Old Korean

Old KoreanTemplate:Efn is the first historically documented stage of the Korean language,Template:Sfn 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 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 a vague outline"Template:Sfn 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 Hanja (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 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.

History and periodization

File:History of Korea-576.png

Three Kingdoms of Korea in 576

Old Korean is generally defined as the ancient Koreanic language of the Silla state (57 BCE – 936 CE), especially in its Unified period (668–936).Template:Sfn Proto-Koreanic, the hypothetical ancestor of the Koreanic languages understood largely through the internal reconstruction of later forms of Korean,Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn Korean syntax and morphemes are visibly attested for the first time in Silla texts of the mid- to late sixth century,Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn 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 the southern two-thirds of the Korean Peninsula under their rule.Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn Middle Korean, and hence Modern Korean, are thus direct descendants of the Old Korean language of Silla.Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Efn

Little data on the languages of the other two kingdoms survive, but most linguists agree that both were related to the language of Silla.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn 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 the fragments of the three languages as representing three separate corpora".Template:Sfn 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".Template:Sfn Nam Pung-hyun and Alexander Vovin, on the other hand, classify the languages of all three kingdoms as regional dialects of Old Korean.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Other linguists, such as Lee Seungjae, group the languages of Silla and Baekje together as Old Korean while excluding that of Goguryeo.Template:Sfn 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".Template:Sfn

File:Historical capitals of Korea since 668.png

The historical capitals of Korea, including Gaegyeong and the Silla capital of Gyeongju

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: 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.Template:Sfn 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 the central dialect of Gaegyeong during this time.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn

In 2003, South Korean linguist Nam Pung-hyun proposed that the Old Korean period should be extended into the mid-thirteenth century.Template:Sfn Nam's arguments center on Korean-language glosses to 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, the erasing of distinctions between nominal and verbal negation, and the loss of the essentiality-marking suffix -ms.Template:Sfn

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, 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-yeopTemplate:Sfn continue to use the older periodization, as do major recent English-language sources such as the 2011 History of the Korean LanguageTemplate:Sfn and the 2015 Blackwell Handbook of Korean Linguistics.Template:Sfn

Sources of Old Korean

Epigraphic sources

Silla inscriptions contain Old Korean elements. Idiosyncratic Chinese vocabulary suggestive of vernacular influence is found even in the oldest surviving Silla inscription, a stele in Pohang dated to either 441 or 501.Template:Sfn These early inscriptions, however, involved "little more than subtle alterations of Classical Chinese syntax".Template:Sfn

File:임신서기석.jpg

The Imsin Vow Stone of 552/612 uses Old Korean 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.Template:Sfn Others use only Classical Chinese vocabulary, but reorder them fully according to Korean syntax. A 551 stele commemorating the construction of a fort in Gyeongju, for instance, writes "begin to build" as (lit. 'build begin') rather than the correct Classical Chinese, (lit. 'begin build'), reflecting the Subject-object-verb word order of Korean.Template:Sfn The Imsin Vow Stone, raised in either 552 or 612,Template:Sfn is also illustrative:

EnglishTemplate:Efn	We swear to learn in turn the Classic of Poetry, the Esteemed Documents, the Book of Rites, and the Zuo zhuan for three years.
Original text
Gloss	Poetry Esteemed Documents Rites Zhuan in-turn learn swear three years
Classical ChineseTemplate:Sfn
Gloss	swear three years in-turn learn Poetry Esteemed Documents Rites Zhuan

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.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

Some inscriptions of the Unified Silla period continue to use only words from Classical Chinese, even as they order them according to Korean grammar.Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn

Mokgan sources

File:Haman Mokgan.jpg

Sixth-century mokgan slips from Haman

Ancient Korean scribes often wrote on bamboo and wooden slips called mokgan.Template:Sfn By 2016, archaeologists had discovered 647 mokgan, out of which 431 slips were from Silla.Template:Sfn Mokgan are valuable primary sources because they were largely written by and reflect the concerns of low-ranking officials, unlike other texts that are dominated by the high elite.Template:Sfn Since the majority of discovered texts are inventories of products, they also provide otherwise rare information about numerals, classifiers, and common nouns.Template:Sfn

