중세국어의 몇 가지 음운 현상과 모음 체계중세국어의 몇 가지 음운 현상과 모음 체계

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to reconstruct a vowel system of middle-Korean, and analyze, based on that system, the phonological phenomena occured during the 15th and 16th centuries. To reconstruct the vowel system, we pointed out some problems with the up-to-now definition on '舌縮', '口蹙', '口張' described in (訓民正音). Through this process, we found that '舌縮' and '口蹙/口張' should be interpreted as 'crouch of tongue' and 'unfold of lips' respectively. This interpretation gave us the following vowel system of the 15th century. To improve the validity of the vowel system, we examined several phonological phenomena such as 'Λ>i', 'a∼3, 'o∼u', vowel(or glide) 'i(j)' assimilation. The result showed that those phenomena are closely related with the tracting power of the vowel 'i'. That is, the phenomena are caused by the excessive functional load of the vowel 'i'.