Home Gudgeon and gist Language Log Korean oralization of Literary Sinitic

Korean oralization of Literary Sinitic

Language Log 2024-04-23

Si Nae Park came to Penn last Thursday (4/18/24) to talk about kugyŏl / gugyeol / kwukyel 구결 口訣 ("oral glossing").

Gugyeol, or kwukyel, is a system for rendering texts written in Classical Chinese into understandable Korean. It was used chiefly during the Joseon dynasty, when readings of the Chinese classics were of paramount social importance. Thus, in gugyeol, the original text in Classical Chinese was not modified, and the additional markers were simply inserted between phrases.

The parts of the Chinese sentence would then be read in Korean out of sequence to approximate Korean (SOV) rather than Chinese (SVO) word order. A similar system for reading Classical Chinese is still used in Japan and is known as kanbun kundoku.

(Wikipedia)

Park's analyses and explanations were like a revelation to me for a number of reasons.  First of all, I was already familiar with the analogous Japanese method for reading Literary Sinitic, called kundoku, which involves a lot of rearrangement, modification, and annotation of the text to make it more like Japanese, whereas it seems that kugyŏl tries to stay closer to the Literary Sinitic.

I was also long aware of the Sinitic expression kǒujué 口訣, but in Chinese it means something quite different than it does in Korean:

(Wiktionary)

This is not to say that premodern Chinese did not see a need for making the content of Literary Sinitic available for those who were unable to read it.  For this purpose, socially sensitive individuals resorted to a variety of devices, including oral and written translations into the vernacular, as I demonstrated in "Language and Ideology in the Written Popularizations of the Sacred Edict", in David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski, eds., Popular Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley and Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 1985), pp. 325-359.

Chinese referred to these devices as zhíjiě 直解 ("direct explanation"), zhíshuō yàolüè 直說要略 ("directly expounded essentials"), yǎnyì 演義 ("elaboration"), tújiě 圖解 ("illustrated explanation"), and many others, which shows that there was a need for making literary texts available to the broader, uneducated populace, and that it was being met by various means.

Nowadays, almost all the major literary and classical Chinese texts have been rendered into Mandarin, and these are called 白話翻譯 ("vernacular translations").

The Koreans during the middle of the second millennium AD also had textbooks for learning vernacular Sinitic.

Bak Tongsa (Chinese: 朴通事; lit. 'Pak the interpreter') was a textbook of colloquial northern Chinese published by the Bureau of Interpreters in Korea in various editions between the 14th and 18th centuries. Like the contemporaneous Nogeoldae ('Old Cathayan'), it is an important source on both Late Middle Korean and the history of Mandarin Chinese. Whereas the Nogeoldae consists of dialogues and focusses on travelling merchants, Bak Tongsa is a narrative text covering society and culture.

(source)

Lest I overlook another significant Korean means for annotating Chinese-language texts, I should mention eonhae 언해 諺解, which the Japanese also had, genkai げんかい 諺解 (lit., "aphoristic explanation").

In sum, I will make two main points:  1.there's a sharp difference between oralization and vernacularization, 2. kugyŏl belongs to the former, beon-yeog 번역 / hon'yaku 翻訳 / fānyì 翻譯 to the latter.

 

Selected readings