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91-442: "Byeonhan (弁韓)" is believed to be a combination of Old Korean words. "Byeon (변)" in native Korean meant "Shiny/Shimmering" while "Han (한)" meant "big", giving the meaning of Byeonhan, the "Big Nation of Shimmering". As part of the Samhan, Jinhan meant "Big Nation of the East" and Mahan meant "Big Nation of the South". This early part of the Three Kingdoms period is sometimes called the Proto–Three Kingdoms period . Byeonhan, like

182-644: A phonemic distinction between the non- aspirated velar stop /k/ and its aspirated equivalent, /kʰ/ . However, both are regularly reflected in Sino-Korean as /k/ . This suggests that /kʰ/ was absent in Old Korean. Old Korean phonology can also be examined via Old Korean loanwords in other languages, including Middle Mongol and especially Old Japanese . All Old Korean was written with Sinographic systems , where Chinese characters are borrowed for both their semantic and phonetic values to represent

273-484: A Korean influence on Khitan. The hypothesis that Korean could be related to Japanese has had some supporters due to some overlap in vocabulary and similar grammatical features that have been elaborated upon by such researchers as Samuel E. Martin and Roy Andrew Miller . Sergei Starostin (1991) found about 25% of potential cognates in the Japanese–Korean 100-word Swadesh list . Some linguists concerned with

364-513: A Korean scholar were made by Yang Chu-dong in 1942 and corrected many of Ogura's errors, for instance properly identifying 只 as a phonogram for *-k. The analyses of Kim Wan-jin in 1980 established many general principles of hyangga orthography. Interpretations of hyangga after the 1990s, such as those of Nam Pung-hyun in the 2010s, draw on new understandings of early Korean grammar provided by newly discovered Goryeo texts. Nevertheless, many poems remain poorly understood, and their phonology

455-408: A comprehensive catalog of hitherto discovered slips was published in 2004. Since its publication, scholars have actively relied on the mokgan data as an important primary source. Mokgan are classified into two general categories. Most surviving slips are tag mokgan , which were attached to goods during transport and contain quantitative data about the product in question. Document mokgan , on

546-480: A core vowel. The IPA symbol ⟨ ◌͈ ⟩ ( U+0348 ◌͈ COMBINING DOUBLE VERTICAL LINE BELOW ) is used to denote the tensed consonants /p͈/, /t͈/, /k͈/, /t͡ɕ͈/, /s͈/ . Its official use in the extensions to the IPA is for "strong" articulation, but is used in the literature for faucalized voice . The Korean consonants also have elements of stiff voice , but it is not yet known how typical this

637-545: A later founder effect diminished the internal variety of both language families. Since the establishment of two independent governments, North–South differences have developed in standard Korean, including variations in pronunciation and vocabulary chosen. However, these minor differences can be found in any of the Korean dialects , which are still largely mutually intelligible . The Chinese language , written with Chinese characters and read with Sino-Xenic pronunciations ,

728-480: A mid-sixth century document mokgan first deciphered in full by Lee Seungjae in 2017. This slip, which contains a report by a village chieftain to a higher-ranking official, is composed according to Korean syntax and includes four uncontroversial examples of Old Korean functional morphemes (given below in bold), as well as several potential content words. Old Korean glosses have been discovered on eighth-century editions of Chinese-language Buddhist works. Similar to

819-574: A possible relationship.) Hudson & Robbeets (2020) suggested that there are traces of a pre- Nivkh substratum in Korean. According to the hypothesis, ancestral varieties of Nivkh (also known as Amuric ) were once distributed on the Korean Peninsula before the arrival of Koreanic speakers. Korean syllable structure is (C)(G)V(C), consisting of an optional onset consonant, glide /j, w, ɰ/ and final coda /p, t, k, m, n, ŋ, l/ surrounding

910-481: A tonal system similar to that of Middle Korean. Phonetic glosses in Silla Buddhist texts show that as early as the eighth century, Sino-Korean involved three tonal categories and failed to distinguish rising and departing tones. On the other hand, linguists such as Lee Ki-Moon and S. Roberts Ramsey argue that Old Korean originally had a simpler prosody than Middle Korean, and that influence from Chinese tones

1001-541: A vague outline" of the characteristics of Old Korean. The only surviving literary works are a little more than a dozen vernacular poems called hyangga . Hyangga use hyangchal writing. Other sources include inscriptions on steles and wooden tablets, glosses to Buddhist sutras , and the transcription of personal and place names in works otherwise in Classical Chinese. All methods of Old Korean writing rely on logographic Chinese characters , used to either gloss

