Research on Korean Lexicon: Examine the entry "Jiu" in "Zailin Leishi"

Author: Wang Shuoquan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-04-01
Features: Northern Song Dynasty of China (960-1127 AD). In the article "Chicken Forest Miscellaneous Records" written by the translator Sun Mu during his mission to Goryeo in Joseon, more than 300 social life terms used by the residents of the Korean Peninsula at that time were recorded using the pronunciation of Chinese characters. By comparing this with modern Korean, it can be found that the pronunciation and meaning of the Goryeo dialect vocabulary recorded in "Chicken Forest Miscellaneous Records" are similar to, or even identical to, modern Korean. That is to say, the vocabulary currently referred to as Korean "native words" shows a remarkable degree of similarity and a high ratio of resemblance to the ancient Chinese vocabulary recorded in early Chinese classics such as "Shan Hai Jing" (Classic of Mountains and Seas), "Erya" (Classified Dictionary), and "Shu Wen" (Explaining Characters). Through comparison and analysis, the following speculation can be made: The ancestors of Korean and the ancestors of Chinese may have originated from the same source in a much earlier historical period (before the 20th century BC); the development of modern Korean from ancient Korean at that time is much slower than the development of modern Chinese from ancient Chinese at that time. Korean is an extremely stable language. And this is precisely the reason why modern Korean and Chinese have relatively obvious differences. Not only grammar, but just by examining the Korean vocabulary in this book, the above conclusion can be drawn. This book relies on modern Korean, selecting some Korean vocabulary records from the "Fang Yan" (Local Language) section of "Chicken Forest Miscellaneous Records" in the 10th to 12th centuries, and comparing them with ancient Chinese vocabulary. The conclusion is: their coexisting relationship is long-standing.