Korean oralization of Literary Sinitic
Si Nae Park came to Penn last Thursday (4/18/24) to talk about kugyŏl / gugyeol / kwukyel 구결 口訣 ("oral glossing").
Gugyeol, or kwukyel, is a system for rendering texts written in Classical Chinese into understandable Korean. It was used chiefly during the Joseon dynasty, when readings of the Chinese classics were of paramount social importance. Thus, in gugyeol, the original text in Classical Chinese was not modified, and the additional markers were simply inserted between phrases.
The parts of the Chinese sentence would then be read in Korean out of sequence to approximate Korean (SOV) rather than Chinese (SVO) word order. A similar system for reading Classical Chinese is still used in Japan and is known as kanbun kundoku.
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