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1092-619: Is also generated by longstanding alliances, military involvement, and diplomacy, such as between South Korea–United States and China–North Korea since the end of World War II and the Korean War . Along with other languages such as Chinese and Arabic , Korean is ranked at the top difficulty level for English speakers by the United States Department of Defense . Modern Korean descends from Middle Korean , which in turn descends from Old Korean , which descends from

1183-656: Is an agglutinative language . The Korean language is traditionally considered to have nine parts of speech . Modifiers generally precede the modified words, and in the case of verb modifiers, can be serially appended. The sentence structure or basic form of a Korean sentence is subject–object–verb (SOV), but the verb is the only required and immovable element and word order is highly flexible, as in many other agglutinative languages. Question 가게에 gage-e store- LOC 가셨어요? ga-syeo-sseo-yo go- HON . PAST - CONJ - POL 가게에 가셨어요? gage-e ga-syeo-sseo-yo store-LOC go-HON.PAST-CONJ-POL 'Did [you] go to

1274-622: Is analyzed as a low tone followed by a high tone within a bimoraic syllable. Middle Chinese was also a tonal language, with four tones : level, rising, departing, and entering. The tones of fifteenth-century Sino-Korean partially correspond to Middle Chinese ones. Chinese syllables with level tone have low tone in Middle Korean; those with rising or departing tones, rising tone; and those with entering tone, high tone. These correspondences suggest that Old Korean had some form of suprasegmentals consistent with those of Middle Chinese, perhaps

1365-641: Is called mareum cheomgi ( Korean :  말음첨기 ; Hanja :  末音添記 ), literally "final sounds transcribed in addition". A phonogram is used to mark the final syllable or coda consonant of a Korean word already represented by a logogram. Handel uses an analogy to "-st" in English 1st for "first". Because the final phonogram can represent a single consonant, Old Korean writing has alphabetic properties. Examples of mareum cheomgi are given below. Unlike modern Sino-Korean, most of which descends from Middle Chinese, Old Korean phonograms were based on

1456-511: Is closer to a near-open central vowel ( [ɐ] ), though ⟨a⟩ is still used for tradition. Grammatical morphemes may change shape depending on the preceding sounds. Examples include -eun/-neun ( -은/-는 ) and -i/-ga ( -이/-가 ). Sometimes sounds may be inserted instead. Examples include -eul/-reul ( -을/-를 ), -euro/-ro ( -으로/-로 ), -eseo/-seo ( -에서/-서 ), -ideunji/-deunji ( -이든지/-든지 ) and -iya/-ya ( -이야/-야 ). Some verbs may also change shape morphophonemically. Korean

1547-626: Is found even in the oldest surviving Silla inscription, a stele in Pohang dated to either 441 or 501 . These early inscriptions, however, involved "little more than subtle alterations of Classical Chinese syntax". Inscriptions of the sixth and seventh centuries show more fully developed strategies of representing Korean with Chinese characters. Some inscriptions represent functional morphemes directly through semantic Chinese equivalents. Others use only Classical Chinese vocabulary, but reorder them fully according to Korean syntax. A 551 stele commemorating

1638-399: Is mainly reserved for specific circumstances such as newspapers, scholarly papers and disambiguation. Today Hanja is largely unused in everyday life but is still important for historical and linguistic studies. The Korean names for the language are based on the names for Korea used in both South Korea and North Korea. The English word "Korean" is derived from Goryeo , which is thought to be

1729-454: Is now lost, and only twenty-five works survive. Fourteen are recorded in the Samguk yusa , a history compiled in the 1280s by the monk Iryeon , along with prose introductions that detail how the poem came to be composed. These introductions date the works to between 600 and 879. The majority of Samguk yusa poems, however, are from the eighth century. Eleven additional hyangga , composed in

1820-399: Is of faucalized consonants. They are produced with a partially constricted glottis and additional subglottal pressure in addition to tense vocal tract walls, laryngeal lowering, or other expansion of the larynx. /s/ is aspirated [sʰ] and becomes an alveolo-palatal [ɕʰ] before [j] or [i] for most speakers (but see North–South differences in the Korean language ). This occurs with

1911-455: Is particularly unclear. Due to the opaqueness of data, it has been convention since the earliest Japanese researchers for scholars to transcribe their hyangga reconstructions using the Middle Korean lexicon , and some linguists continue to anachronistically project even non-lexical Middle Korean elements in their analyses. Silla inscriptions also document Old Korean elements. Idiosyncratic Chinese vocabulary suggestive of vernacular influence

