Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in the World of Wen 文: Reading Sheldon Pollock from the Sinographic Cosmopolis [5, 1 ed.] 9789004437692, 9789004529441

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IN THE SINOGRAPHIC COSMOPOLIS 5

9 789004 437692

ISSN 2589-8787

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Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in the World of Wen 文

LANGUAGE, WRITING AND LITERARY CULTURE

SINC 5 Ross King (Ed.)

Ross King earned his PhD in Linguistics at Harvard University, and specializes in the history of language, reading, writing, and literary cultures in the Sinographic Cosmopolis, with a focus on Korea in the ��fteenth through twentieth centuries.

Language, Writing and Literary Culture in the Sinographic Cosmopolis

Contributors are Daehoe Ahn, Yufen Chang, Wiebke Denecke, Torquil Duthie, Marion Eggert, Greg Evon, Hoduk Hwang, John Jorgensen, Ross King, David Lurie, Alexey Lushchenko, Si Nae Park, John Phan, Mareshi Saito, and S. William Wells.

SINC Edited by Ross King, David Lurie and Marion Eggert

Sheldon Pollock’s work on the history of literary cultures in the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’ broke new ground in the theorization of historical processes of vernacularization and served as a wakeup call for comparative approaches to such processes in other translocal cultural formations. But are his characterizations of vernacularization in the Sinographic Sphere accurate, and do his ideas and framework allow us to speak of a ‘Sinographic Cosmopolis’? How do the special typology of sinographic writing and associated technologies of vernacular reading complicate comparisons between the Sankrit and Latinate cosmopoleis? Such are the questions tackled in this volume.

L A N G UAG E , W R I T I N G A N D L I T E R A R Y C U LT U R E IN THE SINOGRAPHIC COSMOPOLIS

Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in the World of Wen 文 READING SHELDON POLLOCK FROM THE SINOGRAPHIC COSMOPOLIS

Edited by

Ross King

Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in the World of Wen 文

Language, Writing and Literary Culture in the Sinographic Cosmopolis Edited by Ross King (University of British Columbia) David Lurie (Columbia University) Marion Eggert (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)

volume 5

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sinc

Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in the World of Wen 文 Reading Sheldon Pollock from the Sinographic Cosmopolis Edited by

Ross King

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Map of the Sinographic Sphere by Hogweard (source: https://commons.wikimedia.org /wiki/File:East_Asian_Cultural_Sphere.svg) courtesy of Wikipedia Commons under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License), with additional design elements added courtesy of Alexander Jinho King. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOE) (AKS-2011-AAA-2103).

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. isSn 2589-8787 isbn 978-90-04-43769-2 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-52944-1 (e-book) Copyright 2023 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements ix List of Illustrations x Editorial Conventions xii Notes on Contributors xiii

Introduction: Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in the Sinographic Cosmopolis and Beyond: Traditional East Asian Literary Cultures in Global Perspective 1 Ross King

1

The Vernacular in the World of Wen: Sheldon Pollock’s Model in East Asia? 49 David B. Lurie

2

Pollock’s Comparative Wake-Up Call: Towards the Conceptual Modeling of Premodern Literary Cultures and Institutions 69 Wiebke Denecke

3

Vernacularizing the Cosmopolitan? Regional Sanskrits, “Stuffed Latin,” “Variant Sinitic,” and the Problem of Hybridity 96 Ross King

PART 1 Beginnings: Origins and Early Centuries of the Sinographic Cosmopolis 4

The Space of Cultivated Speech (Yayan 雅言): Writing and Language in the Sinographic Sphere 137 Saitō Mareshi

5

Waka Poetry as a Cosmopolitan Vernacular in Early Japan 159 Torquil Duthie

vi

Contents

PART 2 Medieval and Early Modern Cases from China, Japan, and Vietnam 6

Secondary Cosmopolitan Language(s): Non-literary Chinese and Its Use in Pre-modern Korea 187 John Jorgensen

7

Documents and Fiction in Three Early Edo Biographies of Hideyoshi: Translations to and from Kanbun 221 Alexey Lushchenko

8

A Crisis in the Cosmopolitan: Colonization and the Promotion of the Vernacular in an Early-Twentieth-Century Vietnamese Script Experiment 245 John D. Phan

9

Traveling Civilization: The Sinographic Translational Network and Colonial Vietnam’s Modern Lexicon Building, 1890s–1910s 289 Yufen Chang

PART 3 The Special Case of Korea: From Late Chosŏn to Colonial Chōsen 10

Literary Sinitic and Korea’s Hierarchy of Inscriptional Practice 323 W. Scott Wells

11

Script Apartheid and Literary Production in Pre-modern Korea: Framing Pollock’s Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in East Asia 349 Gregory N. Evon

12 13

Prolegomena to a Study of “Chosŏn-Style Hanmun” 朝鮮式漢文 378 Ross King The Lexical Vernacularity of the Tongp’ae naksong and the Boundaries of Korean Vernacular Literature 412 Si Nae Park

Contents

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14

Language Use and Language Discourse in Pak Chiwŏn’s Yŏrha ilgi 471 Marion Eggert

15

Late Chosŏn Korean Intellectual Discourse on the Discrepancy between Speech and Writing 506 Ahn Daehoe

16

The Geopolitics of Vernacularity and Sinographs: The Making of Bilingual Dictionaries in Modern Korea and the Shift from Sinographic Cosmopolis to “Sinographic Mediapolis” 534 Hwang Hoduk Index of Named Individuals 593 Index of Terms 598 Index of Texts Cited 608

Acknowledgements First and foremost, I wish to thank the contributors to this volume for their patience and forbearance as the preparations for this volume dragged on for far too long. The original conference that led to this volume was convened almost exactly a decade ago at the University of British Columbia: “Thinking about ‘Cosmopolitan and Vernacular’ in the Sinographic Cosmopolis: What Can We Learn from Sheldon Pollock?” (July 2–4, 2012). When, barely two years later, the stimulating volume Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919, edited by Benjamin Elman, appeared (also inspired to a great extent by Sheldon Pollock’s ideas), I noted with interest that it had originated in a conference convened in 2008. Six years? Surely our volume will not take so long as that. Or so I thought. Some contributors were not able to participate in the original conference, but kindly agreed to provide chapters later: Wiebke Denecke (a constant source of wise counsel over the years), Yufen Chang, Marion Eggert, and Ahn Daehoe. The chapters by professors Eggert and Ahn were originally presented even earlier at a different conference in 2004, hosted in Bellagio, Italy, by the late Jahyun Kim Haboush of Columbia University. That meeting, too, was inspired in no small part by Pollockian ideas, and I would like to think that providing a home for them at long last in this volume counts as a modest gesture of homage to Professor Haboush, who would have found this book very stimulating. I would be remiss if I did not also acknowledge the kind encouragement on several different occasions of Professor Sheldon Pollock himself. May the volume serve as a form of sincere tribute to him as well. I also wish to acknowledge the hard work of the (now long graduated) UBC PhD students in Asian Studies who contributed and/or translated chapters: Alexey Lushchenko, Daniel Pieper, Scott Wells, and Si Nae Park. Our indefatigable copy-editor, Daniel Kane, has rendered invaluable editorial assistance all throughout, the team at Brill has been efficient and accommodating as always, and current UBC MA student Nicole Lin has been enormously helpful in the home stretch. Finally, I acknowledge with gratitude that this work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies Grant funded by the Korean Government (MEST) (AKS-2011-AAA-2103). Ross King Vancouver, Canada, June 22, 2022

Illustrations

Figures

8.1 Tone mark positions 260 8.2 Basic syllabic spelling 262 9.1 China’s tianxia world order 293 10.1 Opening page of the 1691 printing of the Sŏkpong ch’ŏnjamun 340

7.1 8.1 8.2 8.3 9.1 9.2 9.3 11.1 11.2 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 16.1 16.2

Tables Relationship between registers and inscriptional styles 233 The 22 “root” graphemes of the qatt 253 Branch diacritic variations for /th-/ 255 Key to qatt tone marks 260 Translations of “civilization” in some languages of former members of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis 302 Some early modern Vietnamese dictionaries 304 Entries for “civilization” in early East Asian dictionaries compiled by native Lexicographers 306 Transcription mistakes: evidence of successive copies 360 Literary Sinitic poems without sinographs 362 Tongp’ae naksong vernacular idioms listed in the Kogŭm sŏngnim and the Songnam chapchi, “Kŭnch’wi p’yŏn,” and “Pangŏnnyu” 437 Tongp’ae naksong idioms found in Yijo sillok nanhaeŏ sajŏn (1993) 440 Ŏrokhae (Glossaries of Chinese colloquialisms and slang expressions) of the Zhuzi yulei 451 Sosŏl ŏrokhae (Glossaries of Chinese colloquialisms and slang expressions found in Chinese vernacular novels) 452 Yŏgŏ yuhae po (Supplemented Classified Dictionary of Translated Words and Phrases for Interpreters) 453 English lemmata and Korean glosses from five English–Korean dictionaries 555 Materials consulted and other publications related to bilingual dictionary production 583

Illustrations



xi

Appendices

6.1 Comparison of Literary Sinitic and Chan koiné key grammatical indicators 211 6.2 Comparison of key grammatical indicators in Chan koiné, bianwen, liwen, the textbook language, and the language of the novels 214 9.1 List of Quốc Ngữ publishers 314

Editorial Conventions

Romanization

For Japanese, we use Revised Hepburn. The object particle を is rendered everywhere as “o,” except in texts from the Nara period, which follow a modified kunrei system that represents the ha-gyō consonant as “p” and does not indicate the kō and otsu phonological distinctions of Nara period Japanese. For Korean, McCune-Reischauer is used, with the proviso that premodern Korean examples in Si Nae Park’s chapter use “ă” for the “arae a” vowel and transcribe all cases of ㅅ as “s” rather than follow later Korean neutralizations. For both Japanese and Korean examples, Sino-Japanese and Sino-Korean words are rendered in CAPS. For Chinese, pinyin is used, but we have omitted indications of tone in most instances.

Fonts and Footnotes

Following the conventions in Handel (2019),1 sinographs are rendered in PMingLiU (Proportional Ming Light Unicode) when the context is Chinese, in HAN NOM A/B when the context is Vietnamese, in MS PMincho when the context is Japanese, and in Noto Serif CJK KR when the context is Korean. In contexts that span more than one civilization, PMingLiU is used. Premodern Korean text in John Jorgensen’s chapter is rendered in Noto Serif CJK KR, and romanized using Yale romanization. The editor has operated with the assumption that, all things being equal, readers need access to both sinographs and to the originals of literary texts cited and translated; this we have provided in the footnotes. 1 Zev Handel, Sinography: How the Chinese Script has been Adapted to Write Other Languages (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2019).

Notes on Contributors AHN Daehoe (安大會) completed his BA, MA, and PhD at Yonsei University’s Department of Korean Language and Literature. After initial teaching appointments at Yeungnam University and Myongji University, he joined Sungkyunkwan University, where he currently serves as Professor in the Department of Korean Literature in Classical Chinese. A prolific scholar, interpreter, and translator of Korean literature in hanmun across all genres from the past millennium and more, Professor Ahn has won numerous major academic prizes and awards. His most recent books are Kojŏnhak ŭi saeroun mosaek (Exploring new avenues in classical studies, Sungkyunkwan University Press, 2018), Han’guk sanmunsŏn (Selections from Korean prose works, Minŭmsa, 2020), and Mano manp’il: yadam munhak ŭi saeroun p’unggyŏng (Mano manp’il: New scenes from yadam literature, Sungkyunkwan University Press, 2021). Yufen CHANG (張毓芬) earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan in 2013 and currently serves as Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, National Taipei University. Her areas of research interest are inter-East Asian cultural interchanges (China, Vietnam, Taiwan, overseas Chinese communities) in Southeast Asia, identity formation and politics, and comparative and historical sociology, among many others. She recently published “Constructing Vietnam, Constructing China: Chinese Scholarship on Vietnam from the Late Nineteenth Century until the Present,” in Journal of Vietnamese Studies 16(1), 2021, and “Academic Dependency Theory and the Politics of Agency in Area Studies: The Case of Anglophone Vietnamese Studies, from the 1960s to the 2010s,” in Journal of Historical Sociology 35(1), 2022. Wiebke DENECKE (魏樸和) was trained in Sinology, Japanology, Korean studies, philosophy, and medicine in her native Germany, in Hungary, Norway, Dalian, Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul, and Boston. She received her BA and MA from the University of Göttingen and her PhD from Harvard University. Her research and teaching encompass the classical literature and thought of China, Japan, and Korea; comparative studies of East Asia and the premodern world; world literature; and the politics of cultural heritage and memory. She serves as one of the editors of The Norton Anthology of World Literature, and of the three-volume 日本「文」学史 Nihon “bun”gakushi (A New History of Japanese “Letterature”), with Kōno Kimiko,

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Shinkawa Tokio, and Jinno Hidenori (2015–2019, Bensei Shuppan). In 2019 she became inaugural General Editor of The Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature (Oxford University Press). Torquil DUTHIE earned his BA in Japanese from SOAS, University of London, his MA in classical Japanese literature from Hokkaidō University, and his PhD in premodern Japanese literature from Columbia University (2005). Currently he serves as Professor and Vice Chair in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA. His research interests include early and classical Japanese poetry, mythical and historical writing in early Japan, narrative theory and representations of the first person in Japanese literature, representations of empire, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century kokugaku (“national learning”) and its relationship to modern and contemporary philology and theory. His most recent book is Man’yōshū and the Imperial Imagination in Early Japan (Brill, 2014), and he has also translated selections from the Kokinshū into Spanish. Marion EGGERT completed her undergraduate studies at Heidelberg University before pursuing her MA (Chinese Studies, Japanese Studies, Cultural Anthropology), Dr. Phil. (Chinese Studies), and Habilitation (Chinese and Korean Studies, 1998), all at Munich University. Since 1999 she has served as Professor and Chair of the Department of Korean Studies at the Ruhr University Bochum. Her research interests include Korean intellectual history (especially of the Chosŏn dynasty), Korean literature in Literary Sinitic (especially travel literature), modern Korean literature (especially poetry), and Sino-Korean cultural relations in the premodern period. Her most recent publication is “Practicing forgiveness in Chosŏn Korea: With some observations on Confucian normative discourse,” in Guilt, Forgiveness, and Moral Repair: A Cross-Cultural Comparison, edited by Maria-Sibylla Lotter and Saskia Fischer (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Gregory N. EVON completed his BA and MA in Korean and East Asian Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington before completing his PhD at Australian National University in 1995 under the supervision of Professor Ken Wells. Since 2001 he has taught at the University of New South Wales where he is now a Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages and Linguistics. Dr. Evon has published on the Buddhist literature of Han Yongun (1879–1944), on the classical poetry of Kim Sisŭp (1435–1493) and Yi Kyubo (1168–1241), and more widely on premodern Korean literary and intellectual history. He is co-editor (with Michael Pettid and Chan

Notes on Contributors

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Park) of Premodern Korean Literary Prose: An Anthology (Columbia University Press, 2018). Currently, he is working on a book on the role of Buddhism in the shift from classical to modern literature in Korea. HWANG Hoduk earned his degrees in the Department of Korean Language and Literature, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul. Currently an Associate Professor at the same university, Dr. Hwang is a prolific author in the fields of Korean literary criticism, critical theory, comparative literature, and intellectual history, especially as concerns modernity in East Asia. Notable publications include Kŭndae neishŏn kwa kŭ p’yosang tŭl: T’aja, kyot’ong, pŏnyŏk, ek’ŭrit’wirŭ (The modern nation and its representations: National language discourse in the formative period of modernization in Korea; Somyong Ch’ulp’an, 2005); Chŏnjaenghanŭn sinmin, singminji ŭi kungmin munhwa (Behind the lines: Culture in late colonial Korea, co-authored with Watanabe Naoki; Somyŏng Ch’ulp’an, 2010); Pŏlle wa cheguk: Singminji mal munhak ŭi ŏnŏ, saengmyŏng chŏngch’i, t’ek’ŭnolloji (Insects and empire: Language, technology, and the politics of life in late-colonial literature; Sae Mulkyŏl, 2011); and Kaenyŏm kwa yŏksa, kŭndae Han’guk ŭi ijungŏ sajŏn (Concepts and history: Modernizing Korea’s bilingual dictionaries, co-authored with Yi Sanghyŏn; Pangmunsa, 2012). Professor Hwang is also co-editor and cotranslator of Saito Mareshi’s Kŭndaeŏ ŭi t’ansaeng kwa hanmun: Hanmunmaek kwa kŭndae Ilbon (Literary Sinitic and the birth of modern Japanese: The Literary Sinitic context and modern Japan; Hyŏnsil Munhwa, 2010). John JORGENSEN studied in Japan and Korea, and has a PhD in Asian Studies from the Australian National University (1990). He taught Japanese Studies at Griffith University from 1990–2010 and is currently a senior research associate in the Chinese Studies Research Centre at La Trobe University. A specialist in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Buddhism, he was a researcher at The Australian National University before taking up his current role at La Trobe University. Dr. Jorgensen’s publications deal mainly with Chan/Sŏn Buddhism and include Inventing Huineng: Hagiography and Biography in Early Ch’an (Brill, 2005), and translations of Sŏn texts, such as (with Eun-su Cho) The Essential Passages that Directly Point at the Essence of Mind, by Reverend Baegun (1299–1375) (Jogye Order Publishing, 2005), and three volumes in the Collected Works of Korean Buddhism series: Hyujeong: Selected Works (vol. 3), Gongan Collections II (vol. 7–2), and Seon Dialogues (vol. 8), (Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism, 2012). Dr. Jorgensen has published numerous articles and encyclopedia entries on Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Buddhism, as well as on Korean new religions.

