Old Korean (North Korean name: 고대 조선어 ; South Korean name: 고대 한국어 ) is the first historically documented stage of the Korean language , typified by the language of the Unified Silla period (668–935).
97-538: 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 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
194-582: 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
291-527: A centralized government. Silla was the smallest and weakest of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, but it used cunning diplomatic means to make opportunistic pacts and alliances with the more powerful Korean kingdoms, and eventually Tang China, to its great advantage. Renamed from Saro to Silla in 503, the kingdom annexed the Gaya confederacy (which in turn had absorbed Byeonhan earlier) in the first half of
388-404: 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
485-554: A flourishing genre in the Silla period, with a royally commissioned anthology published in 888. That anthology 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
582-525: A fundamental role in transmitting cultural and material developments to ancient Japan , including Chinese written characters , Chinese and Korean literature , technologies such as ferrous metallurgy and ceramics , architectural styles , sericulture and Buddhism . Baekje exerted its political influence on Tamna , a kingdom that ruled Jeju Island . Baekje maintained a close relationship with and extracted tribute from Tamna. Baekje's religious and artistic culture influenced Goguryeo and Silla. Baekje
679-475: 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
776-462: A regional scale between cemeteries. Near the end of the 2nd century AD, interior space in elite burials increased in size, and wooden chamber burial construction techniques were increasingly used by elites. In the 3rd century, a pattern developed in which single elite cemeteries that were the highest in status compared to all the other cemeteries were built. Such cemeteries were established at high elevations along ridgelines and on hilltops. Furthermore,
873-533: A similar culture and language. Baekje and Goguryeo shared founding myths which likely originated in Buyeo. Buddhism , which arrived in Korea in the 3rd century AD from India via Tibet and China, became the state religion of all constituents of the three kingdoms, starting with Goguryeo in 372 AD. The Three Kingdoms of Korea all had a warrior aristocracy in contrast to the literary elite of China. The period ended in
970-554: A single river valley, etc. make up some of these correlates that define states. Among the archaeology sites dating to the Three Kingdoms of Korea, hundreds of cemeteries with thousands of burials have been excavated. The vast majority of archaeological evidence of the Three Kingdoms period of Korea consists of burials, but since the 1990s there has been a great increase in the archaeological excavations of ancient industrial production sites, roads, palace grounds and elite precincts, ceremonial sites, commoner households, and fortresses due to
1067-407: A sufficient number and scale that state-level societies can be confidently identified using archaeological data. Lee Sung-Joo analyzed variability in many of the elite cemeteries of the territories of Silla and Gaya polities and found that as late as the 2nd century there was intra-cemetery variation in the distribution of prestige grave goods , but there was an absence of hierarchical differences on
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#17327656966321164-479: 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
1261-621: 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
1358-638: 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
1455-623: 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
1552-539: 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 , 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
1649-690: 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 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
1746-508: Is insufficient, and that linguists ought to "treat 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
1843-683: Is on the Bussokuseki no Uta of Yakushi-ji temple in Nara . In the same year, a festschrift was dedicated to Vovin on his 60th birthday. He had been engaged in coordinating the Etymological Dictionary of the Japonic Languages from 2019 to the time of his death in 2022, with cooperation from several universities and European Union funding of €2,470,200,00. However, the project was terminated upon his death. Vovin
1940-638: The Korean Peninsula during the ancient period of Korean history . During the Three Kingdoms period ( Korean : 삼국시대 ), many states and statelets consolidated until, after Buyeo was annexed in 494 and Gaya was annexed in 562, only three remained on the Korean Peninsula: Goguryeo, Baekje and Silla. The " Korean Three Kingdoms " contributed to what would become Korea; and the Goguryeo, Baekje and Silla peoples became