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2002-544: Is the native language for about 81 million people, mostly of Korean descent. It is the national language of both North Korea and South Korea . Beyond Korea, the language is recognized as a minority language in parts of China , namely Jilin , and specifically Yanbian Prefecture , and Changbai County . It is also spoken by Sakhalin Koreans in parts of Sakhalin , the Russian island just north of Japan, and by

2093-540: Is the first historically documented stage of the Korean language , typified by the language of the Unified Silla period (668–935). The boundaries of Old Korean periodization remain in dispute. Some linguists classify the sparsely attested languages of the Three Kingdoms of Korea as variants of Old Korean, while others reserve the term for the language of Silla alone. Old Korean traditionally ends with

2184-747: Is well attested in Western Old Japanese and Northern Ryukyuan languages , in Eastern Old Japanese it only occurs in compounds, and it is only present in three dialects of the Southern Ryukyuan language group . Also, the doublet wo meaning "hemp" is attested in Western Old Japanese and Southern Ryukyuan languages. It is thus plausible to assume a borrowed term. (See Classification of the Japonic languages or Comparison of Japanese and Korean for further details on

2275-521: The Koryo-saram in parts of Central Asia . The language has a few extinct relatives which—along with the Jeju language (Jejuan) of Jeju Island and Korean itself—form the compact Koreanic language family . Even so, Jejuan and Korean are not mutually intelligible . The linguistic homeland of Korean is suggested to be somewhere in contemporary Manchuria . The hierarchy of the society from which

2366-527: The yangban aristocracy, who looked down upon it too easy to learn. However, it gained widespread use among the common class and was widely used to print popular novels which were enjoyed by the common class. Since few people could understand official documents written in classical Chinese, Korean kings sometimes released public notices entirely written in Hangul as early as the 16th century for all Korean classes, including uneducated peasants and slaves. By

2457-816: The Nakdong River valley that were not formal members of the Jinhan confederacy. Byeonhan was internationally known for its production of iron , which was also its main export good to the Lelang Commandery to the northwest, the Japanese archipelago, and the rest of the Korean peninsula . It was also a center of stoneware manufacture. According to the Records of Three Kingdoms , Byeonhan consisted of 12 statelets: Old Korean Old Korean (North Korean name: 고대 조선어 ; South Korean name: 고대 한국어 )

2548-600: The Old Chinese pronunciation of characters. For instance, characters with Middle Chinese initial *j were used to transcribe an Old Korean liquid , reflecting the fact that initial *j arose from Old Chinese *l . The characters 所 and 朔 had the same vowel in Old Korean orthography, which was true in Old Chinese where both had *a , but not in Middle Chinese, where the former had the diphthong *ɨʌ and

2639-589: The Proto-Koreanic language , which is generally suggested to have its linguistic homeland somewhere in Manchuria . Whitman (2012) suggests that the proto-Koreans, already present in northern Korea, expanded into the southern part of the Korean Peninsula at around 300 BC and coexisted with the descendants of the Japonic Mumun cultivators (or assimilated them). Both had influence on each other and

2730-505: The Three Kingdoms of Korea (not the ancient confederacies in the southern Korean Peninsula), while " -eo " and " -mal " mean "language" and "speech", respectively. Korean is also simply referred to as guk-eo , literally "national language". This name is based on the same Han characters ( 國語 "nation" + "language") that are also used in Taiwan and Japan to refer to their respective national languages. In North Korea and China ,

2821-889: The 17th century, the yangban had exchanged Hangul letters with slaves, which suggests a high literacy rate of Hangul during the Joseon era. In the context of growing Korean nationalism in the 19th century, the Gabo Reform of 1894 abolished the Confucian examinations and decreed that government documents would be issued in Hangul instead of literary Chinese. Some newspapers were published entirely in Hangul, but other publications used Korean mixed script , with Hanja for Sino-Korean vocabulary and Hangul for other elements. North Korea abolished Hanja in writing in 1949, but continues to teach them in schools. Their usage in South Korea

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2912-408: The 20th century. The script uses 24 basic letters ( jamo ) and 27 complex letters formed from the basic ones. When first recorded in historical texts, Korean was only a spoken language . Since the turn of the 21st century, aspects of Korean culture have spread to other countries through globalization and cultural exports . As such, interest in Korean language acquisition (as a foreign language )

3003-511: The 960s by the Buddhist monk Gyunyeo , are preserved in a 1075 biography of the master. Lee Ki-Moon and Ramsey consider Gyunyeo's hyangga to also represent "Silla poetry", although Nam Pung-hyun insists on significant grammatical differences between the works of the Samguk yusa and those of Gyunyeo. Because centuries passed between the composition of hyangga works and the compilation of

