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Old Korean is the first historically documented stage of the
Korean language Korean is the first language, native language for about 81 million people, mostly of Koreans, Korean descent. It is the national language of both South Korea and North Korea. In the south, the language is known as () and in the north, it is kn ...
, typified by the language of the
Unified Silla Unified Silla, or Late Silla, is the name often applied to the historical period of the Korean kingdom of Silla after its conquest of Goguryeo in 668 AD, which marked the end of the Three Kingdoms period. In the 7th century, a Silla–Tang alli ...
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 The Three Kingdoms of Korea or Samhan (Goguryeo, Baekje and Silla) competed for hegemony over the Korea, Korean Peninsula during the ancient period of History of Korea, Korean history. During the Three Kingdoms period (), many states and statele ...
as variants of Old Korean, while others reserve the term for the language of
Silla Silla (; Old Korean: wikt:徐羅伐#Old Korean, 徐羅伐, Yale romanization of Korean, Yale: Syerapel, Revised Romanization of Korean, RR: ''Seorabeol''; International Phonetic Alphabet, IPA: ) was a Korean kingdom that existed between ...
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" of the characteristics of Old Korean. The only surviving literary works are a little more than a dozen vernacular poems called ''
hyangga ''Hyangga'' () were poems written using Chinese characters in a system known as ''hyangchal'' during the Unified Silla and early Goryeo periods of Korean history. Only a few have survived: 14 in the ''Samguk yusa'' (late 6th to 9th centuries) and ...
''. Hyangga use
hyangchal ''Hyangchal'' () is an archaic writing system of Korea and was used to transcribe the Korean language in Chinese characters. Using the ''hyangchal'' system, Chinese characters were given a Korean reading based on the syllable associated with th ...
writing. Other sources include inscriptions on steles and wooden tablets, glosses to Buddhist
sutra ''Sutra'' ()Monier Williams, ''Sanskrit English Dictionary'', Oxford University Press, Entry fo''sutra'' page 1241 in Indian literary traditions refers to an aphorism or a collection of aphorisms in the form of a manual or, more broadly, a ...
s, and the transcription of personal and place names in works otherwise in Classical Chinese. All methods of Old Korean writing rely on logographic
Hanja Hanja (; ), alternatively spelled Hancha, are Chinese characters used to write the Korean language. After characters were introduced to Korea to write Literary Chinese, they were adapted to write Korean as early as the Gojoseon period. () ...
(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 Middle Korean is the period in the history of the Korean language succeeding Old Korean and yielding in 1600 to the Modern period. The boundary between the Old and Middle periods is traditionally identified with the establishment of Goryeo in 918 ...
. In its typology, it was a subject-object-verb,
agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes (word parts), each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglu ...
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 Japonic or Japanese–Ryukyuan () is a language family comprising Japanese language, Japanese, spoken in the main islands of Japan, and the Ryukyuan languages, spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. The family is universally accepted by linguists, and sig ...
, no links between Old Korean and any non-
Koreanic language Koreanic is a small language family consisting of the Korean and Jeju languages. The latter is often described as a dialect of Korean but is mutually unintelligible with mainland Korean varieties. Alexander Vovin suggested that the Yukjin dial ...
have been uncontroversially demonstrated.