2037-585: The Korean people . The three kingdoms occupied the entire peninsula and roughly half of Manchuria (modern-day Northeast China and small parts of the Russian Far East ). Goguryeo controlled the northern half of the peninsula, as well as Liaodong Peninsula and Manchuria. Baekje and Silla occupied the southern half of the peninsula. The island kingdoms of Tamna and Usan were subordinated to Baekje and Silla, respectively. All three kingdoms shared
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#17327656966322134-591: The Later Silla period, the concepts of Samhan as the ancient confederacies and the Three Kingdoms of Korea were merged. In a letter to an imperial tutor of the Tang dynasty, Ch'oe Ch'i-wŏn equated Byeonhan to Baekje, Jinhan to Silla, and Mahan to Goguryeo. By the Goryeo period, Samhan became a common name to refer to all of Korea. In his Ten Mandates to his descendants, Wang Geon declared that he had unified
2231-613: The Later Three Kingdoms and ultimately annexed by the new Goguryeo revivalist state of Goryeo . Beginning in the 7th century, the name " Samhan " became synonymous with the Three Kingdoms of Korea. The "Han" in the names of the Korean Empire , Daehan Jeguk , and the Republic of Korea (South Korea), Daehan Minguk or Hanguk , are named in reference to the Three Kingdoms of Korea, not the ancient confederacies in
2328-600: 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
2425-577: The Three Kingdoms of China. The Three Kingdoms were founded after the fall of Wiman Joseon and gradually conquered and absorbed various other small states and confederacies. After the fall of Gojoseon , the Han dynasty established four commanderies in the northwestern Korean Peninsula and present Liaoning . Three fell quickly to the Samhan , and the last was destroyed by Goguryeo in 313. The nascent precursors of Baekje and Silla expanded within
2522-462: The Unified Silla . According to Korean records, in 57 BC, Seorabeol (or Saro, later Silla) in the southeast of the peninsula unified and expanded the confederation of city-states known as Jinhan . Although Samguk sagi records that Silla was the earliest-founded of the three kingdoms, other written and archaeological records indicate that Silla was likely the last of the three to establish
2619-918: The University of Hawaiʻi (1995–2003). He was appointed full professor at the University of Hawaiʻi in 2003, and continued working there until 2014. He was visiting professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies , Kyoto from 2001 to 2002 and again in 2008, a visiting professor at the Ruhr University Bochum , Germany (2008–2009), and a visiting professor at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) in Tokyo, Japan from May to August 2012. In 2014, Vovin accepted
2716-624: The "Eastern Barbarians" section (東夷傳) from the Book of Wei (魏書) of the Records of the Three Kingdoms in China. All three kingdoms shared a similar culture and language. The Book of Sui (Volume 81) recorded: "The customs, laws and clothes of Goguryeo, Baekje and Silla are generally identical." Their original religions appear to have been shamanistic , but they were increasingly influenced by Chinese culture, particularly Confucianism and Taoism . In
2813-630: 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 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
2910-456: The 4th century, Buddhism was introduced to the peninsula and spread rapidly, briefly becoming the official religion of all three kingdoms. According to Lisa Kay Bailey, the material culture of the Three Kingdoms can be clearly distinguished as they displayed cultural influence from different regions. Goguryeo's culture showed stronger influence from northern Chinese art, Baekche showed stronger influence from southern Chinese art, and Silla, which
3007-462: The 6th century. Goguryeo and Baekje responded by forming an alliance. To cope with invasions from Goguryeo and Baekje, Silla deepened its relations with the Tang dynasty, with her newly gained access to the Yellow Sea making direct contact with the Tang possible. After the conquest of Goguryeo and Baekje with her Tang allies, the Silla kingdom drove the Tang forces out of the peninsula and occupied
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3104-473: The 7th century, after Silla allied with Tang China and unified the peninsula for the first time in history. After the fall of Baekje and Goguryeo, the Tang dynasty established a short-lived military government to administer parts of the Korean Peninsula. Silla was joined by Goguryeo and Baekje loyalists and fought the Tang for hegemony over the Korean Peninsula. Silla was eventually divided into
3201-726: The Chinese Lelang commandery in 313. The cultural influence of the Chinese continued as Buddhism was adopted as the official religion in 372. Goguryeo was a highly militaristic state; it was a powerful empire and one of the great powers in East Asia . The state was at its zenith in the 5th century, during the rule of King Gwanggaeto the Great and his son King Jangsu , and particularly during their campaign in Manchuria. For