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Ross KING earned his BA at Yale University in Linguistics and Political Science (1983), and his MA and PhD at Harvard University in Linguistics (1990). After a brief a brief stint at SOAS, University of London, and a Korea Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at UC-Berkeley, King took up his position in 1995 at the University of British Columbia, where he serves as Professor of Korean. His research focuses on the cultural and social history of language, writing, and literary culture in Korea and in the Sinographic Cosmopolis more broadly, with a particular interest in comparative histories of vernacularization. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies, as Managing Editor of the Korean Studies Library (Brill), and as co-editor (with David Lurie and Marion Eggert) of the series “Language, Writing and Literary Culture in the Sinographic Cosmopolis” (also Brill). He is the author of “I Thank Korea for her Books:” James Scarth Gale, Korean Literature in hanmun, and Allo-metropolitan Missionary Orientalism (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming) and The Graphic Imagination: Script Primordialism and the Revenge of the Sinographically Oppressed (Brill, forthcoming). David LURIE earned his BA from Harvard University (1993), and his MA (1996) and PhD (2001) from Columbia University. Currently he serves as Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University. In addition to the history of writing systems and literacy, Professor Lurie’s research interests include: the literary and cultural history of premodern Japan; the Japanese reception of Chinese literary, historical, and technical writings; the development of Japanese dictionaries and encyclopedias; the history of linguistic thought; Japanese mythology; and world philology. Dr. Lurie’s first book, Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing (Harvard University East Asia Center, 2011), investigated the development of writing systems in Japan through the Heian period and received the Lionel Trilling Award in 2012. Along with Haruo Shirane and Tomi Suzuki, he was co-editor of the Cambridge History of Japanese Literature (2015), to which he contributed chapters on myths, histories, gazetteers, and early literature in general. Professor Lurie is completing a new scholarly monograph, tentatively entitled The Emperor’s Dreams: Reading Japanese Mythology. Alexey LUSHCHENKO completed his PhD in Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) in 2018. His research explores Edo-period intellectual history, focusing on didactic commentaries on the Heike monogatari (Tale of

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the Heike). His research interests also include premodern Japanese education, reading and writing practices, kanbun, and cursive handwriting (kuzushiji). Si Nae PARK is Associate Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. She examines the literature and literary practices of premodern Korea within the larger context of the Sinographic Cosmopolis. Broadly interested in how the interplays between cosmopolitan Literary Sinitic (hanmun) and written and spoken vernacular Korean shaped literary production, linguistic thought, and the materiality of texts, she has written on inscriptional ecologies, vernacular reading practices, nation-centered linguistic ideologies, the history of the book, the vernacular story (yadam) genre, and fiction glossaries (sosŏl ŏrokhae). She is co-editor (with Ross King) of Score One for the Dancing Girl and Other Selections from the Kimun ch’onghwa: A Story Collection from Nineteenth-Century Korea (University of Toronto Press, 2016) and author of The Korean Vernacular Story: Telling Tales of Contemporary Chosŏn in Sinographic Writing (Columbia University, 2020). John D. PHAN earned his BA from Saint Olaf College (2002), his MA from Columbia University (2005), and his PhD from Cornell University (2013), after which he held a post-doctoral fellowship with the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), based at the National Institute for Japanese Language & Linguistics (NINJAL) in Tokyo. From 2014–2017 he taught in the Department of Asian Languages & Cultures at Rutgers University, before joining the faculty at Columbia University, where he currently serves as Assistant Professor of Vietnamese Humanities in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, and is also a member of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute and the Columbia Linguistics Program. Professor Phan’s research focuses both on the historical phonology of the Sinitic and Vietic languages, as well as on the literary and intellectual history of premodern Vietnam. His forthcoming book, to be published by Harvard Asia Center, is tentatively titled Lost Tongues of the Red River: Annamese Middle Chinese and the Origins of the Vietnamese Language. SAITŌ Mareshi (齋藤希史) studied Chinese Language and Literature at Kyoto University at both the bachelor’s and post-graduate level. In 2002, he was appointed Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and since 2015 he serves as Professor of Chinese Literature, specializing in Six Dynasties literature, theories of classical literature, and modern East Asian literature. Professor

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Saitō’s research interests range from the literary interactions between Late Qing China and Meiji Japan to questions of “écriture” or inscriptional style, rhetoric, and orthography in Literary Sinitic, to finely grained analyses of Literary Sinitic poetry from both Japan and China. Two recent books of note are Kanji sekai no chihei: watashitachi ni totte moji to wa nani ka (Horizons of the Sinographic World: What is “Writing” for Us?; Shinchōsha, 2014) and Shi no toposu: hito to basho o musubu kanshi no chikara (Poetic Topos: The Power of Sinitic Poetry to Link Individuals and Places; Heibonsha, 2016). In 2020, Brill published his Kanbunmyaku: The Literary Sinitic Context and the Birth of Modern Japanese Language and Literature, edited by Ross King and Christina Laffin. W. Scott WELLS earned a BA in Korean and Linguistics from Brigham Young University and both an MA and PhD in Asian Studies from the University of British Columbia. Following his PhD, Scott received a Korea Foundation postdoctoral fellowship to teach and conduct research at Arizona State University. He now works at Heritage Academy in Mesa, Arizona where he teaches a variety of courses in American history, American government, and economics, and continues his research as an independent scholar into the history and development of East Asian inscriptional practices and the 20th-century transition from cosmopolitan writing to vernacular writing in Korea. Scott’s most recent publication is the chapter “Legitimizing Literary Sinitic in Korea’s Pre-colonial Classroom: Yŏ Kyuhyŏng and the Publication of Hanmunhak kyogwasŏ” in Education, Language, and the Intellectual Underpinnings of Modern Korea, 1875–1945, edited by Andrew Hall and Leighanne Yuh (Brill, 2022). He and his wife Lindsay are the parents of three children—two daughters and a son.

Introduction

Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in the Sinographic Cosmopolis and Beyond: Traditional East Asian Literary Cultures in Global Perspective Ross King 1

Introduction1

When this volume was first conceived in 2010, it was barely four years since the appearance of Professor Sheldon Pollock’s The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (2006). Of course, Professor Pollock had been publishing papers and chapters on the topics of “cosmopolitan and vernacular” and comparative vernacularization since at least 1996, but in 2010 his oeuvre had not yet attracted sustained attention from scholars of premodern East Asia. In the intervening years, meanwhile, Pollock’s ideas about and conceptual vocabulary for the study of translocal cultural formations, transculturation, and histories of vernacularization have inspired numerous and wide-ranging responses, not just from scholars of South Asia but from a wide range of geographical areas and disciplines. Thus, in order to contextualize our own intervention into questions of cosmopolitan and vernacular interactions and the history of vernacularization in what I call the Sinographic Cosmopolis, this introduction will: 1) review some of the key terms necessary for an engagement with Pollock’s conceptual framework and for discussing—in a way that promotes non-Sinocentric and denationalized thinking as much as possible—both the cosmopolitan code and morphosyllabic writing system that bound together premodern East Asia and the region itself; 2) survey some of the most important responses to Pollock’s work, while noting some of the resonances with our volume. My survey begins with a summary of reactions from scholars working in different cosmopoleis (beginning with the Sanskrit Cosmopolis before moving on to Latinity, the Persianate Cosmopolis, the Babylonian Cosmopolis, and then back to the Sinographic 1 I am grateful to Azalea Lee, Nicole Lin, Daniel Pieper, Scott Wells, Si Nae Park, Christina Laffin, Torquil Duthie, Wiebke Denecke, and Greg Evon for helpful comments and criticism on an earlier version of this chapter. This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOE) (AKS-2011-AAA-2103).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163

2

King

Cosmopolis) and in comparative and world literature; 3) conclude with a brief overview of our volume’s engagement with Pollock in the East Asian context, along with a detailed bibliography. 2

Terminology

Readers will note a certain amount of variation in key terminology used by different contributors to the volume. This is to be expected in what is still, in many ways, an emerging field, and as editor I have tried not to be dogmatic. Nonetheless, in King (2014, 2015) I have argued for eschewing, whenever possible, the term “Chinese” when a better alternative is available. “Chinese” invites too many unwarranted assumptions and misunderstandings, and in this day and age of virulent Han Chinese nationalism that has long since ethnicized, racialized and nationalized anything and everything “Chinese” or “Han” anachronistically back into antiquity, we do best to avoid the term unless it can be precisely defined. Hence, for the most part, contributors to this volume have been happy to refer to the classical code known today in Mandarin Chinese as wenyan(wen) 文言(文) as “Literary Sinitic”—a term for which Victor Mair (1994) has already given excellent linguistic justifications—rather than “Classical Chinese” or “Literary Chinese,” while also occasionally using kanbun and hanmun as stand-ins for it in Japanese and Korean contexts, respectively. The term “Literary” in “Literary Sinitic” has exercised at least one colleague (see Wixted 2018, 2020) to insist that “Literary” must imply “belletristic,” but we agree with Smith (2020: xxxii) to use it with no such connotations. Peter Kornicki’s important new book Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia consistently uses just “Sinitic,” a more streamlined usage that in hindsight would have worked just as well for our volume, but his reasons for eschewing “Chinese” are basically the same: “For Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and others, the use of Sinitic had no implications for their identity or their citizenship until the twentieth century. It is, of course, for this reason that I have chosen to refer to literary Chinese as Sinitic, to emphasize that every society made it their own” (Kornicki 2018: 301). An additional important motivation is to avoid whenever possible the unhelpful term “Chinese” and its modern-day ethnic and national(ist) entailments. Similar reasoning applies to the preference for “sinographs” over “Chinese characters.” In a perfect world we would have a handy pair of English terms to distinguish between pre-Qin characters and post-Qin/Han sinographs. That is, already in the Spring and Autumn (771–450 bce) and Warring States (450–221 bce) periods “Chinese” morphosyllabic writing was serving a variety

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of states comprised of multiple languages and ethnicities, and we have to assume that the texts from this period were amenable to being read in and through more than one language. This is why Saitō (2014: 12) speaks of the pre-Qin period as the “First Sinographic Sphere,” whereas the translocal cultural formation studied in the present volume concerns the post-Han “Second Sinographic Sphere.” In principle, and following models already established by colleagues working on language and writing in the ancient Middle East, we could translate post-unification hanzi 漢字 as “Hanograms” or “sinograms” (the latter used occasionally), but I have seen no proposals for a thorough terminological revision. For now, “sinographs” will have to do. 2.1 Against Spherespeak and Sino-Speak Some of the terminology about the East Asian cultural region that has gained traction in recent years is reminiscent of a debate from the last decades of the last century in the field of modern and contemporary East Asian studies. Cumings (1998) called out a tendency in 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s academic and journalistic writing to engage in a discourse of “Rimspeak”—a discourse that he faulted for constricting the public discourse around questions of space, the state, race, and political economy in what had come to be called in popular and academic discourse the “Pacific Rim.” Admittedly, when it comes to how we study and imagine premodern East Asia, and what we call it, the stakes are admittedly lower, but with the terms “Sinographic Sphere” and “Sinosphere” I wonder if we are not perhaps coming dangerously close to a sort of “Spherespeak” as well, where the “sphere” in these terms carries little indexical, explanatory or theoretical weight.2 What is the trouble with Spherespeak? The term “Sinographic Sphere” started life in English as a translation of the Japanese term kanji bunkaken 漢字文化圈 (Sinographic Cultural Sphere) coined by Japanese researchers like Kamei Takashi et al. in their Moji to no meguriai (Encounters with Writing; 1963: 88) and Nishijima Sadao in his Chūgoku kodai kokka to higashi ajia sekai (The Ancient Chinese States and the East Asian World; 1983: 586–594).3 Thus, “sphere” here is simply an uncritical and mechanical adoption via translation of the sinograph ken 圈 while jettisoning the bunka 文化 for “culture.” Saitō 2 The only way I can envision in which “sphere” here might be tasked with any heavy theoretical lifting would be through an appeal to the work of Peter Sloterdijk on “spheres”: cf. Morin (2009), Sloterdijk (2011–2016), Nieuwenhuis (2014), Ernste (2018). 3 Saitō (2014: 9) gives Kamei Takashi et al. (1963) as the locus classicus, whereas Denecke (2017: 512) cites Nishijima. As both Lurie (2011: 348–349) and Duthie (2014: 16 fn. 5) note, it was indeed Kamei et al. that first proposed the term, but it was Nishijima who popularized it. See also Ri Sonshi = Lee Sungsi (2003).

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Mareshi has modified this term to kanjiken 漢字圈, or Sinographic Sphere, on the sensible grounds that the earlier term insinuated incorrectly that the region was unified culturally, when in fact the key common denominator was not culture but the use of sinographic writing and texts (see Saito 2021: 11). A number of colleagues writing in English now are using the term “Sinographic Sphere.” In and of itself, this term is unobjectionable, but I think we can do better and defend “Sinographic Cosmopolis” further below. More problematic is the term “Sinosphere.” Joshua Fogel (2009: 4) claims to have coined it, but Matisoff (1990, 1991) seems to have been the first (he contrasts it with the “Indosphere”) and has been followed ever since by other Tibeto-Burmanist linguists. But “Sinosphere” is basically Sinocentric and repackages the old center-periphery model of the tributary system. An especially difficult problem with “Sinosphere” is that it is now used indiscriminately to refer to both the modern/contemporary region and to the older premodern cultural formation that is the subject of the present volume. A quick search for “Sinosphere” in Google Scholar turns up hit after hit on questions of contemporary East Asian politics, political economy, and security, among other topics that animate journalists, policy makers, and social scientists. Indeed, William Callahan has recently identified a problematic discourse of “Sino-speak” in this “mix of scholarship and policy-making” which he fears “provides discursive legitimacy for Sinocentric hegemony in the twenty-first century” (Callahan 2012: 51, 52). An even bigger problem with the term “Sinosphere” is that it has no explanatory force: it tells us little and has no theoretical purchase. As the designation for a translocal cultural formation that persisted for more than two millennia, “Sinosphere” indexes nothing. Moreover, the term “Sinosphere” risks confusion or complicity with what Callahan (2012) has branded as “Sino-speak”—the “emerging dialect for the new orientalism” that “presents an essentialized Chinese civilization that is culturally determined to rule Asia, if not the world” (Callahan 2012: 33, 49). It is unfortunate that this term limps along even in recently published work on premodern East Asia: the two volumes Rethinking the Sinosphere and Reexamining the Sinosphere edited by Nanxiu Qian et al. are a case in point (see below for more discussion of these titles).4 4 Two notable recent works that use the term “Sinosphere” as part of a broad translocal approach to scholarly and literary culture in the early modern period are Wu (2014) and Paramore (2018). Wu sketches out the creation of a “pan-East Asian literati culture” (247–251), while Paramore argues for “the existence of an intellectually Confucian-centered, Classical Chinese language delivered, trans-Asian Sinosphere archive of knowledge in the early modern period” and posits a “Sinosphere Archive of Knowledge” (2018: 288–289) in early modern

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For these reasons, I would submit that we need to distinguish clearly between modern/contemporary and premodern appellations for this region, and would suggest that we let our modernist and presentist colleagues keep “Sinosphere” (or find something better) while the premodernists work with “Sinographic Cosmopolis.” 2.2 The Case for “Cosmopolis” The terms “cosmopolis” and “cosmopolitan” are much in vogue these days in scholarship across a wide range of disciplines, and there are many competing definitions of them depending on theoretical orientation.5 In this volume, we follow the specific usage of Pollock. For Pollock, the word cosmopolis combines cosmo- (from Greek cosmos meaning “world” and referencing a supraregional, translocal dimension) and polis (from the Greek word for “city,” but referencing a political dimension), meaning that the cosmopolitan code in question is intimately linked to the ways in which power, political ideology and governance are imagined and expressed. A cosmopolitan code then is a literary language that on the one hand transcends space and time, and on the other hand has political dimensions or underwrites an “aestheticization of the political” (Pollock 1996: 216). A literary cosmopolis is a “vast, transcultural, translingual, transpolitical space within which a single literary language predominates” (Beecroft 2015: 105), but crucial to Pollock’s use of the term cosmopolis is a notion of “culture-power,” by which Pollock means to “emphasize the power that culture (as a force of practice, imagination, and narrative) has in the world” (Cornwall 2015: 6–7). For Pollock, it is a given in the premodern context “literature is always related to power, that in fact it creates and even constitutes forms of political life” (Gould 2008: 535). Our use of the term Sinographic Cosmopolis is tied to a premodern politics of culture and power rather different and much bigger than questions of traditional Sinocentric realpolitik and tributary relations. Note that it is not the case that a literary cosmopolis need have a selfconscious, self-reflexive name for itself in order to be called such. With respect to the “Sanskrit Cosmopolis,” a term invented by Pollock, he observes that “there is no self-generated descriptor for either the spatial or the cultural sphere that Sanskrit created and inhabited … The fact that Sanskrit never East Asia. Besides Paramore’s mooting of a “Confucian Sinosphere,” we can also mention instances of scholars positing a “Buddhist Cosmopolis”: cf. Roddy (2016) and Sen (2018). 5 Pollock et al. have quipped: “Cosmopolitanism … must always escape positive and definite specification, precisely because specifying cosmopolitanism positively and definitely is an uncosmopolitan thing to do” (2000: 577).

