들리지 않는 소리, 혹은 발설되지 않는 말과 ‘국어’의 구상 — 근대계몽기 국문 담론 분석 —

Abstract

This article discusses the national characters used in early modern Korea through the concepts of ‘homogenization’ and ‘nationalization.’ Written characters in the traditional Eastern Asian society were closely related to ‘Do,’ which was held to be a universal principle; this is why the creators of Hunminjeongeum (the indigenous Hangul script) tried to explain all its characters in accordance with EumYangOHaeng, i.e. yin-yang and the five elements. In early modern Korea, some arguing for nationalization assumed that using Chinese characters instead of Hangul constituted a form of voluntary enslavement, but they also had to accept the merits of homogenization： that characters should be chosen on a purely phonetic basis, completely unrelated to any qualitative values, such as universal or logical principles. The concepts of homogenization and nationalization were the main issues influencing the discussions on the use of national characters in early modern Korea, but from around 1905 the concept of nationalization appears to have become dominant. As a result of homogenization, however, it was language, rather than characters, which became the target of nationalization, so that discussions on the use of national characters now focused on the national language. While the question of how to use the national characters still remained unresolved, discussions came to include the morphophonemics layer, which distinguishes the elemental sounds of the language from how they are combined in practice to make actual words and sentences.