The Formation and Alternation of Sino-Korean Pronunciation

조선한자음(朝鮮漢字音)의 성립(成立)과 변천(變遷)

In most Asian areas Chinese writing and characters had been used as a unique recording device. The way to account for the circumstance related with the writing system could be twofold. Firstly the races inhabited around Sino-territory actually neither used the type of languages as Chinese - not isolating type but agglutinative one - nor established any independent writing letters. Secondly those people who belonged to the races accepted the writing system of China due to the frequent cultural and economical interchange between them and Chinese people. In Korean peninsula the same situation of linguistic phenomenon had been pervasive. The aborigine of the territory who acquired to use Chinese writing applied their knowledge of the second language to record the facts related with the management of the country. But the grammatical structure of Chines writing and native language showed the remarkable contrast; so, the people of the peninsula managed the specific letter system - in other words, the discrepancy between language and writing. This difference carried on the huge influence on the way of using Chinese writing and characters in Korea. Some scholars of historical linguistics of Korean language considered the alternation of Chinese writing system and characters as "the procedure of nativization" - in which the inflow of characters into Korean and the same one continuously used in China illustrated the large gap of the phonological aspects. The method of reading Chinese characters came to be named as Sino-Korean Pronunciation. In the categorization of Chinese characters' pronunciation Sino-Korean Pronunciation was also categorized as the Eastern Pronunciation(東音). It indicates the sound of Chinese characters which has been historically adapted to the phonological system of Korean language. In this paper the main point is to survey the procedure of reception of Chinese writing and characters and that of establishment and alternation of Korean phonetic feature of Chinese writing and characters.