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sought to theorize its own universality is consistent with its entire historical character as a cosmopolitan formation” (Pollock 2000: 600–601). 2.3 Defining Vernacular Like the term “cosmopolitan,” “vernacular” has come to be used in a wide variety of contexts with a wide range of meanings. As Tageldin (2018: 115) notes, the vernacular is “terminological quicksand,” and he asks (with an explicit nod to Pollock): “Does the Latinate term vernacular adequately capture nonEurophone relationships of speech to writing?” Nearly a generation earlier, in their short preface to The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity, Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson sketched out three different uses of the term “vernacular” common in western European contexts: 1) harking back to the etymology of Latin vernacularis “of a slave,” a “subaltern or local language or style, one accessible to a particular, generally nonelite group,” with attendant nuances of vulgarity, rusticity, provinciality, and naturalness; 2) a mother tongue, which shades into the idea of the national tongue; and 3) the common tongue (Somerset and Watson 2003: ix). In the present volume, “vernacular” is used in a Pollockian sense to reference a local language of place with aspirations to emulate and eventually supplant a higher-placed (or superposed, to use Pollock’s term) cosmopolitan language as a literary language. This notion of vernacularity is gaining increasing purchase in the field of comparative literature, where, for example, Bodin et al. (2020: 715, 716) confirm that “the conceptual purchase of the vernacular lies not in the delimitation of an object but in its indication of a relationality that by definition implicates other languages or linguistic registers.” One salutary effect of Pollock’s work has been to highlight just how scandalously under-researched and under-theorized historical processes of vernacularization have been, especially when it comes to the premodern and non-western. The present volume thus hopes to contribute to future research on historical processes of vernacularization in the former Sinographic Cosmopolis. 2.4 Defining the Sinographic Cosmopolis How then can we define the Sinographic Cosmopolis? Or, what was it exactly that literati across the Sinographic Cosmopolis imagined themselves to be participating in? Just as there was no precise self-conscious and self-reflexive term in Sanskrit to name the Sanskrit Cosmopolis, it is difficult to locate a term in Literary Sinitic that would identify the Sinographic Cosmopolis. But the term siwen 斯文 (“This Culture of Ours”) that graces the cover of Bol (1992) is a good place to start. The book begins with the locus classicus of this phrase in the Analects:

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When under siege in Kuang, the Master said, “With King Wen dead, is Culture [wen 文] not here with me? Had Heaven intended that This Culture of Ours [siwen 斯文] should perish, those who died later would not have been able to participate in This Culture of Ours. Heaven is not yet about to let This Culture of Ours perish, so what can the men of Kuang do to me?” Analects 9.56

Bol reads Confucius here as making two claims—“participating in siwen … continues the legacy of the Zhou founder and accords with Heaven’s will”—and then asks, “But what is wen?” (Ibid.: 1). The sinological literature attempting to answer this question is vast (see Kern 2001, 2007 and Lewis 2007 for more references) but the works of Connery (1998) and Lewis (1999) in particular go a long way toward providing explanations for the ideologies of language, writing, and imperial “culture-power” that emerged from the Han dynasty (202 bce–200 ce) and informed subsequent thinking about literary culture across the Sinographic Cosmopolis. The title of Connery (1998) in many ways says it all: The Empire of the Text. For Connery—who draws on a combination of critical theory, cutting-edge research on western European medieval textuality by the likes of Brian Stock (1990) and Martin Irvine (1994), and sinology (such as Boltz [1994])7—government and governance in this empire was conducted via “entextualization” and was embodied in a “quasi-world of texts” that “do not just constitute but also perform textuality’s authority” (Ibid.: 22). Moreover—and importantly for the way vernacularization has unfolded in the Sinographic Cosmopolis—this selfcontained world of textuality “identified itself without reference to a world of orality” (Durrant 2000: 703): “the oral/literate dichotomy in thought that we associate with the work of Eric Havelock and his followers might not be appropriate to a China that always gave discursive prominence to the textual” (Connery 1998: 52). Lewis (1999) develops a similar but much more comprehensive and magisterial argument, in a work that has garnered the sorts of praise among sinologists that Pollock has earned from (at least North American) Sanskritists. Svensson (2000: 614) heralded Lewis’ book as “a long-awaited event in the sinological 6 Cited from Bol (1992, 1) with parenthetical information added and Romanization changed to pinyin. 7 Connery’s engagement with critical theory is of a piece with Pollock’s work. Though praised by at least one reviewer (Durrant 2000), Connery’s book has encountered significant resistance from scholars of ancient China, who seem to have either savaged it (Kern [2000a], alongside Kern [2000b]—a deservedly glowing review of Lewis [1999] in the same journal issue) or ignored it.

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world,” while von Falkenhausen (2001: 135) characterizes it as “without question among the masterpieces of twentieth-century sinology.” Svensson summarizes the book as a narrative of the Han “triumph of the canon” that defines the “Chinese Empire” as “a parallel, phantasmic, all-encompassing textual version of the ideal Empire created in the canon” (2000: 615). This “textual double of the polity … provided the mechanism by which the institution of the empire survived the collapse of each of its incarnations” (Lewis 1999: 4). One of the key takeaway points of Lewis’ book for Holcombe (2000: 189) was the fact that “Universal elite commitment to a shared body of texts cemented together an empire twice the size of Europe, for two thousand years, with only the weakest of coercive machinery,” a comment reminiscent of Pollock’s contrasting of a coercive Latin cosmopolitanism with a voluntaristic adoption of Sanskrit literary culture. In Lewis’ words: the ultimate importance of writing to the Chinese empire and imperial civilization did not derive from its administrative role. Rather the Chinese empire, including its artistic and religious versions, was based on an imaginary realm created within texts. These texts, couched in an artificial language above the local world of spoken dialects, created a model of society against which actual institutions were measured. More important, they provided the basis of an educational program that embedded the vision of empire within the upper reaches of local communities. Lewis 1999: 4

I would argue that this is precisely the sort of sociotextual community in which elites from around the Sinographic Cosmopolis imagined themselves as members. In his lengthy review of Lewis, von Falkenhausen gives a useful encapsulation of the six primary functions of writing in ancient China as elucidated by Lewis: “enforcing state authority; creating text-based communities and ‘public spheres’; transcending the confines of space, time, and human mortality; fashioning figures of authority in the past; standardizing specialized technical terminology; and encrypting secret meanings” (Falkenhausen 2011: 128). All of these functions persisted for the following two millennia and defined the special nature of the Sinographic Cosmopolis. Both Falkenhausen (Ibid.: 132) and especially Kern (2000b) appreciate Lewis’ emphasis on the deeply ritual nature of the earliest Chinese writing. Kern extends Lewis’ “basic thesis on the creation of a normative second reality in writing” (Kern 2000b: 340) to what he calls “ritual self-referentiality,” according to which “writing was dissociated from speech and given preeminence as

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endowed with the capacity, as a graphic system ‘rooted in the patterns of the cosmos’ (p. 255), to relate directly to the world. In this ideological construct, writing is not the extension of the spoken word but its superior and more trustworthy replacement” (Ibid.: 362). Thus, “[t]he new ideology of the written ‘image’ and graph … was accompanied by an explicit denunciation of the spoken word” (Ibid.: 362). To return then to wen 文 and siwen 斯文, “This Culture of Ours,” Victor Mair has recently written—in an explicit comparison with the Persianate world—of what he calls the “Cult(ure) of Writing” in China, noting that “in premodern China, it would not be an exaggeration to speak of the sacrality of the written word” (Mair 2012: 392). He also draws attention to the “striking parallel between the ethos of siwen as the nucleus of ‘culture,’ ‘civilization,’ and ‘literature’ on the one hand, and [Persianate] adab (‘courtesy, civility, etiquette’ → ‘knowledge of poetry, oratory, rhetoric, grammar, and philology’ → ‘belles lettres’) as the core of adabiyāt (literature) on the other” (Ibid.: 393): “it is difficult to imagine the overwhelming status of writing per se in Chinese society. For users of primarily pragmatic writing systems, it is perhaps even harder to grasp the ethical and political dimensions of writing in China” (Ibid.: 395). Such, then, was the overall nature of the Sinographic Cosmopolis: an allencompassing, ritually entextualized world that existed beyond space and time and was written in a cosmopolitan code that was fundamentally unsayable: a crucial but often-overlooked difference between the Sinographic Cosmopolis and other cosmopoleis (see below) was its exclusively written nature. Whereas Latin was spoken as a kind of learned lingua franca among scholars in Europe for centuries, it is doubtful that Literary Sinitic ever functioned as a spoken language. In the Sinographic Cosmopolis, inscription in the cosmopolitan code guaranteed an immortality of sorts, and “culture-power” was embodied and entextualized in a realm of Literary Sinitic (inscribable exclusively in sinographs) that existed apart from and above speech; speech counted for little, other than in specifically ritualized contexts requiring the recitation and performance of texts. 2.4.1

Prolepsis: Countering Objections to the Term “Sinographic Cosmopolis” The term “Sinographic Cosmopolis” has not been around long enough in print to attract much attention, let alone criticism, and there are still so few scholars working on questions of comparative literary culture in premodern East Asia that it may be premature to mount a defense of it, but in conference and workshop settings I have occasionally encountered objections to the term. Most recently, one or two colleagues have articulated qualms with the term in print.

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One objection is easily dispensed with: “there was no term for the Sinographic Cosmopolis in Literary Sinitic.” I have already noted Pollock’s remarks about the lack of a self-generated term in Sanskrit for the Sanskrit Cosmopolis, and how this is of little consequence. And in any case siwen 斯文 “This Culture of Ours” goes some way toward indexing what it was that literati in this translocal cultural formation imagined themselves to be a part of. A parallel example can be taken from the recent burgeoning field of research into “world philology” and the comparison of premodern traditions of philology—another field spearheaded by Pollock (see Pollock et al. 2015). In his recent Modes of philology in medieval South India, Whitney Cox writes: “Philological discipline appears to have been so integral to the life-world of those élite literates to whom we owe India’s textual archive that to name it as such may have simply been superfluous” (Cox 2017: 12). Much the same could be said for the Sinographic Cosmopolis. Another objection to terming our translocal cultural formation a “cosmopolis” that I have heard on more than one occasion is that “it wasn’t a true ‘Republic of Letters.’” But to insist on the sort of active and multidirectional exchange of correspondence and interchange of personnel that characterized western Europe from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries in first Latin, and then French, as the litmus test for a cosmopolitan cultural formation in other parts of the world at other times in history would be to enforce a textbook definition of Eurocentrism.8 Kornicki (2018) discusses the various terms proposed as English-language renderings of the Japanese kanji bunkaken, or “Chinese character cultural sphere,” and notes deficiencies with all of them. Although he does not explicitly reject “cosmopolis,” he does note more than once that because of the hermetic nature of East Asian book cultures, and also because of the lack of a common spoken language, there was no “Sinitic Republic of Letters” (Kornicki 2018: 52, 148, 299).9 One interesting objection that Kornicki raises with respect to the term “Chinese character cultural sphere” is that “it focuses on the script to the exclusion of the texts and thus appears to elide the importance both of the Chinese textual tradition for the whole of East Asia and of the composition of texts in literary Chinese outside China” (Ibid.: 16). Given that he spells out that he uses 8 A point emphasized by Rebecca Gould in her review of Pollock and his methodology (2008: 548–549). See below for more on Gould. 9 In this regard, it is interesting that Kornicki (2018: 299) nonetheless notes that “East Asia came close to a ‘Republic of Letters’ during the Tang dynasty,” and that recent work on intellectual exchange between Qing China, Chosŏn Korea and Edo Japan has claimed the existence of a type of “East Asian Republic of Letters.” See Takahashi (2009), Chŏng Min (2014) and Elman (2016).

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the term “Sinitic” as a synonym for “literary Chinese,” and given his own excellent exposition of how, for example, “Chinese translations of Buddhist texts did not find their way to Japan, Korea, and Vietnam in a vacuum, but rather as part of a much larger package which included the whole literate culture of China” (Ibid.: 244), can we not simply take it as a given that when we characterize this region as “sinographic,” the “graphic” is indexing not just the grammatological technicalities of Chinese writing and the individual sinographs qua written symbols, but is synonymous with precisely this much larger “package”—the “whole literate culture of China?” Our terms rarely spell out every nuance of the phenomena they are coined to name. If one were to be pedantic about it, we could opt for “Sinographotextual Cosmopolis” or “Sinotextual Cosmopolis” or the like, but at some point the terms just get too kludgy. Wiebke Denecke (in this volume) does not moot the “Republic of Letters” per se, but nevertheless expresses reservations about the appropriateness of the term “Sinographic Cosmopolis” as against her preferred “Sinographic Sphere,” and insists on a “conscious, self-reflexive awareness among the language users” as a key criterion for “cosmopolitanism.” That is, “[t]he author needs to ‘consider’ himself as cosmopolitan, or at least as a subject, writing for a translocal audience.” Denecke then contrasts the primarily stay-at-home nature of East Asian elites with the high mobility of cosmopolitan elites in the Hellenistic world or the Roman Empire, objecting that “there was very little demographically significant migration between the various East Asian states after the seventh century.” In the case of Japan, she detects “hardly any desire to reach a translocal readership” and therefore wishes to “avoid a concept that requires speculation on the individual consciousness of a subject.” But I would argue that this sort of insistence on a textual smoking gun—of explicit documentation from participants in the Sinographic Cosmopolis declaring their intentions or desires to reach readers “out there” rather than “right here,” is unenforceable and—again—Eurocentric. We have to recognize and accommodate different configurations of the various features that characterize cosmopolitan cultural formations, and the work of Kornicki (2018) and others has already made it clear that cultural flows in East Asia were mostly one-way and centrifugal, while regional literary cultures were mostly hermetic—siloed and sealed off from robust two-way traffic. Thus, one key characteristic of the Sinographic Cosmopolis was its highly centralized nature (see Yufen Chang in this volume), whereas “the absence of imperial centers within both cosmopolises enabled Sanskrit and Persian literary cultures to flourish” in different ways (Gould 2008: 543; see also below). The highly centralized nature of Chinese imperial polities seems to have led to a general lack of interest in or engagement with the literary production of literati outside China (a state of affairs

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that lives on in the general lack of interest in the Sinographic Cosmopolis on the part of sinologists today), and the vast majority of scholars writing on the periphery would have had little hope of traveling to China or seeing their compositions read or printed there. Thus, for literati in what are now Japan, Korea and Vietnam, participation in the Sinographic Cosmopolis was a sort of unrequited cosmopolitanism or “cosmopolitanism of the mind” (see Arntzen [2020] in this regard), but that did not diminish the theoretical possibility that a reader “somewhere out there” might perchance one day read their compositions. Certainly Chosŏn Korea’s literati were quite conscious or even anxious on this account (see King’s chapter on “Vernacularizing the Cosmopolitan” in this volume). Levels and explicitness of self-conscious participation could wax and wane from one region to the next and from one historical period to another, and how precisely they did so is an important task for future research; but to engage with the Empire of the Text and siwen 斯文 was, at its core, a form of cosmopolitan behavior, however realistic the chances of mutual readership may have been. 3

The Reception of Pollock’s Conceptualization of Cosmopolitan and Vernacular

Not surprisingly, the bulk of engagements with Pollock’s work on “cosmopolitan and vernacular” and comparative histories of vernacularization has come from colleagues in the field of Indology/South Asian Studies, but the impact of his ideas is such that increasingly we also note productive take-up of his work beyond the geographic region that formerly comprised the Sanskrit Cosmopolis, as well as in a growing number of different disciplines. Below is a survey of the wide-ranging engagement with Pollock’s ideas to date, with a view to clarifying emerging topics for future research. 3.1 South (and Southeast) Asia and the Sanskrit Cosmopolis Reactions to Pollock (2006) and his related articles and chapters have been mostly highly laudatory, even adulatory (at least those from North America, many of which are by his own students).10 Engagement with Pollock can be 10 Smith (2006) ridicules Pollock’s frequently overwrought prose (“Why would the author choose to express himself in such a fashion?”) and faults him for “straining to persuade too much,” but otherwise engages little with Pollock’s key conceptual vocabulary around “cosmopolis,” “cosmopolitan and vernacular,” or “vernacularization” (among others). Fussman (2008: 165), writing in French from the Collège de France, quips that Pollock’s

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divided into book reviews and articles on the one hand and monographs and edited volumes reacting to and/or inspired by Pollock on the other. Book reviews and articles—while almost always awestruck—either take up cases overlooked by Pollock (especially individual cases of vernacularization that fit poorly with his model) or else engage with him on issues of theory and methodology. John Nemec points out the ways in which both Marathi and Tamil vernacularization challenge Pollock’s model, and praises it as a “useful counterpoint to Eurocentric theories” about “language-use and its relationship to political and cultural institutions and imagination” (2007: 211). Israeli Indologist David Shulman, an authority on Tamil (among other languages), takes issue with Pollock’s insistence that most of the “more dramatic creative impulses” in localized contexts after the “vernacular revolution” in the early centuries of the second millennium were in the vernacular, and argues that “at least in south India, intense regionalization in the literary realm tended to go hand in hand with highly innovative ‘Sanskritization,’ to use an old term—that is, continuous experimentation with both new forms of Sanskrit literary production and the canonical terms, categories, and modes of Sanskrit-informed culture and theory more generally” (Shulman 2007: 822). Thus, “Vernacularization may have accelerated the process of differentiation, as Pollock shows, but hardly at the expense of Sanskrit” (Ibid.: 824). In a similar vein, Tieken (2008) offers an extensive and critical review that on the one hand takes Pollock to task for the ways in which his model fails to account for the history of Tamil literary culture, and on the other hand develops an entirely different narrative and timeline of how vernacularization unfolded in India that in many ways anticipates points made in Ollett (2017) about Prākrits and Apabhraṃśa. For Tieken, vernacularization “seems to have started much earlier” than assumed by Pollock and was a kind of Sanskritization (“with the vernaculars taking on the cloak of Prākrit or Apabhraṃśa”) more than anything else, with “vernacularization proper” only starting in the colonial period (Tieken 2008: 339, 379). David Shulman teamed up with his Hebrew University of Jerusalem colleague Yigal Bronner in a 2006 article that takes issue again with Pollock’s characterizations of both “Sanskrit in the vernacular millennium” and “The Death of Sanskrit” (see Pollock [2001]). They do so through the lens of regional Sanskrit, a topic mostly eschewed by Pollock (see also King’s chapter on “Vernacularizing the Cosmopolitan” in this volume.). For Bronner and Shulman, “[f]irst and book “reflects American intellectual controversies,” but otherwise engages usefully with Pollock’s claims.

