110-item wordlists for the Korean group (Korean family).

Languages included: Middle Korean.

Our wordlist is based on texts of the so-called Late Middle Korean period, AD 15th-16th c., since earlier Korean texts are less numerous and do not provide us with necessary lexical data. As stated by Lee and Ramsey (2011: 100–101), the Late Middle Korean corpus reflects “an extremely homogeneous language <...> then spoken by the upper classes of the central region”. The majority of our examples are extracted from the following four Middle Korean texts dated back to the reign of King Sejong and, more recently, to that of his son King Sejo, mid-15th c.:

1) YB: Yongbi ŏch’ŏnka ‘The Song of the Dragons Flying Through Heaven’, 龍飛御天歌.

2) SS: Sŏkpo sangjŏl ‘Detailed Articles on the Record of Sakyamuni’, 釋譜詳節.

3) WCh: Wŏrin ch’ŏn’gang chi kok ‘Songs of the Moon’s Imprint on the Thousand Rivers’, 月印千江之曲.

4) WS: Wŏrin sŏkpo,月印詳節 (an expanded compilation of SS and WCh).

Some instances were taken from the texts of the second half of the 15th c. and the 16th c.: Nŭngŏm kyŏng ŏnhae (楞嚴經諺解); Kugŭppang ŏnhae (救急方諺解); Samgang haengsil to (三綱行實圖); Tusi ŏnhae (杜詩諺解); Kŭmgang kyŏng samga hae (金剛經三家解); Sok Samgang haengsil to (續三綱行實圖); Pŏnyŏk Pak T’ongsa (飜譯朴通事); Kani pyŏgon pang ŏnhae (簡易辟瘟方諺解); Hunmong chahoe (訓蒙字會); Naehun (內訓); Sohak ŏnhae (小學諺解). See Lee & Ramsey 2011: 103–115 for description of the aforementioned sources.

We generally follow Lee & Ramsey 2011; Starostin, Dybo & Mudrak 2003 and transliterate the Hangul alphabet for Late Middle Korean as follows:

Korean script

Martin et al. 1975, Martin 1992

Current

p

p

ph

W

β

m

m

t

t

th

s

s

z

n

n

l

r

c

č

ch

čʰ

k

k

kh

h

h

ng

ŋ

G (Lee & Ramsey: ɣ/ɦ)

ʔ

a

a

e

ǝ

wo

o

o (Starostin et al.: ă)

ʌ

wu

u

u

ɨ

i

i

one dot (short high tone)

two dots (long rising tone)

ǎː

unmarked (short low tone)

Notes.

  1. {ㅿ} can be rendered as z at least for Late Middle Korean (Lee & Ramsey 2011: 139), but for Proto-Korean it seems more reasonable to interpret it as ɲ (Starostin, Dybo & Mudrak 2003: 163).
  2. {ㅓ}, which we traditionally transliterate as ǝ, was possibly pronounced as e.
  3. Middle Korean vowel prosody (tones, length) is very inconsistently quoted in the sources. In a substantial number of cases, Middle Korean dictionaries and grammars contradict each other in regard to tones and/or length. A lot of discrepancies occur, e.g., between different editions of Nam’s Middle Korean dictionary. We cite the headforms after Nam 1997, but please note that the offered prosodic transcription should be used with caution.

References

Lee, Iksop & S. Robert Ramsey. 2000. The Korean language (SUNY Series in Korean Studies). Albany: State University of New York Press.

Lee, Ki-Moon & S. Robert Ramsey. 2011. A history of the Korean language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Martin, Samuel E. 1992. A reference grammar of Korean: a complete guide to the grammar and history of the Korean language. Rutland, Vt: Charles E. Tuttle.

Martin, Samuel E., Yang Ha Lee & Sung-Un Chang. 1967. A Korean-English dictionary. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Martin, Samuel Elm. 1966. Lexical evidence relating Korean to Japanese. Language 42(2). 185. doi:10.2307/411687.

Nam, Kwang Woo. 1997. Koŏ sajŏn [A dictionary of the Ancient Korean language]. Seoul: Kjohaksa.

Ramstedt, Gustaf John. 1982. Paralipomena of Korean etymologies (Suomalais-Ugrilaisen Seuran Toimituksia, Mémoires de La Société Finno-Ougrienne 182). (Ed.) Songmoo Kho. Helsinki: Suomalais-ugrilainen Seura.

Sohn, Ho-Min. 2015. Middle Korean and Pre‐Modern Korean. In Lucien Brown & Jaehoon Yeon (eds.), The handbook of Korean linguistics (Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics), 439–458. First Edition. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell.

Starostin, Sergei A., Anna V. Dybo & Oleg A. Mudrak. 2003. Etymological dictionary of the Altaic languages (Handbook of Oriental Studies = Handbuch Der Orientalistik. Section Eight, Central Asia 8). 3 vols. Leiden: Brill.

Vovin, Alexander. 2000. Pre-Hankul materials, Koreo-Japonic, and Altaic. Korean Studies 24. 142–155.

Authors:

Middle Korean: Ekaterina Logunova, December 2020.