Modern mokgan research began in 1975.Template:Sfn With the development of infrared imaging science in the 1990s, it became possible to read many formerly indecipherable texts,Template:Sfn and 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.Template:Sfn

Mokgan are classified into two general categories.Template:Sfn Most surviving slips are tag mokgan,Template:Sfn which were attached to goods during transport and contain quantitative data about the product in question.Template:Sfn Document mokgan, on the other hand, contain administrative reports by local officials.Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn A small number of texts belong to neither group; these include a fragmentary hyangga poem discovered in 2000Template:Sfn and what may be a ritual text associated with Dragon King worship.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn

The earliest direct attestation of Old Korean comes from a mid-sixth century document mokgan first deciphered in full by Lee Seungjae in 2017.Template:Sfn This slip, which contains a report by a village chieftain to a higher-ranking official,Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn

Mokgan No. 221	Reconstruction (Lee S. 2017)	Gloss (Lee S. 2017)	Translation (Lee S. 2017)Template:Sfn
	*tasəm 從-kje-n	Template:Interlinear	five planned to hurry
	*人-i 人 鳴	Template:Interlinear	the people were all grieved
	*不行-kje-n-ul 白	Template:Interlinear	"unable to go", [I] report

Hyangga literature

File:삼국유사.jpg

The Samguk yusa contains most surviving Silla hyangga

The only Korean-language literature that survives from Silla are vernacular poems now called hyangga (Korean: ; Hanja: Template:Category handler), literally "local songs".Template:Sfn

Hyangga appears to have been a flourishing genre in the Silla period, with a royally commissioned anthology published in 888.Template:Sfn 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,Template:Sfn along with prose introductions that detail how the poem came to be composed.Template:Sfn These introductions date the works to between 600 and 879. The majority of Samguk yusa poems, however, are from the eighth century.Template:Sfn Eleven additional hyangga, composed in the 960s by the Buddhist monk Gyunyeo,Template:Sfn are preserved in a 1075 biography of the master.Template:Sfn Lee Ki-Moon and Ramsey consider Gyunyeo's hyangga to also represent "Silla poetry",Template:Sfn although Nam Pung-hyun insists on significant grammatical differences between the works of the Samguk yusa and those of Gyunyeo.Template:Sfn

Because centuries passed between the composition of hyangga works and the compilation of the works where they now survive, textual corruption may have occurred.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Some poems that Iryeon attributes to the Silla period are now believed to be Goryeo-era works.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn 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 the poems while acknowledging that the overall framework of the hyangga texts is Old Korean.Template:Sfn

The hyangga could no longer be read by the Joseon period (1392–1910).Template:Sfn 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.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn 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 as a phonogram for *-k.Template:Sfn The analyses of Kim Wan-jin in 1980 established many general principles of hyangga orthography.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn 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.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

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 researchersTemplate:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn

Other textual sources

Old Korean glosses have been discovered on eighth-century editions of Chinese-language Buddhist works.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Similar to the Japanese kanbun tradition,Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn

File:National Treasure of South Korea 196 (Avatamsaka sutra in ink on white paper).jpg

Scroll of a Silla edition of the Avatamsaka Sutra, written in 754–755

Classical Chinese original
English gloss	that time Jingjinhui bodhisattva ask Fahui bodhisattva speech
Old Korean glossed text	尒時精良進慧菩薩白法慧菩薩言
English gloss	that timeTemplate:Interlinear Jingjinhui bodhisattva ask Fahui bodhisattva speech
Translation	At that time, the Jingjinhui Bodhisattva asked the Fahui Bodhisattva...

Classical Chinese original
English gloss	then be not clean then be can dislike
Old Korean glossed text	則爲不淨厼則爲可猒
English gloss	then be not cleanTemplate:Interlinear then be can dislike
Translation	[That] it is an unclean thing and [that] it is a disliked thing...

Classical Chinese original
English gloss	not.exist edge kind kind border boundary
Old Korean glossed text	无邊種種叱境界
Purpose of gloss	Shows that 種種 is to be read as a native Korean word with final *-sTemplate:Efn
Translation	The many kinds of endless boundaries...

