[KS] Koguryo part of China?

??? Gary Rector/Yu gary at korealore.com
Sun Jan 4 23:38:46 EST 2004


Statements such as

> And, once again, Koguryo people were not linguistic ancestors of the
> present-day Koreans, from what we know it appears that their language was
> probably closer to Japanese.

have been repeated a few times in this thread. While it appears certain that
the direct "ancestor" of modern Korean is the language of Silla, such
statements can be misleading because they seem to imply that there
was no relationship or only a distant one between the language of Goguryeo
and that of Silla (or of modern-day Korean). Though the extremely limited
amount of available documentation makes it difficult to access ancient
Korean, through analysis of idu representations of place names, personal
names,
titles, and so on and of stories and bits of ancient Korean vocabulary found
in Chinese
and Japanese writings, some linguists have presented good evidence that
the languages of Silla, Baekje, and Goguryeo were extremely closely related
and may have been dialects that were to a great extent mutually
intelligible.
Ryu Ryeol (1983, Senarasigiuy ridue daehan yeongu 'Research on the Idu
of the Three Kingdoms Period') and Gim Su-Gyeong (1989, Senarasigi
eoneoryeoksa-e gwanhan namjoseonhakgyeuy gyeonhae-e daehan
bipanjeok gochal, 'A Critical Study of South Korean Academic Views of
the Linguistic History of the Three Kingdoms Period') are two whose works
happen to be close at hand here. They are both North Koreans.

Gary Rector






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