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foremost, a regional Sanskrit work aims at a local audience…. Nearly all ‘regional’ Sanskrit texts show evidence of local linguistic materials, from the purely phonological stratum to morphology, lexis and syntax” (Bronner and Shulman 2006: 6). Their focus is India’s Dravidian south, and primarily Tamil, a sort of Achilles heel for Pollock’s model: In Tamil country, “[V]ernacular metrical schemes penetrate into Sanskrit, … the Dravidian technique of head-rhyme becomes prevalent in some Sanskrit poetry composed by speakers of south Indian languages.” Considerations such as these prompt Bronner and Shulman to ask “to what extent these linguistic entities that we think of as so neatly bounded and distinct—Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, etc.—were truly separate in the minds of those who used them” (Ibid.: 7), a question that can be usefully extended to premodern East Asia and the ways in which Literary Sinitic was perceived (see Lushchenko’s chapter in this volume). Brian Hatcher, who is more of a modernist than a premodernist, takes issue with Pollock on more theoretical grounds, and argues against his frequently stark characterization of the cosmopolitan vs. vernacular binary, and his exaggerated metaphors of historical rupture and radical breaks or deaths (i.e., of Sanskrit): “one wonders if Pollock’s simple distinction between Sanskrit and the vernacular (for example, Sanskrit cosmopolitans are rootless, the vernacular is local) doesn’t threaten to disguise any number of quotidian forms of convergence, interrelationship, cross-fertilisation and hybridity” (Hatcher 2007: 339). Fussman (2008) criticizes Pollock’s treatment of questions surrounding the identity and roles of Middle Indic vs. Prākrits and problems of hybridity: “How are we to distinguish between a hyper-Sanskritized vernacular and a Sanskrit that includes some vernacular words? This is the case for the Newari Sanskrit text cited … did the author and eventual readers of this inscription think it was in Sanskrit or in Newari? One can see just how ambiguous these phenomena of bilingualism can be within the same text” (Fussman 2008: 172). Ultimately, Fussman sees Pollock (2006) as a worthy attack on Eurocentrism and praises it for its “culture, philosophical reflection, and humanism” (Ibid.: 174). Lawrence McCrea notes how rare it is “for any book concerned with Sanskrit literary and cultural production to attract serious, sustained interest outside of the world of South Asian studies” (McCrea 2013: 117) and welcomes Pollock’s corrective to previous accounts of vernacularization in India. But like other critics he calls attention to noteworthy exceptions to Pollock’s broad-stroke characterization of the process of vernacularization (in this case, Tamil and Hindi). Overall, he criticizes Pollock for downplaying or ignoring “many elements of the Sanskrit logosphere” at the expense of rājya- (“kingship” or, more broadly, “power”) centered courtly kāvya (“poetry”) and praśasti inscriptional

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poetry: “there is a great deal going on in the realm of Sanskrit that lies outside the ‘world of men’ as Pollock seems to understand it” (Ibid.: 121). Bronner (2011) circles back to the problems that some of the Dravidian languages pose for Pollock’s model (e.g., “Malayalam, by and large, is conspicuously absent from the book” [Bronner 2001: 539]) as well as to Pollock’s exaggerated claims about the “death” of Sanskrit in the vernacular millennium (“the idea that Sanskrit ‘died’ or was ‘supplanted’ by the languages of place still hovers over the pages of the book, and I believe that it remains a highly problematic one” [Ibid.: 543]). Although Bronner finds Pollock stronger when it comes to identifying “newness” and “beginnings” in literary cultures, he faults Pollock for paying less attention to “the equally fascinating question of what constitutes an end”—one area, incidentally, where cases from the Sinographic Cosmopolis can be instructive (see Wells, this volume). But Bronner sounds an optimistic note with respect to the promise that Pollock’s ideas hold out for comparative work: “given the striking paucity of scholarship on both the Latinate cosmopolis and its vernacularization, it is entirely possible that Pollock’s work will provide Europeanists with better models that are actually based on the South Asian case” (Ibid.: 542), and as hinted at in the title of his review (“A Road Map for Future Studies”), he stresses that Pollock’s book “charts numerous new paths for future scholarship” (Ibid: 540). One final area where Pollock has been criticized concerns gender—a topic on which his work is largely silent, other than to note the total absence of a discourse on “mother tongue” in premodern India. Novetzke (2016: 34) notes in passing that Pollock has little to say about gender and Sanskrit or gender and vernacularization, but other scholars have tried to address this lacuna. Berkwitz (2012) uses Pollock’s ideas on cosmopolitan and vernacular to explore two premodern Sinhala works through the lens of gender, while Thompson (2012a) presents a fascinating Freudian psychoanalytic take on Pollock’s “grammar envy” (the tendency in newly vernacularizing polities to “adorn” and “philologize” their new literary vernaculars with a grammatical apparatus) as penis envy and the way Pollock uses terms like “impulse,” “desire,” and “free will” vs. “coercion” in the book. In many ways the most interesting review article on Pollock’s work on cosmopolitan and vernacular is that of Rebecca Gould. A brilliant and prolific scholar of the literary culture(s) of the Caucasus within the context of the “Persian Cosmopolis” (a term she appears to have been the first to use), Gould is also the most ecstatic of Pollock’s reviewers, characterizing his work as a “miracle” and “a monumental work of genius” (Gould 2008: 554). Gould’s focus is methodological, asking how we can extend Pollock’s insights “to envision the futures of our various disciplines” at a time when “[t]he biggest danger

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of area studies as it is organized today is precisely the ignorance it enforces on scholarship that takes place beyond the boundaries of a single region … It is particularly difficult to do so in a climate of fragmented areal knowledge” (Ibid.: 534, 556). She complains that she has “yet to see any of Pollock’s seminal works used fruitfully by anyone outside South Asian studies” and hopes to “see the relevance of Pollock’s work become clearly perceptible beyond South Asian studies” (Ibid.: 557, 556). Monographs and edited volumes engaging with Pollock’s work in South Asian studies have also started to appear. Bronner et al. (2011) is a sort of festschrift in honor of Pollock by colleagues and former students responding to his work across a range of topics on which he has published, of which “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular” is but one.11 Christian Novetzke (2016) takes up the counterexample to Pollock’s model represented by the emergence of literary Marathi and the “vernacular turn” in Maharashtra. Novetzke shows that this process took place “in the field of everyday life, outside of the royal court of the Yadava dynasty (1183–1317 ce),” and moreover in religious contexts (pace Pollock, who insists that vernacularization was always spearheaded by royal courts, and was a secular undertaking). The work is very much in a Pollockian idiom, but usefully extends the notion of “vernacularization” to other expressive forms besides language, because “Part of the brilliance of Pollock’s work is to read vernacularization well beyond its literary context, rather as a force like modernity” (Novetzke 2016: 6). But where Pollock’s thesis focused on the elite spheres of royal courts, Novetzke broadens his purview to “the force of public sentiment” outside the court (Ibid.: 7)—a “public culture within the quotidian world” (Ibid.: 10) or “a rudimentary form of a premodern public sphere” (Ibid.: 26). Thus, Novetzke offers a new definition of vernacularization: the strategic use of the topos of everyday life within a social, political, artistic, linguistic, and cultural process in which the quotidian (“ordinary,” “everyday”) expands at the center of a given region’s public culture. ibid.: 1012

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The others are The Rāmāyaṇa and Its Readers; Kāvya: Sanskrit Literary Culture in History; Śāstra: Sanskrit Systems of Knowledge in (and outside) History; and Early Modernity. Bronner et al. (2011) came in for a mean-spirited review from Austrian scholar Walter Slaje (2014), who lashed out at what he calls its “undisguised personality cult,” “exaggerated rhetoric,” “hagiographical epiphany narrative,” and “anglophone-myopic tunnel vision,” characterizing the contributions in the volume overall as “anything but ‘critical’” (Slaje 2014: 574, 575, 577). This definition accords well with Pastreich’s (2011) discussion of the reception of baihua/“vernacular” Chinese fiction in Edo Japan and vernacularity in early modern Japanese popular narrative.

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For Novetzke, then, his book on Marathi is about “the language of men (and women) in a world of Gods” (Ibid.: 16) and is driven by the thesis that “the primary driver of vernacularization is an engagement with the everyday life of a place, specially its language and other affective and expressive idioms. Vernacularization is not primarily about the creation of a new literature—this is a secondary effect” (Ibid.: 34).13 Finally, Andrew Ollett has recently published a book-length treatment of Prākrit—“a language without a people and without a place, between and beyond Sanskrit, the ‘language of the gods,’ and the vernacular, the ‘language of men,’” and “the most important Indian language you’ve never heard of” (Ollett 2017: 14). The book begins with the important observation that whereas Saussure succeeded in defining the object of modern linguistics as a formal system, this “has meant that comparatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which languages are posited in relation to each other.” And this is precisely where Pollock’s work has provided new conceptual vocabulary and tools. For Ollett, the complex language order of premodern India was built on the “dichotomy between Sanskrit and Prakrit” (Ibid.: 4), and thus the Sanskrit Cosmopolis can be reframed as “the world in which textuality is governed by the schema of co-figuration of Sanskrit and Prakrit” (Ibid.: 135). Insofar as the very term “Sanskrit Cosmopolis” elides Prākrit, Ollett’s book is an attempt to rehabilitate the important roles Prākrit played—especially its role as “a catalyst of, and model for, vernacularization” (Ibid.: 16), wherein “Prakrit forms of knowledge formed the background for vernacular forms of knowledge” (Ibid.: 172). As Ollett explains it, the first centuries of what Pollock characterizes as the “vernacular millennium” in India, between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, were in fact a time when “the dichotomy of Sanskrit and Prakrit was replaced by the dichotomy of Sanskrit and the regional vernacular” (Ibid.: 175). 4

Summary

In sum, Pollock’s work on cosmopolitan and vernacular in the Sanskrit Cosmopolis has come in for both praise and constructive criticism. Praise has focused on the philosophical depth and theoretical breadth of Pollock’s approach, and scholars have found his framework useful for challenging Eurocentric and 13

Another work that tries to explain vernacularization in Marathi is Eaton (2014). An historian of India in the Persianate age, Richard Eaton argues that the “crucial decision to conduct the routine business of government at the local level—collecting revenue and administering justice—in written Marathi” rather than in Dakani or Persian helped create a discursive community of Marathi speakers and thus played an important role in Marathi vernacularization (Eaton 2014: 120–121).

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presentist approaches to non-western and premodern literary cultures and for thinking comparatively about earlier forms of globalization and culturepower. His critics have found him especially strong on the question of beginnings and “newness” in literary cultures—how cosmopolitan codes arise and how vernaculars refashion themselves as cosmopolitan vernaculars in the image of a superposed cosmopolitan code—but weaker on endings and how cosmopolitan codes die. Critical engagement with Pollock by scholars working on the Sanskrit Cosmopolis has ranged from studies of specific cases of vernacularization that fit poorly with his model (primarily Marathi and Tamil), to deeper examinations of other cosmopolitan codes that co-existed with Sanskrit like Prākrit and Apabhraṃśa; affirmations of the continued vitality of Sanskrit and of the importance of “Sanskritization” alongside vernacularization; calls for more attention to regional forms of Sanskrit and hybridity; calls to broaden our understanding of “vernacularization” beyond just literature and written language; and cautions against metaphorical hyperbole and stark black-andwhite depictions of the cosmopolitan vs. vernacular binary. 4.1 Latinitas Hopes expressed by some of Pollock’s critics and reviewers that his work would stimulate a response from students of Latinity in Europe have been mostly disappointed to date. Part of the problem is no doubt the siloed insularity of area studies generally, including the field of Classics, where in any case most of the attention appears to be on antiquity, when in fact a more fertile time period for comparative work is that of Medieval Latin. Certainly experts on the history of Latin are likely to take umbrage at some of Pollock’s stark characterizations of Latin as a kind of vernacular killer, and my own reading in this area suggests Pollock may indeed be overstating his case. For example, Andy Orchard writes that “far from stifling vernacular languages and cultures in the British Isles, Latin could well be said to have provided the necessary stimulus and vehicle for their development and (in the case of written records) their very survival” (Orchard 2003: 218–219). In any case, it is still difficult to identify Latinists engaging in any meaningful way with Pollock’s rich comparisons between vernacularization in South Asia and in Europe. The lone exception I have found is Mortensen (2018), who complains that modern-day national philologies in Europe have privileged questions of historical linguistics and language origins, whereas an orientation toward book language—writing in books—suggests a key point of no return for the “European Vernacular Revolution” in the century between approximately 1150 and 1250. Thus, Mortensen amends Pollock’s model of literization (Verschriftung) followed by literarization (Verschriftlichung) by

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insisting on adding a third stage, which he calls “librarization”—“denoting the fact that there is a language-specific library (in an abstract sense) and system of book use to contribute to” (Mortensen 2018: 74). He continues: “Pollock’s idea of two regimes or constellations of ‘power and culture’—in, respectively, the cosmopolitan and the vernacular millennium—overlooks the book-historical aspect and exaggerates the impact of literary practices on the ideological and structural make-up of the European societies in question” (Ibid.: 76–77). Thus, Mortensen is able to offer a revised periodization for the “different habitats” of Latin as a cosmopolitan language in Europe. In his fascinating section on “Latin as a Book Vernacular in the Middle Ages,” Mortensen also raises intriguing questions about hybridity and the seepage of vernaculars into Latin of the sort largely ignored in Pollock’s model. For example, he describes how a group of scholars in the second half of the tenth century rewrote—“phrase by phrase, clause by clause”—the earlier eighth-century Historia Romana by Paul the Deacon into a “non-learned ‘Romance register’” of Latin. Much of the original Latin is replaced by Romance constructions and parataxis, while vocabulary and morphology are replaced with equivalents from the spoken language, prompting Mortensen to ask “Is this a vernacular text?” Texts of this nature are typically omitted from narratives of vernacular origins in modern-day national language paradigms. (See King’s chapters in this volume for related discussions of “Chosŏn-style Literary Sinitic.”) 4.2 The Persianate Cosmopolis While the one major attempt to date to conceptualize an “Arabic Cosmopolis” has met with mixed reviews,14 recent work on the “Persian(ate) World” has engaged most fruitfully with Pollock and has generated some interesting insights. An early attempt at capturing the importance, historical depth and geographic reach of Persian across much of Asia was Fragner (1999), but his 14 Ricci (2011) focuses on vernaculars like Tamil, Javanese, and Malay in South and Southeast Asia and argues for “the rise of an Arabic cosmopolis in parts of the same geographical regions discussed by Pollock, one that came to coexist with, often overlap with, and in some cases inherit the Sanskrit cosmopolis” (Ibid.: 14). Ricci’s study focuses on translation and religious conversion but vacillates in its terminology between “translocal Islamic sphere,” “Islamic cosmopolitanism,” and “Arabic cosmopolis,” and quickly qualifies the latter as “Arabicized, rather than Arabic, language and literary cultures” (Ricci 2011: 15). Davis (2013: 226) doubts the utility of the cosmopolis concept for the region studied and complains: “underexplored is the role of Persian and perhaps the ‘Persian cosmopolis.’” Schomburg is even more insistent on the largely elided Persian angle: “two of the three South/Southeast Asian One Thousand Questions texts Ricci selects … are, by her account, based on Persian originals. … Given … the plausibility of a ‘Persian cosmopolis’ concept, the logic of the analysis is problematic” (Schomburg 2012: 197).

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focus was primarily on spoken Persian and aspects of language contact around Persian as a koiné—hence the “-phonie” of his term, “Persophonie.” This focus on Persian as a spoken language, as well as the relatively early date of Fragner’s book compared to Pollock’s publications, explains the lack of engagement with notions of cosmopolitan and vernacular. The important collection of papers in Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order, edited by Brian Spooner and William Hanaway (2012a), contains a number of excellent studies offering insights into the dynamics of cosmopolitan culture formations. There is only tangential reference to Pollock throughout the volume, and no explicit mention of “cosmopolis.” But comparative vernacularization is discussed, and the volume explicitly welcomes comparative approaches. The volume’s editors make a number of excellent points that are of direct relevance to thinking about the Sinographic Cosmopolis and vernacularization in comparative perspective. The first is their deliberate shift of attention away from spoken Persian to written Persian, as signaled in the book’s title, and their insistence on treating spoken language and written language as fundamentally different beasts. The second is their rejection of the notion of “diglossia” as unhelpful in understanding written language dynamics: “the use of the term diglossia brings with it all the other assumptions of linguists which because they assume writing to be secondary to speech are unhelpful in the study of the historical role of written Persian. It not only hides the importance of writing as a distinct medium, but suggests a framework for its discussion that is incompatible with the idea that written language may have a distinct dynamic of its own” (Spooner and Hanaway 2012b: 52). The third is their trenchant critique of “the voluminous discussion of literacy that has developed in English over the past fifty years,” and their attack on Goody and Watt (1963) and the “literacy thesis” as “surprisingly occidentocentric: it pays little serious attention to the question of whether writing might have functioned differently under different writing technologies, or indeed other differences in social or cultural context.” They ask: “Are these differences correlated with civilizations, or particular languages, or with what we have called script-families?” (Ibid.: 44). The fourth is their focus on the munshi, or professional class of scribes, secretaries, and writers, and the important role that chancelleries, poets, and scribes played—in the absence of any central authority governing usage and models of correctness—in developing written Persian and keeping it so remarkably stable over the course of what they call the “Persianate millennium” from the ninth to nineteenth centuries. The fifth is their attention not just to writing, but to reading, to diplomatics (the materiality of written documents and the way they are formatted to facilitate reading), and to modes of reading not easily accommodated by

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English-language accounts of “literacy”: “However reading might have been taught, mature reading is always in practice not analytic but pictographic” (Ibid.: 19).15 Sixth, they link writing and literary culture with ritual and public behavior: “Written Persian was not only a means of communication— administrative, epistolary, and literary—but also the legitimizer of public behavior in general” (Ibid.: 24). Of particular significance for those of us who study the Sinographic Cosmopolis, Spooner and Hanaway dedicate a section to “The Historical Significance of Writing,” in which they complain that “the role of written language in cultural life, or in society, has received relatively little attention either from anthropologists or linguists, or even from their predecessors in the study of textual language, philologists … [W]e have lost sight of the significance of the enormous value of writing in societies where only a small proportion of the population can actually read and write” (Ibid.: 27, 31). Another point that will resonate with students of Literary Sinitic is their observation that “The study of the historical dynamics of spoken and written language has been hampered by pervasive assumptions about their interdependence,” but because writing “always required a professional to interpret its meaning, the nature of its relationship to speech (phonetic and analytical, or analogical) was irrelevant” (Ibid.: 38, 43). If Rebecca Gould seems to have been the first scholar to have deployed the term “Persian Cosmopolis,” certainly its earliest champion of sorts has been Richard Eaton (2013), who draws a number of explicit parallels between the Sanskrit Cosmopolis as analyzed by Pollock and the Persian Cosmopolis: “Both expanded and flourished well beyond the land of their origin, giving each a transregional—indeed, ‘placeless’—quality. Both were grounded in a prestige language and literature that conferred elite status on their users. They both articulated worldly power—specifically, universal dominion. And while both cosmopolises elaborated, discussed, and critiqued religious traditions, neither was grounded in any specific religion, but rather transcended the claims of any and all religions.”16 Eaton and Wagoner (2013) expand on this comparison but focus primarily on the diffusion of material culture (e.g., architecture, dress, courtly comportment, cuisine) rather than on literary culture. A key takeaway 15 But note that when they write “pictographic” they really mean logographic: the mature reader of an alphabetic script does not read by analyzing each letter individually, but instead reads whole words as distinct word signs. “Pictography” and “ideography” would be as inappropriate for characterizing Persianate reading and writing as they are for Sinitic. 16 No page numbers available. Available at https://www.gcgi.info/blog/423-revisiting -the-persian-cosmopolis-the-world-order-and-the-dialogue-of-civilisations, accessed August 5, 2020.

