[KS] Koreanstudies Digest, Vol 110, Issue 11

[Andrew]

Thank-you Seunghun Lee and Werner for the useful insights particularly on
the origin of tones.

The reason this seems significant to me is if the tone of a character
sometimes distinguishes its function as a verb or noun etc, it would
greatly aid in translation.  From this point of view, it's a shame Koreans
didn't maintain the system of small circles in the corner of characters
found in 용비어천가 (and I assume 훈민정음 though don't have a copy to double-check.
 Was it introduced at that time or had it been used previously?)

I guess there are two possible reasons why they dropped the system of
explicitly marking the tones. 1)  Either Koreans already were not
pronouncing the tone when reading hanmun and paid less heed to it in
general (and/or they considered that the circles looked ugly).  Or 2)
Koreans were familiar enough with Classical Chinese that they could deduce
the tone from the grammatical and textual context and so did not need to
mark them.  i.e. To them the grammatical function or specific meaning of
the character was always clear enough that they didn't need the tone to
help decipher it in the way I'm suggesting would be useful to a less versed
foreign translator like myself.


Regarding the 106韻字 or "representative rhyming characters" I had initially
asked about.  I've realized now, they are not (just?) a system for ordering
character dictionaries, but each of the 106 characters represents a "rhyme
group".  The characters which rhyme in hansi quatrains (the last character
on the 2nd, 4th and often 1st line) all have to be classified in the same
group.

How these rhyme groups were originally formulated by Chinese poets is
something I'd still be interested to know.

An interesting point is that the rhyming characters in Korean hansi
quatrains often also rhyme in Korean (i.e. the hangul pronunciation
rhymes), but these characters do not necessarily rhyme in modern Mandarin
(which for this purpose I'm assuming wasn't too different to Qing dynasty
Mandarin).  Maybe it is just coincidence that Korean still preserves many
of the immediate rhymes of earlier Chinese.  Or, did Korean poets like Yu
Deuk-gong (유득공 1748-1807) make an extra effort to not only have their poems
rhyme according to classical convention, but at the same time also in
contemporary Korean pronunciation?  (By 'rhyming in Korean,' I mean in a
sense audible to Western ears, 회,개,래; 향,왕,장; 지미시 etc.)

sincerely to all,
Andrew Logie
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