Old Korean
Old Korean is the first historically documented stage of the Korean language, typified by the language of the Unified Silla period.
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" of the characteristics of Old Korean. The only surviving literary works are a little more than a dozen vernacular poems called. use 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, 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
Old Korean is generally defined as the ancient Koreanic language of the Silla state, especially in its Unified period. Proto-Koreanic, the hypothetical ancestor of the Koreanic languages understood largely through the internal reconstruction of later forms of Korean, is to be distinguished from the actually historically attested language of Old Korean.Old Korean semantic influence may be present in even the oldest discovered Silla inscription, a Classical Chinese-language stele dated to 441 or 501. Korean syntax and morphemes are visibly attested for the first time in Silla texts of the mid- to late sixth century, and the use of such vernacular elements becomes more extensive by the Unified period.
Initially only one of the Three Kingdoms of Korea, Silla rose to ascendancy in the sixth century under monarchs Beopheung and Jinheung. After another century of conflict, the kings of Silla allied with Tang China to destroy the other two kingdoms—Baekje in 660, and Goguryeo in 668—and to unite the southern two-thirds of the Korean Peninsula under their rule. This political consolidation allowed the language of Silla to become the lingua franca of the peninsula and ultimately drove the languages of Baekje and Goguryeo to extinction, leaving the latter only as substrata in later Korean dialects. Middle Korean, and hence Modern Korean, are thus direct descendants of 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. Ki-Moon Lee and S. Robert 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, 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 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, 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, 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. Following Ki-Moon Lee'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 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.
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 ... One thinks that the general periodization of Korean language history, in which prior to the founding of Goryeo is considered Old Korean, is in need of revision." The Russian-American linguist Alexander Vovin also considers twelfth-century data to be examples of "Late Old Korean". On the other hand, linguists such as Lee Seungjae and Hwang Seon-yeop continue to use the older periodization, as do major recent English-language sources such as the 2011 History of the Korean Language and the 2015 Blackwell Handbook of Korean Linguistics.
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. 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, for instance, writes "begin to build" as 作始 rather than the correct Classical Chinese, 始作, reflecting the Subject-object-verb word order of Korean. The Imsin Vow Stone, raised in either 552 or 612, is also illustrative:
| English | 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 | 詩尙書傳倫淂誓三年 |
| Gloss | Poetry ''Esteemed Documents Rites Zhuan in-turn learn swear three years |
| Classical Chinese | 誓三年倫淂詩尙書傳 |
| 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.
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 pagodas.
''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 imaging science 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 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, as well as several potential content words.
| Mokgan No. 221 | Reconstruction | Gloss | Translation |
| 丨彡從在 | *tasəm 從-kje-n | five planned to hurry | |
| 人此人鳴 | *人-i 人 鳴 | the people were all grieved | |
| 不行遣乙白 | *不行-kje-n-ul 白 | "unable to go", report |