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An Introduction to Early Korean Writing Systems

by Adrian Buzo

. INTRODUCTION

While it is generally accepted that literacy in Korea dates back to at least the period of the Four Han Commanderies (2nd century BC to 3rd century AD), our first direct evidence for it comes in the form of the Kwanggaeto Stela, a large stone monument located in what is now southern Manchuria, which recounts at length the deeds of the Koguryo monarch Kwanggaeto (391-412) and bears a date corresponding to 414 AD.1

The l,800-character text of the stela is in Chinese, which is fitting because this earliest glimpse we have of native Korean literacy sets the scene for the almost total monopoly that was to be enjoyed by Classical Chinese as the instrument of literate culture in Korea during the next 1,500 years. It is also fitting that it be a Koguryo monument, because Koguryo was the first state east of the Chinese cultural world to acquire literacy in the Chinese language.

This marriage of spoken Korean and written Chinese was a long one. It lasted while the traditional political order lasted, and it crumbled away almost as quickly and as completely as did that order around the end of the 19th century. It was not a totally monogamous marriage, however, and it is with an aspect of the relatively tiny body of writing in the Korean language from the pre-modern era that we are concerned here.

Its history may be divided into two periods, with the division coming rather sharply at the promulgation of the Korean alphabet in 1446. It should be noted at the outset, however, that the basis of this division is largely a technical one, for although this alphabet, known formally in its day as the hunmin chongum (Correct Sounds for Instructing the People), marked a radical improvement in the means by which the Korean language was transcribed, its impact was very limited in the Yi period, being largely confined to the very areas previously covered by the earlier Korean writing systems which we call idu, hyangchal and kugyol.

At the same time as we acknowledge the achievement of the hunmin chongum, it is important to recognize this essential continuum of Korean [page 36] language writing throughout the pre-modern era, for it was part of an overall cultural continuum. It is the purpose of this paper to identify the characteristics and trace the development of what we shall call Early Korean Writing Systems, the predecessors to the hunmin chongum and the means by which the Korean language was transcribed during the thousand years or so prior to 1446.

Source Material

The source material we have for tracing the development of idu, hyangchal and kugyol is extremely scanty. In the case of idu there is a good deal of material dating from the Yi period, but from the Koryo, Unified Silla and Three Kingdoms periods we have only a handful of short documents and a few brief inscriptions. For hyangchal we have 25 short lyrics known as hyang-ga, the texts for some of which may be corrupt. For kugyol there are some documents from the Yi period, five pages of a Kugyol-annotated sutra from the Koryo period, and nothing earlier. In addition, there are a fair number of Korean names transcribed with Chinese characters in a variety of contexts, principally in the two major sources for early Korean history, the Samguk sagi (1145) and the Samguk yusa (13th century).

Much of this material is fragmentary, and all of it comes without any explanation, annotation or commentary. Our ability to use it depends on our ability to reconstruct the spoken forms of the Korean language for these early periods, and for this we are able to go back only as far as the 15th century, the earliest period for which we have substantial material in the Korean language. It also depends on our ability to define with precision the phonetic value of the Chinese characters used in early texts to transcribe native Korean sounds. The chief tool used for this is Karlgrens reconstruction of 7th century Chinese known as Ancient Chinese.2 Lastly, and more intangibly, it depends upon our ability to understand the cultural context in which these systems were used.

Despite the considerable amount of work that has been done, we may never have more than a general idea of the sounds and grammatical forms contained in idu/hyangchal/kugyol source material. There is simply not enough of it, and what there is is not precise enough to allow much in the way of detailed interpretation. If there is any ray of hope, it is in the steady uncovering of old documents previously presumed lost, a process that has been going on since the Japanese colonial period. This plus the continuing process of re-evaluation of existing material enables us to see the outlines of early Korean writing systems far more clearly today than even a generation ago.

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Terminology

The lack of linguistic explanation or commentary in idu/hyangchal/ kugyol source material has tended to obfuscate the basic terminology in popular use. In addition, the terms idu3 and kugyol4 first occur in early Yi period sources, several centuries after the first evidence of their actual existence, while we have only one pre-15th century reference to the term hyangchal as a method of poetry/lyric transcription, and that is in the Kyunyo-jon (1075). No known term for the practice of name transcription, which shows some indications of distinct development, has survived.

A basic source of confusion is the apparent application by late Koryo times of the term idu to cover by implication all forms of Korean language transcription. The actual works identified as idu works in early Yi times, howeverfor example, the idu translation of the Great Ming Code (Taemyong yuljikhae, 1396)clearly relate to a more restricted field of use, that of prose transcription for a formal or official purpose.5 Further, the function of poetry/lyric transcription is clearly absent from the account of idu usage given by Choe Man-ri in his defense of idu against the hunmin chongum before King Sejong.6 It is indications like this that suggest that the use of idu as a broad generic term is inadequate.

In this situation it is more helpful to proceed from the actual functions and features of these systems rather than from their names. The

FunctionName Definition

Proseidu a comparatively primitive, hybrid written transcription language coniaining both Chinese and Korean

elements.

poetry/lyric hyangchal a full and true transcription of Korean song transcriptionlyrics using Chinese characters.

translation/kugyol a precise, written form used for rendering interpretation Chinese texts into Korean using a system of transcriptionmarginal annotations based on simplified Chinese characters.

name transcription ohui pyogi a system for transcrioing Korean nouns and pro

per nouns using Chinese characters.

[page 38] names applied to them in this article are the ones in current general use in academic circles and provide as effective a working terminology as the paucity of source material on them allows.

It is important to stress that these systems are fundamentally interrelated and that the differences between them are primarily functional ones. Idu was not a spoken form because it is not necessary to transcribe spoken forms fully in order to communicate basic information. A person reading idu would understand its contents directly, and in communicating them to others he would probably start with a phrase like It says that... On the other hand, the more complex demands of lyric transcription where the actual sound of the the language is of prime importance, and the demands of translation/interpretation transcription where great precision is necessary to render, for example, philosophical concepts, required a far more comprehensive, detailed system. This is the basis for distinguishing between idu and hyangchal/kugyol. These latter two in turn require different kinds of precisianhyangchal for its aesthetic effect, kugyol for the articulation of phisolophy. All three systems appear to have proceeded from the same principles, but they differ markedly in the purpose for which, and thus in the extent to which, they applied these principles.

II. THE DEVELOPMENT OF EARLY KOREAN WRITING SYSTEMS

The Chinese and Korean Languages

The characteristics of early Korean writing systems were determined first of all by the nature of the differences between the Chinese and Korean languages, and a brief consideration of these is relevant here.

Few languages could be more dissimilar than Chinese and Korean. Chinese is a monosyllabic, tonal language in which grammatical functions are determined largely by word order, which in turn follows a basic subject-verb-object pattern. In its written form it employs ideographic characters, each of which possesses both a phonetic and a semantic value. Korean, on the other hand, is a polysyllabic, non-tonal language which follows a basic subject-object-verb pattern and in which grammatical function is indicated by a system of grammatical morphemes attached to substantives in a sentence. Its sound system, especially its use of final [page 39] consonants, is more complex than Chinese and its use of particles is also far more extensive.

There were three major implications of these differences for the field of Korean language transcription. The first was that the actual order of words would have to be changed. I love you would become I you love. The second was that grammatical particles not consistently found in Chinese would have to be accounted forfor example in the sentence above, the sentence topic particle, the object particle and the verb endings. Thus, while the Korean sentence

Na tangsin sarang

communicates in a basi