History and periodization

Old Korean is generally defined as the ancient Koreanic language of the
Silla Silla (; Old Korean: wikt:徐羅伐#Old Korean, 徐羅伐, Yale romanization of Korean, Yale: Syerapel, Revised Romanization of Korean, RR: ''Seorabeol''; International Phonetic Alphabet, IPA: ) was a Korean kingdom that existed between ...
state (57 BCE – 936 CE), especially in its Unified period (668–936)."" (Meanwhile, the method of classifying the Three Kingdoms period as the formative period of Korean, the Unified Silla period as the Old Korean period, and the
Goryeo Goryeo (; ) was a Korean state founded in 918, during a time of national division called the Later Three Kingdoms period, that unified and ruled the Korea, Korean Peninsula until the establishment of Joseon in 1392. Goryeo achieved what has b ...
period as the Early Middle Korean period has long been used convincingly.)
Proto-Koreanic, the hypothetical ancestor of the Koreanic languages understood largely through the
internal reconstruction Internal reconstruction is a method of reconstructing an earlier state in a language's history using only language-internal evidence of the language in question. The comparative method compares variations between languages, such as in sets of co ...
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 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."통일신라시대의 이두문은 토(吐)가 발달한 것이 특징이다." ("''Idu'' ernaculartexts of the Unified Silla period are characterized by their developed ''to'' xplicit orthographic representation of Old Korean morphemes") Initially only one of the
Three Kingdoms of Korea The Three Kingdoms of Korea or Samhan (Goguryeo, Baekje and Silla) competed for hegemony over the Korea, Korean Peninsula during the ancient period of History of Korea, Korean history. During the Three Kingdoms period (), many states and statele ...
, 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 The Tang dynasty (, ; zh, c=唐朝), or the Tang Empire, was an Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 618 to 907, with an Wu Zhou, interregnum between 690 and 705. It was preceded by the Sui dynasty and followed ...
to destroy the other two kingdoms—
Baekje Baekje or Paekche (; ) was a Korean kingdom located in southwestern Korea from 18 BCE to 660 CE. It was one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, together with Goguryeo and Silla. While the three kingdoms were in separate existence, Baekje had the h ...
in 660, and
Goguryeo Goguryeo (37 BC – 668 AD) (; ; Old Korean: Guryeo) also later known as Goryeo (; ; Middle Korean: 고ᇢ롕〮, ''kwòwlyéy''), was a Korean kingdom which was located on the northern and central parts of the Korea, Korean Peninsula an ...
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 A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, link language or language of wider communication (LWC), is a Natural language, language systematically used to make co ...
'' 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 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 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 Alexander Vladimirovich Vovin (; 27 January 1961 – 8 April 2022) 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 wa ...
, on the other hand, classify the languages of all three kingdoms as regional dialects of Old Korean. Other linguists, such as Lee Seungjae, group the languages of Silla and Baekje together as Old Korean while excluding that of Goguryeo. The
LINGUIST List The LINGUIST List is an online resource for the academic field of linguistics. It was founded by Anthony Aristar in early 1990 at the University of Western Australia, and is used as a reference by the National Science Foundation in the United S ...
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: the rump Silla state, and two new kingdoms founded by local magnates.
Goryeo Goryeo (; ) was a Korean state founded in 918, during a time of national division called the Later Three Kingdoms period, that unified and ruled the Korea, Korean Peninsula until the establishment of Joseon in 1392. Goryeo achieved what has b ...
, 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 Prestige in sociolinguistics is the level of regard normally accorded a specific language or dialect within a speech community, relative to other languages or dialects. Prestige varieties are language or dialect families which are generally c ...
of Korean also shifted from the language of Silla's southeastern heartland to 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 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 The conditional mood (abbreviated ) is a grammatical mood used in conditional sentences to express a proposition whose validity is dependent on some condition, possibly counterfactual. It may refer to a distinct verb form that expresses the condit ...
markers, the restriction of the former nominalizing suffixes ''-n'' and ''-l'' to
attributive In grammar, an attributive expression is a word or phrase within a noun phrase that modifies the head noun. It may be an: * attributive adjective * attributive noun * attributive verb or other part of speech, such as an attributive numeral. ...
functions alone, 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 or Old Korean.. One thinks that the general periodization of Korean language history, in which nly the languageprior 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 the Korean Language'' and the 2015 ''Blackwell Handbook of Korean Linguistics''.


