writing in Korea, including government documents, scholarship and much literature, was written in
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 ...
. Before the 15th century, the little writing in Korean was done using cumbersome adaptations of Chinese characters such as '' idu'' and ''
hyangchal ''Hyangchal'' (, literally "vernacular letters", "local letters", or "corresponded sound") is an archaic writing system of Korea and was used to transcribe the Korean language in Chinese characters. Using the ''hyangchal'' system, Chinese chara ...
''. Thus Early Middle Korean, like Old Korean before it, is sparsely documented. This situation changed dramatically with the introduction of the Hangul alphabet in 1446. Before the 1970s, the key sources for EMK were a few wordlists. * The ''
Jilin leishi 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 in ...
'' (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. The Korean forms were rendered using characters whose Chinese sound provides a necessarily imprecise approximation of the Korean pronunciation. * The ''Cháoxiǎn guǎn yìyǔ'' (, 1408) is another Chinese glossary of Korean, containing 596 Korean words. * The ''Hyangyak kugŭppang'' (, 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. * The Japanese text ''Nichū Reki'' (, believed to be compiled from two works from the early 12th century), contains ''
kana The term may refer to a number of syllabaries used to write Japanese phonological units, morae. Such syllabaries include (1) the original kana, or , which were Chinese characters (kanji) used phonetically to transcribe Japanese, the most p ...
'' transcriptions of Korean numerals, but is marred by errors. 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 Gugyeol, also ''kwukyel'', is a system for rendering texts written in Classical Chinese into understandable Korean. It was chiefly used during the Joseon Dynasty, when readings of the Chinese classics were of paramount social importance. Thus ...
'' ('oral embellishment') were discovered, particularly in the 1990s. Many of the ''gugyeol'' characters were abbreviated, and some of them are identical in form and value to symbols in the Japanese
katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived f ...
syllabary, though the historical relationship between the two is not yet clear. An even more subtle method of annotation known as ''gakpil'' (, 'stylus') was discovered in 2000, consisting of dots and lines made with a stylus. Both forms of annotation contain little phonological information, but are valuable sources on grammatical markers. The introduction of the
Hangul The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, . Hangul may also be written as following South Korea's standard Romanization. ( ) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The le ...
alphabet in 1446 revolutionized in the description of the language. The ''
Hunminjeongeum ''Hunminjeong'eum'' () is a document describing an entirely new and native script for the Korean language. The script was initially named after the publication but later came to be known as hangul. Originally containing 28 characters, it was c ...
'' ('Correct sounds for the instruction of the people') and later texts describe the phonology and morphology of the language with great detail and precision. Earlier forms of the language must be reconstructed by comparing fragmentary evidence with LMK descriptions. 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 The Bureau of Interpreters or Sayŏgwŏn was an agency of the Joseon government of Korea from 1393 to 1894 responsible for training and supplying official interpreters. Textbooks for foreign languages produced by the bureau aimed to accurately de ...
.