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.Template:Sfn

Though in Classical Chinese, the Korean histories Samguk sagi and Samguk yusa offer Old Korean etymologies for certain native terms. The reliability of these etymologies remains in dispute.Template:Sfn

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 the clothing words have Middle Korean cognates, but the other four words remain "uninterpretable".Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn

Proper nouns

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 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.Template:Sfn

Period	Place name	TransliterationTemplate:Efn	Gloss
Post-757		Yengtwong County	long same county
Pre-757		Kiltwong County	auspicious same county
吉 is a phonogram for the Old Korean morpheme *kil- "long", represented after 757 by the logogram 永 and cognate to Middle Korean kil- "id."Template:Sfn
Post-757		Milseng County	dense fortress county
Pre-757		Chwuhwoa County	push fire county
推 is a logogram for the Old Korean morpheme *mil- "push", represented after 757 by the phonogram 密 mil and cognate to Middle Korean mil- "id."Template:Sfn

Non-textual sources

The modern Korean language has its own pronunciations for Chinese characters, called Sino-Korean.Template:Sfn Although some Sino-Korean forms reflect Old Chinese or Early Mandarin pronunciations, 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.Template:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:SfnTemplate:Efn

As Sino-Korean originates in Old Korean speakers' perception of Middle Chinese phones,Template:Sfn elements of Old Korean phonology may be inferred from a comparison of Sino-Korean with Middle Chinese.Template:Sfn For instance, Middle Chinese, Middle Korean, and Modern Korean all have a phonemic distinction between the non-aspirated velar stop and its aspirated equivalent, . However, both are regularly reflected in Sino-Korean as . This suggests that was absent in Old Korean.Template:Sfn

Old Korean phonology can also be examined via Old Korean loanwords in other languages, including Middle MongolTemplate:Sfn and especially Old Japanese.Template:Sfn

Orthography

All Old Korean was written with Sinographic systems, where Chinese characters are borrowed for both their semantic and phonetic values to represent the vernacular language.Template:Sfn The earliest texts with Old Korean elements use only Classical Chinese words, reordered to fit Korean syntax, and do not represent native morphemes directly.Template:Sfn Eventually, Korean scribes developed four strategies to write their language with Chinese characters:

• Directly-adapted logograms (DALs or eumdokja 音讀字), used for all morphemes loaned from Classical Chinese and perceived as such. A character adapted as a DAL retains both the semantic and phonetic values of the original Chinese.Template:Sfn
• Semantically-adapted logograms (SALs or hundokja 訓讀字), where native Korean morphemes, including loanwords perceived as native words, are written with Chinese semantic equivalents. A character adapted as a SAL retains only the semantic value of the original Chinese.Template:Sfn
• Phonetically-adapted phonograms (PAPs or eumgaja 音假字), where native Korean morphemes, typically grammatical or semi-grammatical elements, are written with Chinese phonological equivalents. A character adapted as a PAP retains only the phonetic value of the original Chinese.Template:Sfn
• Semantically-adapted phonograms (SAPs or hungaja 訓假字), where native Korean morphemes are written with a Chinese character whose Korean semantic equivalent is phonologically similar to the morpheme.Template:Sfn A SAP retains neither the semantic nor the phonetic value of the Chinese.

It is often difficult to discern which of the transcription methods a certain character in a given text is using.Template:Sfn For example, Nam 2019 gives the following interpretation of the final line of the hyangga poem Anmin-ga (756):Template:Sfn

Original script	國	惡	太	平	恨	音	叱	如
Meaning of characters	country	evil	great	peace	regret	sound	scold	like
Modern Sino-Korean reading
Korean word with same meaning
Phonetic adaptation
Reconstructed text
Gloss	country		great.peace-do-Template:Sc-Template:Sc
Translation	'The country will deservedly be greatly peaceful.'

The text of this line uses all four strategies:

• The Sino-Korean words and are written with the corresponding Chinese characters (DAL).
• The native Korean word is written with a Chinese character having the same meaning (SAL).
• The Korean affixes are spelled out using characters whose Sino-Korean reading contain those sounds (PAP).
• The Korean verb ending is written with a Chinese character having the same meaning as * 'like', which is not attested but is presumably an ancestor of LMK 'to be like' (SAP).

