Inscribing and Erasing the Vernacular in Late Chosŏn Linguistic Imaginations

• In Event: Sound and Script: Phonological Scholarship and Intellectual Life in Early Modern East Asia

Abstract

Premodern Korean literature pivoted around a cosmopolitan, high-prestige Literary Sinitic (classical Chinese; K. hanmun), which formed a complex relationship with the local vernacular (the Korean language) and was the literary medium par excellence. This paper introduces some of the flourishing and many-hued scholarly practices during the 18th and 19th centuries concerned with the vernacular language and script. To some, the Korean script (now known as han'gŭl) was a script that helped the Korean language register “correct sounds” (chŏng'ŭm; C. zhengyin) of sinographs (Chinese characters) that were more authentic than contemporary Chinese pronunciations. Others argued that contemporary Sino-Korean pronunciations were full of errors and needed to be rectified according to the rhyming principles of contemporary spoken Chinese. Yet others saw virtue in the local verbal expressions of spoken Korean and promoted the use of of Korean vernacular vocabulary in otherwise sinographic writing. Some contended that Chosŏn people should abandon spoken Korean altogether and adopt spoken Chinese, accusing the former of being unable to bring about the kind of unity between language and writing that spoken Chinese allegedly enjoys, while others endeavored to compile the lyrics of vernacular songs and contemporary Korean proverbs by rendering them into Literary Sinitic. The paper seeks to answer questions like: (1) What ideas about sound and script account for this diversity of views? (2) To what extent did such linguistic concerns translate into the question of literary style and the vernacularization of Literary Sinitic as a literary language?

Author

• Si Nae Park, Harvard University