3094-441: The Buddhist canon. He identifies grammatical commonalities between Silla-period texts and glosses from before the thirteenth century, which contrast with the structures of post-thirteenth century glosses and of fifteenth-century Middle Korean. Such thirteenth-century changes include the invention of dedicated conditional mood markers, the restriction of the former nominalizing suffixes -n and -l to attributive functions alone,

3185-679: The Japanese kanbun tradition, these glosses provide Old Korean noun case markers, inflectional suffixes , and phonograms that would have helped Korean learners read out the Classical Chinese text in their own language. Examples of these three uses of glossing found in a 740 edition of the Avatamsaka Sutra (now preserved in Tōdai-ji , Japan) are given below. Portions of a Silla census register with Old Korean elements, likely from 755 but possibly also 695, 815, or 875 , have also been discovered at Tōdai-ji. Though in Classical Chinese,

3276-530: The Korean Language and the 2015 Blackwell Handbook of Korean Linguistics . The only Korean-language literature that survives from Silla are vernacular poems now called hyangga ( Korean :  향가 ; Hanja :  鄕歌 ), literally "local songs". Hyangga appears to have been a flourishing genre in the Silla period, with a royally commissioned anthology published in 888. That anthology

3367-472: The Korean histories Samguk sagi and Samguk yusa offer Old Korean etymologies for certain native terms. The reliability of these etymologies remains in dispute. Non-Korean texts also provide information on Old Korean. A passage of the Book of Liang , a seventh-century Chinese history, transcribes seven Silla words: a term for "fortification", two terms for "village", and four clothing-related terms. Three of

3458-588: The Old Korean phonemes, using Chinese characters as phonograms , and one that translates the Old Korean morphemes, using Chinese characters as logograms . This is especially true for place names; they were standardized by royal decree in 757, but the sources preserve forms from both before and after this date. By comparing the two, linguists can infer the value of many Old Korean morphemes. The modern Korean language has its own pronunciations for Chinese characters, called Sino-Korean. Although some Sino-Korean forms reflect Old Chinese or Early Mandarin pronunciations,

3549-541: The Pyŏnhan grouping, one such toponym is identified with Chinhan. This is exactly the kind of complexity we might expect to be associated with the situation described by Ahn, where a population associated with Mumun wet rice growing culture lives alongside more recently arrived members of the Korean-style bronze dagger culture. Byeonhan may have simply been a political description for decentralized polities south and west of

3640-736: The Unified Silla period continue to use only words from Classical Chinese, even as they order them according to Korean grammar. However, most inscriptions of the period write Old Korean morphemes more explicitly, relying on Chinese semantic and phonetic equivalents. These Unified-era inscriptions are often Buddhist in nature and include material carved on Buddha statues, temple bells , and pagodas . Ancient Korean scribes often wrote on bamboo and wooden slips called mokgan . By 2016, archaeologists had discovered 647 mokgan , out of which 431 slips were from Silla. Mokgan are valuable primary sources because they were largely written by and reflect

3731-600: The afterlife souls fly into the sky. Byeonhan as a political grouping was also sometimes referred to by a calque of Byeon ( 弁 ) and Jin ( 辰 ) as Byeonjin with the ethnonym Han ( 韓 ) being used by its inhabitants, identical to that of its neighbours. There are also two hypotheses about the Byeonhan constituting a separate ethnicity distinct from the Jinhan: However, there is no distinct evidence that indicates an ethnic separation of Byeonhan and Jinhan as

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3822-455: The beginnings of words. /l/ becomes alveolar flap [ɾ] between vowels, and [l] or [ɭ] at the end of a syllable or next to another /l/ . A written syllable-final ' ㄹ ', when followed by a vowel or a glide ( i.e. , when the next character starts with ' ㅇ '), migrates to the next syllable and thus becomes [ɾ] . Traditionally, /l/ was disallowed at the beginning of a word. It disappeared before [j] , and otherwise became /n/ . However,

3913-402: The central dialect of Gaegyeong during this time. Following Lee Ki-Moon's work in the 1970s, the end of Old Korean is traditionally associated with this tenth-century change in the country's political center. In 2003, South Korean linguist Nam Pung-hyun proposed that the Old Korean period should be extended into the mid-thirteenth century. Nam's arguments center on Korean-language glosses to

4004-523: The clothing words have Middle Korean cognates, but the other four words remain "uninterpretable". The eighth-century Japanese history Nihon Shoki also preserves a single sentence in the Silla language, apparently some sort of oath, although its meaning can only be guessed from context. The Samguk sagi , the Samguk yusa , and Chinese and Japanese sources transcribe many proper nouns from Silla, including personal names, place names, and titles. These are often given in two variant forms: one that transcribes