3298-722: The Goguryeo ruling tribe of Geumgwan Gaya in 372 AD, by the Silla in 528 AD, and by the Baekje in 552 AD. Allied with China under the Tang dynasty, Silla conquered Goguryeo in 668, after having already conquered Gaya in 562 and Baekje in 660, thus ushering in the North–South states period with Later Silla to the south and Balhae to the north, when Dae Jo-young , a former Goguryeo military officer, revolted against Tang Chinese rule and began reconquering former Goguryeo territories. Archaeologists use theoretical guidelines derived from anthropology , ethnology , analogy, and ethnohistory to
3395-799: 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,
3492-524: 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
3589-403: The Old Korean language of Silla. Little data on 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
3686-586: 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,
3783-537: The Silla language. Other scholars, such as Park Yongsik, point to thirteenth-century grammatical elements in 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
3880-453: The Tang dynasty. Goguryeo was alternately called Mahan by the Tang dynasty, as evidenced by a Tang document that called Goguryeo generals "Mahan leaders" ( 마한추장 ; 馬韓酋長 ; Mahan Choojang ) in 645. In 651, Emperor Gaozong of Tang sent a message to the king of Baekje referring to the Three Kingdoms of Korea as Samhan. Epitaphs of the Tang dynasty, including those belonging to Baekje, Goguryeo, and Silla refugees and migrants, called
3977-579: The Three Han (Samhan), referring to the Three Kingdoms of Korea. Samhan continued to be a common name for Korea during the Joseon period and was widely referenced in the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty . In China, the Three Kingdoms of Korea were collectively called Samhan since the beginning of the 7th century. The use of the name Samhan to indicate the Three Kingdoms of Korea was widespread in
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4074-448: The Three Kingdoms of Korea "Samhan", especially Goguryeo. For example, the epitaph of Go Hyeon ( 고현 ; 高玄 ), a Tang dynasty general of Goguryeo origin who died in 690, calls him a "Liaodong Samhan man" ( 요동 삼한인 ; 遼東 三韓人 ; Yodong Samhanin ). The name "Three Kingdoms" was used in the titles of the Korean histories Samguk sagi (12th century) and Samguk yusa (13th century), and should not be confused with
4171-731: 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
4268-475: The archaeological record indicates that states formed between 300 BC and 300/400 AD. However, archaeologists are not prepared to suggest that this means there were states in the BC era. The correlates of state-level societies did not develop as a package but rather in spurts and starts and at various points in time. It was some time between 100 and 400 AD that individual correlates of state societies had developed to
4365-531: The boom in salvage archaeology in South Korea. Rhee and Choi hypothesize that a mix of internal developments and external factors lead to the emergence of state-level societies in Korea. A number of archaeologists including Kang demonstrate the role of frequent warfare in the development of peninsular states. Some individual correlates of complex societies are found in the chiefdoms of Korea that date back to c. 700 BC . The best evidence from
4462-564: 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 the Buddhist canon. He identifies grammatical commonalities between Silla-period texts and glosses from before
4559-573: 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
4656-534: The complete academic translation into English of the Man'yōshū (ca. 759), the earliest and the largest premodern Japanese poetic anthology, alongside the critical edition of the original text and commentaries. He also researched the moribund Ainu language in northern Japan, and worked on Inner Asian languages and Kra–Dai languages , especially those preserved only in Chinese transcription, as well as on Old and Middle Korean texts. His last work, published in 2021,
4753-450: The composition of hyangga works and the compilation of 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
4850-510: The concept of what defines a state-level society . This is different from the concept of state ( guk or Sino ko: 國, walled-town state, etc.) in the discipline of Korean history. In anthropological archaeology the presence of urban centres (especially capitals), monumental architecture, craft specialization and standardization of production, ostentatious burials, writing or recording systems , bureaucracy , demonstrated political control of geographical areas that are usually larger in area than
4947-433: 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
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#17327656966325044-836: 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
5141-402: The eighth century. Eleven additional hyangga , composed in 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
5238-472: 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
5335-446: 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
5432-406: The establishment of Goguryeo, its early history is well attested archaeologically: the first and second capital cities , Jolbon and Gungnae city, are located in and around today's Ji'an, Jilin . In 2004, the site was designated as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO . Since 1976, continuing archaeological excavations concentrated in the southeastern part of modern Gyeongju have revealed parts of
