Chinese and Hangul

Korean literature was written for most of its history in a script that was not made for the Korean language. This chapter follows the problem and the answers the sources describe: writing in Classical Chinese, adapting Chinese characters to spell Korean, and then, in the 1440s, a new alphabet and the first long poem written in it. The script itself is the subject of Korean Alphabet 1; this chapter is about what it meant for literature.

Writing in Chinese

Chapter 1 gave the Korean literature article's line that "For much of Korea's 1,500 years of literary history, it was written in Hanja." The Literary Chinese article explains why a language like that could spread. It says Literary Chinese "represented the only known common form of writing for a long time" in the countries that used it, that adoption "came mainly from diplomatic and cultural ties with China", with conquest, colonisation and migration playing smaller roles, and that it served as an "international auxiliary language" for civil administration and scholarly communication. It adds that speakers of other languages later "similarly abandoned" it in favour of their own, with no Korean timeline. That article says almost nothing specific about Korea: it does not cover Korean ways of reading Chinese, the civil service examinations in Korea or when its use declined there. I read nothing on those, so I make no claim.

Writing Korean with Chinese characters: idu

The Idu script article describes idu, "official's reading", as a writing system for Korean using Chinese characters. In it, characters carried both meaning and sound: some represented native Korean words or grammatical elements, others Chinese loanwords, and a character used only for its sound lost its Chinese meaning. Korean word order was followed. It says idu arose in the Three Kingdoms period (57 BCE to 668 CE), and that it was developed by Buddhist monks, a claim the article gives without a source. Its main dated use was official documents and the examinations from 958 to 1894 CE, and it helped Koreans read Chinese government documents and was used to translate Chinese texts such as the Ming legal code.

The article offers two definitions. In the broad sense idu covers several ways of writing Korean with Chinese characters, including hyangchal, used for the vernacular poetry of Chapter 2, and gugyeol. In the narrow sense it means only the system developed in Goryeo (918 to 1392). It also notes that the Chinese pronunciation was only "approximately" followed. For literature, the point is that the hyangga of Chapter 2 belong to the same family of methods, which is why they are hard to read.

The Invention of Hangul

The document and the alphabet

The Hunminjeongeum article says the title means "The Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People" and that it is an 1446 work that formally introduced the first Korean alphabet. The alphabet was originally also called Hunminjeongeum, and is now widely called Hangul (or Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, the article's only mention of the North). The term is used in several ways: for the base text only (the preface and letter descriptions, also called Yeui), or for the base text plus a commentary, Haerye.

The stated reason

The preface says the sounds of the language differ from Chinese characters, so that many ordinary people could not express what they wanted to say. The article gives its wording: "The sounds of our country's language are different from those of the Middle Kingdom." The preface says Sejong designed 28 letters so people could learn them easily and use them every day. That is what the document says about itself. The article notes that scholarly accounts differ in places (for example, a scholar who reads some apparent translation "mistakes" as attempts to deal with Chinese tones), and that it is unclear whether the Eonhae edition first appeared in Wŏrin sŏkpo (1459). The article does not mention opposition to the new alphabet, so I say nothing on it.

The First Work in Hangul: Yongbi eocheonga

The Yongbi eocheonga article calls this fifteenth-century Joseon epic poem "the first work written in Hangul", and says it records the first Korean writing in Hangul beside Hanja after a long period of writing only in Chinese characters. It gives 1447 as the publication year, and 125 cantos. It names Chŏng Inji, An Chi and Kwŏn Chae as authors, with Sŏng Sammun and Pak P'aengnyŏn writing the preface. It concerns the Joseon dynasty and its predecessors and justifies the change from Goryeo to Joseon: its dragons stand for six ancestors from Mokjo through Taejong, and the dynasty's rise is framed through the Mandate of Heaven. The article also notes its value for understanding the Jurchens and the Confucian ideas of the time, and says it was designated Korean Treasure No. 1463 in 2006.

Exercises

Next chapter: Sijo, Gasa and the Poetry of Joseon.