Middle Korean
"Songs of the Moon Shining on a Thousand Rivers" (Worin Cheongang Jigok, 1447), a collection of Buddhist hymns composed byKing Sejong
Region	Korea
Era	11th – 16th centuries
Language family	Koreanic Middle Korean
Early forms	Proto-Koreanic Old Korean
Writing system	Hanja (Idu,Hyangchal,Gugyeol),Hangul
Language codes
ISO 639-3	okm
Linguist List	okm
Glottolog	midd1372
South Korean name
Hangul	중세 한국어
Hanja	中世韓國語
RR	Jungse Hangugeo
MR	Chungse Han'gugŏ
North Korean name
Hangul	중세 조선어
Hanja	中世朝鮮語
RR	Jungse Joseoneo
MR	Chungse Chosŏnŏ

Middle Korean is the period in the history of theKorean language succeedingOld Korean and yielding toEarly Modern Korean in the late 16th century.The boundary between the Old and Middle periods is traditionally identified with the establishment ofGoryeo in 918 and the associated transition of the prestige dialect from the Southeast to the center of the peninsula, but some scholars have argued for theMongol invasions of Korea in the mid-13th century. Middle Korean is divided into Early and Late periods corresponding to Goryeo (until 1392) andJoseon respectively.

It is difficult to extract linguistic information from texts of the Early period, which are written withChinese characters (calledHanja in Korean). The situation was transformed in 1446 by the introduction of theHangul alphabet, so that Late Middle Korean provides the pivotal data for thehistory of Korean.

Middle Korean is traditionally taken to span the period from the establishment ofGoryeo in 918, when the political centre moved fromGyeongju in the southeast toKaesong in the central west, up to the start of theImjin War in 1592. The boundary between early and late periods is variously taken as the beginning of theJoseon period in 1392 or the promulgation of Hangul in 1446.^[1][2] The Joseon capital was only a short distance away in Hanyang (modernSeoul), so any language change would have been minimal, but the introduction of Hangul dramatically changed the documentation of the language.^[3]

Until the late 19th century, most formal writing in Korea, including government documents, scholarship and much literature, was written inClassical Chinese. Before the 15th century, the little writing in Korean was done using cumbersome systems using Chinese characters, such asidu andhyangchal. Thus Early Middle Korean, like Old Korean before it, is sparsely documented.^[2]

Before the 1970s, the key sources for EMK were a few wordlists.

• TheJilin leishi (1103–1104) was a Chinese book about Korea. All that survives of the original three volumes is a brief preface and a glossary of over 350 Korean words and phrases.^[4] The Korean forms were rendered using Chinese characters as phonograms, though sometimes the chosen character had a semantic connection with the Korean term, as is common in Chinese glossing practice. Identification of the Korean pronunciations is complicated by uncertainty about Chinese phonology of the time and the differences between the two languages.^[5]
• TheCháoxiǎn guǎn yìyǔ (朝鮮館譯語, 1408) is another Chinese glossary of Korean, containing 596 Korean words.^[6][7]
• TheHyangyak kugŭppang (朝鮮館譯語鄕藥救急方, mid-13th century) is a Korean survey of herbal treatments. The work is written in Chinese, but the Korean names of some 180 ingredients are rendered using Chinese characters according to Korean scribal traditions, using phonograms intended to be read withSino-Korean pronunciations, semantic glosses, and phonograms with native Korean pronunciations.^[8]
• The Japanese textNichū Reki (二中曆, believed to be compiled from two works from the early 12th century), containskana transcriptions of Korean numerals, but is marred by errors.^[9]

In 1973, close examination of a Buddhist sutra from the Goryeo period revealed faint interlinear annotations with simplified Chinese characters indicating how the Chinese text could be read as Korean.More examples ofkugyŏl ('oral embellishment') were discovered, particularly in the 1990s.^[10][11]Many of thekugyŏl characters were abbreviated, and some of them are identical in form and value to symbols in the Japanesekatakana syllabary, though the historical relationship between the two is not yet clear.^[12] An even more subtle method known askakp'il (각필;角筆;lit. 'stylus') annotations was discovered in 2000. This consists of dots and lines made with a stylus at various positions around a character, with their interpretation depending on the position at which they were placed.[13]^[14] Both forms of annotation contain little phonological information, but are valuable sources on grammatical markers.^[15]

Thekugyŏl used after theMongol invasions of Korea in the mid-13th century differs from that used before in style and grammar. Nam Pung-hyun suggests that the language changed due to the disruption of the invasions and occupation, and the period before should be considered Late Old Korean rather than part of Middle Korean.^[16]

The introduction of theHangul alphabet in 1446 revolutionized the description of the language.^[17] TheHunminjeongeum ('The Correct/Proper Sounds for the Instruction of the People') and later texts describe the phonology and morphology of the language with great detail and precision.^[18] Earlier forms of the language must be reconstructed by comparing fragmentary evidence with LMK descriptions.^[17]These works are not as informative regarding Korean syntax, as they tend to use a stilted style influenced by Classical Chinese. The best examples of colloquial Korean are the translations in foreign-language textbooks produced by the JoseonBureau of Interpreters.^[17]

Hangul letters correspond closely to the phonemes of Late Middle Korean. The romanization most commonly used in linguistic writing on the history of Korean is theYale romanization devised bySamuel Martin, which faithfully reflects the Hangul spelling.^[19]

