Gugyeol

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Gugyeol

Gugyeol is a system for rendering texts written in Classical Chinese

Classical Chinese

Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of written Chinese based on the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Chinese, making it different from any Chinese spoken language....
into understandable Korean

Korean language

Korean is the official language of North Korea and South Korea. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China....
. It was chiefly used during the Joseon Dynasty

Joseon Dynasty

Joseon , was a sovereign state founded by Taejo Taejo of Joseon, and lasted for approximately five centuries. It was founded in the aftermath of the overthrow of the Goryeo Kingdom at what is today the city of Kaesong....
, when readings of the Chinese classics were of paramount social importance. Unlike the idu
Idu

Idu is an archaic writing system which represents the Korean language using hanja. The term "idu" is used in two senses. It may refer to various systems of representing Korean phonology through Chinese characters, which were used from the Three Kingdoms of Korea to Joseon Dynasty periods....
and hyangchal
Hyangchal

Hyangchal is an archaic writing system of Korea and was used to transcribe the Korean language in hanja. Under the hyangchal system, Chinese characters were given a Korean reading based on the syllable associated with the character....
systems which preceded it, gugyeol used specialized markings, together with a subset of Chinese characters, to represented Korean morphological

Morphology (linguistics)

Morphology is the identification, analysis and description of structure of words . While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most languages, words can be related to other words by rules....
markers. Also, the idu and hyangchal systems appear to have been used primarily to render the Korean language into hanja

Hanja

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Encyclopedia

Gugyeol is a system for rendering texts written in Classical Chinese

Classical Chinese

Korean language

Joseon Dynasty

Morphology (linguistics)

Hanja

Hanja is the Korean language name for Chinese characters. More specifically, it refers to those Chinese characters borrowed from Chinese language and incorporated into the Korean language with Korean pronunciation....
; on the other hand, gugyeol sought to render Chinese texts into Korean with a minimum of distortion. Thus, in gugyeol, the original classical text was not modified, and the additional markers were simply inserted between phrases.

The name gugyeol can be rendered as "phrase parting," and may refer to the separation of one Chinese phrase from another. This name is itself believed to originate from the use of Chinese characters to represent the Middle Korean

Middle Korean

Middle Korean corresponds to the age from 10th century to 16th century, or from the era of Goryeo to the middle of Joseon.The language standard of this period is based on the dialect of Kaesong because the new Goryeo Dynasty moved its capital city to the north area of Korean Peninsula....
phrase ipgyeot, with a similar meaning. The gugyeol system is also sometimes referred to as to (?, ?) or hyeonto (??, ??), since to is also used to refer to the morphological affixes themselves; or as seogui (??, ??) which can be rendered as "interpretation of the classics."

Gugyeol first came into use in the early Goryeo

Goryeo

The Goryeo Dynasty was a sovereign state established in 918 by Taejo of Goryeo. It united the Later Three Kingdoms in 936 and ruled most of the Korean peninsula until it was removed by the Joseon dynasty in 1392....
dynasty. In this period, certain Chinese characters were used (along with specialized symbols) to represent Korean sounds through their meaning. For example, the syllable '?' (is) was represented with the Chinese character ?, since that character has the Korean meaning '??.' This technique came to be replaced in the late Goryeo period with using Chinese characters according to their sound. This later version of the gugyeol system was formalized by Jeong Mong-ju

Jeong Mong-ju

Jeong Mongju , often known by his pen name Po Eun, was a Korean scholar born during the Goryeo dynasty. He was born in Yeongcheon, to a family of the Yeongil Jeong clan....
and Gwon Geun around 1400 in the early Joseon Dynasty

Joseon Dynasty

Taejong of Joseon

Taejong was the third king of the Joseon Dynasty in Korea and the father of Sejong the Great of Joseon....
. At this time a number of Confucian classics, including the Classic of Poetry, were rendered into gugyeol.

The term gugyeol is often extended beyond this early system to similar uses of hangul

Hangul

Hangul is the native alphabet of the Korean language, as distinguished from the logogram Sino-Korean vocabulary hanja system. It was created in the mid-fifteenth century, and is now the official writing system of both North Korea and South Korea, being co-official in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture of China....
following the introduction of the Hunmin jeongeum
Hunmin Jeongeum

Promulgated in September or October 1446, Hunminjeongeum was an entirely new and native writing system for the Korean people. The script was initially named after the publication, but later came to be known as hangul....
in the 15th century. In this respect, gugyeol remains in occasional use in contemporary South Korea

South Korea

South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea , ), often referred to as Korea and the "names of Korea#Revival of the names", is a Semi-presidential system republic in East Asia, located in the southern half of the Korean Peninsula....
, where such techniques are still sometimes used to render the Confucian classics into readable form.

Gugyeol

See also

External links