4095-437: The concerns of low-ranking officials, unlike other texts that are dominated by the high elite. Since the majority of discovered texts are inventories of products, they also provide otherwise rare information about numerals, classifiers , and common nouns. Modern mokgan research began in 1975. With the development of infrared imaging science in the 1990s, it became possible to read many formerly indecipherable texts, and

4186-840: The construction of a fort in Gyeongju , for instance, writes "begin to build" as 作始 (lit. "build begin") rather than the correct Classical Chinese, 始作 (lit. "begin build"), reflecting the Subject-object-verb word order of Korean. The Imsin Vow Stone, raised in either 552 or 612, is also illustrative: Other sixth-century epigraphs that arrange Chinese vocabulary using Korean syntax and employ Chinese semantic equivalents for certain Korean functional morphemes have been discovered, including stelae bearing royal edicts or celebrating public works and sixth-century rock inscriptions left at Ulju by royals on tour. Some inscriptions of

4277-528: The eighth-century poem Heonhwa-ga given below , for instance, the inflected verb 獻乎理音如 give- INTENT - PROSP - ESSEN - DEC begins with the SAL 獻 "to give" and is followed by three PAPs and a final SAP that mark mood, aspect, and essentiality. Hunju eumjong is a defining characteristic of Silla orthography and appears not to be found in Baekje mokgan . Another tendency of Old Korean writing

4368-450: The entering tone among the four Chinese tones. Middle Korean had a complex syllable structure that allowed clusters of up to three consonants in initial and two consonants in terminal position, as well as vowel triphthongs. But many syllables with complex structures arose from the merger of multiple syllables, as seen below. Middle Korean closed syllables with bimoraic "rising tone" reflect an originally bisyllabic CVCV form in which

4459-411: The erasing of distinctions between nominal and verbal negation, and the loss of the essentiality-marking suffix -ms . Nam's thesis has been increasingly influential in Korean academia. In a 2012 review, Kim Yupum notes that "recent studies have a tendency to make the thirteenth century the end date [for Old Korean]... One thinks that the general periodization of Korean language history, in which [only

4550-439: The examples below. Korean Sinographic writing is traditionally classified into three major systems: idu , gugyeol , and hyangchal . The first, idu , was used primarily for translation. In its completed form after the Old Korean period, it involved reordering Classical Chinese text into Korean syntax and adding Korean functional morphemes as necessary, with the result that "a highly Sinicized formal form of written Korean"

4641-598: The existence of clausal nominalization and the ability of inflecting verb roots to appear in isolation. Despite attempts to link the language to the putative Altaic family and especially to the Japonic languages , no links between Old Korean and any non- Koreanic language have been uncontroversially demonstrated. Old Korean is generally defined as the ancient Koreanic language of the Silla state (BCE 57–CE 936), especially in its Unified period (668–936). Proto-Koreanic ,

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4732-418: The fall of Silla in 935. This too has recently been challenged by South Korean linguists who argue for extending the Old Korean period to the mid-thirteenth century, although this new periodization is not yet fully accepted. This article focuses on the language of Silla before the tenth century. Old Korean is poorly attested. Due to the paucity and poor quality of sources, modern linguists have "little more than

4823-518: The final vowel was reduced, and some linguists propose that Old Korean or its precursor originally had a CV syllable structure like that of Japanese, with all clusters and coda consonants forming due to vowel reduction later on. However, there is strong evidence for the existence of coda consonants in even the earliest attestations of Korean, especially in mareum cheomgi orthography. On the other hand, Middle Korean consonant clusters are believed not to have existed in Old Korean and to have formed after

4914-399: The first Korean dynasty known to Western nations. Korean people in the former USSR refer to themselves as Koryo-saram or Koryo-in (literally, " Koryo/Goryeo persons"), and call the language Koryo-mal' . Some older English sources also use the spelling "Corea" to refer to the nation, and its inflected form for the language, culture and people, "Korea" becoming more popular in

5005-518: The first time in Silla texts of the mid- to late sixth century, and the use of such vernacular elements becomes more extensive by the Unified period. Initially only one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea , Silla rose to ascendancy in the sixth century under monarchs Beopheung and Jinheung . After another century of conflict, the kings of Silla allied with Tang China to destroy the other two kingdoms— Baekje in 660, and Goguryeo in 668—and to unite

5096-434: The following interpretation of the final line of the hyangga poem Anmin-ga (756): The text of this line uses all four strategies: In Old Korean, most content morphemes are written with SALs, while PAPs are used for functional suffixes . In Korean scholarship, this practice is called hunju eumjong ( Korean :  훈주음종 ; Hanja :  訓主音從 ), literally "logogram is principal, phonograms follow". In