In Old Korean, most content morphemes are written with SALs, while PAPs are used for functional suffixes.Template:Sfn In Korean scholarship, this practice is called hunju eumjong (Korean: ; Hanja: Template:Category handler), literally "logogram is principal, phonograms follow".Template:Sfn In the eighth-century poem Heonhwa-ga given below, for instance, the inflected verb Template:Interlinear begins with the SAL "to give" and is followed by three PAPs and a final SAP that mark mood, aspect, and essentiality.Template:Sfn Hunju eumjong is a defining characteristic of Silla orthographyTemplate:Sfn and appears not to be found in Baekje mokgan.Template:Sfn

Another tendency of Old Korean writing is called mareum cheomgi (Korean: ; Hanja: Template:Category handler), 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.Template:Sfn Handel uses an analogy to "-st" in English 1st for "first".Template:Sfn Because the final phonogram can represent a single consonant, Old Korean writing has alphabetic properties.Template:Sfn Examples of mareum cheomgi are given below.

English	Old Korean	Logogram	Phonogram	Value of consonant phonogramTemplate:Sfn	Modern Sino-Korean readingTemplate:Efn	Middle Korean cognateTemplate:Efn
Night	(Mojukjirang-ga)Template:Sfn	夜	音	*-m	야음 ya um	pam
Road	(Mojukjirang-ga)Template:Sfn	道	尸	*-l	도시 two si	kil
Fortress	(Hyeseong-ga)Template:Sfn	城	叱	*-s	성질 seng cil	cas
Thousand	(Docheonsugwaneum-ga)Template:Sfn	千	隱	*-n	천은 chen un	cumun
Only	(Ujeok-ga)Template:Sfn	唯	只	*-k	유지 ywu ci	wocik
Sixty (Chinese loan)	(Haman Seongsan Sanseong Mokgan No. 221)Template:Sfn	六十	𢀳	*-p	육십읍 ywuk sip up	lywuksip
Stream	(Chan'giparang-ga)Template:Sfn	川	理	syllabic	천리 chen li	nali
Rock	(Heonhwa-ga)Template:Sfn	岩	乎	syllabic	암호 am hwo	pahwoy

Unlike modern Sino-Korean, most of which descends from Middle Chinese, Old Korean phonograms were based on the Old Chinese pronunciation of characters. For instance, characters with Middle Chinese initial were used to transcribe an Old Korean liquid, reflecting the fact that initial arose from Old Chinese . The characters and had the same vowel in Old Korean orthography, which was true in Old Chinese where both had , but not in Middle Chinese, where the former had the diphthong and the latter .Template:Sfn

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.Template:Sfn

"Problematic phonogram"	Old KoreanTemplate:Efn	Modern Sino-KoreanTemplate:Efn	Middle Chinese (Baxter's transcription)Template:Sfn	Old Chinese (Baxter-Sagart 2014)Template:SfnTemplate:Efn	Explanation
	*a~e	lyang	ljang	*[r]aŋ	May have been read as *la~le instead,Template:Sfn although mokgan data supports *a.Template:Sfn May also be a SAP.Template:Sfn
	*mye	mye	mjie	*m-nə[r]	Lee and Ramsey consider this phonogram problematic because MC mjie had lost its diphthong by the eighth century, and so the Korean reading reflects "an especially old pronunciation".Template:Sfn
	*kwo	kyen	khjienX	*[k]ʰe[n]ʔ	May have been read as *kye or *kyen instead,Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn but evidence for *kwo is quite strong.Template:Sfn
	*-l	si	syij	*l̥[ə]j	Preserves the Old Chinese lateral-initial pronunciation.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn
	*-s	cil	N/A	N/A	"Probably"Template:Sfn preserves an older reading of with initial *s-.Template:Sfn Alternately, may be a Korean creation independent of the Chinese glyph , perhaps a simplification of (MdSK si).Template:Sfn May also be due to influence from Chinese Buddhist transcription systems for Sanskrit.Template:Sfn
	*ki / *-k	ci	N/A	N/A	May preserve an Old Chinese pronunciation that included velars.Template:Sfn

Silla scribes also developed their own characters not found in China. These could be both logograms and phonograms, as seen in the examples below.Template:Sfn

Silla-developed character	Use	Origin
太	Logogram for "bean"Template:Efn	Compound ideogram of 大 "big" and 豆 "bean"
椋	Logogram for "grain storehouse"Template:Efn	Compound ideogram of 木 "wood" and 京 "capital"
丨	Phonogram for *taTemplate:Efn	Graphic simplification of 如, SAP for *ta
𢀳	Phonogram for *-p	Graphic simplification of 邑, PAP for *-p

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" was produced.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn The gugyeol system was created to aid the comprehension of Classical Chinese texts by providing Korean glosses.Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn Finally, hyangchal refers to the system used to write purely Old Korean texts without a Classical Chinese reference.Template:Sfn 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".Template:Sfn 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 the main differences between them to be purpose rather than any structural difference.

