Hunmin jeongeum Haeryae (Sangjubon) and its Brush-written Notes

Kim Juwon,Nam Kwonhui 훈민정음학회 2014 Scripta Vol.6 No.1

This article aims to present a critical bibliography of a particular copy of Hunmin jeongeum haerye ( 訓民正音解例 , Explanations and examples of the correct sounds for the instruction of the people), the existence of which was made known to the public on July 30th, 2008. It is called Hunmin jeongeum haerye Sangjubon (hereafter “Sangjubon”) following the city name where the book came to light. The purpose of this article is two-fold. It first provides a general biblio-graphic description of the book. Then, it further investigates when and why the brush-written notes inside the book were made through an examination of their content. We have reached the following conclusions: 1. Printed using the same woodblocks, Sangjubon belongs to the same edition as Gansongbon. Unlike Gansongbon which has truncated top and bottom margins, Sangjubon seems to be preserved in its original size. 2. The brush-written notes were written in the top and bottom margins of the pages containing the poetic summary of the “Explanation of the design of the letters.” Included in the notes are (i) a list of the 23 letters for “initial sounds” (consonants), each with an example and additional pieces of classificatory information regarding the Five Sounds, the Five Notes, and the laryngeal features (cheongtak 淸濁 ), (ii) a list of the 11 letters for “medials” (vowels), and (iii) a discussion on the correspondence between the Five Sounds and the Five Notes. 3. Regarding (iii) above, we show that the particular text the note writer referred to was the “Sìshēng wǔyīn jiǔnòng fǎnniǔtú xù” ( 四聲五音九弄反紐圖 序 ), written by the Buddhist monk Shéngǒng ( 神珙 ) and contained in the Enlarged and expanded jade chapters (Dàguǎng yìhuì yùpiān 大廣益會玉篇 , published in 1013 in the Northern Song). 4. Taking into consideration the Sino-Korean readings transcribed in the Korean alphabet next to the Chinese characters, we argue that the notes reflect Southeastern (Gyeongsang) dialect. We also date the notes to the 18th century or later.

Lorenzo Hervas (1735–1809) and the account of the Japanese and Korean scripts in his Paleografía universal

Sven Osterkamp 훈민정음학회 2015 Scripta Vol.7 No.1

The aim of the present paper is to introduce the little studied Paleografia universal of Lorenzo Hervas (1735–1809) and especially its chapter treating the Japanese and Korean scripts. While the manuscript nowadays kept at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid (Mss. 8496–8498) was only finished in 1805, the chapter in question can be demonstrated to have already been written by 1798. Together with Joseph Hager’s well-known “Alphabet of Corea” (1800) Paleografia thus constitutes the earliest Western work to contain an actual specimen of han’gul, predating those by Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat and others by a number of years. Unlike Hager, Hervás even had an actual Korean print at his disposal, the original of which could be located in the Vatican library. Positioning Paleografìa in the history of Western studies of both Korean and Japanese, this paper will outline Hervás’s actual achievements and demonstrate in how far the flawed results can be reconciled with the author’s claims as to how they were arrived at. As will become clear, a correct understanding and decipherment of the Korean script was all but impossible from the beginning due to the paucity of available sources as well as erroneous and conflicting Western accounts of the Japanese syllabaries.

Can a Logographic Script be Simplified?

Zev Handel 훈민정음학회 2013 Scripta Vol.0 No.5

In the 1950s and 1960s, the government of the People’s Republic of China undertook, in two stages, a carefully planned “simplification” of the logographic Chinese script. Drawing on a variety of historical precedents, over 2,000 individual graphs were modified in an attempt to make the script easier to learn and use. This was the first significant change in the official form of the Chinese script in nearly two millennia, and resulted in the script variety that is widely used today in mainland China, commonly termed “simplified Chinese characters.” Drawing on recent psycholinguistic experiments that attempt to characterize the cognitive functions involved in Chinese script processing, this study revisits long-standing questions about the efficacy of character simplification and provides some additional theoretical insights into the nature of logographic writing. The central conclusion of this study is that meaningful simplification of a logographic script is possible, but that today’s simplified character script cannot be characterized as an effective reform by any reasonable metric—it is only “simpler” in the crudest of senses. After evaluating the results of recent studies on the cognitive processing of Chinese characters, I introduce the concept of semantic orthographic depth and argue that a true simplification of a logographic script should be based on regularization of semantic and phonetic components, rather than on reduction of the number of graphs or the reduction of the number of strokes per graph. Furthermore, there is reason to believe that a well functioning logographic script has cognitive advantages over purely phonographic scripts. As a thought experiment, I apply these conclusions to sketch out a scheme for what genuinely effective logographic reform of the Chinese script might have looked like.

Laying a foundation for tone orthography research and decision-making:

David Roberts 훈민정음학회 2015 Scripta Vol.7 No.1

The standard orthography of Kabiye (Togo) does not mark tone. In such a context, how can a researcher adequately assess the degree of ambiguity in the written language and make a valid contribution to the debate about how tone might be incorporated in the second generation of language development? This article approaches that question, not from the perspective of phonological analysis which has tended to dominate the literature, but from the point of view of the linguistics of writing. Applying Catach’s (1984) model of lexical ambiguity to Kabiye, it advocates the development of a homograph corpus in which words, roots and affixes are included or excluded on the basis of semantic, morphological and dialectal criteria. A homographic prefix with pronominal, negative and immediative interpretations illustrates how the homograph corpus is then applied to a frequency and distribution analysis of ambiguity in natural written contexts, and an analysis of oral reading errors in the classroom. A dictation task reveals that participants who were taught a segmental modification of the negative prefix write with greater accuracy than participants who were taught to add tone diacritics.

