충북 중원군 엄정면의 땅이름 연구 : 통일의 대상이 되었던 땅이름을 중심으로 = A Study of the Place Names of Eomjeong Borough in Joongwon Counry, Choonfchong Bukdo Province

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The government, in a Central Committee on place names session on March 14, unified and promulgated each of the first 8 of the 46 place names of Eomjeong Borough in Joongwon County, Choongchong Bukdo Province, which have so far been called differently among its inhabitants. It was known that the government also plans to do likewise within this year by selecting five model boroughs in five provinces. The place names thus fixed are reportedly to be used compulsorily in cartography, conduct of administrative affairs, and school textbooks.
Viewed in this context, the question of how to unify the diversely called regional names bears great significance. It appears that place names are made easily. Yet in these names dwell the soul and spirit of their users, and with time they become part of the local history and cannot be changed or disappear readily. Accordingly, if these place names handed down by word of mouth through thousnads of years are tampered with for the sake of mere administrative expediency in the course of their unification, it might result in burying alive all the living materials and soul of our history and culture.
Deeply mindful of this, the writer, to be of some help in the approach to and process of unifying place names henceforth, shows what are the problems involved and in which direction to go in doing so, by examining the place names decided upon and promulgated and the ones soon to be unified.
These problems have surfaced in the process of unifying district names :
1.Low are the levels of knowledge and perceptive powers of the administrators involved in the task and the respondents to the questionnaires.
2.Poor is the perception, that is, the perception of the significance of the Korean language, written and spoken, by the people involved in the task.
3.No research is done at all into place names.
4.Decisions are made on what is right or wrong, upon the basis of questionnaire results.
5.In the course of the task, orthographical errors are occasionally made and place names are in danger of becoming quite different names from their original as a result, especially, of incorrectly transcribing them into Chinese characters.
6.In some cases, no distinction is made between the upper and lower categories of place names.
7.A place name is sometimes called in two different ways due to the discrepancy between spoken and written speech : spoken speech in the native Korean tongue and written speech in the Korean characters originating from Chinese characters (but, in this case also, mainly in Chinese characters).
The following suggestions are offered :
1.Place names be unified, based on native ones.
2.Place names be written in the Korean alphabet.
3.Place names be written in conformity with the Korean orthography.
4.Place names coming direct from Chinese characters be changed into native ones.
5.Place names written incorrectly on maps and their orthographical errors be corrected.
6.Names not only of smaller districts but also larger administrative units (small village, large village, borough, township, county, city, province) be changed into native ones if possible and, if not, at least be written in the Korean alphabet.
7.The urgency be felt to get the names of smaller places on the maps.
We have our own writing system which fits our language system. But we have not utilized it to the fullest extent in many areas. The most conspicuous of all is the area of human names and place names. Even today, newspapers express all other things in Korean but use Chinese characters for both human and place names. There is no special reason for this.
Now, though belatedly, we ought to win back what is our own, beginning with our human and regional names. For example, a place name like '가래올' should not be written deliberately in the Chinese characters '楸洞' but stand as 가래올, unifying both its spoken and written form. In this way we should utilize our national language, spoken and written, in a convenient manner. I believe that this is the way we nurture our culture and our national spirit.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ.머리말
• Ⅱ.중원군 및 엄정면의 연혁
• Ⅲ.통일의 대상이 되었던 땅이름
• Ⅳ.땅이름 통일의 과정에서 드러난 문제점
• Ⅴ.제안