Phonology

The phonological system of Old Korean cannot be established "with any certainty",Template:Sfn and its study relies largely on tracing back elements of Middle Korean (MK) phonology.Template:Sfn

Prosody

Fifteenth-century Middle Korean was a tonal or pitch-accent language whose orthography distinguished between three tones: high, rising, and low.Template:Sfn The rising tone is analyzed as a low tone followed by a high tone within a bimoraic syllable.Template:Sfn

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 a tonal system similar to that of Middle Korean.Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn

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

Syllable structure

Middle Korean had a complex syllable structure that allowed clusters of up to three consonants in initialTemplate:Sfn and two consonants in terminal position,Template:Sfn as well as vowel triphthongs.Template:Sfn But many syllables with complex structures arose from the merger of multiple syllables, as seen below.

Attestation and source language	English	Pre-Middle Korean form	Reconstruction	Fifteenth-century formTemplate:Efn
Hyangga textsTemplate:Sfn	old times		*niäri	nyey
body		*muma	mwom
Korean transcription of Early Middle KoreanTemplate:Sfn	arbor monkshood		*wotwokputuk	wotwokptwoki
Song transcription of Early Middle KoreanTemplate:Sfn	earth		*holki	holk
day		*nacay	nac
Japanese and Korean transcription of BaekjeTemplate:Sfn	front		*arIpIsI	alph
	stone		*tərak	twolh
	belt		*sItOrO	stuy

Middle Korean closed syllables with bimoraic "rising tone" reflect an originally bisyllabic CVCV form in which the final vowel was reduced,Template:Sfn 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.Template:Sfn However, there is strong evidence for the existence of coda consonants in even the earliest attestations of Korean, especially in mareum cheomgi orthography.Template:Sfn

On the other hand, Middle Korean consonant clusters are believed not to have existed in Old Korean and to have formed after the twelfth century with the loss of intervening vowels.Template:Sfn Old Korean thus had a simpler syllable structure than Middle Korean.

Consonants

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.

Middle Korean consonant phonemesTemplate:Sfn

		Bilabial	Alveolar		Velar	Glottal
Nasal
Stop and affricateTemplate:Efn	plain
	aspirated
Voiced fricative
Voiceless fricative	plain
	reinforced					Template:Efn
Liquid

Three of the nineteen Middle Korean consonants could not occur in word-initial position: , , and . Only nine consonants were permitted in the syllable coda. Aspiration was lost in coda position; coda merged with ;Template:Sfn and , , , and the reinforced consonants could not occur as the coda. Coda was preserved only word-internally and when followed by another voiced fricative; otherwise it merged with .Template:Sfn

Nasals

Sino-Korean evidence suggests that there were no major differences between Old Korean and Middle Korean nasals.Template:Sfn

Middle Chinese onset is reflected in Sino-Korean as a null initial, while both Chinese and Korean transcriptions of Old Korean terms systematically avoid characters with onset . Middle Korean phonotactic restrictions on thus seem to have held true for Old Korean as well.Template:Sfn

The Samguk Sagi sometimes alternates between nasal-initial and liquid-initial characters in transcribing the same syllable of the same proper noun. This suggests that Old Korean may have had a sandhi rule in which nasals could become liquids, or vice versa, under certain circumstances.Template:Sfn

Aspirate consonants

The Middle Korean series of aspirated stops and affricates developed from mergers of consonant clusters involving /h/ or a velar obstruent, which in turn had formed from the loss of intervening vowels.Template:Sfn To what extent this process had occurred in the Old Korean period is still debated.

Middle Chinese had a phonemic distinction between aspirated and unaspirated stops. This is reflected somewhat irregularly in Sino-Korean.