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. The tensed stops ''pp'', ''tt'', ''cc'' and ''kk'' are distinct phonemes in modern Korean, but in LMK they were allophones of consonant clusters. The tensed fricative ''hh'' only occurred in a single verb root, 'to pull', and has disappeared in Modern Korean. The voiced fricatives , and occurred only in limited environments, and are believed to have arisen from
lenition In linguistics, lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them more sonorous. The word ''lenition'' itself means "softening" or "weakening" (from Latin 'weak'). Lenition can happen both synchronically (within a language at a pa ...
of , and , respectively. They have disappeared in most modern dialects, but some dialects in the southeast and northeast retain , and in these words. The affricates ''c'', ''ch'' and ''cc'' were apical consonants, as in modern northwestern dialects, rather than palatals as in modern Seoul. Late Middle Korean had a limited and skewed set of initial clusters: ''sp-'', ''st-'', ''sk-'', ''pt-'', ''pth-'', ''ps-'', ''pc-'', ''pst-'' and ''psk-''. It is believed that they resulted from syncope of vowels ''o'' or ''u'' during the Middle Korean period. For example, the has () 'rice', which became LMK and modern . A similar process is responsible for many aspirated consonants. For example, the has () 'big', which became LMK and modern . Late Middle Korean had seven vowels: The precise phonetic values of these vowels are controversial. Six of them are still distinguished in modern Korean, but only the Jeju language has a distinct reflex of ''o''. In most other varieties it has merged with ''a'' in the first syllable of a word and ''u'' elsewhere. 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. LMK had rigid
vowel harmony In phonology, vowel harmony is an assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, mea ...
, described in the ''Hunminjeongeum'' by dividing the vowels into three groups: * ''yang'' ('bright'): ''a'', ''o'' and ''wo'' * ''yin'' ('dark'): ''e'', ''u'' and ''wu'' * neutral: ''i'' ''Yang'' and ''yin'' vowels could not occur in the same word, but could co-occur with the neutral vowel. The phonetic dimension underlying vowel harmony is also disputed. Lee Ki-Moon suggested that LMK vowel harmony was based on
vowel height A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (le ...
. Some recent authors attribute it to
advanced and retracted tongue root In phonetics, advanced tongue root (ATR) and retracted tongue root (RTR) are contrasting states of the root of the tongue during the pronunciation of vowels in some languages, especially in Western and Eastern Africa, but also in Kazakh and Mong ...
states. Loans from
Middle Mongolian Middle Mongol or Middle Mongolian, was a Mongolic koiné language spoken in the Mongol Empire. Originating from Genghis Khan's home region of Northeastern Mongolia, it diversified into several Mongolic languages after the collapse of the empire ...
in the 13th century show several puzzling correspondences, in particular between Middle Mongolian ''ü'' and Korean ''u''. 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 shift In historical linguistics, a chain shift is a set of sound changes in which the change in pronunciation of one speech sound (typically, a phoneme) is linked to, and presumably causes, a change in pronunciation of other sounds as well. The soun ...
s involving five of these vowels: * > > > * > >
William Labov William Labov ( ; born December 4, 1927) is an American linguist widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of ...
found that this proposed shift followed different principles to all the other chain shifts he surveyed. Lee's interpretation of both the Mongolian and ''Jilin leishi'' materials has also been challenged by several authors. LMK also had two
glide Glide may refer to: * Gliding flight, to fly without thrust Computing *Glide API, a 3D graphics interface *Glide OS, a web desktop *Glide (software), an instant video messenger *Glide, a molecular docking software by Schrödinger (company), Schr ...
s, ''y'' and ''w'' : * A ''y'' on-glide could precede four of the vowels, indicated in Hangul with modified letters: ''ya'' , ''ye'' , ''ywo'' and ''ywu'' . * A ''w'' on-glide could precede ''a'' or ''e'', written with a pair of vowel symbols: ''wa'' and ''we'' . * 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'' . 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). 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. 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 A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ...
rather than a full tone system.


Vocabulary

Although some Chinese words had previously entered Korean, Middle Korean was the period of the massive and systematic influx of Sino-Korean vocabulary. 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.
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 ...
was the language of government and scholarship in Korea from the 7th century until the
Gabo Reforms The Gabo Reform, also known as the Kabo Reform, describes a series of sweeping reforms suggested to the government of Korea, beginning in 1894 and ending in 1896 during the reign of Gojong of Korea in response to the Donghak Peasant Revolution. ...
of the 1890s. After King Gwangjong established the ''
gwageo The ''gwageo'' or ''kwago'' were the national civil service examinations under the Goryeo and Joseon dynasties of Korea. Typically quite demanding, these tests measured candidates' ability of writing composition and knowledge of the Chinese clas ...
'' civil service examinations on the Chinese model in 958, familiarity with written Chinese and the
Chinese classics Chinese classic texts or canonical texts () or simply dianji (典籍) refers to the Chinese texts which originated before the imperial unification by the Qin dynasty in 221 BC, particularly the "Four Books and Five Classics" of the Neo-Confuci ...
spread through the ruling classes. Korean literati read Chinese texts using a standardized Korean pronunciation, originally based on
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 ...
. They used Chinese
rhyme dictionaries A rime dictionary, rhyme dictionary, or rime book () is an ancient type of Chinese dictionary that collates characters by tone and rhyme, instead of by radical. The most important rime dictionary tradition began with the '' Qieyun'' (601), ...
, which specified the pronunciations of
Chinese characters Chinese characters () are logograms developed for the writing of Chinese. In addition, they have been adapted to write other East Asian languages, and remain a key component of the Japanese writing system where they are known as ''kanji ...
relative to other characters, and could thus be used to systematically construct a Sino-Korean reading for any word encountered in a Chinese text. This system became so entrenched that 15th-century efforts to reform it to more closely match the Chinese pronunciation of the time were abandoned. 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. Some of these denoted items of imported culture, but it was also common to introduce Sino-Korean words that directly competed with native vocabulary. Many Korean words known from Middle Korean texts have since been lost in favour of their Sino-Korean counterparts, including the following.


Notes


References

Works cited * * * * * * * * * * *


External links


Joseon dynasty translation texts
at the Academy of Korean Studies {{Authority control Goryeo Joseon dynasty History of the Korean language Korean, Middle