19세기 서양인의 한국어 문자와 음운 현상에 대한 기술

Abstract

In the history of Korean linguistics, the nineteenth century showed the inception of the research method of the grammatical description. From the invention of Hunminjeongeum up to the eighteenth century (in which the backdrop for Silhak, realist school of confucianism,was formed), Korean linguistics was characterized by the research on Hunminjeongeum itself. The systematic description of the Korean language first began in the nineteenth century, particularly, by some Westerners. Given the situation, this research aims to provide an analysis and explication with regard to Korean graphemics and phonology, particularly, focusing on the theoretical description available in the Korean linguistic literature in the early and mid-nineteenth century. As most of the post-promulgation studies on the Korean language were concerned with Hunminjeongeum, this paper centers around the questions of (a) how the previous academic insight into Hunminjeongeum’s script and pronunciation systems was reflected and handed down in the academic works by the Westerners in the nineteenth century and (b)how the system of Hangeul and its respective phonetic values were interpreted by those Westerners from their perspective. In the respect of Korean graphemics, the main attention is paid to the sequential order of the consonant and vowel letters in Hangeul as well as to the phonetic values of the respective letters. The sequential arrangement of the letters refers to that of Se-Jin Choi in Hunmongjahoe (1527). One noteworthy finding is that some single identical letter was observed to have two different pronunciations, which was, then, a linguistically fruitful discovery confirming the existence of the allophone in Korean. On the other hand, what drew attention in terms of the pronunciation is that the phonological phenomenon of euphony was highlighted and specified. In the linguistic description,phonologically distinctive phenomena―such as voicing, consonant assimilation, palatalization,initial liquid avoidance, and the final consonant rule―were taken into account and well elaborated in order to increase the general understanding of the Korean pronunciation. For the nineteenth-century Westerners, it was possible to spot those particular phenomena in Korean owing to the fact that they, as speakers of European languages, had the background knowledge of historical comparative linguistics, the main methodological trend of those times.