Introduction

Summary

KOREA IS A nation blessed with her own unique orthography for phonetic representation of the spoken language. Until hun-min-jŏng-ŭm (훈민정음), now called han-gŭl (한글), the phonetic writing system invented by King Sejong the Great (1397–1450) and his court scholars, was promulgated in the middle of the fifteenth century, Chinese ideograms were the sole means for written communication. After the creation and prom-ulgation of hun-min-jŏng-ŭm in 1443, however, poetic composition was done both in classical Chinese and in the vernacular.

Composing in classical Chinese required the background of an extensive knowledge of Chinese classics and mastery of the firmly-set rules in poetic composition established by the Tang masters. As Chinese is a tonal language, and since the prosodic rules in poetic composition were strictly based on the tonal quality of the sound of each character, learning how to compose in that verbal medium required strenuous exertion of intellectual vigour and artistic gift cultivated through arduous literary training in a foreign tongue and the use of the ideograms alien to our native language. The fact that many Chinese men of letters were amazed at the poems composed in Chinese by contemporary Koreans attests to the high level of literary accomplishment the latter had attained, despite the deep chasm of linguistic barrier between Korean and Chinese.

Composing in the vernacular must have provided relief from the tension of composing lines in an alien tongue and in its ideography, for now it was simply a matter of recording what flowed out in one's native tongue in an easy-to-learn writing system fit for its phonetic representation.

Throughout the Chosŏn dynasty period (1392–1910), however, composing in the vernacular, utilizing the home-grown orthography, hun-min-jŏng-ŭm (or han-gŭl, as later it has become called), was often looked down upon as a non-scholarly activity—something that one could resort to from time to time. The way Latin was the verbal medium in the world of serious learning and scholarship in Europe for such a long time in the past, mastery of classical Chinese remained the main criterion of scholarly achievement, and consequently, composing in the vernacular, by resorting to han-gŭl, a “non-orthodox” writing system, was not deemed to deserve whole-hearted scholarly and artistic devotion of a person of learning.