The tensed stopspp,tt,cc andkk are distinct phonemes in modern Korean, but in LMK they were allophones of consonant clusters.^[21]The tensed fricativehh only occurred in a single verb root,hhye- 'to pull', and has disappeared in Modern Korean.^[22]

The voiced fricatives/β/,/z/ and/ɣ/ occurred only in limited environments, and are believed to have arisen fromlenition of/p/,/s/ and/k/, respectively.^[23][24] They have disappeared in most modern dialects, but some dialects in the southeast and northeast retain/p/,/s/ and/k/ in these words.^[25]

The affricatesc,ch andcc were apical consonants, as in modern northwestern dialects, rather than palatals as in modern Seoul.^[26]

Late Middle Korean had a limited and skewed set of initial clusters:sp-,st-,sk-,pt-,pth-,ps-,pc-,pst- andpsk-.^[22][27] It is believed that they resulted fromsyncope of vowelso oru during the Middle Korean period. For example, theJilin leishi has*posol (菩薩) 'rice', which became LMKpsól and modernssal.^[28] A similar process is responsible for many aspirated consonants. For example, theJilin leishi has*huku- (黒根) 'big', which became LMK and modernkhu.^[27]

Late Middle Korean had seven vowels:

The precise phonetic values of these vowels are controversial.^[29] Six of them are still distinguished in modern Korean, but only theJeju language has a distinct reflex ofo.^[29] In most other varieties it has merged witha in the first syllable of a word andu elsewhere.^[30]An exception is found in theYukchin dialect in the far northeast and dialects along the south coast, where first-syllableo has merged withwo when adjacent to a labial consonant.^[31]

LMK had rigidvowel harmony, described in theHunminjeongeum Haerye by dividing the vowels into three groups:^[30][32]

Yin andyang vowels could not occur in the same word, but could co-occur with the neutral vowel.^[30][33]The phonetic dimension underlying vowel harmony is disputed.Ki-Moon Lee suggested that LMK vowel harmony was based onvowel height.^[33]Some recent authors attribute it toadvanced and retracted tongue root states.^[34]

Loans fromMiddle Mongolian in the 13th century show several puzzling correspondences, in particular between Middle Mongolianü and Koreanu.^[35]Based on these data and transcriptions in theJilin leishi, Ki-Moon Lee argued for a Korean Vowel Shift between the 13th and 15th centuries, consisting ofchain shifts involving five of these vowels:^[36]

• y >u >o >ʌ
• e >ə >ɨ

William Labov found that this proposed shift followed different principles to all the other chain shifts he surveyed.^[37]Lee's interpretation of both the Mongolian andJilin leishi materials has also been challenged by several authors.^[38][39]

LMK also had twoglides,y[j] andw[w]:^[40][41]

• Ay on-glide could precede four of the vowels, indicated in Hangul with modified letters:yaㅑ[ja],yeㅕ[jə],ywoㅛ[jo] andywuㅠ[ju].
• Aw on-glide could precedea ore, written with a pair of vowel symbols:waㅘ[wa] andweㅝ[wə].
• Ay off-glide could follow any of the pure vowels excepti or any of the six onglide-vowel combinations, and was marked by adding the letteri⟨ㅣ⟩. In modern Korean the vowel-offglide sequences have become monophthongs.

Early Hangul texts distinguish three pitch contours on each syllable: low (unmarked), high (marked with one dot) and rising (marked with two dots).^[42] The rising tone may have been longer in duration, and is believed to have arisen from a contraction of a pair of syllables with low and high tone.^[43] LMK texts do not show clear distinctions after the first high or rising tone in a word, suggesting that the language had apitch accent rather than a fulltone system.^[44][45]

Although some Chinese words had previously entered Korean, Middle Korean was the period of the massive and systematic influx ofSino-Korean vocabulary.^[46]As a result, over half the modern Korean lexicon consists of Sino-Korean words, though they account for only about a tenth of basic vocabulary.^[47]

Classical Chinese was the language of government and scholarship in Korea from the 7th century until theGabo Reforms of the 1890s.^[48]After KingGwangjong established thegwageo civil service examinations on the Chinese model in 958, familiarity with written Chinese and theChinese classics spread through the ruling classes.^[49]

Korean literati read Chinese texts using a standardized Korean pronunciation, originally based onMiddle Chinese.They used Chineserhyme dictionaries, which specified the pronunciations ofChinese characters relative to other characters, and could thus be used to systematically construct a Sino-Korean reading for any word encountered in a Chinese text.^[50]This system became so entrenched that 15th-century efforts to reform it to more closely match the Chinese pronunciation of the time were abandoned.^[51]

The prestige of Chinese was further enhanced by the adoption of Confucianism as the state ideology ofJoseon, and Chinese literary forms flooded into the language at all levels of society.^[52]Some of these denoted items of imported culture, but it was also common to introduce Sino-Korean words that directly competed with native vocabulary.^[52]Many Korean words known from Middle Korean texts have since been lost in favour of their Sino-Korean counterparts, including the following.

Works cited

For a list of words relating to Middle Korean language, see theMiddle Korean language category of words inWiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Joseon dynasty translation texts at theAcademy of Korean Studies

• Society of Goryeo
• Society of Joseon
• History of the Korean language
• Vowel-harmony languages
• 11th-century establishments in Korea
• 16th-century disestablishments in Korea

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• Pages with plain IPA