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point is that it is possible for people to participate in more than one cosmopolis at once; they stress that during the centuries that the Sanskrit and Persian cosmopoleis overlapped and coexisted in India, they were not antagonistic: “Although the former elaborated a vivid mythic reality, while the latter was more invested in the biographical, the historical, and the bureaucratic, both articulated coherent visions for maintaining moral and social order” (Eaton and Wagoner 2013: 26). Richard Eaton builds further on his comparison of the Sanskrit and Persian cosmopoleis, identifying as common features their “lack of a single geographic center and the astonishing portability of their respective bodies of literature” (2019: 70). He also adds observations about class and attitudes to alien cultures: “whereas the Sanskrit cosmopolis was always a mainly Brahman and Jain project, the Persian cosmopolis spanned across a much broader cross-section of society” (Ibid.: 78) and “Brahmanic scholars were historically hostile to assimilating, or even acknowledging, alien cultures. … This raises the rather basic question of just how cosmopolitan the Sanskrit cosmopolis really was” (Ibid.: 83), compared to the more open Persian Cosmopolis. Eaton concludes by suggesting that “the idea of a Persianate world, or Persianate cosmopolis, might prove a promising conceptual key for understanding pre-modern South Asian history on its own terms—and indeed, for rescuing both Iranian and Indian history from the steel grip of nationalist historiographies” (Ibid.: 83). Hamid and Khan (2017), following points made in Spooner and Hanaway (2012b), make the useful observation that a key difference between the Persian Cosmopolis and the Sanskrit Cosmopolis was the use of Persian in the former “as a language of practical imperium” (Ibid.: 492). These remarks by Eaton and Spooner and Hanaway raise interesting questions about the nature of the cosmopolitanism that characterized the Sinographic Cosmopolis. Eaton implies that whereas the Sanskrit Cosmopolis elided difference, the Persian Cosmopolis embraced it. The Sinographic Cosmopolis would appear to be more similar to the Sanskrit ecumene on this score, especially given the ways in which sinographic writing papered over local linguistic difference, even in China itself. Comparative study of the “language of practical imperium” in the Sinographic Cosmopolis is a largely untouched topic (at least in English), but one that should be approached from the perspective of technologies of bureaucratic literacy and in the light of decades of important research on chanceries and chancery language in both Latinate Europe and the Persianate Cosmopolis.17 Other recent works that explicitly develop Pollock’s ideas and expand on the idea of a Persian(ate) Cosmopolis are Cornwall (2015), who “investigates 17

I am grateful to Greg Evon for discussion on these points.

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how participants in the Persian cosmopolis imagined themselves to be connected” (Ibid.: 3) through a study of the Persian Alexander epic cycle as represented by the Shāh-nāma, which “was a sustained meditation on Alexander’s cosmopolis as a Persian Empire” (Ibid.: 12); Gould (2015) who examines the circulation of medieval Persian prison poems from South Asia to the Caucasus; and Petrů (2016: 147), who argues that “the societies of the Malay-Indonesian region were once part of a great cultural sphere, which has been labeled the ‘Persian cosmopolis.’” Leezenberg (2016) tackles questions of cosmopolitan and vernacular in the Ottoman Empire by building on Pollock’s ideas, but faults him for insufficiently addressing questions of linguistic ideology; he introduces the notion of “governmentalization” and stresses that local philological traditions played a key role in the early modern vernacularization processes in the Ottoman Empire starting in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while challenging the notion that these were somehow influenced by European (German Romantic) ideas or developments.18 Focusing specifically on the “Persianate cosmopolitan,” Leezenberg (2020b) asks “how premodern forms of literary domination (or, if one prefers, linguistic, literary, cultural and/or intellectual hegemony) are articulated and reproduced in the absence of direct political control or strict religious dominance” (Ibid.: 274–275) and advocates for “further studies of the Caucasus and the Ottoman empire as part of this cosmopolis” (Ibid.: 274n29). Finally, two recent edited volumes have considerably advanced the fortunes of comparative research on the Persian Cosmopolis: The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere, edited by Abbas Amanat and Assef Ashraf (2019) and The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca, edited by Nile Green (2019a). Both volumes contain sustained engagements with Pollock’s ideas on cosmopolitan and vernacular, and both resonate in useful ways for thinking about the Sinographic Cosmopolis. Ashraf touches on the issue of self-conscious terms for translocal cultural concepts: “It is curious,” he comments (recall the discussion above about the lack of a self-reflexive term in Sanskrit for the Sanskrit Cosmopolis or in Literary Sinitic for the Sinographic Cosmopolis), “that there was no Persian-language equivalent for the term ‘Persianate’” (Ashraf 2019: 1). Ashraf and the other contributors see their goal as reclaiming “Persian language and culture out of the confines of Iranian nationalism … that emphasized the exceptional features of Iranian history” (Ibid.: 5); for them, “the framework of the ‘Persianate’ … offers an opportunity to break free not just from national boundaries, but also forces scholars to move beyond 18 Leezenberg’s notion of “governmentalization” is developed further in Leezenberg (2020a).

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the strictures of outdated academic disciplines;” a “truly comparative method is in fact the best antidote to the framework of exceptionalism” (Ibid.: 8–9). Green’s lengthy introduction is especially rich, both in terms of comparative insights and methodological guidance. Green and his collective understand “the Persianate” as process; crucially, “neither the Persianate as process, nor the Persianate world it created, can be understood through Persian sources alone.” They seek to decenter Iran, “denationalize the study of Persian,” “decouple the study of Persian from both explicit and implicit methodological nationalisms,” and “accentuate the non-Iranian spaces of Persian” as they trace “the contours and constraints of the cosmopolitan” (Green 2019b: 2). With a nod to Fragner’s earlier work and Spooner and Hanaway’s accentuation of Persian as a written language, Green coins the term “Persographia” in place of “Persophonie,”19 emphasizing that “the scribal practices and manuscript-based exchanges that expanded and sustained the Persianate world across the length of Eurasia did not necessarily require the ability to speak Persian” (Ibid.: 4). Like Spooner and Hanaway, Green calls special attention to “Persian’s role as a chancery language,” to the “court secretaries, in their dual roles in the political-administrative and cultural-literary arenas,” and to the “importance of shared and transferred writing practices, the acquired skill sets, and standard repertoires that distinguish written languages like Persian from the spoken languages” (Ibid.: 13, 23). Research on the Persianate Cosmopolis to date has emphasized above all else the crucial differences between written and spoken language, and the paramount importance of the former to the longevity and stability of cosmopolitan cultural formations. Scholars of the Persianate Cosmopolis have stressed the need to decenter Iran, denationalize studies of the Persianate world, and define the limits of the cosmopolitan. For those of us studying the Sinographic Cosmopolis, it is hard to know which is more difficult: “decentering China” when even today it is referred to as Zhongguo 中國 “the Middle Kingdom,” or denationalizing the historical study of literary cultures still institutionalized in academia in some cases as “national literatures” (國文學). Scholars of the Persianate Cosmopolis have called attention to the role of chancelleries, scribes, and bureaucratic language and diplomatics; broadened their focus from literary culture to material culture; queried the diffuse and decentralized nature of the Persianate world; challenged the notion that early modern vernacularization processes were derivative of influences stemming from western Europe; and questioned the utility of “diglossia” and Eurocentric notions of alphabetic literacy that overlook the question of different writing technologies 19 Although personally I would have preferred “Persographie” or even “Persographic Cosmopolis” …

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and “script-families.” All of this resonates strongly with the Sinographic Cosmopolis, provided we also recognize the key importance of different reading technologies in the case of a morphosyllabic (“logographic”) writing system. 4.3 The Babylonian Cosmopolis? Given the broad typological similarities between logography in cuneiform and sinographic writing,20 and the multitude of languages that used cuneiform in the ancient Middle East, we should expect to see experimentation with Pollockian ideas about cosmopolitan and vernacular from Assyriologists and other colleagues working on ancient Mesopotamia. The first example I have seen is Mieroop (2016a), who looks to Pollock’s ideas about the Sanskrit Cosmopolis as a way to break free from the increasingly outdated core-periphery model in Assyriological scholarship, according to which “the Babylonians were the creative minds whose works traveled abroad, to be copied and imitated” (Ibid.: 15). Mieroop’s focus is “Babylonian” literary culture, by which he means “the bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian literate culture produced by people with a multitude of linguistic backgrounds in the southern part of Mesopotamia for the entire duration of the existence of cuneiform script” (Ibid.: 15), as well as the ways in which cuneiform facilitated intellectual exploration, not as a common language, but as a common script—especially when “people outside Babylonia applied them to new vernaculars” (Ibid.: 205). These ideas—with obvious parallels to East Asia that are explored elsewhere in this volume—are developed further in Mieroop (2016b), which calls for nothing less than a “new approach to the study of Ancient Near Eastern literate cultural history” centered on what he calls a “Babylonian Cosmopolis.” Parallel to the Sanskrit Cosmopolis, “[t]he driving force behind the spread of the Babylonian cosmopolitan tradition was not military … Nor was it connected to the spread of a religious ideology or scripture … One element seems to have been the ideology of power” (Ibid.: 264). Moreover, “[i]t is clear that Babylonian cosmopolitan culture did not erase vernaculars, as Latin did in the case of the Western Roman Empire.” Instead, numerous vernaculars in the ancient Near East were committed to writing using cuneiform, and oftentimes deployed cuneiform writing in new and different ways while maintaining close links to and erudition in Sumerian and Akkadian. Thus, “[c]osmopolitan writings can easily coexist with local ones and the latter can be themselves very complex and combine multiple inspirations” (Ibid.: 266).

20

See King (2021) for a discussion of parallels between “vernacular reading” in the ancient Middle East and the Sinographic Cosmopolis.

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4.4 The Sinographic Cosmopolis In the intervening years since our original conference of 2012, a number of works have appeared that engage Pollockian concepts in the study of the Sinographic Cosmopolis. One exciting author that escaped my attention in the early phases of our project is Alexander Beecroft. In what is the only review of Pollock (2006) by an East Asianist of which I am aware, Beecroft (2011) begins by declaring, “If there was a discipline of Pre-Modern Studies, Language of the Gods would be required reading,” but also notes that “the book’s combination of dense theoretical argument and copious textual evidence may scare off all but the most intrepid of readers” (Beecroft 2011: 154, 156), a claim confirmed by my own experience in assigning Pollock’s book to graduate students. Trained in both Classics and Sinology, Beecroft takes issue with Pollock’s categorization of Latin as a cosmopolitan language in a way that skips over the story of how Latin too, once upon a time, was a vernacular remaking itself into a cosmopolitan vernacular in the image of its “reference culture,” Greek.21 Beecroft also makes the useful observation that Latin as a cosmopolitan language is most usefully compared to Sanskrit not during the Roman Empire or with the conversion to Christianity, but “in the literary culture of the medieval and early modern period. Here we find a cultural eco-system which thrives for centuries after the collapse of any political force eager to spread the use of Latin and of the unified church as agent of Latinitas” (Ibid.: 159). Beecroft also supposes we can discern not one but “two waves of vernacularization in Europe[:] … an initial ‘cosmopolitan’ stage, in which European vernaculars seek to appropriate for themselves the cultural resources necessary for literary status, followed by a second, ‘national’ period,” and calls for “for a more supple framework to comprehend developments in Europe” (Ibid.: 160). With his unique combination of expertise in Ancient Greek, Literary Sinitic, and comparative literature, Beecroft (2010a) adapts Pollock’s ideas about the cosmopolitan functions of literature to craft a compelling and revealing comparison of authorship in ancient Greece and what he calls the “Panhuaxia” era of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods in ancient China. But where Pollock’s work tends to focus on cosmopolitan practices of writing and is interested in historical transitions from cosmopolitan to vernacular, Beecroft’s emphasis is more on cosmopolitan practices of reading, “allowing texts from a precosmopolitan era access to cosmopolitan forms of circulation” (Beecroft 2010b: 268). Beecroft (2010a) shows, through different readings of key poems in 21

For the notion of “reference cultures” and Greco-Latin literary relations, see Denecke (2014). For a potted account of how Latin literature was inaugurated in the image of Greek models, see Farrell (2012).

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the Book of Odes (Shijing), how the Spring and Autumn and Warring States eras witnessed the consolidation of first Panhuaxia thinking and then cosmopolitan thinking that became dominant by the Han dynasty (Ibid.: 12). The most fascinating portion of the book for scholars of the Sinographic Cosmopolis is Beecroft’s demonstration of the development of cosmopolitan readings of the “Airs of the States” in the Shijing in the Han dynasty: “The Panhuaxia moment, politically fragmented and unstable, sought at most to construct a common language and behavioral system to ease interstate communication and to foster a sense of identity against the non-Huaxia Other, even as new (especially southern) states were incorporated into the Panhuaxia world. The cosmopolitan moment, by contrast, did not conceive of interstate relations at all (because by definition empire, real or imagined, is universal)” (Ibid.: 206). In this process, the Chinese classics played a central role; in the late Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods classics like the Shijing, the Documents, and the Rites were reconfigured “as the basis of a language of interstate discussion … and a means of identifying who did and did not belong in the Huaxia world,” until their eventual reification, canonization, and textualization by the Eastern Han (Ibid.: 276–277). The first volume on premodern East Asia explicitly inspired by Pollock’s work is Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919, edited by Benjamin Elman (2014). Originating from a research cluster first convened in 2008, this volume set itself the goals of considering “new views of the classical versus vernacular dichotomy” and asking “whether and why East Asian languages should be analyzed in light of a Eurocentric dichotomy” (Elman 2014: 1). The volume argues for “a new conceptual framework that recognizes that in East Asia the literary and vernacular registers historically interacted and influenced each other as part of a unified, if hybrid, language system” (Ibid.: 2), but engagement with Pollock’s ideas is uneven. Hu and Elverskog (2016) is a rare edited volume addressing the theme of cosmopolitanism in China. The editors lament in their introduction that “the question of cosmopolitanism in China has rarely been seriously addressed as part of Chinese history” (Ibid.: 3) and that while “the thought-world of the Han literati during the Qing has received much scholarly attention … it has rarely been framed within a cosmopolitan framework” (Ibid.: 6). Thus, they argue for a “Confucian cosmopolis that stretched from China to Japan and Korea to Vietnam … the East Asian Confucian cosmopolis” (Ibid.: 9). But this latter term and the volume overall do not give appropriate weight to the key defining aspect of this cosmopolis: sinographic writing and the Chinese textual canon. While not directly inspired by Pollock’s oeuvre, another recent work of note that addresses broadly similar themes and concerns in an explicitly

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comparative way is the trilogy edited by Kōno Kimiko, Wiebke Denecke et al. in Japanese titled Nihon “bun”gakushi [A New History of Japanese “Letterature”] (2015–2019). Some forty-eight authors are mobilized across the three volumes, and an overarching theme of the series is the transition from the premodern world of “bun” 文—the wen referenced in the title of this volume—to a modern concept of “bungaku” 文學 modulated by and reconceptualized as Western “literature.” Questions of vernacularization in the early modern and modern periods dominate in the third volume of the series, with essays on China, Japan, and Korea, but nothing on Vietnam. Another welcome feature of this series is its attempt to link a new and explicitly transregional and comparative approach to literary cultures in the Sinographic Sphere of the past with problems of identity and peaceful coexistence in the present and future of the East Asian region. Lamenting that it is easy enough to find ambitious comparative works with the phrase “History of European Literature” in their titles, while analogous works with the phrase “History of East Asian Literature” are nonexistent, the editors call for a de-nationalization of and paradigm shift in the way we approach the history of literary culture in the modern-day nations that once belonged to the Sinographic Cosmopolis. Following on the heels of the Kōno et al. edited volumes, another set titled Reexamining the Sinosphere and Rethinking the Sinosphere and edited by Nanxiu Qian et al. (2020a, 2020b), marked another milestone in the comparative study of premodern East Asian literary culture(s). As with Elman’s Rethinking East Asian Languages, the chapters are fascinating and the comparative thrust of many is a welcome feature. Sonja Arnzten’s (2020) superb account of Japanese Zen Monk Ikkyū Sōjun’s 一休宗純 (1394–1481) “imaginative identification with writers of the past” in his “personal Sinosphere”—in a “China of the imagination”—offers a view of participation in the Sinographic Cosmopolis that accords with my own. But these two Sinosphere volumes seek a unifying theme by claiming that “Sinosphere” denotes both “東亞文化圈” (not translated, but literally “East Asian Cultural Sphere”) and “cultural sphere of Chinese written characters” (漢字文化圈) (Smith 2020: xxii). As I have already discussed, however, there are many problems with these terms. Smith also broaches the important question of how to define “vernacular,” but the notions of cosmopolitan and vernacular are largely absent from both volumes, as is engagement with issues of language, linguistics, grammatology, and the history of reading and writing. Most recently, another ambitious edited volume has appeared, dedicated to the fascinating but underexplored topic of “brush conversation” 筆談 in premodern East Asia: David C. S. Li et al.’s Brush Conversation in the Sinographic Cosmopolis: Interactional Cross-border Communication Using Literary Sinitic in Early Modern East Asia (2022). Remarkable for its inclusion of

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chapters on both Ryukyu and Vietnam in addition to those on China, Japan, and Korea, this volume is also notable for its embrace of the notion of “Sinographic Cosmopolis.” But the single best work to appear to date on language, writing, and literary culture in premodern East Asia is Kornicki (2018). Kornicki’s meticulous research, his broad inclusion of polities and literary cultures that did not survive into modernity like the Tanguts, his expertise in the history of the book in East Asia, his deep engagement with scholarship from modern-day China, Japan, and Korea,22 and his highly accessible exposition are just some of the features that make this volume essential for university students and specialized researchers alike. Among many attractive points are his insistence on viewing the relationship between cosmopolitan and vernacular as a continuum or spectrum rather than as a stark binary opposition; his rejection of “diglossia” as a useful concept for understanding the relationship between Sinitic and the vernaculars in East Asia; his discussions of the ubiquity of “vernacular reading” (reading-by-gloss) practices and the way they challenge Pollock’s claims that vernacularization essentially never took place in East Asia,23 and his emphasis that Japanese and Korean were both “literized” (committed to writing) and “literarized” (made literary) “even before they developed vernacular scripts” (Ibid.: 60; a fact framed in Pollockian terms that has massive implications for understanding subsequent vernacularization processes). Kornicki engages deeply with Pollock’s ideas throughout the book, and makes the useful observation that Pollock fixates on the written language aspect of vernacularization. This is a crucial insight that usefully complicates Pollock’s schema by recognizing the significance of the oral dimension, something essential in the case of a cosmopolitan written code like Sinitic that operates morphosyllabically or logographically and can thus be read (vocalized) in and through any number of languages. In his stimulating concluding chapter, Kornicki finds Pollock’s model of cosmopolitan and vernacular “heuristically valuable”: “there can, I think, be no doubt that Sinitic functioned in East Asia as a cosmopolitan language, albeit only as a written one” (Ibid.: 297), but he concludes that the notion of cosmopolitan versus vernacular is nonetheless an “uncomfortably binary formulation” (Ibid.: 298). In effect, Sinitic could function as a common, cosmopolitan language only when written, and yet it also interacted with 22 A survey of recent scholarship by Chinese scholars writing in Chinese about the Sinographic Cosmopolis is beyond the scope of this introduction, but note that one defining feature of much of this body of research is that it tends to deal exclusively with the primary sources in Literary Sinitic, and rarely engages with scholarship written in Japanese, Korean, or Vietnamese. Sinocentrism dies hard. 23 See also Whitman (2011) on this point.

