INTRODUCTION This Is a Book on the Koguryo1 Language, Its

INTRODUCTION

This is a book on the Koguryo1 language, its relationship to Japanese, and the implications of the Japanese-Koguryoic family of languages and its study for historical-comparative linguistics in eastern Eurasia. To the author’s knowledge, it is the first monograph focusing on the Koguryo language, from any point of view. One of its primary aims is to further clarify the genetic relationship of Koguryo to Japanese and the question of the origins and early history of the Japanese-Koguryoic family of languages. The latter question is closely connected to the traditional problem of the origin of the Japanese language and people. Since Koguryo is known only from lexical data cited in Chinese transcriptions (of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese provenance), and since many theories have been proposed regarding its connection to Japa- nese and other languages based on the same lexical data, this study necessarily deals in some depth with theoretical issues of lexically- based historical-comparative linguistics, and suggests modifications of some current scholarly views and practices.2 The Koguryo lexical corpus is recorded in historical and geographi- cal sources written during several stages of the language’s existence: Archaic Koguryo, Old Koguryo, and perhaps also post-Koguryo, i.e., forms recorded after the death of the language. Although no Koguryo sentences are preserved, some morphosyntactic features are discernible from collocations in Old Koguryo toponyms. In order to establish the phonology of Old Koguryo, it is necessary to establish the phonology of the language which underlies the transcriptions, namely the form of Chinese spoken in Korea. It was clearly not the same as the Central dialect or language. Several divergent dia- lects of Chinese are already attested in some form or another in Antiq- uity. Because most of the Chinese speakers in the Korean Peninsula lived in the Koguryo kingdom, and since the Chinese spoken in Korea is preserved almost exclusively as phonological peculiarities of the transcriptions of the Koguryo language,3 the reconstruction of both

1 The name is spelled ‘Koguryŏ’ in the Reischauer-McCune system of Korean transcription. See the remarks in Transcription and Transliteration. 2 See the Preface for remarks on the coverage of previous scholarship in this book. 3 The phonological features of this colonial Chinese dialect or language (called in 2 INTRODUCTION languages is heavily circular. In an attempt to overcome this limitation, reconstructions have sometimes been discussed at great length, citing recent work on the reconstruction of Middle and Old Chinese and pay- ing much attention to variant transcriptions. However, the numerous studies of this same problem in Korean (and to some extent in Japa- nese) are generally flawed by their assumption that Korean or Sino- Korean either underlies the transcriptions or is to be identified with them in some other way. As it is known that the Silla kingdom was restricted to a small area of the southeastern Korean Peninsula until the seventh century, it is extremely unlikely that early Silla Korean (Pre- Old Korean) had any influence on the transcriptions of Archaic Koguryo or on the Old Koguryo forms recorded by the T’ang Chinese at the time of the invasion and destruction of the Koguryo kingdom. On the other hand, the toponyms that form the bulk of the Old Koguryo corpus were apparently not recorded until the time of King Kyŏngdŏk (景德王) of Silla, who in the year 755 ordered most of the place names in Paekche and the southern and central part of the former Koguryo kingdom to be changed into Chinese. The work was evidently carried out, at least in large part, by Silla-Korean speaking offi- cials. (See chapters 3 and 8.) The record of this change, copied centu- ries later into the Samguk Sagi, constitutes our main source for the Old Koguryo language. As 755 is the mid-T’ang period in China, and the massive borrowing of Middle Chinese into literary Old Japanese had already taken place, the Old Koguryo toponyms recorded then or soon thereafter should theoretically reflect—at least in part—the phonology of T’ang Chinese (i.e., Late Middle Chinese, in Pulleyblank’s termi- nology), as recognized by Kim Bang-han (1985: 112), among others. The latter period and dialect of Chinese is, or should be, comparatively well known because it is extensively recorded in segmental alphabetic scripts (mainly Old Tibetan script) and these transcriptions have been carefully studied by Sinologists, most recently by Takata Tokio (1988). However, despite some agreement with T’ang Chinese features, the transcriptions actually reflect, in the main, an archaic Chi- nese dialect, evidently the Chinese language once spoken in Korea by the descendants of Han dynasty Chinese settlers (see Chapter 4). In any case, reconstructions of Chinese based on earlier theories, such as this book ‘Archaic Northeastern Middle Chinese’) are actually attested in transcriptions from throughout the Korean Peninsula, but the Koguryo forms are by far the best and most numerous.