Our Language Was Different from China's
나랏말싸미 듕귁에 달아 문자와로 서르 사맛디 아니할쎄.
Hunminjeongeum opens with this sentence. It is the first line of the preface written by King Sejong himself.
In plain English, it means: "The language of our country differs from that of China, and so it does not fit with Chinese characters."
The preface then continues:
이런 전차로 어린 백성이 니르고져 할 배 이셔도 마참내 제 뜨들 시러 펴디 몯할 노미 하니라
"For this reason, many uneducated commoners have things they wish to say but are ultimately unable to express their thoughts."
The word eorin (어린) in the original means "young" in modern Korean, but here it does not refer to children. In Sejong's time, it meant "unlearned" or "lacking education." It referred to common people who had little or no access to learning, particularly those who could not read or write.
The people of Joseon thought and spoke in Korean, but when they wrote, they had to use Chinese characters, known in Korea as hanja. Since hanja were China's script, they had clear limits when it came to writing Korean as it was spoken.
That is not to say there was no way to write Korean with Chinese characters. Early on, Koreans devised systems such as idu and hyangchal, which adapted hanja to record their own language. But these methods took considerable time and knowledge to learn and use, so they could hardly be called a script that anyone could easily pick up.
Everyone had a language to speak, but few could put it into writing.
Today, when Koreans think of King Sejong, the first thing that comes to mind is Hangul, and the second is probably aemin (愛民), "love for the people."
Aemin is a value that runs through many of Sejong's policies. The creation of Hunminjeongeum was perhaps the greatest expression of this ideal.
Writing Korean with Borrowed Characters
Long before Hangul was created, there were many attempts to preserve the Korean language in writing. The best known are hyangchal, idu, and gugyeol.
Hyangchal
Hyangchal is a way of writing entire Korean sentences by borrowing the meanings and sounds of Chinese characters. It was used mainly to record hyangga, songs sung by the people of Silla.
Only 25 hyangga survive today: 14 in Samguk Yusa (Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms) and 11 in Gyunyeo-jeon, a text from the Goryeo period. They include "Seodongyo" and "Cheoyongga."
Hyangchal mixed characters read for their meaning with characters read for their sound. In general, words carrying the core meaning borrowed a character's meaning, while grammatical elements such as particles and verb endings borrowed its sound.
Because adapting hanja to Korean in this way was so complicated, scholars still disagree over the exact readings today. Meanwhile, as literature in Classical Chinese flourished, the tradition of writing hyangga in hyangchal gradually faded during the Goryeo period.
Idu
Idu was used mainly for government documents and for private documents such as deeds for buying and selling land and nobi (servants of unfree status). Chinese characters were arranged in Korean word order, and grammatical elements such as particles and endings were also written by borrowing a character's sound or meaning.
For example, 爲 was read as ha- ("to do") and 是 as i- ("to be") to express Korean grammar.
Idu appears to have been in use since the Silla period. Tradition credits 'Seol Chong' with inventing it, but it is more accurate to say that he organized and refined a system that had already been developing before his time.
※ 'Seol Chong (薛聰)' was a great scholar of Silla and the son of the Buddhist monk Wonhyo, known for teaching people how to read the Confucian classics in Korean.
That idu was still in use during the Joseon dynasty can be seen in Daemyeongnyul Jikhae, published in 1395, the fourth year of King Taejo's reign. It renders the Great Ming Code, the law code of China's Ming dynasty, into idu so that officials could understand the laws and apply them in their work.
Gugyeol
Gugyeol is a method of adding Korean particles and endings to a Classical Chinese text to make it easier to read and understand.
Take the opening line of the Analects: "學而時習之 不亦說乎." Read in Korean, it becomes "To learn and to practice what you have learned from time to time, is that not a joy?"
Gugyeol marks the Chinese text with Korean grammatical elements such as -myeon ("if, when") and -a (a question ending). In actual gugyeol texts, these markers were written by borrowing the sound of a character or with abbreviated forms made from just part of a character's strokes.
Some forms of gugyeol even guided readers through the Chinese text in Korean word order, but at heart it was a tool for reading and understanding Classical Chinese.
All three methods reflect the efforts of earlier Koreans to put their language into writing. Borrowing the meanings and sounds of characters, abbreviating strokes, rearranging word order: they found every possible way to work with the script they had.
But there was a fundamental limit. People had to learn the meanings and sounds of Chinese characters, and the writing systems themselves were complicated. For common people who wanted to learn to read and write but never had the chance, it remained a high barrier.
Continued in Part 2