Korean reflexes of Chinese aspirationTemplate:Sfn

Middle Chinese phoneme	Middle Sino-Korean reflex	Frequency of reflexes	Percentage
		164	88.6%
		1	0.5%
	Other	20	10.8%
		34	52.3%
		31	47.7%
		70	73.6%
		25	26.4%
		81	76.4%
		23	21.7%
	Other	2	1.9%

Based on this variable reflection of Middle Chinese aspirates, Korean is thought to have developed the dental aspirates and first, followed by and finally .Template:Sfn is often believed to have been absent when Sino-Korean was established.Template:Sfn

Silla scribes used the aspirate-initial characters only infrequently.Template:Sfn When they did, the aspirates were often replaced with unaspirated equivalents. For instance, the 757 standardization of place names sometimes involved changing aspirated phonograms for unaspirated ones, or vice versa.Template:Sfn This suggests that aspiration of any sort may have been absent in Old Korean,Template:Sfn or that aspirate stops may have existed in free variation with unaspirated ones but were not distinct phonemes.Template:Sfn On the other hand, Ki-Moon Lee and S. Roberts Ramsey argue that Silla orthography confirms the existence in Old Korean of at least the dental aspirates as phonemes.Template:Sfn

Meanwhile, Nam Pung-hyun believes that Old Korean had and but may have lacked and , while noting that the functional load of the aspirates was "extremely low".Template:Sfn

Origin of MK /h/

Some characters with initial in Middle Chinese are reflected in Sino-Korean as . Conversely, some instances of the Middle Chinese initial , usually loaned as Sino-Korean , are found as Sino-Korean . This may be because Koreans mistakenly assigned the same initial consonant to characters which do share a phonetic radical but in practice had different Middle Chinese initials.Template:Sfn On the other hand, this may reflect a velar value for the Old Korean ancestor of Middle Korean . Korean scholars often propose an Old Korean velar fricative as ancestral to Middle Korean .Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

Some orthographic alternations suggest that Silla writers did not distinguish between Middle Chinese initial and initial , although linguist Marc Miyake is skeptical of the evidence, while some Middle Korean allomorphs alternate between and a velar. Linguist Wei Guofeng suggests that the Old Korean phonemes and had overlapping distributions, with allophones such as being shared by both phonemes.Template:Sfn Alexander Vovin also argues via internal reconstruction that intervocalic in earlier Korean lenited to Middle Korean .Template:Sfn

Sibilants

In some pre-Unified Silla transcriptions of Korean proper nouns, Chinese affricate and fricative sibilants appear interchangeable. This has been interpreted as some stage of Old Korean having lacked the Middle Korean distinction between and . The hyangga poems, however, differentiate affricates and fricatives consistently, while the Chinese distinction between the two is faithfully preserved in Sino-Korean phonology. Koreans thus clearly distinguished from by the eighth century, and Marc Miyake casts doubt on the notion that Korean ever had a stage where affricates and fricatives were not distinct.Template:Sfn

Liquids

Middle Korean had only one liquid phoneme, which varied between and . Old Korean, however, had two separate liquid phonemes. In Old Korean orthography, this first liquid phoneme was represented by the PAP , whose Old Chinese value was *l̥[ə]j, and the second phoneme by the PAP , whose Old Chinese value was *qrət.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Besides this orthographic variation, the distinction between the liquid phonemes is also suggested by the tonal behavior of Middle Korean verb stems ending in .Template:Sfn

According to Alexander Vovin, Lee Ki-Moon asserts that represented and that represented . Vovin considers this claim "unacceptable" and "counterintuitive", especially given the reconstructed Old Chinese pronunciations of both characters, and suggests instead that represented while stood for a rhotic.Template:Sfn Ramsey and Nam Pung-hyun both agree with Vovin's hypothesis.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn

Grammar

The case markers in Old Korean are the following:

Nominative case	()
Genitive case	(), ()
Accusative case	()
Dative case	, (, in Idu script)
Instrumental case	()
Comitative case	()
Vocative case	, (, ), ()

Other affixes are:

Topic marker	()
Additive	()
Honorific	()
Humble	()

The pronunciations written in parentheses are from Middle Korean (中世國語, 중세국어). The letter ʌ is used to represent the pronunciation of "" (arae-a), which is obsolete in Modern Korean.