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 Pohang (; ), formerly spelled Po-Hang, is the largest city in North Gyeongsang Province, South Korea, with a List of cities in South Korea, population of 499,363 as of 2022, bordering the Sea of Japan, East Sea to the east, Yeongcheon to the w ...
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 the construction of a fort in
Gyeongju Gyeongju (, ), historically known as Seorabeol (, ), is a coastal city in the far southeastern corner of North Gyeongsang Province, South Korea. It is the second largest city by area in the province after Andong, covering with a population of ...
, 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. 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 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
pagoda A pagoda is a tiered tower with multiple eaves common to Thailand, Cambodia, Nepal, India, China, Japan, Korea, Myanmar, Vietnam, and other parts of Asia. Most pagodas were built to have a religious function, most often Buddhist, but some ...
s.


''Mokgan'' sources

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 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 Infrared (IR; sometimes called infrared light) is electromagnetic radiation (EMR) with wavelengths longer than that of visible light but shorter than microwaves. The infrared spectral band begins with the waves that are just longer than those ...
imaging science Imaging is the representation or reproduction of an object's form; especially a visual representation (i.e., the formation of an image). Imaging technology is the application of materials and methods to create, preserve, or duplicate images. ...
in the 1990s, it became possible to read many formerly indecipherable texts, 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. ''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 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 The Dragon King, also known as the Dragon God, is a Chinese water and weather god. He is regarded as the dispenser of rain, commanding over all bodies of water. He is the collective personification of the ancient concept of the '' lóng'' in ...
worship. The earliest direct attestation of Old Korean comes from 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.


''Hyangga'' literature

The only Korean-language literature that survives from Silla are vernacular poems now called ''hyangga'' (), 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 is now lost, and only twenty-five works survive. Fourteen are recorded in the ''
Samguk yusa ''Samguk yusa'' (; ) or ''Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms'' is a collection of legends, folktales, and historical accounts relating to the Three Kingdoms of Korea (Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla), as well as to other periods and states before, d ...
'', 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 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 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 Goryeo (; ) was a Korean state founded in 918, during a time of national division called the Later Three Kingdoms period, that unified and ruled the Korea, Korean Peninsula until the establishment of Joseon in 1392. Goryeo achieved what has b ...
-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 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 Joseon ( ; ; also romanized as ''Chosun''), officially Great Joseon (), was a dynastic kingdom of Korea that existed for 505 years. It was founded by Taejo of Joseon in July 1392 and replaced by the Korean Empire in October 1897. The kingdom w ...
period (1392–1910). The modern study of Old Korean poetry began with Japanese scholars during the Japanese colonial period (1910–1945), with
Shinpei Ogura was a Japanese linguist who studied the Korean language. Ogura is well-known in Korea for his contributions to Korean linguistics, with much of his field work and studies considered invaluable resources even in recent years. Ogura made a number ...
pioneering 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 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 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 A lexicon (plural: lexicons, rarely lexica) is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word () ...
, and some linguists continue to anachronistically project even non-lexical Middle Korean elements in their analyses.


Other textual sources

Old Korean glosses have been discovered on eighth-century editions of Chinese-language Buddhist works. Similar to the Japanese ''
kanbun ''Kanbun'' ( 'Han Chinese, Han writing') is a system for writing Literary Chinese used in Japan from the Nara period until the 20th century. Much of Japanese literature was written in this style and it was the general writing style for offici ...
'' tradition, these glosses provide Old Korean
noun case A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals) that corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nominal ...
markers,
inflectional suffix In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carr ...
es, 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 is a Buddhist temple complex that was once one of the powerful Nanto Shichi Daiji, Seven Great Temples, located in the city of Nara, Nara, Nara, Japan. The construction of the temple was an attempt to imitate Chinese temples from the much-admir ...
, 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, the Korean histories ''
Samguk sagi ''Samguk sagi'' () is a historical record of the Three Kingdoms of Korea: Goguryeo, Baekje, and Silla. Completed in 1145, it is well-known in Korea as the oldest surviving chronicle of Korean history. The ''Samguk sagi'' is written in Classical ...
'' 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 the clothing words have Middle Korean cognates, but the other four words remain "uninterpretable". The eighth-century Japanese history ''
Nihon Shoki The or , sometimes translated as ''The Chronicles of Japan'', is the second-oldest book of classical Japanese history. It is more elaborate and detailed than the , the oldest, and has proven to be an important tool for historians and archaeol ...
'' also preserves a single sentence in the Silla language, apparently some sort of oath, although its meaning can only be guessed from context.