5529-438: 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"
5626-515: 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
5723-426: The first reconstructions of all twenty-five hyangga in 1929. The earliest reconstructions by 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
5820-431: 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
5917-574: The fourth century unleashed a wave of refugees that proved pivotal in speeding up the process of state-building in Korea," starting the Three Kingdoms era. Goguryeo emerged on the north and south banks of the Yalu (Amrok) River, in the wake of Gojoseon 's fall. The first mention of Goguryeo in Chinese records dates from 75 BC in reference to a commandery established by the Chinese Han dynasty , although even earlier mentions of "Guri" ( 구리 ) may be of
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#17327656966326014-489: The kingdom continued to take aggressive actions against China, Silla, and Baekje attacks until it was conquered by allied Silla–Tang forces in 668. Most of its territory was absorbed by the Tang dynasty of China, and the territory of Baekje was absorbed by Silla. Baekje was founded as a member of the Mahan confederacy. Two sons of the founder of Goguryeo are recorded to have fled a succession conflict, to establish Baekje around
6111-512: The kings of Silla allied with Tang China to destroy the other two kingdoms— Baekje in 660, and Goguryeo in 668—and to unite 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
6208-442: The lands south of Pyongyang. The capital of Silla was Seorabeol (now Gyeongju ; "Seorabeol", "서라벌", is hypothesized to have been the ancient Korean term for "capital"). Buddhism became the official religion in 528. The remaining material culture from the kingdom of Silla including unique gold metalwork shows influence from the northern nomadic steppes, differentiating it from the cultures of Goguryeo and Baekje where Chinese influence
6305-403: 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 :
6402-435: 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
6499-411: 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 the language] prior to the founding of Goryeo is considered Old Korean,
6596-424: 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
6693-551: 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
6790-568: 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 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
6887-521: The next century or so, Goguryeo was the dominant nation in Manchuria and the northern Korean peninsula. Goguryeo eventually occupied the Liaodong Plains in Manchuria and today's Seoul area. Gwanggaeto achieved a loose unification of the Three Kingdoms of Korea. Goguryeo also controlled Tungusic tribes in Manchuria. After the establishment of the Sui dynasty and later the Tang dynasty in China,
6984-450: The northeast outskirts of the Silla capital. Songok-dong and Mulcheon-ri are examples of the large-scale of specialized factory-style productions in the Three Kingdoms and Unified Silla periods. The site was excavated in the late 1990s, and archaeologists found the remains of many production features such as pottery kilns , roof-tile kilns, charcoal kilns, as well as the remains of buildings and workshops associated with production. Since
7081-534: The oldest discovered Silla inscription, a Classical Chinese-language stele dated to 441 or 501. Korean syntax and morphemes are visibly attested for 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,
7178-466: 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
7275-609: The position of Director of Studies at the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale (CRLAO) unit of the EHESS , where he remained until his death in 2022. Alexander Vovin specialized in Japanese historical linguistics (with emphasis on etymology , morphology , and phonology ), and Japanese philology of the Nara period (710–792), and to a lesser extent of the Heian period (792–1192). His last project before his death involved
7372-524: The present Seoul area. Baekje absorbed or conquered other Mahan chiefdoms and, at its peak in the 4th century, controlled most of the western Korean Peninsula. Buddhism was introduced to Baekje in 384 from Goguryeo, which Baekje welcomed. Baekje was a great maritime power; its nautical skill, which made it the Phoenicia of East Asia, was instrumental in the dissemination of Buddhism throughout East Asia and continental culture to Japan . Baekje played
7469-476: 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
7566-504: The same state. Evidence indicates Goguryeo was the most advanced, and likely the first established, of the three kingdoms. Goguryeo, eventually the largest of the three kingdoms, had several capitals in alternation: two capitals in the upper Yalu area, and later Nangrang ( Lelang in Chinese) which is now part of Pyongyang . At the beginning, the state was located on the border with China; it gradually expanded into Manchuria and destroyed