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vernaculars. This echoes points made by others when adapting Pollock to various historical linguistic and cultural formations, as outlined above, as well as those found in the chapters of this volume. Monograph-length treatments that seek to denationalize modern-day conceptions of the literary historiography of specific premodern East Asian literary cultures have begun to appear, and some of them share this volume’s concerns with vernacularization, eurocentrism, sinocentrism, and Pollock’s ideas. For example, Fraleigh (2016) begins with an excellent discussion of the invention of kanshibun 漢詩文 (Literary Sinitic poetry and prose) and both “national literature” and national literary historiography in the last decades of the nineteenth century in Japan, and opts for “Sinitic poetry” to translate kanshi 漢詩—a term that “has never referred to the works of a particular nationality or ethnicity” (Ibid.: 20). Fraleigh does not invoke Pollock, but Steininger (2017) does in his study Chinese Literary Forms in Heian Japan (Ibid.: 8, 181). The most ambitious book-length treatment to date of a premodern East Asian literary culture that engages with Pollock’s ideas is Park (2020). Park uses the yadam 野談 narrative genre of late-Chosŏn Korea—a genre recorded in sinographic script in a vernacularized form of Literary Sinitic—to challenge modern-day Koreans’ nationalist conflation of (Korean) language and (han’gŭl) script and to decouple sinographs from Sinitic. Thus, she christens this sinographically inscribed but vernacular-inflected genre the “Korean vernacular story” and faults Pollock’s brief dismissal of vernacularization in Korea as a “project of derivative modernity”: “his view of the case of vernacularization in Korea is fundamentally limiting because it is uninformed about the rise of sinographic vernacular writing for literature within the sinographic cosmopolis” (Ibid.: 220–221; see also Park’s chapter in this volume). 4.5 Comparative and World Literature Finally, another field in which Pollock’s oeuvre has begun to have an impact is that of comparative or world literature. Here again Alexander Beecroft was quick to discern the value of Pollock’s work for challenging the dominant moderno- and eurocentric paradigms in comparative literature. Beecroft (2008) was quick to sketch out a new approach to world literature based on six modes: the epichoric (a mode of literary production in which literature is produced within the confines of a local community); the panchoric (literary texts and systems of circulation operating across a range of epichoric communities, united to some degree in language and culture, but generally fragmented politically); the cosmopolitan (wherein “a cosmopolitan literary language creates a cross-cultural system, in which speakers of many languages share a common literary idiom,” borrowed from Pollock’s usage); the vernacular (which “reacts

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against the hegemony of a cosmopolitan literary language,” drawing again on Pollock); and the national (“when the history of a given literature, and its contemporary practices, are mapped onto the history and contemporary status of a particular political state”) (Ibid.: 91–97). This compelling new framework for a truly world literature approach to comparative literature makes it possible to incorporate the premodern and the non-western, and it is fleshed out in greater detail in Beecroft (2015), where he dubs it an “ecological” approach that focuses on “the interaction of literature with its environment” (Ibid.: 3) and refines some of Pollock’s ideas further. Beecroft’s ideas, in turn, are taken up by Stefan Helgesson (2017), who praises Beecroft for building on Pollock’s understanding that cosmopolitan literature took historical precedence over vernacularization and albeit with some criticism, predicts that the book is “destined to become a classic within world literature studies” (Ibid.: 236). Helgesson (2018) is the introduction to an ambitious edited volume titled World Literatures: Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange that builds on both Pollock and Beecroft in an ongoing attempt to overcome “methodological nationalism and eurocentrism” in the study of world literature. Affirming that “The most salient point in both Pollock’s and Beecroft’s discussions is that the vernacular in literary contexts is never reducible to an organic authenticity, untouched by the artifice of a cosmopolitan model” (Ibid.: 8), Helgesson et al. organize their volume around an “open-ended dynamic” of “cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange … [that] provides not only a uniquely adaptable comparative fulcrum for literary studies, but redresses what has repeatedly been identified as the inability of the world literature paradigm to accommodate literature which does not circulate, accumulate global prestige or make it on the Euro-American market” (Ibid.: 7).24 Høgel (2018) extends ideas from Pollock and Beecroft to advocate for the term “trans-imperial” as a more useful tool for conceptualizing world literature in both premodern and modern times. For Høgel, the definition of “cosmopolitan” used by Pollock and Beecroft diminishes “the importance of the empires that caused the spread of these languages and literatures” and elides the fact that “imperial institutions and practices continued to be part of how these languages were perceived and practised, not least through the reading of canonized texts from past times of imperial glory” (Ibid.: 10). Thus, Høgel’s definition of “imperial language”:

24

See also Bodin et al. (2020: 715), who argue for the “pertinence of vernacularity to world literature studies.”

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(1) it needs to be identifiable through grammars and/or a canon of standard texts (for use in schools); (2) it has to be the language used in the administrative running of an empire; (3) it must be the linguistic code that central persons and institutions of an empire employ when giving imperial self-representations. ibid.: 10

Høgel’s framework is useful in that it allows us to frame as “trans-imperial” certain literary traditions or authors (e.g., Kierkegaard, Balzac, Dickens) typically conceived of as “national,” that it overcomes the modern/pre-modern divide, and that it (much as with Spooner and Hanaway’s exposition on written Persian) highlights administrative aspects of prestige written codes. 5

Concluding Remarks: This Volume’s Engagement with Pollock in the East Asian Context

Comparative study of the Sinographic Cosmopolis is still in its infancy and faces many challenges, both in terms of the linguistic and philological “startup costs” for scholars wishing to pursue it, and in terms of entrenched institutional and disciplinary barriers, to name only the most obvious ones. But as I hope to have shown in this introduction, we seem to be much better positioned now than we were even a decade ago to undertake this kind of research, and this is due in no small part to the rich ideas and conceptual apparatus that Sheldon Pollock has generated through his work on the Sanskrit Cosmopolis, on questions of cosmopolitan and vernacular, and on the theoretical and comparative historical study of vernacularization processes. His work has already yielded impressive dividends at the hands of numerous researchers working in diverse fields, and it continues to be critiqued and improved upon. Above all else, Pollock’s ideas have shown the weaknesses of traditional “area studies” paradigms and their intellectual silos, stimulating bold new questions for scholars concerned with incorporating the pre-modern and nonwestern into what heretofore has been a largely eurocentric enterprise that has privileged the present at the expense of a rich and unexplored past. This volume addresses similar themes and problems mooted in this introduction from a variety of angles, but with specific reference to the Sinographic Cosmopolis. Ranging across questions of theory and methodology as well as historical areas and sociopolitical formations, all in one way or another try to assess the ways in which Pollock’s ideas and conceptual apparatus might help

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us further comparative work on the literary cultures of premodern East Asia. China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam are all represented, but with a preponderance of Korea-related content owing to the funding source of the original project. It was indeed heartening that the Korean scholarly and funding community understood the significance of this project. At the same time, such understanding underscores Korea’s self-awareness of its historic participation in a cultural and linguistic formation that transcended—yet never denied—political boundaries. I sketch out below some of the more salient contributions of each chapter. In Chapter 1, David Lurie makes a number of excellent observations that critique or extend Pollock’s ideas. He asks us to imagine additional “pathways to the cosmopolis” besides the two discussed in Pollock (2006)—the “voluntary election of Sanskrit” or the “coercive imposition of Latin”—and like many of us sees the typologically different morphosyllabic Sinitic writing as an obvious contrast with the Latin and Sanskrit cases: the scenario of “a single cosmopolitan script associated with multiple local languages” forces us to account for the role of reading systems. Lurie coins the new term “multiple vernacularities,” asks that we be more attentive to questions of “cosmopolitan persistence,” and concludes with three concrete proposals for adjusting Pollock’s model on the basis of data from the Sinographic Cosmopolis. In Chapter 2, Wiebke Denecke describes Pollock’s work as a “comparative wake-up call” and remarks on how little debate Pollock’s ideas have sparked among scholars of premodern China (again, sinocentrism dies hard, but see above for the important exception of Beecroft’s work). She compares poetry in the earliest Japanese and Korean historical chronicles to assess differences in early Japanese and Korean literary cultures and extract their “embedded poetics.” Like Lurie, Denecke flags the total absence of script issues in Pollock’s discussions—not simply technical grammatological aspects, but also the “exceptionally high cultural, even cosmic prestige” of Sinitic writing. She calls attention to the “distinctive biliteracy” of the cultures on China’s periphery and to the hybrid stylistic modes that developed there. In Chapter 3, Ross King begins a two-part investigation of questions of localized, vernacularized and hybridized cosmopolitans. Chapter 3 compares regional Sanskrits (a topic left to one side by Pollock), “stuffed Latin,” and “Variant Sinitic” along with the metaphors used to describe them both traditionally and today. Two ongoing challenges are understanding how local actors perceived these registers and how modern-day researchers should analyze them. In the case of Variant Sinitic, a strictly grammatological and linguistic approach that insists on assigning one and only one underlying (spoken) linguistic code to such inscriptional practice may not be tenable.

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In Chapter 4, Saito Mareshi takes up the vexed question of how to interpret the term yayan 雅言 in the earliest Chinese sources. Defining it as “cultivated speech,” Saito characterizes it as the patterned eloquence required for ceremonial and performative recitation registers originating in the ritual contexts of ancient China that gave rise to Chinese writing in the first place. Pointing out that Warring States China must have been multi-ethnic and multilingual in nature, Saito supposes that the famous unification and standardization of writing undertaken under the Qin Empire also marked the “establishment of a single writing system compatible with … diverse spoken languages” and that this early period therefore was the first Sinographic Sphere. The special recitative register that he identifies with yayan functioned as a prestigious “cosmopolitan” voice, first in Warring States China, and then later as the Sinographic Sphere spread to places like the Korean Peninsula and Japan, where it lived on in the form of kundoku-type reading practices. Saito’s work will resonate with scholars of the Babylonian Cosmopolis as they explore how cuneiform writing interacted with different local languages and prestige registers there. In Chapter 5, Torquil Duthie shows how Japanese waka poetry was imagined early on as a “discrete textual world comparable to the cosmopolitan realm of Literary Sinitic.” Based on a careful examination of poems in the Man’yōshū, Duthie shows how this new poetic world could function as a kind of Pollockian “cosmopolitan vernacular,” in effect serving as a “parallel universe devoted to similar themes as Sinitic poetry” and allowing the poets to “inhabit both the cosmopolitan and vernacular realms at the same time, moving back and forth between them.” Thus, Duthie appears to find the early Japanese poets rather more cosmopolitan than does Denecke, and his chapter reminds us that literary cultures in history were not restricted to membership in a single cosmopolis: it was possible to live in overlapping cosmopoleis (as with the coexistence of the Sanskrit and Persianate cosmopolises for centuries in India) or to participate simultaneously in both an outward-facing and an inward-facing cosmopolis (as seems to have been the case with Japan in the period Duthie studies). Chapters 6 through 9 examine cases from medieval China and Japan and from modernizing Vietnam. In Chapter 6, John Jorgensen surveys different registers of Sinitic that—while not the orthodox Literary Sinitic of the classical canon—nonetheless enjoyed a sort of cosmopolitan currency across the Sinographic Cosmopolis and qualified as “secondary” or “specialized” cosmopolitan codes. These included the liwen 吏文 used in bureaucratic and diplomatic contexts, the vernacular(ized) Sinitic of Chan Buddhist yulu 語錄, and of course the novelistic vernacular Sinitic now called baihua 白話, all of which posed special problems for learners and users in premodern Korea because of their many differences with Literary Sinitic. For Jorgensen, as with other

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authors (see Shang Wei [2014] and Lurie in this volume), the cosmopolitanlike qualities of baihua and these other “secondary cosmopolitan” languages complicate Pollock’s simplistic cosmopolitan vs. vernacular binary, and in this respect his chapter is of a piece with Ollett’s recent book on Prakrit (2017). In Chapter 7, Alexey Lushchenko examines three different biographies of Hideyoshi from the early Tokugawa period (1603–1868) in Japan to develop the idea of a “high vernacular” register (akin to Pollock’s “cosmopolitan vernacular”) and to demonstrate the ways in which the “same” content could be recorded in different inscriptional styles along a continuum ranging from vernacular to cosmopolitan. Moreover, these different inscriptional styles were interchangeable or at least easily converted from one to the other: a work in a vernacular register could potentially be turned into a cosmopolitan work and vice versa via kundoku reading-by-gloss/vernacular reading algorithms. Lushchenko also dwells on the question of the “foreignness” of Literary Sinitic in seventeenth-century Japan’s inscriptional ecology: we should imagine Literary Sinitic (kanbun) at this time not as a foreign “Chinese” language but as simply a high formal register of Japanese. Thus, Lushchenko characterizes Hayashi’s Literary Sinitic version of Hideyoshi’s biography as “primarily high vernacular” (when accessed via kundoku reading technology in Japanese) and “only potentially cosmopolitan,” in the sense that it could also be accessible and readable for educated readers across East Asia. Chapter 8, by John Phan, is the first of two papers on Vietnam, both of which in one way or another examine the unraveling of the Sinographic Cosmopolis there. Phan’s earlier work on Nôm vernacularity has examined how Vietnamese elites sought to use Nôm to hybridize with Literary Sinitic and thereby elevate the vernacular to a point where it could be viewed as an extension of Literary Sinitic (paralleling in some respects Pollock’s ideas about the cultivation of “cosmopolitan vernaculars”). But in this chapter Phan asks how vernacularization processes triggered under conditions of colonialism intersect with script, and studies one fascinating attempt to create a new and “phonographically accurate” script for Vietnamese that nonetheless appealed to traditional numerological design principles found in the Book of Changes. Ultimately, Phan insists that “Pollock’s ‘cosmopolitan and vernacular’ need not in fact be a zero-sum game, and that vernacular phenomena like Chữ Nôm may coexist within a greater cosmopolitan rubric fluidly, until other cultural, intellectual, or political forces intrude.” In Chapter 9, Yufen Chang constructs a genealogy for the way the term “civilization” was rendered into Vietnamese. In so doing, she sheds light on how the Vietnamese lexicon was restructured during the dissolution of the Sinographic Cosmopolis under conditions of French colonialism and intellectual contact

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with Japan mediated via China. She describes what she calls the Sinographic Translational Network and uncovers the networks of translation and print culture that facilitated the adoption of numerous sinographic lexical items via Chinese translations of Japanese translations of western works. In the process, Chang raises the question as to whether a similar translational network ever came into being for the former Sanskrit Cosmopolis in Southeast Asia, and concludes in the negative. Her findings raise interesting questions yet again about the fundamental differences between morphosyllabic Sinitic writing and its immense possibilities for word-formation across multiple languages, and the multiple alphasyllabaries used to write Sanskrit over time. Chang’s paper pairs well with Hwang’s paper in this volume. The remaining chapters of the volume focus on Korea. In Chapter 10, Scott Wells sets the stage with an overview of how, at the turn of the last century, inscriptional practices in Korea underwent a rapid shift from cosmopolitan Literary Sinitic to vernacular Korean that left knowledge of Literary Sinitic as a “legacy literacy.” But whereas standard nationalist narratives of this shift portray it teleologically as natural and inevitable, Wells shows how numerous societal actors rendered this process more of a “forced conversion” than a natural evolution from within. Moreover, he uses the demise of Literary Sinitic in turnof-the-last-century Korea to illustrate Pollock’s contention that vernacularity and the “authorization to write” is “not a natural state of being but a willed act of becoming,” and one that societal actors willingly choose to undertake. Wells’ chapter is another excellent contribution to studies of how cosmopolitan formations end. In Chapter 11, Greg Evon introduces the novel concept of “script apartheid” to explain the reluctance of Chosŏn Korea elites to fully exploit the Korean vernacular for literary production, despite having at their disposal a wellfunctioning vernacular script. Unlike in Japan, in Korea sinographs and the vernacular script “typically did not occupy the same visual space,” and certainly not in fictional narratives. Like others in the volume, Evon emphasizes the different roles of writing and script in the Sanskrit and Sinographic Cosmopolises: there was “far closer correspondence between script and written language in Literary Sinitic than existed in the case of Sanskrit.” Evon finds that Pollock’s distinction between a text’s “workly” and “documentary”/“cont entual”/“informational” dimensions (this in turn aligning with the use of cosmopolitan Sanskrit vs. the vernacular) does not fit well with definitions of what counted as “literature” in the Sinographic Cosmopolis and understandings of the informational vs. the imaginative. Evon engages in a fascinating forensic discussion of a Literary Sinitic poem included in Kim Manjung’s (1637–1692) novel A Nine Cloud Dream (extant in multiple manuscript versions in both vernacular Korean and Literary Sinitic), to reinforce the view that—pace much

