「日本書紀」와 고대 한국어 한자음

Abstract

Identifying the correct sounds of Chinese characters in the Old Korean language is not easy because of the shortage of historical documents. The purpose of this paper is to develop a new method to solve this problem through the use of Japanese history books. One of the oldest Japanese history books, Nihonshoki (A.D. 720), was written only in Chinese characters because there was no written Japanese language at that time. Recently, Mori Hiromichi discovered that some parts of this book were written by two specific Chinese individuals. In Nihonshoki, these individuals recorded many Japanese poems (Waka) by using the sounds of Chinese characters at that time. Using this process, the Chinese scribes used multiple documents written by some of the many Korean-Japanese secretaries who had been working in Japan. I believe that some of these Korean-Japanese must have assisted the Chinese writers by reading Waka aloud to them because the Chinese may not have been well trained in Japanese. As a result, some features of the sounds of Chinese characters, as pronounced in Old Koran, were recorded in this book. In this paper, I have presented some phonetical evidence of this. It is my belief that this is anew method to approach the sounds of the Old Korean language.