7663-643: The same university in 1987, with a doctoral dissertation on the Hamamatsu Chūnagon Monogatari (ca. 1056). After serving as a Junior Researcher at the St. Petersburg Institute of Oriental Studies (1987–1990), he moved to the United States where he held positions as assistant professor of Japanese at the University of Michigan (1990–1994), assistant professor at Miami University (1994–1995), and assistant professor and then associate professor at
7760-682: The so-called Silla Wanggyeong (Silla royal capital). A number of excavations over the years have revealed temples such as Hwangnyongsa , Bunhwangsa, Heungryunsa, and 30 other sites. Signs of Baekje's capitals have also been excavated at the Mongchon Fortress and the Pungnap Fortress in Seoul. Alexander Vovin Alexander (Sasha) Vladimirovich Vovin ( Russian : Александр Владимирович Вовин ; 27 January 1961 – 8 April 2022)
7857-454: The southern Korean Peninsula. According to the Samguk sagi and Samguk yusa , Silla implemented a national policy, "Samhan Unification" ( 삼한일통 ; 三韓一統 ; Samhan Iltong ), to integrate Baekje and Goguryeo refugees. In 1982, a memorial stone dating to 686 was discovered in Cheongju with an inscription: "The Three Han were unified and the domain was expanded." During
7954-552: 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. Three Kingdoms of Korea The Three Kingdoms of Korea or Samhan ( Goguryeo , Baekje and Silla ) competed for hegemony over
8051-419: 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
8148-399: 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, the erasing of distinctions between nominal and verbal negation, and
8245-427: 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 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
8342-518: 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
8439-469: The uppermost elite were buried in large-scale tombs established at the highest point of a given cemetery. Cemeteries with 'uppermost elite' mounded burials such as Okseong-ri, Yangdong-ri, Daeseong-dong, and Bokcheon-dong display this pattern. Lee Sung-Joo proposed that, in addition to the development of regional political hierarchies as seen through analysis of burials, variation in types of pottery production gradually disappeared and full-time specialization
8536-428: 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
8633-622: The web of statelets during the Proto-Three Kingdoms period , and Goguryeo conquered neighboring state like Buyeo in Manchuria and chiefdoms in Okjeo , Dongye which occupied the northeastern Korean Peninsula. The three polities made the transition from walled-town state to full-fledged state-level societies between 1st – 3rd century AD. The primary sources for this period include Samguk sagi and Samguk yusa in Korea, and
8730-591: 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 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
8827-718: Was a Soviet-born Russian-American linguist and philologist , and director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris , France. He was a linguist, well known for his research on East Asian languages. Alexander Vovin earned his M.A. in structural and applied linguistics from the Saint Petersburg State University in 1983, and his Ph.D. in historical Japanese linguistics and premodern Japanese literature from
8924-448: 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
9021-413: Was more distant from China, showed greater influence from Eurasian steppe nomad cultures and greater preservation of native traditions. During this period, the Three Kingdoms had yet to unify their separate identities. Each kingdom produced their own individual histories; only in the Goryeo dynasty period was the collective history of the Korean Peninsula written together. "The decline of Chinese power in
9118-597: Was more pronounced. Other smaller states or regions existed in Korea before and during this period: Centuries after Buddhism originated in India , the Mahayana Buddhism arrived in China through the Silk Route in 1st century AD from Tibet , then to Korean Peninsula in the 3rd century from where it transmitted to Japan. In Korea, it was adopted by the state religion by three constituent polities, first by
9215-403: Was once a great military power on the Korean Peninsula, especially during the time of Geunchogo , but was critically defeated by Gwanggaeto and declined. In the late 5th century, under attack from Goguryeo, the capital of Baekje was moved south to Ungjin (present-day Gongju ) and later further south to Sabi (present-day Buyeo ). Baekje was conquered by Silla-Tang alliance in 660, submitting
9312-399: 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
9409-458: Was the only recognizable kind of pottery production from the end of the 4th century A.D. At the same time the production centers for pottery became highly centralized and vessels became standardized. Centralisation and elite control of production is demonstrated by the results of the archaeological excavations at Songok-dong and Mulcheon-ni in Gyeongju . These sites are part of what was an interconnected and sprawling ancient industrial complex on
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