5187-460: The fragments of the three languages as representing three separate corpora". Earlier in 2000, Ramsey and Iksop Lee note that the three languages are often grouped as Old Korean, but point to "obvious dissimilarities" and identify Sillan as Old Korean "in the truest sense". Nam Pung-hyun and Alexander Vovin , on the other hand, classify the languages of all three kingdoms as regional dialects of Old Korean. Other linguists, such as Lee Seungjae, group

5278-485: The hypothetical ancestor of the Koreanic languages understood largely through the internal reconstruction of later forms of Korean, is to be distinguished from the actually historically attested language of Old Korean. Old Korean semantic influence may be present in even the oldest discovered Silla inscription, a Classical Chinese-language stele dated to 441 or 501. Korean syntax and morphemes are visibly attested for

5369-479: The inflow of western loanwords changed the trend, and now word-initial /l/ (mostly from English loanwords) are pronounced as a free variation of either [ɾ] or [l] . All obstruents (plosives, affricates, fricatives) at the end of a word are pronounced with no audible release , [p̚, t̚, k̚] . Plosive sounds /p, t, k/ become nasals [m, n, ŋ] before nasal sounds. Hangul spelling does not reflect these assimilatory pronunciation rules, but rather maintains

5460-408: The issue between Japanese and Korean, including Alexander Vovin, have argued that the indicated similarities are not due to any genetic relationship , but rather to a sprachbund effect and heavy borrowing, especially from Ancient Korean into Western Old Japanese . A good example might be Middle Korean sàm and Japanese asá , meaning " hemp ". This word seems to be a cognate, but although it

5551-639: The language is most often called Joseon-mal , or more formally, Joseon-o . This is taken from the North Korean name for Korea (Joseon), a name retained from the Joseon dynasty until the proclamation of the Korean Empire , which in turn was annexed by the Empire of Japan . In mainland China , following the establishment of diplomatic relations with South Korea in 1992, the term Cháoxiǎnyǔ or

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5642-472: The language originates deeply influences the language, leading to a system of speech levels and honorifics indicative of the formality of any given situation. Modern Korean is written in the Korean script ( 한글 ; Hangeul in South Korea, 조선글 ; Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea), a system developed during the 15th century for that purpose, although it did not become the primary script until

5733-403: The language] prior to the founding of Goryeo is considered Old Korean, is in need of revision." The Russian-American linguist Alexander Vovin also considers twelfth-century data to be examples of "Late Old Korean". On the other hand, linguists such as Lee Seungjae and Hwang Seon-yeop continue to use the older periodization, as do major recent English-language sources such as the 2011 History of

5824-472: The languages of Silla and Baekje together as Old Korean while excluding that of Goguryeo. The LINGUIST List gives Silla as a synonym for Old Korean while acknowledging that the term is "often used to refer to three distinct languages". Silla began a protracted decline in the late eighth century. By the early tenth century, the Korean Peninsula was once more divided into three warring polities :

5915-465: The languages of the other two kingdoms survive, but most linguists agree that both were related to the language of Silla. Opinion differs as to whether to classify the Goguryeo and Baekje languages as Old Korean variants, or as related but independent languages. Lee Ki-Moon and S. Roberts Ramsey argue in 2011 that evidence for mutual intelligibility is insufficient, and that linguists ought to "treat

6006-455: The late 1800s. In South Korea the Korean language is referred to by many names including hanguk-eo ("Korean language"), hanguk-mal ("Korean speech") and uri-mal ("our language"); " hanguk " is taken from the name of the Korean Empire ( 대한제국 ; 大韓帝國 ; Daehan Jeguk ). The " han " ( 韓 ) in Hanguk and Daehan Jeguk is derived from Samhan , in reference to

6097-489: The latter *ʌ . Partly because of this archaism, some of the most common Old Korean phonograms are only partially connected to the Middle Chinese or Sino-Korean phonetic value of the character. Ki-Moon Lee and S. Robert Ramsey cites six notable examples of these "problematic phonograms", given below. Silla scribes also developed their own characters not found in China. These could be both logograms and phonograms, as seen in

6188-428: The main differences between them to be purpose rather than any structural difference. The phonological system of Old Korean cannot be established "with any certainty", and its study relies largely on tracing back elements of Middle Korean (MK) phonology. Fifteenth-century Middle Korean was a tonal or pitch accent language whose orthography distinguished between three tones: high, rising, and low. The rising tone

