Evolved into Middle Korean in the tenth or thirteenth century
Language family
Koreanic
Old Korean
Early form
Proto-Koreanic
Writing system
Idu, Hyangchal, Gugyeol
Language codes
ISO 639-3
oko
Linguist List
oko
Glottolog
sill1240
Korean name
Hangul
고대 한국어
Hanja
古代韓國語
Revised Romanization
Godae hangugeo
McCune–Reischauer
Kodae han'gugŏ
North Korean name
Hangul
고대 조선어
Hanja
古代朝鮮語
Revised Romanization
Godae joseoneo
McCune–Reischauer
Kodae chosŏnŏ
Old Korean (North Korean name: 고대 조선어; South Korean name: 고대 한국어) is the first historically documented stage of the Korean language,[1] typified by the language of the Unified Silla period (668–935).
The boundaries of Old Korean periodization remain in dispute. Some linguists classify the sparsely attested languages of the Three Kingdoms of Korea as variants of Old Korean, while others reserve the term for the language of Silla alone. Old Korean traditionally ends with the fall of Silla in 935. This too has recently been challenged by South Korean linguists who argue for extending the Old Korean period to the mid-thirteenth century, although this new periodization is not yet fully accepted. This article focuses on the language of Silla before the tenth century.
Old Korean is poorly attested. Due to the paucity and poor quality of sources, modern linguists have "little more than a vague outline"[2] of the characteristics of Old Korean. The only surviving literary works are a little more than a dozen vernacular poems called hyangga. Hyangga use hyangchal writing. Other sources include inscriptions on steles and wooden tablets, glosses to Buddhist sutras, and the transcription of personal and place names in works otherwise in Classical Chinese. All methods of Old Korean writing rely on logographic Chinese characters, used to either gloss the meaning or approximate the sound of the Korean words. The phonetic value of surviving Old Korean texts is thus opaque. Its phoneme inventory seems to have included fewer consonants but more vowels than Middle Korean. In its typology, it was a subject-object-verb, agglutinative language, like both Middle and Modern Korean. However, Old Korean is thought to have differed from its descendants in certain typological features, including the existence of clausal nominalization and the ability of inflecting verb roots to appear in isolation.
Despite attempts to link the language to the putative Altaic family and especially to the Japonic languages, no links between Old Korean and any non-Koreanic language have been uncontroversially demonstrated.
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