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
logogram In a written language, a logogram (from Ancient Greek 'word', and 'that which is drawn or written'), also logograph or lexigraph, is a written character that represents a semantic component of a language, such as a word or morpheme. Chine ...
s. 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.


Non-textual sources

The modern Korean language has its own pronunciations for Chinese characters, called Sino-Korean. Although some Sino-Korean forms reflect
Old Chinese Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese language, Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones ...
or Early Mandarin pronunciations, the majority of modern linguists believe that the dominant layer of Sino-Korean descends from the
Middle Chinese Middle Chinese (formerly known as Ancient Chinese) or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese language, Chinese recorded in the ''Qieyun'', a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expande ...
prestige dialect of
Chang'an Chang'an (; zh, t=長安, s=长安, p=Cháng'ān, first=t) is the traditional name of the city now named Xi'an and was the capital of several Chinese dynasties, ranging from 202 BCE to 907 CE. The site has been inhabited since Neolithic time ...
during the
Tang dynasty The Tang dynasty (, ; zh, c=唐朝), or the Tang Empire, was an Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 618 to 907, with an Wu Zhou, interregnum between 690 and 705. It was preceded by the Sui dynasty and followed ...
. 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 a
phonemic A phoneme () is any set of similar speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word from another. All languages con ...
distinction between the non- aspirated
velar stop In phonetics and phonology, a velar stop is a type of consonantal sound, made with the back of the tongue in contact with the soft palate (also known as the velum, hence velar), held tightly enough to block the passage of air (hence a stop consona ...
and its aspirated equivalent, . However, both are regularly reflected in Sino-Korean as . This suggests that was absent in Old Korean. Old Korean phonology can also be examined via Old Korean loanwords in other languages, including
Middle Mongol Middle Mongol or Middle Mongolian was a Mongolic languages, Mongolic koiné language spoken in the Mongol Empire. Originating from Genghis Khan's home region of Northeastern Mongolia, it diversified into several Mongolic languages after the coll ...
and especially
Old Japanese is the oldest attested stage of the Japanese language, recorded in documents from the Nara period (8th century). It became Early Middle Japanese in the succeeding Heian period, but the precise delimitation of the stages is controversial. Old Ja ...
.


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. 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: * 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. * 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. * 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. * 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. 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. For example, Nam 2019 gives the following interpretation of the final line of the ''hyangga'' poem '' Anmin-ga'' (756): 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 morpheme A content morpheme or contentive morpheme is a root that forms the semantic core of a major class word. Content morphemes have lexical denotations that are not dependent on the context or on other morphemes. For instance, in English, the abstract ...
s are written with SALs, while PAPs are used for functional suffixes. In Korean scholarship, this practice is called ''hunju eumjong'' (), literally "logogram is principal, phonograms follow". In the eighth-century poem '' Heonhwa-ga'' given below, for instance, the inflected verb begins with the SAL "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 is called ''mareum cheomgi'' (), 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
alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...
ic 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 the
Old Chinese Old Chinese, also called Archaic Chinese in older works, is the oldest attested stage of Chinese language, Chinese, and the ancestor of all modern varieties of Chinese. The earliest examples of Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones ...
pronunciation of characters. For instance, characters with Middle Chinese initial were used to transcribe an Old Korean
liquid Liquid is a state of matter with a definite volume but no fixed shape. Liquids adapt to the shape of their container and are nearly incompressible, maintaining their volume even under pressure. The density of a liquid is usually close to th ...
, 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 . 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 the examples below. Korean Sinographic writing is traditionally classified into three major systems: '' idu'', ''
gugyeol Gugyeol, or kwukyel, is a system for rendering texts written in Classical Chinese into understandable Korean. It was used chiefly during the Joseon dynasty, when readings of the Chinese classics were of paramount social importance. Thus, i ...
'', and ''
hyangchal ''Hyangchal'' () is an archaic writing system of Korea and was used to transcribe the Korean language in Chinese characters. Using the ''hyangchal'' system, Chinese characters were given a Korean reading based on the syllable associated with th ...
''. 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. 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 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 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", and its study relies largely on tracing back elements of Middle Korean (MK) phonology.