6279-557: The majority of modern linguists believe that the dominant layer of Sino-Korean descends from the Middle Chinese prestige dialect of Chang'an during the Tang dynasty . As Sino-Korean originates in Old Korean speakers' perception of Middle Chinese phones , elements of Old Korean phonology may be inferred from a comparison of Sino-Korean with Middle Chinese. For instance, Middle Chinese, Middle Korean, and Modern Korean all have

6370-446: The meaning or approximate the sound of the Korean words. Thus, the phonetic value of surviving Old Korean texts is opaque. Its phoneme inventory seems to have included fewer consonants but more vowels than Middle Korean . In its typology, it was a subject-object-verb , agglutinative language, like both Middle and Modern Korean. However, Old Korean is thought to have differed from its descendants in certain typological features, including

6461-496: The other Samhan confederacies, appears to be descended from the Jin state of southern Korea. Archaeological evidence indicates an increase in military activity and weapons production among the Byeonhan in the 3rd century, especially an increase in iron arrowheads and cuirasses (Barnes 2000). This may be associated with the decline of Byeonhan and the rise of the more centralized Gaya Confederacy , which most Byeonhan states joined. Gaya

6552-471: The other hand, contain administrative reports by local officials. Document mokgan of extended length were common prior to Silla's conquest of the other kingdoms, but mokgan of the Unified period are primarily tag mokgan . A small number of texts belong to neither group; these include a fragmentary hyangga poem discovered in 2000 and what may be a ritual text associated with Dragon King worship. The earliest direct attestation of Old Korean comes from

6643-475: The poems while acknowledging that the overall framework of the hyangga texts is Old Korean. The hyangga could no longer be read by the Joseon period (1392–1910). The modern study of Old Korean poetry began with Japanese scholars during the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945), with Shinpei Ogura pioneering the first reconstructions of all twenty-five hyangga in 1929. The earliest reconstructions by

6734-515: The population was illiterate. In the 15th century King Sejong the Great personally developed an alphabetic featural writing system , known today as Hangul , to promote literacy among the common people. Introduced in the document Hunminjeongeum , it was called eonmun ('colloquial script') and quickly spread nationwide to increase literacy in Korea. The Korean alphabet was denounced by

6825-477: The rump Silla state, and two new kingdoms founded by local magnates. Goryeo , one of the latter, obtained the surrender of the Silla court in 935 and reunited the country the next year. Korea's political and cultural center henceforth became the Goryeo capital of Gaegyeong (modern Gaeseong ), located in central Korea. The prestige dialect of Korean also shifted from the language of Silla's southeastern heartland to

6916-522: The same. Furthermore, the Wei shu states that “Chinhan men and women are close to Wa (男女近倭),” the ethnonym for the contemporary inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago, and like the Wa tattoo their bodies. The Hou Han shu however identifies this with Byeonhan, stating that “their country is close to Wa, therefore they frequently have tattoos.” The linguist John Whitman summarizes the situation as such: In fact,

7007-669: The short form Cháoyǔ has normally been used to refer to the standard language of North Korea and Yanbian , whereas Hánguóyǔ or the short form Hányǔ is used to refer to the standard language of South Korea. Korean is a member of the Koreanic family along with the Jeju language . Some linguists have included it in the Altaic family, but the core Altaic proposal itself has lost most of its prior support. The Khitan language has several vocabulary items similar to Korean that are not found in other Mongolian or Tungusic languages, suggesting

7098-438: The southern two-thirds of the Korean Peninsula under their rule. This political consolidation allowed the language of Silla to become the lingua franca of the peninsula and ultimately drove the languages of Baekje and Goguryeo to extinction, leaving the latter only as substrata in later Korean dialects. Middle Korean, and hence Modern Korean, are thus direct descendants of the Old Korean language of Silla. Little data on

7189-532: The syllable coda. Aspiration was lost in coda position; coda /ts/ merged with /s/ ; and /β/ , /ɣ/ , /h/ , and the reinforced consonants could not occur as the coda. Coda /z/ was preserved only word-internally and when followed by another voiced fricative; otherwise it merged with /s/ . Sino-Korean evidence suggests that there were no major differences between Old Korean and Middle Korean nasals. Korean language Korean ( South Korean : 한국어 , Hanguk-eo ; North Korean : 조선어 , Chosŏnŏ )

7280-421: The system used to write purely Old Korean texts without a Classical Chinese reference. However, Lee Ki-Moon and S. Robert Ramsey note that in the Old Korean period, idu and hyangchal were "different in intent" but involved the "same transcription strategies". Suh Jong-hak's 2011 review of the Korean scholarship also suggests that most modern Korean linguists consider the three to involve the "same concepts" and

