Old Korean
| Old Korean | |
|---|---|
| Region | Korea |
| Era | Evolved into Middle Korean by the tenth century |
| Hanja | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
|
Linguist list
|
oko |
| Glottolog | None |
| Old Korean | |
| Hangul | 고대 국어 |
|---|---|
| Hanja | 古代國語 |
| Revised Romanization | Godae gugeo |
| McCune–Reischauer | Kodae kugŏ |
Old Korean is the historical variety of the Korean language or Koreanic languages dating from the beginning of Three Kingdoms of Korea to the latter part of Later Silla, roughly from the fourth to tenth centuries CE.
Old Korean is distinct from proto-Korean (원시 한국어), the ancestral language reconstructed from comparison of Korean dialects.
Some linguists propose that Old Korean may have been one of the Altaic languages, although this claim has been controversial and is not accepted by modern linguists.
The extent of Old Korean is unclear. It is generally accepted as including Sillan, which is thought to be the direct ancestor of Middle and Modern Korean, and may also have included the languages of Buyeo, Goguryeo, and Baekje. If so, Old Korean was a language family, not a single language. (See Buyeo languages, Koreanic languages.)
Only some literary records of Unified Silla, changed into Goryeo text, are extant and some texts (written in their native Writing system) of the Three Kingdoms period are mostly available in form of inscriptions at present.
Thus, the languages of the Three Kingdoms period are generally examined through official government names and local district names. The point at which Old Korean became Middle Korean is assessed variously by different scholars. The line is sometimes drawn in the late Goryeo dynasty and sometimes around the 15th century in the early Joseon. It is usually thought that Middle Korean started with the establishment of a new capital at the foundation of the state of Goryeo.
The first texts in Old Korean date from the Three Kingdoms period. They are written using Chinese characters (hanja) to represent the sound and grammar of the native language. Various systems were used, beginning with ad hoc approaches and gradually becoming codified in the Idu script and the hyangchal system used for poetry, and in a later phase, gugyeol.
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