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modern-day nationalist literary historiography—A Nine Cloud Dream must have been written first in Literary Sinitic, and his discussion of Kim Manjung’s other famous novel, Lady Sa’s Journey to the South, similarly illuminates Chosŏn Korean elites’ ideologies around language, writing, and literature. In short, “script apartheid” hindered the move from vernacular “literization” to vernacular “literarization.” Chapter 12 by Ross King continues the discussion begun on a more comparative level in Chapter 3 and calls for more attention to texts in hybridized formats that have been traditionally derogated at the expense of pristine and orthodox cosmopolitan registers. This chapter focuses more specifically on Variant Sinitic from Korea as a first step toward more in-depth study of the wealth of texts in Chosŏnsik hanmun 朝鮮式漢文, or “Chosŏn-style hanmun.” King’s overview of research to date on this topic and of the wide range of sources available suggests that a full-fledged accounting of historical processes of vernacularization in Korea must also take into account sinographically rendered vernacular (or vernacularized) texts, and in this sense harmonizes with the work of Si Nae Park (2020 and in Chapter 13 of this volume). Chapter 13, by Si Nae Park, is a sequel to her monograph of 2020 and provides a detailed examination of what she calls “Korean Vernacular Sinitic” as instantiated in Late-Chosŏn yadam narratives. Park’s work forces a reconceptualization of the very boundaries of Korean vernacular literature and uses the idea of “lexical texture” to show how a narrative rendered exclusively in sinographs can nonetheless be highly vernacular. Her work challenges Pollock’s conception of vernacularization as emphasizing a rupture with the cosmopolitan order, and synergizes with Chapters 3 and 12 by King. Chapter 14, by Marion Eggert, was first presented at a conference on “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular: The Politics of Language in the Diglossic Culture of Korea” hosted by the late Professor JaHyun Kim Haboush in 2004. A colleague of Sheldon Pollock at Columbia University, Kim Haboush deserves credit for being the first to begin exploring Pollockian notions of cosmopolitan and vernacular in the Korean context. Eggert’s chapter analyzes language use and language discourse in Pak Chiwŏn’s (1735–1805) virtuoso travelogue to Beijing, Yŏrha ilgi (Jehol Diary), to lodge yet another series of arguments against modern-day Korean nationalist teleological narratives of vernacularization. Pak Chiwŏn’s intense interest in language, languages, and “the relative merits of Korean versus spoken Chinese and Literary Sinitic” was tied more to his quest to capture the quotidian than to the valorization of any one particular code or register. Chapter 15, by Ahn Daehoe, one of South Korea’s foremost authorities on premodern Korea’s literature in Literary Sinitic, also originated as a paper prepared for the 2004 conference on cosmopolitan and vernacular in Korea

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organized by JaHyun Kim Haboush. Ahn does not make specific reference to Pollock, but fills an important gap in our knowledge of the history of Korean perceptions of the traditional “gap” between speech and writing through his exhaustive survey of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chosŏn Korean elite views on this topic. Echoing to some extent the Wells chapter in this volume, Ahn shows that the views and debates in late Chosŏn did not necessarily presage the language reform measures taken at the turn of the last century. In the final chapter, Hwang Hoduk examines the role of sinographs and sinographic vocabulary in reconfiguring much of the intellectual lexicon of modern-day Korean as the Sinographic Cosmopolis disintegrated and morphed into the Japanese empire. Building on his extensive research with Yi Sanghyŏn on the earliest bilingual dictionaries in modern Korea, Hwang uses Saitō Mareshi’s notion of the “Literary Sinitic Context” (K. hanmunmaek 漢文脈; see Saito [2021]) to show how sinographs became a mediating technology to negotiate the shift from the Sinographic Cosmopolis to the Latin Cosmopolis as Korean incorporated huge numbers of made-in-Japan calques of Latinate terminology. Hwang’s paper is another excellent contribution to studies of the “endings” of cosmopolitan codes and is a good companion piece to Chang’s chapter in this volume. To conclude, the contributors and I sincerely hope this volume will serve as a catalyst for new research into the history of cosmopolitan and vernacular interactions in the Sinographic Cosmopolis. References Amanat, Abbas, and Assef Ashraf, eds. 2019. The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Arntzen, Sonja. 2020. “Chinese Community of the Imagination for the Japanese Zen Monk Ikkyū Sōjun 一休宗純 (1394–1481).” In Rethinking the Sinosphere: Poetics, Aesthetics, and Identity Formation, edited by Nanxiu Qian, Richard J. Smith, and Bowei Zhang, 67–94. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press. Ashraf, Assef. 2019. “Pathways to the Persianate.” In The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere, edited by Abbas Amanat and Assef Ashraf, 1–14. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Aussant, Emilie. 2009. Review of The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India by Sheldon Pollock. Histoire Épistémologie Language 31/II: 178–181. Beecroft, Alexander. 2008. “World Literature without a Hyphen: Towards a Typology of Literary Systems.” New Left Review 54 (Nov.–Dec.): 87–100.

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Chapter 1

The Vernacular in the World of Wen: Sheldon Pollock’s Model in East Asia? David B. Lurie 1

Introduction1

Sheldon Pollock’s The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (2006) provides a rich and fruitful framework for thinking about the comparative history of literature and literacy. This is not just a matter of the useful pair “cosmopolitan” and “vernacular,” terms that have taken on a somewhat independent existence in more or less the particular senses that Pollock gives them. As originally deployed these concepts are part of a complex and dynamic theoretical model that describes a two-part process: the establishment of a cosmopolis (a “transregional culture-power sphere” [Pollock 2006: 12]) of literary language, and the emergence, centuries later, of vernacular modes of expression, shaped into new literary languages through superposition of and opposition to preexisting cosmopolitan structures that they eventually replace. The model pertains not just to the Sanskrit cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia and the vernaculars (Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, and so on) that supplant it, but also to the Latin cosmopolis and the European vernaculars. In an example of what Victor Lieberman (2003, 2009) refers to as “strange parallels,” the structurally similar (and yet significantly different) rise of a cosmopolitan and later appearances of vernaculars in these far-flung parts of Eurasia took place, Pollock argues, close together in time: around the start of the first millennium ce, and, roughly a thousand years later, during the early second millennium, respectively. The first stage of Pollock’s model offers much to scholars of East Asia. For example, his delineation of contrasting conditions of expansion—voluntary for Sanskrit versus coercive for Latin—opens up potential comparisons with the adoption of Sinitic textuality by East Asian states as they emerged.2 There is 1 This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOE) (AKS-2011-AAA-2103). 2 By “textuality” I mean the combination of a distinctive script with: a set of canonical works written in it; associated commentaries, lexicons, and primers; techniques for producing new works in the same mode; and methods for connecting such writings to spoken language(s).

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a potentially significant contrast between Vietnam and Koguryŏ in the northern part of the Korean Peninsula, areas which were at times under the control of the Chinese empire, and the states of the southern Korean Peninsula and the Japanese Archipelago, which never were. It is provocative to think about the potential applicability along the eastern periphery of China of a description like this: First, it is astonishing how quickly—in hardly more than a century—the elements of a new cultural-political form, a Sanskrit cosmopolitan way of political being, spread across southern Asia. No good explanations have been advanced to account for this transformation, and indeed, explanations are not ready to hand. We have seen that most of the usual factors in such large-scale change can be set aside at once. There was no event of conquest; no “Sanskrit” polity had conquered the subcontinent, let alone beyond. New universalist visions of power did arise at just this time […], but none ever took on a presence real enough to effect such a transformation the way Romanization followed in the train of Roman legions […] No religious revolution had taken place, and no new revelation was produced in Sanskrit to stimulate evangelism, nor did any transregional movement or institution even exist to propagate such a revolution, had one occurred. What transpired seems to have happened according to some cultural process of imitation and borrowing less familiar to us as causative than conquest or conversion, some impulse toward transculturation that made it sensible, even desirable, to adopt the new Sanskrit cultural-political style as an act of pure free will. Pollock 2006: 132–133

Despite the absence of anything like the “Romanization” referred to here, in the Korean states of Silla and Paekche, and in Wa (precursor to Japan), Sinitic textuality was adopted in the context of interstate warfare and regional rivalry, which potentially represents a third path to the cosmopolis that is neither the voluntary election of Sanskrit nor the coercive imposition of Latin.3 But the area of greater interest to specialists in East Asia is the second part of the model: the development of vernacular forms of expression within a 3 In East Asia, as the Sinographic Cosmopolis expanded in the middle of the first millennium ce, religion (in the form of Buddhism) seems to have played a rather larger role than it does in Pollock’s description of the South Asian case, but even so it is difficult to see it as a determining factor in the expansion of literacy and literary expression. For a consideration of this issue in early Japan, see Lurie (2011: 131–150); further discussion of the transcultural role of Buddhism in premodern East Asia can be found in Holcombe (1999; 2001: 94–108).

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pre-existing cosmopolitan world. Here we encounter more difficulties in adopting Pollock’s framework, difficulties that are in themselves highly edifying for the comparative history of literature and literacy in East Asia. Pollock is well aware of these difficulties, and so the place to start any attempt to evaluate the applicability of the cosmopolitan/vernacular paradigm to East Asia is with what he himself has to say about the region. To argue that China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam fit his paradigm poorly is not to contradict Pollock but to agree with him: the interesting questions are how and why, and to what extent, these various non-cosmopolitan textualities depart from the latter half of his model. Introducing his discussion of the “European Counter-Cosmopolis” of Latinity, Pollock explains that one reason he does not address the East Asian case is that “in the most consequential later phase of the story told here, that of vernacularization, the East Asian parallel breaks down, or at least a very different historical trajectory manifests itself” (Pollock 2006: 259). In Vietnam, for example, “the two great alternatives in premodern Asian globalization met toe to toe” but there regional individuation in the cultural-political sphere was asserted hesitantly in the late medieval period but then arrested, and vernacularization was consummated only under the vastly changed circumstances of colonialism. The same holds true for almost the entire periphery of the Middle Kingdom, Japan excepted. In China itself, vernacularization in the full sense of the term used here never occurred […]. ibid.: 259–260

These points are restated and amplified in the later treatment of “Comparative/ Connective Vernacularization,” in which East Asia is mentioned in passing as an exception to parallel “Eurasia-wide” developments: a theory of cultural change based on the late-medieval world system certainly cannot account for the very different developments for literary culture in East Asia. While the region was an essential component of that system, with the sole exception of Japan there was a complete absence of vernacularization in the sense in which the term is used in this book. […] The full vernacularization of Vietnam—like that of Korea, despite the development there too of a demotic writing system in the mid-fifteenth century owing to King Sejong’s reforms—would be the project of a derivative modernity. Indeed, the breakthrough to vernacularization was absent throughout the Chinese world, including in China itself. ibid.: 486–487

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Obviously, the validity of these specific claims for China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam turn on the definition of (“full”) “vernacularization.” For Pollock, this is the process by which a local spoken language (a “language of Place”) becomes a written medium for literary expression and the assertion of political power (acts that are, in premodernity at least, inherently intertwined), and then supplants the cosmopolitan register on which it has been modeled, taking over its functions and authority in a geographically narrower context. To consider the extent of vernacularization in East Asia in this specific sense, then, three key issues must be addressed: the relationship between local language and writing, the problem of literature, and the degree to which the Literary Sinitic cosmopolitan is “supplanted” before the modern period. 2

Local Languages and Cosmopolitan Writing

The inscription of local languages, which Pollock refers to as “literization,” takes place on a fundamentally different terrain in East Asia, because of a factor that Language of the Gods leaves in the background: the technical functioning of writing systems. In both South Asia and Europe, the older cosmopolitan languages of Sanskrit and Latin and the newly emerging vernaculars were written in common or closely related scripts (the expanse of the phonographic Latin alphabet is too familiar to dwell upon, but even in South Asia, where there are more pronounced visual and technical distinctions among scripts used to write different languages, all are alphasyllabic phonographic writing systems descended from the Brahmi script). In the East Asian case, however, in Japan and Korea at least, the nature of contact between cosmopolitan and non-cosmopolitan was significantly complicated by a contrast in the fundamental workings of writing systems: that is, the logographic Literary Sinitic cosmopolitan interacted with the non-cosmopolitan phonographic scripts of kana 假名 and han’gŭl. Japan and Korea are, of course, not the only cases of such contact between logography and phonography: there is the great contact line with Indic and Central Asian scripts (all ultimately derived from Aramaic) in what is now Vietnam and along the northwestern borders of China; a number of similar situations occur in the ancient Near East with contact between hieroglyphic and cuneiform logography and various phonographic scripts; and Mesoamerica in the early sixteenth century arguably presented a similar kind of contact, although the details are obscure because so little contemporary written material survived the European incursion. It is important to note that characterizing entire writing systems as either “logographic” or “phonographic” is

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problematic: in the East Asian context, the Sinitic script has always involved phonographic elements, and at certain points in its history, its use to record the Chinese language has been more extensively phonographic than is often recognized. In other East Asian contexts as well, both “phonographic” and “logographic” styles incorporate significant degrees of the opposing graphic principle. But such examples of hybridity do not obscure the significance of the broad contrast between these two styles. In premodern Japan, for example, it may seem tempting to simply equate logographic writing with the cosmopolitan and phonographic with the noncosmopolitan (and, potentially, with the vernacular in Pollock’s sense), but that would be a serious mistake. Certainly, there is a large literary corpus centered on Heian-period classics (waka 和歌 poetry and closely allied prose genres) written primarily in phonographic kana, and the development of that literature has traditionally been linked to the purported new emergence of the phonographic script (more about this below). But as I have argued extensively elsewhere (Lurie 2011), the history of writing in Japan cannot be understood without taking into account the role of reading systems that localize Literary Sinitic cosmopolitan writing (in ways with clear connections to early Korean literacies). Kundoku 訓讀 reading allows cosmopolitan texts to be vocalized in the non-cosmopolitan local language; this complicates the linguistic status of even the most orthodox Literary Sinitic writing, but it also makes possible logographic styles so inconsistent with orthodoxy that they cannot be considered cosmopolitan, even at the textual level.4 The contrast with the methods of inscription addressed in Pollock’s model is apparent in one of the only places he directly addresses the topic of writing systems: Perhaps a more suggestive index of Sanskrit’s relation to local styles of culture is the remarkable adaptability of the Sanskrit graphic sign itself, a “substitutability” that made it unique among the various “immense communities” of premodernity [quoting Anderson 1983]. Latin carried the Roman script with it wherever it went and tolerated no fundamental deviation from the metropolitan style for centuries to follow […]. And the 4 As Shang Wei (2014) points out, within China as well there were regionally contrasting reading pronunciations of Literary Sinitic logographic texts, which amounted to the linguistic localization of cosmopolitan writings. As Whitman et al. (2010) suggest, the use of the Japanese term “kundoku” for a practice found in Korea and other non-Japanese contexts (about which see also Whitman [2011]) is invidious, but because the alternative they propose, “vernacular reading,” is liable to cause confusion in the context of a discussion of Pollock’s model of vernacularization, I have reluctantly opted to continue using the Japanese term here.

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script was indivisible from the literature: Vergil could have written the opening words of the Aeneid, arma virumque cano, only in a single alphabet, and from then on the words would be written only in that alphabet. In southern Asia, no writing system was ever so determinative of Sanskrit (until, ironically, Devanagari attained this status just as the cosmopolitan era was waning). Whereas early Brahmi script ultimately shaped all regional alphabets in South Asia and many in Southeast Asia (Burmese, Lao, Thai, Khmer, and probably Javanese), that script tolerated modification, often profound modification, wherever it traveled. Through this process, which appears to have occurred more or less synchronously across the Sanskrit world, scripts quickly began to assert a regional individuality in accordance with local aesthetic sensibilities, so much so that by the eighth century one self-same cosmopolitan language, undeviating in its literary incarnation, was being written in a range of alphabets almost totally distinct from each other and indecipherable without specialized study. […] Perhaps no better sign than the graphic sign itself shows how clearly one could be in the Sanskrit cosmopolis and simultaneously remain at home. Pollock 2006: 273–274

There are two scenarios for cosmopolitan textuality here: Latin, in which a single cosmopolitan language is inseparable from a single cosmopolitan script, and Sanskrit, in which a single cosmopolitan language is associated with multiple local scripts. But in East Asia there is a third scenario: a single cosmopolitan script associated with multiple local languages. This is a striking departure from the cases considered in Language of the Gods, and yet it seems relatively straightforward to accommodate it to the cosmopolitan half of Pollock’s model, because of the large role played therein by processes of “localization” (such as the regionally distinct scripts discussed in the passage just quoted).5 In other words, as long as we are concerned with the structure of the Sinographic Cosmopolis, logographic reading/writing techniques (i.e., kundoku or “vernacular reading/reading by gloss”), along with localized character pronunciations stemming from Chinese (“sinoxenic readings,” to use Samuel Martin’s term) and contrasting regional reading traditions within China itself, are examples of the localization processes that enable the cosmopolitan to function across a wide geographic expanse. However, the nature 5 The phenomenon of a single cosmopolitan script associated with multiple local languages is not unique to East Asia; on this issue, see the cursory overview in Lurie (2011: 359–361), and the more extensive discussions in Whitman (2011) and King (in press).

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of logography in East Asia, and the contrast between logographic and phonographic writing there, are harder to accommodate in the second half of the model—vernacularization—especially with regard to the crucial next step Pollock posits as following the initial literization of local languages. 3

Literarization/Wen-ification

Pollock’s distinction between the cosmopolitan and the vernacular and his theorization of their inter-relation have been widely noted, but another important opposition advanced in Language of the Gods seems to have been less influential, even though it is a crucial part of his particular definition of the vernacular. This is perhaps because of the awkwardness of the terms involved: “literization” versus “literarization.” (At the risk of further muddying the waters, I will propose a reformulation of the latter that has specific East Asian resonances.) By literization Pollock means, in “analogy with the German Verschriftlichung,” the “breakthrough to writing;” in other words, “the invention of literacy and the growth of manuscript culture.” This is necessary for but not identical to a related transformation (a “close cousin”): “literarization,” which is the “process” of “achieving conformity” with a “relatively stable paradigm of literary properties that in addition to lexical, metrical, and thematic features included writing as a fundamental component” (Pollock 2006: 4–5). To reduce the potential for confusion between these terms, and to emphasize Pollock’s inclusion of political documents left out of modern belletristic definitions of literature, we can also think of “literarization” as a process of “wenification,” drawing on the venerable tradition of patterned language (C. wen, J. bun, K. mun, Viet. văn 文) that is central to premodern East Asian concepts of literature.6 One of Pollock’s major arguments is that there is a lag between literization—the process by which a language acquires a script and comes to be writable—and literarization/wen-ification—the process by which a written language becomes the medium for literary works (broadly defined). It is only once a local language (a “language of Place”) has been literarized/wenified that it becomes possible to consider it a vernacular in Pollock’s sense; until that transformation, one simply has literized (writable) languages subsumed under the overarching cosmopolitan medium for expression. This distinction is the crucial point for any consideration of the applicability of the 6 For a selection of classic statements on wen, see Owen (1992); a recent treatment of the concept in premodern Japan can be found in Duthie (2014: 403–408).