7371-441: The tense fricative and all the affricates as well. At the end of a syllable, /s/ changes to /t/ (example: beoseot ( 버섯 ) 'mushroom'). /h/ may become a bilabial [ɸ] before [o] or [u] , a palatal [ç] before [j] or [i] , a velar [x] before [ɯ] , a voiced [ɦ] between voiced sounds, and a [h] elsewhere. /p, t, t͡ɕ, k/ become voiced [b, d, d͡ʑ, ɡ] between voiced sounds. /m, n/ frequently denasalize at

7462-507: The texts indicate a more complex (and plausible) interrelationship between language, ethnicity, and protopolitical grouping. [...] The Chinhan population lives intermixed with Pyŏnhan; the Chinese reporters struggle to describe the resultant demographic complexity. Their languages may be similar, or different; some resemble the Wa, some tattoo their bodies. While Wa-like toponyms are more frequent in

7553-520: The twelfth century with the loss of intervening vowels. Old Korean thus had a simpler syllable structure than Middle Korean. The consonant inventory of fifteenth-century Middle Korean is given here to help readers understand the following sections on Old Korean consonants. These are not the consonants of Old Korean, but of its fifteenth-century descendant. Three of the nineteen Middle Korean consonants could not occur in word-initial position: /ŋ/ , /β/ , and /ɣ/ . Only nine consonants were permitted in

7644-813: The two shared essentially the same culture, with varying religious customs, and apparently were not separated by a clear boundary according to the contemporary Chinese chronicle San Guo Zhi . The Dongyi ("Eastern Barbarian") in the Wei Shu section of the Chinese Sanguo Zhi states that the culture of Byeonhan was similar to that of Jinhan (言語法俗相似) and that their populations lived "intermingled together" (弁辰與辰韓雑居), while having similar language and customs. The fifth century Hou Han Shu however notes on differences in their language and customs as “languages and customs have differences” (言語風俗有異), after stating that their enclosed settlements and clothing are

7735-464: The underlying, partly historical morphology . Given this, it is sometimes hard to tell which actual phonemes are present in a certain word. The traditional prohibition of word-initial /ɾ/ became a morphological rule called "initial law" ( 두음법칙 ) in the pronunciation standards of South Korea, which pertains to Sino-Korean vocabulary. Such words retain their word-initial /ɾ/ in the pronunciation standards of North Korea. For example, ^NOTE ㅏ

7826-431: The vernacular language. The earliest texts with Old Korean elements use only Classical Chinese words, reordered to fit Korean syntax, and do not represent native morphemes directly. Eventually, Korean scribes developed four strategies to write their language with Chinese characters: It is often difficult to discern which of the transcription methods a certain character in a given text is using. For example, Nam 2019 gives

7917-507: The works where they now survive, textual corruption may have occurred. Some poems that Iryeon attributes to the Silla period are now believed to be Goryeo -era works. Nam Pung-hyun nevertheless considers most of the Samguk yusa poems to be reliable sources for Old Korean because Iryeon would have learned the Buddhist canon through a "very conservative" dialect and thus fully understood the Silla language. Other scholars, such as Park Yongsik, point to thirteenth-century grammatical elements in

8008-451: Was among the reasons for Korean tonogenesis. The hypothesis that Old Korean originally lacked phonemic tone is supported by the fact that most Middle Korean nouns conform to a tonal pattern, the tendency for ancient Korean scribes to transcribe Old Korean proper nouns with Chinese level-tone characters, and the accent marks on Korean proper nouns given by the Japanese history Nihon Shoki , which suggest that ancient Koreans distinguished only

8099-487: Was first introduced to Korea in the 1st century BC, and remained the medium of formal writing and government until the late 19th century. Korean scholars adapted Chinese characters (known in Korean as Hanja ) to write their own language, creating scripts known as idu , hyangchal , gugyeol , and gakpil. These systems were cumbersome, due to the fundamental disparities between the Korean and Chinese languages, and accessible only to those educated in classical Chinese. Most of

8190-403: Was produced. The gugyeol system was created to aid the comprehension of Classical Chinese texts by providing Korean glosses. It is divided into pre-thirteenth century interpretive gugyeol , where the glosses provide enough information to read the Chinese text in the Korean vernacular, and later consecutive gugyeol , which is insufficient for a full translation. Finally, hyangchal refers to

8281-406: Was subsequently annexed by Silla , one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea . Various cultural aspects supposedly unique to Byeonhan overlap with Jinhan, but are not universal in Byeonhan. One notable tradition was tattooing , which was done by both men and women. Another tradition was the burying of feathers and pottery in graves alongside the dead body as it was believed that the feathers helped

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