Prosody

Fifteenth-century Middle Korean was a tonal or pitch-accent language whose orthography distinguished between three tones: high, rising, and low. The rising tone 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 The four tones of Chinese poetry and dialectology () are four traditional tone classes of Chinese words. They play an important role in Chinese poetry and in comparative studies of tonal development in the modern varieties of Chinese, both in ...
: 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. 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 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 the entering tone among the four Chinese tones.


Syllable structure

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 syllable A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word, typically defined by linguists as a ''nucleus'' (most often a vowel) with optional sounds before or after that nucleus (''margins'', which are ...
s with bimoraic "rising tone" reflect an originally bisyllabic CVCV form in which 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 the twelfth century with the loss of intervening vowels. 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. 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 ; 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 .


Nasals

Sino-Korean evidence suggests that there were no major differences between Old Korean and Middle Korean nasals. 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. 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 Sandhi ( ; , ) is any of a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on nearby sounds or the grammatical function o ...
rule in which nasals could become liquids, or vice versa, under certain circumstances.


Aspirate consonants

The Middle Korean series of aspirated stops and affricates developed from mergers of consonant clusters involving /h/ or a
velar Velar may refer to: * Velar consonant Velar consonants are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth (also known as the "velum"). Since the velar region ...
obstruent An obstruent ( ) is a speech sound such as , , or that is formed by ''obstructing'' airflow. Obstruents contrast with sonorants, which have no such obstruction and so resonate. All obstruents are consonants, but sonorants include vowels as well ...
, which in turn had formed from the loss of intervening vowels. 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. Based on this variable reflection of Middle Chinese aspirates, Korean is thought to have developed the dental aspirates and first, followed by and finally . is often believed to have been absent when Sino-Korean was established. Silla scribes used the aspirate-initial characters only infrequently. 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. This suggests that aspiration of any sort may have been absent in Old Korean, or that aspirate stops may have existed in
free variation In linguistics, free variation is the phenomenon of two (or more) sounds or forms appearing in the same environment without a change in meaning and without being considered incorrect by native speakers. Sociolinguists argue that describing such ...
with unaspirated ones but were not distinct phonemes. 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. Meanwhile, Nam Pung-hyun believes that Old Korean had and but may have lacked and , while noting that the
functional load In linguistics and especially phonology, functional load, or phonemic load, is the collection of words that contain a certain pronunciation feature (a phoneme) that makes distinctions between other words. Phonemes with a high functional load distin ...
of the aspirates was "extremely low".


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 Radical (from Latin: ', root) may refer to: Politics and ideology Politics *Classical radicalism, the Radical Movement that began in late 18th century Britain and spread to continental Europe and Latin America in the 19th century *Radical politics ...
but in practice had different Middle Chinese initials. On the other hand, this may reflect a
velar Velar may refer to: * Velar consonant Velar consonants are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth (also known as the "velum"). Since the velar region ...
value for the Old Korean ancestor of Middle Korean . Korean scholars often propose an Old Korean
velar fricative A velar fricative is a fricative consonant produced at the velar place of articulation. It is possible to distinguish the following kinds of velar fricatives: *Voiced velar fricative, a consonant sound written as in the International Phonetic Alp ...
as ancestral to Middle Korean . 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. Alexander Vovin also argues via
internal reconstruction Internal reconstruction is a method of reconstructing an earlier state in a language's history using only language-internal evidence of the language in question. The comparative method compares variations between languages, such as in sets of co ...
that intervocalic in earlier Korean
lenited In linguistics, lenition is a sound change that alters consonants, making them "weaker" in some way. The word ''lenition'' itself means "softening" or "weakening" (from Latin 'weak'). Lenition can happen both synchronically (within a language ...
to Middle Korean .