Vocabulary

Numerals

Three Old Korean numerals are attested in the hyangga texts: those for one, two, and thousand. All three are found in the Docheonsugwaneum-ga, while the word for one is also attested identically in the Jemangmae-ga.Template:Sfn The Cheoyong-ga uses a somewhat different form for "two",Template:Sfn though it is unlikely to be authentically Silla.Template:Sfn The mokgan data, discussed in Lee Seungjae 2017, suggests that multiples of ten may have been referred to with Chinese loanwords but that indigenous terms were used for single-digit numbers.Template:Sfn Lee's work on mokgan yields Silla words for four of the latter: one, three, four, and five.Template:Sfn The orthography of Old Korean numerals, in both hyangga and the mokgan texts, is marked by the hunju eumjong principle typical of Silla.Template:Sfn

The Old Korean single-digit numerals are given with fifteenth-century and Modern Korean equivalents below. The Modern Korean terms used to refer to the ages of cattle, which Lee Seungjae considers more closely related to Old Korean forms, are also provided.Template:Sfn

English	Old KoreanTemplate:SfnTemplate:Sfn	ReconstructionTemplate:Sfn		Middle Korean (15th c.)Template:SfnTemplate:Efn	Modern KoreanTemplate:Efn	Modern Korean for ages of cattleTemplate:SfnTemplate:Efn
One	(hyangga data)	*hədən		honah	hana	halup
	(mokgan data)	*gadəp
Two	(Docheonsugwaneum-ga)	*tubər	*twuɣulTemplate:Sfn	twulh	twul	itup
	(Cheoyong-ga)		*twuɣurTemplate:Sfn
Three		*sadəp		seyh	seys	salup
Four		*neri		neyh	neys	nalup
Five		*tasəm		tasos	tases	tasup
		*tasap

Relationship to other languages

Some linguists suggest that Old Korean may form part of the now discredited language-family proposal Altaic languages, although this claim is controversial and not accepted by modern linguists. Another hypothesis says that Old Korean is related to the Japonic languages, but this claim is generally not accepted, either. A lesser known and obsolete hypothesis proposes a relationship to the Dravidian languages (see Dravido-Korean).

Sample text

The Heonhwa-ga is a four-line hyangga from the early eighth century, preserved in the Samguk yusa. The Samguk yusa narrative recounts that Lady Suro, the beautiful wife of a local magistrate, once came upon a cliff a thousand zhang high topped by azalea blooms. Lady Suro asked if any of her entourage would pick her some of the azaleas, but none were willing. Upon hearing her words, however, an old man who had been leading a cow beside the cliff presented the flowers to her while singing the Heonhwa-ga.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Nam Pung-hyun considers the song "of relatively easy interpretation" due to its short length, the context provided, and its consistent hunju eumjong orthography.Template:Sfn

This article's reconstruction of the Heonhwa-ga follows the work of Nam 2010,Template:Sfn partly translated into English by Nicolas Tranter in Nam 2012b.Template:Sfn Nam's decipherment reproduces the grammar of Old Korean, but with Middle Korean values for Old Korean morphemes. Elements in bold are phonograms.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn

Heonhwa-ga

Old Korean original	Modern Sino-Korean reading	Reconstruction (Nam 2010)
	ca pho am ho pyen huy cip um ho su mo wu pang kyo kyen o hil pwul ywu cham hil i sa tung hoa hil cel cil ka hen ho li um ye	ᄃᆞᆯ뵈 바희 ᄀᆞᆺᄋᆡ 잡ᄋᆞᆷ 혼 손 암쇼 놓이시고 나ᄅᆞᆯ 안디 븟그리ᄉᆞᆫ ᄃᆞᆫ 곶ᄋᆞᆯ 것거 받오리ᇝ다

NMR: nominalizer INTENT: intentional mood ESSEN: essentiality

Heonhwa-ga Analysis

Romanization	Interlinear gloss	Translation (Nam 2012b)
tólpoy pahuy kós-óy cap-óm [ho]-n son amsyo noh-kisi-ko na-lól anti puskuli-só-n tó-n koc-ól kesk-e pat-o-li-ms-ta		Beside the purple rock [of azaleas] You made me let loose the cows [because of your beauty] And if you do not feel ashamed of me I shall pick a flower and give it to you.Template:Efn