19세기 전반기 서양인의 한국어 문법에 대한 기술

Abstract

This research aims to shed light on de Rosny's accomplishment in the history and historiography of Korean linguistics. As is often proposed, the description of the grammatical phenomena of the Korean language is said to have been initiated by some Western scholars in the early nineteenth century. Representative works include Charles Gützlaff(1832), Fr. von Siebold(1832) and L. de Rosny(1864, 1865). It is argued that, among those many scholars with early academic attempts, Rosny can be seen as the very theoretician whose academic works to describe the Korean grammatical phenomena were implemented in a systematic manner. His works attain significance as the first projects that engaged in linguistic research on the Korean language from a perspective available in and relevant to linguistics. In this research, thus, a main focus is placed on the detailed contents of the grammatical descriptions made in that period of time, especially, in centering on de Rosny's works. Some main characteristics in de Rosny(1864, 1865) can be stated as follows: firstly, it was confirmed that there exists a good degree of disparity between the grammatical phenomena of the Korean language and those of Indo-European languages in general; secondly, the grammatical description therein of the Korean language's linguistic behaviors was made in such a way that the general structuring was organized to comply with the parts-of-speech system, which was relevant to the methodology for the grammatical description of Western languages. The contents of the grammatical-phenomena-based description of the Korean language in Rosny(1864, 1865) can be summarized in the following way. Firstly, the Korean nouns were found to exhibit no declension in their forms in terms of the case and/or number. Also, he concluded that the case variation is determined and identified by the combinatory patterns specified by particular postpositions. The forms of the postpositions were provided, particularly, those which represent the genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative cases. It was thought that no explicit form for the nominative-related postposition can be found in Korean and, also, that the accusative postposition can be omitted depending on contexts. Secondly, even though he was mistaken in treating some Korean-specific phenomena (for instance, thinking of the Korean adjectives as being analogous to the adjectives of the European languages), the actuality of the Korean adjectives was, relatively, well evaluated in the point that the Korean adjectives were shown to have no inflection (a) in terms of the gender and number indication in forming adjective phrases and, elsewhere, (b) in respect of the linguistic realization of the comparative and superlative adjectives. Thirdly, it was confirmed that the Korean numerals are characterized by the coexistence of the indigenous numeral system and the Chinese-derived numeral system. In addition, the declension of the Korean numerals was found to be based on the decimal system. Fourthly, the Korean pronouns were shown to be realized into personal pronouns, possessive pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, reflexive pronouns, negative pronouns, and interrogative pronouns, for which the respective word forms and their features were described. Fifthly, ㄹ(similar to /r/) was assigned as the infinitive ending of the verbs. The conjugation table was constructed by suggesting the representative forms conjugated in the tenses, the imperative mood, and the infinitive mood, which were accompanied with the description of their respective features. From the above analysis of the linguistic works by de Rosny(1864, 1865), it can conclude that his descriptions of the Korean grammatical phenomena are of significance, particularly, in terms of the history of the general research on the Korean grammar.