Origin of MK lenited phonemes


Sibilants

In some pre-Unified Silla transcriptions of Korean proper nouns, Chinese
affricate An affricate is a consonant that begins as a stop and releases as a fricative, generally with the same place of articulation (most often coronal). It is often difficult to decide if a stop and fricative form a single phoneme or a consonant pai ...
and
fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in ...
sibilant Sibilants (from 'hissing') are fricative and affricate consonants of higher amplitude and pitch, made by directing a stream of air with the tongue towards the teeth. Examples of sibilants are the consonants at the beginning of the English w ...
s 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.


Liquids

Middle Korean had only one
liquid Liquid is a state of matter with a definite volume but no fixed shape. Liquids adapt to the shape of their container and are nearly incompressible, maintaining their volume even under pressure. The density of a liquid is usually close to th ...
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 , and the second phoneme by the PAP , whose Old Chinese value was *qrət. Besides this orthographic variation, the distinction between the liquid phonemes is also suggested by the tonal behavior of Middle Korean verb stems ending in . 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. Ramsey and Nam Pung-hyun both agree with Vovin's hypothesis.


Coda consonants


Vowels


Grammar

The case markers in Old Korean are the following: : Other affixes are: : The pronunciations written in parentheses are from
Middle Korean Middle Korean is the period in the history of the Korean language succeeding Old Korean and yielding in 1600 to the Modern period. The boundary between the Old and Middle periods is traditionally identified with the establishment of Goryeo in 918 ...
(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''. The '' Cheoyong-ga'' uses a somewhat different form for "two", though it is unlikely to be authentically Silla. 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. Lee's work on ''mokgan'' yields Silla words for four of the latter: one, three, four, and five. The orthography of Old Korean numerals, in both ''hyangga'' and the ''mokgan'' texts, is marked by the ''hunju eumjong'' principle typical of Silla. 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.


Relationship to other languages

Some linguists suggest that Old Korean may form part of the now discredited language-family proposal
Altaic languages The Altaic () languages are a group of languages comprising the Turkic languages, Turkic, Mongolic languages, Mongolic and Tungusic languages, Tungusic language families, with some linguists including the Koreanic languages, Koreanic and Japon ...
, although this claim is controversial and not accepted by modern linguists. Another hypothesis says that Old Korean is related to the
Japonic languages Japonic or Japanese–Ryukyuan () is a language family comprising Japanese language, Japanese, spoken in the main islands of Japan, and the Ryukyuan languages, spoken in the Ryukyu Islands. The family is universally accepted by linguists, and sig ...
, but this claim is generally not accepted, either. A lesser known and obsolete hypothesis proposes a relationship to the
Dravidian languages The Dravidian languages are a language family, family of languages spoken by 250 million people, primarily in South India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan, with pockets elsewhere in South Asia. The most commonly spoken Dravidian l ...
(see Dravido-Korean).Kim, Chin-Wu (1974). ''The Making of the Korean Language''. Center of Korean Studies, University of Hawai'i.


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 Azaleas ( ) are flowering shrubs in the genus ''Rhododendron'', particularly the former sections ''Rhododendron sect. Tsutsusi, Tsutsusi'' (evergreen) and ''Pentanthera'' (deciduous). Azaleas bloom in the spring (April and May in the temperate ...
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''. Nam Pung-hyun considers the song "of relatively easy interpretation" due to its short length, the context provided, and its consistent ''hunju eumjong'' orthography. This article's reconstruction of the ''Heonhwa-ga'' follows the work of Nam 2010, partly translated into English by Nicolas Tranter in Nam 2012b. Nam's decipherment reproduces the grammar of Old Korean, but with Middle Korean values for Old Korean morphemes. Elements in bold are phonograms.
NMR: nominalizer INTENT: intentional mood ESSEN: essentiality


Notes


References


Citations


Bibliography

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