『亂中日記』의 “女眞共”句 解讀에 관한 一考察 -초고본의 “共”字 考證을 위주로-

Abstract

Admiral Yi Sun-sin’s Nanjungilgi(『亂中日記』) is a war memorandum of a supreme Korean naval admiral written during Imjinwaeran (壬辰倭亂), or the Japanese invasions of Korea. As it contains all the main events during the war time, it is evaluated as one of the best war literary works. As people in the 21st century are very interested in Nanjungilgi to learn the admiral’s fantastic victorious strategies, it is very essential to make the right interpretation of his diary. But the erroneous interpretation of the words ‘Yeojinip(女眞卄)’ and ‘Yeojinsap(女眞卅)’ made in 1935 by the Korean History Compilation Committee(朝鮮史編修會) resulted in a bad impact on the evaluation of Admiral Yi Sun-sin. During the time of peace negotiation in 1596 between the Ming dynasty and Japan, when Admiral Yi Sun-sin stayed in Mujang, the admiral wrote the word ‘Yeojin’ at the end of his diary on Sept. 14 and 15. I have argued, after my scientific correcting of Nanjungilgi, that the characters ‘ip(卄)’ and ‘sap(卅)’ are the misreading of the character “gong(共).’ Recently, a document was found in the archive of the Haenam Yun clan, which showed that ‘Yeojin’ was just the name of a female slave who lived during Imjinwaeran(壬辰倭亂). It was also confirmed that in this document Yoshin(堯臣), an elder brother of admiral Yi Sun-sin, and the 6 slaves, who appeared in Nanjunilgi, are mentioned together. Accordingly, it has been confirmed that the method of interpreting ‘Yeojin’ as the Yeojin people is wrong. In this paper, an intensive comparative analysis was conducted on the 72 cases, where the character ‘gong(共)’ was used, and the 10 cases, where the shape of word used is consistent with the character ‘gong’ in ‘Yeonjingong.’ The word ‘gong’ features a short left line and a long right line. Especially, it was confirmed that the character ‘gong(共)’ written on July 5 in the Byeongsin year and on Aug. 23 in the Gapo year are the representative cases in which the character (共) is the same as the character ‘gong(共)’ in ‘Yeonjingong’ in terms of shape of character. In addition, Admiral Yi Sun-sin used the character ‘gong(共)’ at the end of sentences whenever he recorded a feast, meeting, conversation, discussion or military drill together with his subordinates. Accordingly, the conclusion is that the ‘gong’ in ‘Yeojingong’ was used to refer to a daily encounter. Therefore, there is no more room for a guess or false rumor, because this conclusion has been drawn after a through historical research.