[KS] Re: Taehanin cengkyopo

[Ross King]

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Hi Ann:

>You were unaware at the time that Chwunwen Li Kwang-swu wrote several of the
>works in the Taehanin cengkypo, but acknowledged this later at my talk at
>UBC.  Would you revise your conclusions in light of this new knowledge?

Not really. The key pieces authored by Yi Kwangswu (key for my article,
anyway) were the experiments in 'de-syllabified' (kalo phule ssuki) hankul.
I feel stupid for not realizing earlier that Yi Kwangswu was behind those
experiments, but we live and learn.

>For example, you observe the lack of lenition of /p/ in p-irregular verbs
>e.g. /nup.esno-lamyen/ and you attribute this to the influence of Hamgyong
>dialects spoken by most Koreans on Russian territory, and/or strict
>morphophonemic treatment of verbs.

The "and/or" is crucial -- it seems clear that there was a line of
orthographic thought already prevalent by then (presumably strongest among
Cwu Sikyeng and his students, later championed by his student Kim Twupong
in North Korea) which said: 'write all verbs with alternations as if they
were completely regular and ignore in spelling any changes in
pronunciation'. In the case of verbs like teW- 'hot', chwuW- 'cold', etc.,
such a treatment yields a spelling that coincides perfectly with the way
these verbs are actually pronounced in Hamkyeng dialects, the form(s) of
Korean which dominated in Russian terrirtory. E.g., tepta, tepe, tepessta,
tepumyen, etc.

>Now that you know this was Chwunwen, and he was not from Hamgyong province
>but from P'yongan province, would you modify your conclusions?

Nope.

>Was this not
>the influence of P'yongan dialect, or a reflection of practices in Korea at
>the time?

Neither.

>According to Li Swung-nyeng's Pangen sacen  [snip]

Whatever his dictionary might say, the lack of lenition in so-called
'p-irregular verbs' is by no means typical of any form of Phyengan dialect
(except in some border regions along Hamkyeng), and Phyengan speakers like
Yi Kwangswu (if indeed he even spoke much of the dialect) would have been
drowned in a sea of Hamkyeng forms on Russian soil. As for whether or not
such orthographic practice was common in Korea at the time, again, no.

But perhaps the point is that such orthographic practice (strict
morphophonemic spelling with no concessions made to actual pronunciation in
the case of 'irregular' verbs) -- whether due to a certain ideological
position on orthography or to a desire to reflect the Korean language as
spoken by most Koreans in Russia, OR to a fortuitous combination of both
these factors -- is not at all confined to the Tayhanin Cyengkyopo and the
materials authored by Yi Kwangsu, but rather is characteristic of virtually
ALL materials in hankul from the Russian Far East, starting WITH the
Tayhanin Cyengkyopo (1913-14, if I recall correctly), right up to the
autumn of 1937, the year the Koreans were deported and  all the Soviet
Korean publications in Korean ceased to exist.

Some of the experiments tried by Yi Kwangswu in the Tayhanin Cyengkyopo
with 'de-syllabified' (kalo phule ssuki) Korean orthography do, by the way,
resurface in the heady experimentation with Latinized Korean writing in the
early 1930s (when some Soviet Korean intellectuals, as part of a Union-wide
Latinization movement) proposed to abolish hankul and replace it with a
Latinized script
-- lots of lessons there for NAKL romanizers!). It would be hard to prove
that those ideas went all the way back to Yi Kwangswu and the Tayhanin
Cyengkyopo (though not out of the question).

The article of mine to which you refer was originally part of a much longer
(and still unpublished) work which surveyed Korean orthographic practice in
Russian from the late 1800s up to 1937, and the orthographic facts in the
Tayhanin Cyengkyopo need to be seen in this broader context.

If anything, the fact that Yi Kwangswu was behind the kalo phule ssuki
experimentation in the Tayhanin Cyengyopo suggests that he should be
included among the very few first 'linguistic entrepreneurs' I wrote about
in:

1998.  "Nationalism and Language Reform in Korea: The Questione della lingua in
        Precolonial Korea." In: Timothy Tangherlini and Hyung-il Pai (eds.),
        Nationalism and the Construction of Korean Identity.  Berkeley, CA:
        University of California (Center  for Korean Studies Monograph
Series) Press, pp.
        33-72.

This article only goes up to 1910, and treats Se Cayphil, Yu Kilcwun and
Cwu Sikyeng as the main 'linguistic entrepreneurs' of their time. The
'desyllabification' ~ 'kalo phule ssuki' idea was obviously a powerful and
attractive notion to many Korean intellectuals from about 1910 on, and
maintained almost a cult following right up until the advent of the
personal computer (in a way also substituting for the
Latinization/romanization craze which affected so many Asian countries in
the 1920s and 1930s, but which never got far in Korea). In this connection
(and in other, more literary~linguistic senses), Yi Kwangswu would follow
hard on the heels of these men as one of Korea's important early
'linguistic entrepreneurs'.

Cheers,


Ross King
Associate Professor of Korean
University of British Columbia