[KS] Ch'oe Sejin; Days of the Week; Choso^n Dynasty Regnal Years
Stefan Ewing
sa_ewing at hotmail.com
Sun Jun 12 15:24:15 EDT 2005
Dear KS list members:
Thanks to Lawrence Driscoll, Robert Ramsey, and Don Baker for your
informative answers to my questions.
1. In follow-up to Professor Ramsey, would it be reasonable then to
hypothesize that the modern-day _hun_ readings of characters are not merely
definitions _per se_, but rather hangulized preservations of actual ancient
readings of those characters? Thank you for the explanation of the origin
of the name "siot," and I will definitely try to hunt down Gari Ledyard's
work _The Korean Language Reform of 1446_.
I may have to look at _hyangga_, too. Where may I find David McCann's
translation of the "Song of Ch'oyang"? (Although I am more looking forward
to his introduction to that book on Korean romanization that he wishes Gari
Ledyard, Robert Ramsey, and Ross King--and hopefully such scholars as
Sangoak Lee, Ikseop Lee, and others--would write!)
Along with Don Baker, I too would be curious to know where and when the
practice he mentioned (writing a character with the index finger in the palm
of one's opposite hand) originated. I once met a westerner in Osaka who was
vacationing from teaching English in Taiwan, who used this method for
illustrating a character; so it might possibly be more or less universal in
CJK (or CJKV?) countries.
2. Lawrence Driscoll's comment that the origin of hanja/kanji day names may
lie in Jesuit missionaries in China is plausible. The late arrival of those
names in Korea (Don Baker)--and their subsequent disappearance in
China--also makes sense. Kojong adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1895
("Ko^nyang," Korean Yahoo Encyclopedia,
http://kr.encycl.yahoo.com/enc/info.html?key=1044470&q=??), a few months
before he enacted the era _Ko^nyang_.
Modern-day Buddhist calendars give, if I recall correctly, day numbers
according to the lunar cycle in three sets of ten. This might help to
explain why the native Korean day numbers (harunnal, it'u^nnal, etc.) go up
to ten (yo^ru^llal), then skip all numbers to twenty (su^munal; disregarding
poru^mnal for the fifteenth). (Would, say, the 22nd of December in the
lunar calendar then have been called in native Korean _so^ttal su^mul
it'u^nnal_?)
3. Finally, thanks to Don Baker for confirming what the correspondent (an
SOAS student) told me. The practice of persevering in using _Myo^ngnara_
reign dates is interesting. In the general light of _Choso^n Malgi_ era
names, I just found the article "Yo^nho" in the _Hanguk Minjok Munhwa
Sajo^n_ (KODIA; "Digital Hanguk'ak")
(http://www.koreandb.net/dictionaries/Viewframe.aspx?id=4198), which also
confirms the use of Chinese reign names during most of the Choso^n Dynasty.
It also answers another question I had: the era _Kaeguk_--which preceded
_Ko^nyang and measured years from the founding of the Choso^n dynasty--was
enacted in 1894, making that year _Kaeguk 503 nyo^n_ (counting 1392 as year
1, presumably).
With four different era names in the sixteen years between 1894 and 1910
(Kaeguk to 1896, Ko^nyang to 1897, Kwangmu to 1907, and Yunghu^i), the
Chinese and Korean regnal years that preceded them, the lunar and solar
calendars, ten-day versus seven-day weeks, _and_ the _yuksip kapcha_, times
were tumultuous enough without the added complication of so many different
ways of numbering dates!
Stefan Ewing
>From: "Baker Don" <ubcdbaker at hotmail.com>
>Reply-To: Korean Studies Discussion List <Koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws>
>To: Koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
>Subject: RE: [KS] Ch'oe Sejin; Days of the Week; Choso^n Dynasty Regnal
>Years
>Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 09:07:11 -0700
>
>I'll leave it to the historical linguistics people to answer the first
>question, though I would like to add a related question: When did Koreans
>first begin writing Chinese characters on the palms of their hands with
>their fingers when they wanted to show a listener which Chinese character
>they were talking about?
>
>As for the days of the week, that is clearly a Japanese import. The whole
>notion of a 7 day week wasn't accepted in Seoul until the end of the 19th
>century and it took a while to get people in the countryside to start
>thinking about a week as 7 days long rather than 10. A month was
>traditionally divided into the first 10 days, the 2nd ten days, and the 3rd
>ten days. As for the exact name for a specific day of that ten-day week, I
>don't know of any, though the literate could use the appropriate hanja pair
>from the sixty cyclical calendrical items that were used to name days and
>years.
>
>As for official dates on documents, as a tributary state of China, Korea
>was supposed to use Chinese reign titles for dates. In internal documents,
>Korean reign titles could be used (as long as the rulers in Beijing didn't
>find out about it). It has also been reported that, especially in the 17th
>and 18th centuries, some Koreans who refused to accept the legitimacy of
>the Manchu conquest of the Ming, continued to use Ming reign dates long
>after the Ming was dead. I vaguely recall seeing a Ming reign date on an
>18th century Korean document, but don't remember when or where I saw it.
>
>Don Baker
>Associate Professor, Department of Asian Studies
>Director, Centre for Korean Research
>University of British Columbia
>Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Z2
>dbaker at interchange.ubc.ca
(My original post deleted due to unsightly HTML mangling)
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