The Early Modern Travels of Manchu by Marten Soderblom Saarela

Author:Marten Soderblom Saarela
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Manchu Transcriptions, the Korean Alphabet, and Mandarin Chinese in Korea

The transcription system used in Qianlong’s Manchu-Chinese Mirror, which Korean envoys purchased in Beijing,49 influenced the Korean-script transcriptions adopted in a Chosŏn re-edition of that work from the 1770s. Titled Han-, Ch’ŏngmun’gam 漢清文鑑 (Mirror of the Chinese and Manchu languages), the Korean work clearly advertised its close relationship to the Qing original, but the new book was more than simply a Korean annotation of the Qing dictionary: “Above all, it is a one-of-a-kind, comprehensive research monograph on Yuzhi zengding Qingwen jian,” written by individuals having a “profound and extensive knowledge of the Manchu and Chinese languages.”50 The research that went into the new book largely concerned the phonetic transcriptions. The Chosŏn scholars who worked on the book numbered around forty individuals, but most of the work appears to have been carried out by Yi Tam 李湛 (later changed to Su 洙; 1721–77), a specialist in Mandarin Chinese.51 On the basis of a long tradition of Chinese phonological study using the indigenous Korean script, and a shorter but important tradition of Manchu-language study, Yi Tam and his team added new transcriptions written in the Korean alphabet. The resulting book counted among one of the last great scholarly achievements of the Chosŏn government interpreters.

Since its establishment in 1392, the Chosŏn government maintained a staff with a working knowledge of continental languages, including Mandarin Chinese, which the Koreans needed to communicate with the new Ming regime in China.52 The Korean alphabet hangul was invented at the Chosŏn court in 1443 in this context (see Chapter 1), whence date also the earliest products of Chinese phonological study from Korea. The new script was immediately used in several royally sponsored rhyme books. The new dictionaries in which hangul was used served either to standardize the reading of Chinese characters inside Korea, or impart knowledge of the prestigious reading pronunciation used in China at the time.

The book Hongmu chŏng’un yŏkhun 洪武正韻譯訓 (Correct rhymes of the Hongwu [period], translated and glossed; 1455), based on the Ming founder’s official rhyme book, presented Chinese pronunciations for Korean readers. Sasŏng t’onggo 四聲通考 (Comprehensive examination of the four tones; before 1450) was an abbreviated version of the Hongwu rhymes made for easy consultation. It listed Chinese characters first according to their transcription into the Korean alphabet (as opposed to some Chinese phonological feature or other), which made it easy for Korean users to look up characters.53

The great lexicographic endeavors of the fifteenth century were continued in the early sixteenth, with Ch’oe Sejin’s 崔世珍 (1473–1542) revision of Sasŏng t’onggo as Sasŏng t’onghae 四聲通解 (Comprehensive explanation of the four tones; 1517).54 Ch’oe’s book is extant only in a version from 1614. The book described a form of northern vernacular Chinese that was, however, no longer current by the eighteenth century outside the context of poetic recitation (Ch’oe’s book marked the Middle Chinese entering tone using a glottal stop, long lost in eighteenth-century Mandarin).55 Ch’oe did not follow his Chinese sources in their analysis of the syllable as consisting of two parts, however.

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