Chapter 37 of the ''
Samguk sagi
''Samguk Sagi'' (, ''History of the Three Kingdoms'') is a historical record of the Three Kingdoms of Korea: Goguryeo, Baekje and Silla. The ''Samguk Sagi'' is written in Classical Chinese, the written language of the literati of ancient Korea, ...
'' ('History of the Three Kingdoms', 1145) contains a list of place names and their meanings, from part of central Korea captured by
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 ...
from the former state 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 mos ...
(Koguryŏ).
Some of the vocabulary extracted from these names provides the principal evidence that
Japonic languages
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 ...
were formerly spoken in central and southern parts of the
Korean peninsula
Korea ( ko, 한국, or , ) is a peninsular region in East Asia. Since 1945, it has been divided at or near the 38th parallel, with North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) comprising its northern half and South Korea (Republic o ...
. Other words resemble
Korean
Korean may refer to:
People and culture
* Koreans, ethnic group originating in the Korean Peninsula
* Korean cuisine
* Korean culture
* Korean language
**Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl
**Korean dialects and the Jeju language
** ...
or
Tungusic words.
Some scholars have ascribed the extracted vocabulary to an Old Koguryŏ language.
Others, pointing out that the area concerned had been part of Goguryeo for less than 200 years, argue that these names represent the languages of earlier inhabitants of the area, and call them pseudo-Koguryŏ or Early Paekche (
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 ...
).
Place name glosses
The ''Samguk sagi'' is a history, 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 ...
, of the Korean
Three Kingdoms
The Three Kingdoms () from 220 to 280 AD was the tripartite division of China among the dynastic states of Cao Wei, Shu Han, and Eastern Wu. The Three Kingdoms period was preceded by the Eastern Han dynasty and was followed by the West ...
period, which ended in 668.
The work was compiled in 1145 from records of the kingdoms of
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 ...
,
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 mos ...
and
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 ...
that are no longer extant.
Four chapters survey the geography of the former kingdoms.
Chapters 34, 35 and 36 describe the territories of Silla, Goguryeo and Baekje respectively. They also cover the administrative re-organization after unification as
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 ...
in 668, including former place names and the standardized two-character
Sino-Korean names assigned under
King Gyeongdeok in the 8th century.
Chapter 37, dealing mostly with places in the Goguryeo lands seized by Silla, has a different format, with a series of items of the form
These formulas were first studied by
Naitō Konan (1907), Miyazaki Michizaburō (1907) and
Shinmura Izuru
was a Japanese linguist and essayist. He is best known for his many contributions to Japanese linguistics and lexicography. In honor of him, the Shinmura Izuru Prize is annually awarded for contributions to linguistics.
Background
Shinmura ...
(1916).
Substantial analysis began with a series of articles by Lee Ki-Moon in the 1960s, with further contributions by
Shichirō Murayama.
These scholars interpreted such formulas as giving place names and their meanings.
For example, the following entry refers to the city now known as
Suwon:
Since 水城 is a Chinese phrase meaning 'water city', while 買忽 cannot be read as Chinese, scholars deduce that the characters 買忽 are used to record the sound of the name, while the characters 水城 represent its meaning.
From this, they infer that 買 and 忽 represent a local words for 'water' and 'city' respectively.
In other cases, the two forms of a name are given in the opposite order or annotated in inconsistent ways.
For example, another entry is:
In this case, the first part, 七重縣, can be read in Chinese as 'seven-fold county', while 難隱別 is meaningless, and hence seems to represent the sound of the name.
From other examples, we infer that 難隱 means 'seven' and 別 means '-fold, layer', while the 'county' part of the gloss is not represented.
Such inconsistencies suggest that the names were collated by someone unsure of how they were originally intended to be read.
In this way, a vocabulary of 80 to 100 words has been extracted from these place names.
Characters like 買 and 忽 presumably represented pronunciations based on some local version of the Chinese reading tradition, but there is no agreement on what this sounded like.
Korean scholars tend to use the
Sino-Korean readings of 15th century dictionaries of
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 9 ...
, in which 買 is pronounced ''may''.
Another approximation is to use the
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 ...
reading pronunciations recorded in such dictionaries as the ''
Qieyun'' (compiled in 601), yielding a pronunciation of ''mɛ'' for the same character.
In some cases, the same word is represented by several characters with similar pronunciations.
Vocabulary
Several of the words extracted from these names, including all four of the attested numerals, resemble
Japonic languages
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 ...
, and are accepted by many authors as evidence that now-extinct
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 ...
languages were once spoken in central and southern parts of the Korean peninsula.
Others resemble Korean or
Tungusic languages
The Tungusic languages (also known as Manchu-Tungus and Tungus) form a language family spoken in Eastern Siberia and Manchuria by Tungusic peoples. Many Tungusic languages are endangered. There are approximately 75,000 native speakers of the doz ...
.
Interpretations
The first authors to study these words assumed that, because these place names came from the territory of Goguryeo, they must have represented the language of that state.
Lee and Ramsey offer the additional argument that the dual use of Chinese characters to represent the sound and meaning of the place names must have been done by scribes of Goguryeo, which would have borrowed written Chinese earlier than the southern kingdoms.
They argue that the Goguryeo language formed a link between Japanese and Korean.
Christopher I. Beckwith
Christopher I. Beckwith (born October 23, 1945) is an American philologist and distinguished professor in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.
He has a B.A. in Chinese from Ohio State Unive ...
, assuming that the characters represented a form of northeast Chinese, for which he offers his own reconstruction, claims a much larger proportion of Japonic cognates.
Beckwith's linguistic analysis has been criticized for the ''ad hoc'' nature of his Chinese reconstructions, for his handling of Japonic material and for hasty rejection of possible cognates in other languages.
Other authors point out that most of the place names come from central Korea, an area captured by Goguryeo from Baekje and other states in the 5th century, and none from the historical homeland of Goguryeo north of the
Taedong River
The Taedong River (Chosŏn'gŭl: ) is a large river in North Korea. The river rises in the Rangrim Mountains of the country's north where it then flows southwest into Korea Bay at Namp'o.Suh, Dae-Sook (1987) "North Korea in 1986: Strengthenin ...
.
These authors suggest that the place names reflect the languages of those states rather than that of Goguryeo.
This would explain why they seem to reflect multiple language groups.
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 ...
proposes that the place names reflect the original language of the Korean peninsula and a component in the formation of both Korean and Japanese.
Toh Soo Hee argues that they reflect the original language of Baekje.
Kōno Rokurō argues that two languages were used by different social classes in Baekje, with the glossed placenames coming from the language of the common people.
Notes
References
Works cited
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Further reading
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{{refend
Goguryeo
Historical linguistics
Japonic languages