Tokens in China, Europe and Africa - The Significance

Denise SCHMANDT-BESSERAT 훈민정음학회 2012 Scripta Vol.0 No.4

Over the last decades, excavators in various parts of the world, in particular China, Europe and Africa, have reported finding clay tokens similar to the Near Eastern counters, forerunners of the cuneiform script. In this paper I will argue that the ubiquity of geometric counters for counting in one-to-one correspondence highlights 1) a fundamental aptitude of the human mind; 2)the unique contribution of the Mesopotamian Uruk state administration that developed the system into writing.

The Korean Writing System in the World of the 21 st Century

S. Robert Ramsey 훈민정음학회 2010 Scripta Vol.0 No.2

The advocacy of the Korean Alphabet as a world writing system has largely been focused on the suitability of Hangul 1 for representing the sound systems of other languages. But it is not the mechanics of the writing system that gives it universal significance. Rather, it is the story of Hangul’s creation. The invention represents human values that belong not just to Korea, but to all of humankind in our modern world. One of those universal values is the application of rational thought and the scientific method, documented in detail almost never seen in pre- modern times. The other universal value is concern for the disadvantaged. In an elitist, aristocratic world, Sejong was a passionate advocate of universal literacy. His advocacy is seen not only in the Hunmin chŏngŭm of 1446, but even more strongly in his earlier writings in the Samgang haengsil to of 1434. Moreover, in that earlier text he advocated extending literacy not only to the common man, but to women and girls as well.

Avoiding Circularity: A Response to Handel

J. Marshall Unger 훈민정음학회 2016 Scripta Vol.8 No.1

In vol. 5 of this journal, Zev Handel commented negatively on claims of John DeFrancis and the author about the notion of logogram. The author defended those claims in vol. 6, eliciting a lengthy surrejoinder from Handel in vol. 7. This article continues the discussion, emphasizing the need to avoid the circularity of saying that logograms are graphic units of logographic writing systems, and the context-sensitive nature of how graphic units represent chunks of language.

Orthographic Monosyllabicity

William G. Boltz 훈민정음학회 2016 Scripta Vol.8 No.1

Linguistically, monosyllabicity means that all of the words (technically, the morphemes) of a language consist of only one syllable. This entails a claim that there are no syllables in such a language that do not have a meaning. Chinese, both modern and Classical, has often been described as monosyllabic. It is clear from direct inspection that no modern Chinese language is monosyllabic, and it is equally clear from the lexical analysis of pre-modern written texts that the Classical Chinese language is also not monosyllabic. In both languages it is easy to find words of two syllables, where one or both of the syllables have no independent usage or meaning. But for Classical Chinese in its written form, owing to the nature of the Chinese writing system, we do not find syllables that do not convey, or at least imply, a meaning. Classical Chinese is known only through its representation in written texts, that is, through the medium of Chinese characters. Except when overtly marked as desemanticized, Chinese characters typically carry both sound and meaning. For the great majority of characters this is directly observable in the character’s graphic structure. Most characters include in their composition a semantically marked graphic component, known variously as a semantic determinative, semantic classifier, or somewhat imprecisely, a “radical”, which is associated with or in some way representative of a meaning. Even characters for what are linguistically asemantic syllables typically include a semantic component in their graphic structure, making them orthographically “words.” In this sense Classical Chinese is orthographically monosyllabic.

Developing a Terminology for Pre-hangeul Korean Transcription

Lee SeungJae 훈민정음학회 2016 Scripta Vol.8 No.1

This paper argues that the term “character-borrowing transcription” 借字表記 is insufficient to describe the entirety of writing and transcription systems used in Korea prior to the promulgation of the Hunmin jeongeum (“Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People”) in 1446. First, in recent years, elucidatory gugyeol 口訣 texts have been discovered which utilize a variety of dots and lines (“. , : , .. , / ,∖ , | , - ”) that bear no resemblance to and are not derived from Sinitic characters, in order to transcribe Korean grammatical forms (to 吐 ). Second, characters heretofore considered to be exclusively “gugyeol characters” (‘  [mye],’ ‘  [a],’ and ‘  [ma]’) have been identified frequently on mokgan (wooden tablet writing), as well as in idu and hyangchal texts. Third, the terms gugyeolja, iduja, and hyangchalja are inadequate because they are not based on the orthographic nature of these characters, but on textual differences in usage. This paper proposes the adoption of a new generic term, “Korean characters” han(guk)ja 韓 ( 國 ) 字 , to describe the entirety of pre-hangeul Korean transcription. This broad category is divided into four sub-categories: “Sinitic Korean characters” han han(guk)ja 漢韓 ( 國 ) 字 , “Korean half characters” han(guk)banja 韓 ( 國 ) 半字 , “Korean-made characters” han(guk)jeja 韓 ( 國 ) 製字 , and “Korean point-symbol characters” han(guk)jeomja 韓 ( 國 ) 點字 .

The Prototypical Determinatives in Egyptian and Chinese Writing

Chen Yongsheng 훈민정음학회 2016 Scripta Vol.8 No.1

From the perspective of prototype theory in cognitive science this article conducts a comparative study between prototypical determinatives in Egyptian and Chinese writing. A prototypical determinative stands for a prototypical member (or subcategory) of a category, and is hence used to mark words labelling other members. Through comparable examples of prototypical determinatives in Chinese and Egyptian writing, this article analyses the working mechanisms of prototypical determinatives and the cultural factors that influence their usage.