Chu Sigyŏng


Chu Sigyŏng was one of the founders of modern Korean linguistics. He was born in Pongsan-gun, Hwanghae Province in 1876. He helped to standardize the Korean language, based on the spelling and grammar of vernacular Korean.

Biography

Chu Sigyŏng was born in Hwanghae Province, in what is now North Korea. He studied Classical Chinese from an early age. In 1887 he moved to Seoul and studied linguistics. In 1896, he found work in the first Hangeul-only newspaper, Dongnip Sinmun, founded by the Korean independence activist Seo Jae-pil. In 1897, Seo Jae-pil was sent into exile to the United States, and Chu Sigyŏng left the newspaper.
Interested in Western linguistics and teaching methods, Chu Sigyŏng served as a Korean instructor for the American missionary William B. Scranton, founder of today's Ewha Womans University.

Standardizing Korean Language

Having realized the need of a standardized Korean alphabet, Chu Sigyŏng established the Korean Language System Society in 1886 along with several of his colleagues. Chu also hosted several seminars in the National Language Discussion Centre of the Sangdong Youth Academy of the Korean language.
Chu proposed that the Korean parts of speech include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, unconjugated adjectives, auxiliaries, conjunctions, exclamations, and sentence-final particles. Chu Sigyŏng coined the name Hangul between 1910 and 1913 to identify the Korean writing system, which had previously existed under several other names, such as eonmun, since the 15th century.
In his 1914 publication, Sounds of the Language, he promoted writing Hangul linearly such as ㅎㅏㄴㄱㅡㄹ rather than syllabically as 한글. This is one of his few proposals not to have been implemented in modern Korean linguistics, although there have been experiments with linear Hangul, most notably in Primorsky Krai.

Publications

The History of the Downfall of Vietnam The National Language Classical Phonetics An Introduction to the Chinese Language An Introduction to the National Language The Grammar of the National Language
  • ''Sounds of the Language''