Late Chosŏn Korean Intellectual Discourse on the Discrepancy between Speech and Writing

Abstract

Since the end of Japanese colonial rule in 1945, Koreans have been able to achieve a certain congruity between speech and writing. By contrast, for more than a millennium before the creation of the Korean alphabet, and even for centuries thereafter, people used one of a variety of vernacular Korean dialects in their everyday speech, while for inscription, government organs and the elite class adopted sinography when writing either in orthodox Literary Sinitic or in borrowed-graph inscription. Until the late nineteenth century, Korean linguistic life was characterized by this complex mix of spoken language vs. multiple inscriptional practices, which stimulated debate on the question of the discrepancy between speech and writing. Already prior to the late nineteenth-century debates, however, discussions of Korea’s complex language situation and suggestions for reforms figured prominently in discussions among the literati class about intellectual and practical desiderata from the seventeenth century onward. Yet, in sharp contrast to the great wealth of studies of the ideas and activities surrounding language reform introduced after the modern Kabo Reforms of 1894, pre-1894 language-reform debates and proposals have received only scant scholarly attention. This paper aims to supplement the history of Korean debate on language reform, including the question of the unity of speech and writing (so-called ŏnmun ilch’i 言文一致), by exploring the relevant language discourses conducted by Korean intellectuals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.