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latter half of Pollock’s model to East Asia, not least because it allows a more nuanced approach to the problem of contrasting principles of inscription discussed above. In early Korea, in Japan until the twentieth century, and most likely in Vietnam as well, local languages were literized through the constellation of logographic reading/writing techniques known as kundoku. That is, through associations with Sinitic logographs and techniques of syntactic transposition, non-Sinitic languages experienced a “breakthrough to writing” that allowed them to be inscribed logographically.7 But this, in itself, does not mean that they became “vernacularized.” It is true that, from the reading perspective, the belletristic and political texts that made up the Sinographic Cosmopolis were transposed into local, non-Sinitic linguistic contexts; and it is also the case that new texts written in Literary Sinitic could be produced in the same linguistic contexts (that is, logographic texts that conformed to the usage and syntax of Literary Sinitic while being readable in the local non-Sinitic language). But precisely because such writings were so closely dependent on the cosmopolitan standard, it is hard to see this development as a literarization/wen-ification of the local languages: as I argued above, it is more akin to the process of “localization” that Pollock sees as an inherent feature of the cosmopolitan itself. What, then, of logographic inscription that departs from the cosmopolitan standard in its textual form rather than merely in the reading associated with it? This includes what in Japanese is referred to as “non-standard Sinitic writing” (hentai kanbun 変體漢文) and similar styles in Korea, but more broadly also Korean idu 吏讀 and Vietnamese Chữ Nôm 𡨸喃 (as I stipulated earlier, that phonographic elements are included should not obscure the unifying maintenance of the principle of logography for these methods of writing). Within China itself, the style traditionally termed baihua 白話 also falls into this category, although many such texts have extensive Literary Sinitic features.8 Since these styles are more or less illegible as Literary Sinitic, and since they depart from good form (in terms of genre and expression) in that 7 See Lurie (2011: 169–212). 8 Elsewhere in this volume, baihua is rendered as “written Chinese vernacular,” but I will follow Shang Wei (2014) in calling it “plain writing.” As his paradigm-shifting discussion demonstrates, a crucial problem with the so-called baihua style is the difficulty of associating many such texts with any particular “language of Place.” In that sense it is arguable that baihua does not belong in the same category as Vietnamese Nôm, Korean idu, or Japanese “hentai kanbun,” which are logographic styles firmly linked to local languages. But as the (admittedly anachronistic) name itself suggests, one aspect of the conceptualization of baihua is its connection to speech, and there are parallels between its relationship with Literary Sinitic and those of the other East Asian non-cosmopolitan logographic styles, so here I have elected to maintain, tentatively, a single framework.

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register, they are certainly non-cosmopolitan. Whether or not we can see these logographic styles as “vernaculars” in Pollock’s sense, however, depends on to what extent they are literarized/wen-ified. This turns out to be a difficult question, and the answer is mixed. In Japan and Korea, there are early examples of poetry in the local nonSinitic language written logographically (with varying degrees of phonographic adjuncts) in the late-eighth-century Man’yōshū 萬葉集 (Collection of Myriad Leaves) and the hyangga 鄕歌 of the Koryŏ period (935–1392), but both seem to have been orthographic dead ends. In both, the vast majority of prose written in a non-cosmopolitan logographic style is utilitarian: documents and records rather than works of literary expression or political pronouncement. One does find collections of narratives that incorporate this style of writing, such as the yadam 野談 (“unofficial talk”) texts described by Si Nae Park in this volume or Japanese works like the thirteenth-century Kojidan 古事談 (Conversations about Ancient Matters), but even if these are retrospectively incorporated into modern canons of classical literature, in their contemporary contexts such informal collections of anecdotes did not have the status of literarized/wenified works.9 Two exceptions that come to mind in premodern Japan are the eighthcentury Kojiki 古事記 (Record of Ancient Matters) and the early-fourteenthcentury Azuma kagami 吾妻鏡 (Mirror of the East), histories (the former with a significant mythic component) that were compiled at centers of political power (the Nara court and the seat of military government in Kamakura, respectively). Both of these are in non-cosmopolitan logographic styles that can be seen as literarized/wen-ified, but the former is from the same early experimental moment that produced the logographic poetry of the Man’yōshū, and the latter is associated with a recently founded eastern city of warriors whose culture involved a complex mixture of derivation from and resistance to that of the imperial court in Kyoto, far to the west. Other works compiled at and for political centers, such as the eighth-century Nihon shoki 日本書紀 (Chronicles of Japan) or various histories of the Edo period (for example, longterm projects like the Honchō tsūgan 本朝通鑑 (Comprehensive Mirror of Our Realm), completed in 1670) and Dai Nihonshi 大日本史 (History of Great Japan, 1657–1906), were written in the orthodox Literary Sinitic cosmopolitan style. The situation seems to be quite different for Vietnam and China, where non-cosmopolitan logography appears to have had a more literary character. In Vietnam, Chữ Nôm writing never played the bureaucratic or utilitarian role that cognate styles did in Japan and Korea, being reserved instead for an 9 For another important example of a Korean logographic literary work, see Wang (2019).

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efflorescence of belletristic expression in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one that shows clear signs of being extensively literarized/wen-ified (Phan 2014). The situation in China is particularly complex because of the persistent mixing of Literary Sinitic with “plain writing” (baihua), but there are styles of writing that prominently incorporate non-cosmopolitan elements. Texts written in this way include major works of drama and fiction from the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. It is perhaps these so-called baihua texts that present the greatest challenge to Pollock’s model. Shang Wei (2014) emphasizes the characteristic mixing of “plain writing” with Literary Sinitic elements, and its frequent lack of real local linguistic character, but another complication is that there were also decidedly cosmopolitan elements to the reception of baihua literary works, primarily fiction, elsewhere in East Asia. They were taken as exemplars of a transregional style (distinct from Literary Sinitic) to be studied and emulated, and also influenced writing in local languages through processes of what Pollock refers to as “superposition.”10 So there is great variation across the region in terms of the literarization/ wen-ification of non-cosmopolitan logographic writings, with comparatively little in Japan and Korea and comparatively more in Vietnam and (arguably) China. What, then, of phonographic writing? Here Vietnam and China drop out of consideration, as both cosmopolitan and non-cosmopolitan styles were primarily logographic.11 Despite the court context and ideological trappings of the invention and promulgation of the purely phonographic han’gŭl script in Korea, the genres with which it was associated before the modern period never achieved anything like the prestige and political value of cosmopolitan writings in Literary Sinitic. Nonetheless, its use in poetic/song genres like the sijo 時調 and kasa 歌詞/歌辭 shows a degree of literarization/wen-ification, which contrasts with the different situation of non-cosmopolitan logography. It is in Japan, however, where the most striking literarization/wen-ification of phonographic writing occurs. From the first emergence of widespread inscription in the mid-seventh century there are examples of poems written 10 Because of their perceived connections to spoken Chinese dialects, one could potentially term these baihua writings a “vernacularized cosmopolitan,” the opposite in many respects of Pollock’s “cosmopolitan vernacular.” For aspects of their reception outside of China, especially of works of fiction, see Pastreich (1997; 2011), Hartmann (2014), Hedberg (2020) and Yuan (2022). 11 Early nôm had a greater degree of phonography, but in its mature form the logographic principle dominated; similarly, phonography has been a crucial element of Chinese writing from its inception, but in the stable post-Han dynasty form through which Literary Sinitic became a cosmopolitan medium, characters were inherently logographic in conception and generally so in function, and this remained the case with “plain writing,” excepting occasional phonographic indication of spoken dialect forms.

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entirely in phonograph characters (sinographs used for sound, now known as man’yōgana 萬葉假名), although this format is overshadowed by logographdominated styles of inscription in the eighth-century Man’yōshū, which preserves most of the poetry of the period.12 The unambiguous rise of belletristic phonograph writing occurs about a century later, but in that connection it is important to distinguish between the two different phonographic scripts that developed out of sinographs in the early Heian period. Katakana 片假名 began, and in many ways remained, as adjuncts to cosmopolitan logographic texts, used to transcribe kundoku glosses in manuscripts, and eventually to record them in dictionaries. A derivative usage was to mix them with logographic characters in narrative works such as the Konjaku monogatarishū 今 昔物語集 (Tales from Times Now Past; twelfth century) and the Taiheiki 太平 記 (Chronicle of the Great Peace; late fourteenth century), but such texts were not canonical until long after their composition.13 Hiragana 平假名, on the other hand, are much more strongly associated with fiction and poetry from early in their development: they were the medium of the classical waka of the Heian period, collected in imperially sponsored anthologies starting with the early-tenth-century Kokin wakashū 古今和歌集 (or Kokinshū, Collection of Japanese Poems, Ancient and Modern; ca. 905), and also of works of prose fiction like the tenth-century Ise monogatari 伊勢物語 (Tales of Ise) and the early-eleventh-century Genji monogatari 源氏物語 (Tale of Genji), which were solidly canonized by the twelfth century. As these phonographically inscribed genres remained objects of study and commentary and authoritative models for composition throughout the medieval and early modern periods, they represent the most extensive example of the literarization/wen-ification of noncosmopolitan writings in premodern East Asia. Before moving on to the third aspect of vernacularization to be discussed here, there is one more element of Pollock’s concept of “literarization” that must be addressed. His model describes the use of written language with aestheticized lexical, metrical, and rhetorical features for imaginative expression and proclamation of political power, but it also posits that this development is 12 The mid-seventh century phonographic poem inscriptions are on wooden slips, or mokkan 木簡 (see Frydman 2014); from their archaeological contexts it is unclear if they are really examples of the wen-ification of phonography that can be established more firmly as having taken place by the end of the seventh/early eighth century. On the inscription of poetry in the Man’yōshū, see Lurie (2011: 254–311). 13 There are a few other contexts for katakana, alone or in conjunction with logographic characters—such as petitions and other documents produced on rural estates in the medieval period—but these are even less belletristic. On such medieval documents, see Amino (2012: 123–143); Conlan (2009); and Fröhlich (2007).

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accompanied by the rise of new metalinguistic disciplines, a process he terms “philologization.” A crucial component of literarization/wen-ification, then, is the creation of grammars, lexicons, poetic treatises, and commentaries devoted to writings in local languages (modeled, at least at their inception, on superimposed cosmopolitan traditions).14 Considering the richness of the South Asian linguistic tradition, the strength with which Pollock emphasizes “grammaticization” in particular is understandable, but perhaps he over-generalizes when he states that “Sanskrit was endowed, as every language of the empire form must be, with the dignity and stability conferred by grammar” (Pollock 2006: 255; emphasis added). Given the traditional focus on lexicography and phonology in the Chinese philological tradition it is unsurprising that there is little to no “grammaticization” there until the modern period (Mair 1998), but Pollock also contends that “explicit care for language, in the Roman grammarian as in the Roman overlord, seems to have never attained the conceptual coherence and centrality it acquired in southern Asia” (Pollock 2006: 267). The broader comparative problems here are beyond the scope of this essay, but it is important to consider, even superficially, the extent to which one sees signs of philologization of local languages in East Asia. Here as well we have a decidedly mixed bag. In China there are commentaries associated with so-called baihua novels such as the Shuihuzhuan 水滸傳 (Water Margin) or the Honglou meng 紅樓夢 (Dream of the Red Chamber), and scholars in Japan paid considerable attention to the non-Literary-Sinitic characteristics of such works in lexicons and textbooks (Hartmann 2014; Hedberg 2020; Yuan 2022), although as I wrote above there are ways in which this sort of reception can be seen as an adjunct to the existing cosmopolitan order. In Vietnam, the “golden age” of nôm writing was actually anticipated by a lexicon devoted to the script compiled in the seventeenth century, the Chỉ Nam Ngọc  m Giải Nghĩa 指南玉音解義 (Explication of the Guide to Jeweled Sounds; see Phan [2013; 2014]). In Korea, there are early modern reference works on idu, and the inception of the han’gŭl script itself could be termed a kind of philologization—albeit, ironically, one primarily oriented toward the localization of the cosmopolitan Literary Sinitic (and, later, of baihua plain writing as well). I am unaware of any extended scholarly attention to han’gŭl writings before the modern period, but the persistent controversies surrounding that script incorporated a degree of awareness of and attention to local language that parallels in some ways the South Asian and European metalinguistic 14 Incidentally, this focus on contemporary (emic) metalinguistic practices makes it much harder to dismiss Pollock’s notion of “literarization” as an anachronistic (etic) imposition.

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discourses that Pollock discusses. It is in Japan, though, that we see the clearest and most extensive case of non-cosmopolitan philologization in East Asia; unsurprisingly, it stems directly from the early canonization of literary writings in hiragana, especially classical waka poetry. Early examples of commentary and lexicography were localizations of cosmopolitan practice devoted to Literary Sinitic texts, but by the twelfth century (the late Heian period) these techniques were extended to non-cosmopolitan poetry, particularly the waka of the Kokinshū (in ensuing centuries, prose works, especially the Genji and the Ise, were also taken up). A wide range of treatises, primers, and compendia for the composition of poetry appeared in parallel, including orthography (kanazukai 假名遣) and proto-grammatical scholarship on usage (teniwoha 弖爾乎波). In the early modern period these traditions gave rise to elaborate and sophisticated linguistic scholarship by members of the kokugaku 國学 (national learning) movement, which included the only full-fledged grammatical scholarship to develop in East Asia before the modern period.15 4

From Supplementing to Supplanting?

To summarize, relatively strong cases can be made for literarization/wenification of non-cosmopolitan writings in Vietnamese logography and Japanese phonography, and there was clearly a degree of non-cosmopolitan literarization/wen-ification in Chinese logography and Korean phonography. One can of course argue about the proportions of literarization, the length of time involved, and other factors, but—thus far—many of Pollock’s conditions for vernacularization have been satisfied, albeit piecemeal. Nonetheless, if one hews strictly to his definition, one must conclude that there are indeed no examples of “full vernacularization” in pre- or early modern East Asia. This is because of the last element to be discussed in this essay: the supplantation of the cosmopolitan by the vernacular (a supplantation which is necessary for there to be a vernacular in Pollock’s terms). It is not just that languages like Telugu or French came to be written down (literized) and then, eventually, became media for aesthetic and political expression reproducing the superimposed cosmopolitan languages of Sanskrit or Latin; in Pollock’s model, these newly literarized/wen-ified languages eventually go on to replace their cosmopolitan predecessors in royal courts and other venues of literary production and statecraft. 15

For a summary of these developments, see Kaiser (1995).

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Until the modern period, there are no instances of such a replacement or supplantation in East Asia. In certain limited contexts (such as the aforementioned kokugaku movement in early modern Japan) rivalry or antagonism toward the cosmopolitan Literary Sinitic was expressed by writers and scholars of non-cosmopolitan texts, but overall the cosmopolitan prestige and power of Literary Sinitic remained unchallenged. Across East Asia, even after the rise of various prose and poetic genres in hiragana, baihua, han’gŭl, and Chữ Nôm, Literary Sinitic continued to be a privileged mode of literary expression and political proclamation, used in poetry (especially Tang-style regulated verse); Confucian and Buddhist ritual and scholarship; diplomacy; official histories; and so on. Even at times that saw great enthusiasm for non-cosmopolitan writing, such as the Edo and early Meiji periods in Japan, Literary Sinitic simultaneously reached unprecedented levels of popularity and influence. Of course, in Pollock’s model as well, emerging vernaculars are in a derivative and supplementary relationship with their superimposed cosmopolitan language, with many parallels to the emergence of non-cosmopolitan writing in East Asia. But there we do not see the posited next stage in the premodern and early modern periods: the new “vernaculars” (or quasi-vernaculars) in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam generally remained in a cooperative, complementary relationship with cosmopolitan Literary Sinitic.16 So in the end, if the goal is to evaluate the fit between East Asia and Pollock’s model—or at least its second, vernacular half—then the conclusion must be that he is correct to stipulate that “the breakthrough to vernacularization was absent throughout the Chinese world” (Pollock 2006: 487).17 5

Conclusion: Adjusting the Model

The preceding remarks ended by confirming the inapplicability of Pollock’s cosmopolitan/vernacular paradigm to East Asia, but they can also be seen as laying the groundwork to begin rethinking the terms of that paradigm itself. 16 17

In different ways, this is a point emphasized by Phan (2014), Trambaiolo (2014), and Wang (2014). When Pollock states a few sentences earlier (presumably because of the prominence of literarized/wen-ified works like the Genji) that “with the sole exception of Japan there was a complete absence of vernacularization in the sense in which it is used in this book” (2006: 486), he overstates both the degree to which Japan fits his model and the paucity of vernacularity elsewhere in the region (see also the similar statement on pages 259–260). But insofar as the supplantation of the cosmopolitan by the vernacular is part of his model, it does not fit East Asia before the modern period.

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There are three main areas to be considered here, each corresponding to one of the preceding sections, but in reverse order this time: whether to insist on supplantation of the cosmopolitan; the significance of non-literary textuality; and the potential influence of the technical functioning of different writing systems.18 An overly stringent focus on the supplantation of the cosmopolitan by the vernaculars makes it more difficult to pursue valuable comparisons that would ultimately extend and enrich discussions of phenomena that have parallels beyond South Asia and Europe. Because one of the richest elements of Pollock’s model is its attention to interactions between the existing cosmopolitan and emerging vernaculars, abandoning (or just bracketing temporarily) his teleological insistence on the replacement of the cosmopolitan would make it easier to pursue comparison of such interactions in East Asian contexts using his theoretical armamentarium. This might lead us to nuanced consideration of what factors prevented supplantation (about which more below), but it also encourages rethinking the sustainability of that part of the model, even in the Sanskrit and Latin contexts. In a significant aside, Pollock allows that even after the emergence of full vernacularity, “imaginative literature too would continue to be produced in Latin and Sanskrit, entropically and in a more or less nostalgic spirit, up to the threshold of modernity” (Pollock 2006: 473). One might well consider “New Latin” literary writings as something other than, or at least more than merely, “nostalgic” and “entropic,” and other South Asianists have urged greater attention to Sanskrit literary production, especially poetry, in the second millennium ce (Shulman 2007: 821–822). Consideration of the coexistence of vernacular and cosmopolitan in East Asia could provide a comparative basis for incorporating into the model greater attention to similar phenomena elsewhere. A similar opportunity for expansion lies in reconsidering how strongly literization/wen-ification should be emphasized. One of the great strengths of Pollock’s theorization is the rigor with which he insists on this as a component (really the central component) of vernacularization as he defines it. But just as modern studies of reading and writing in social context have been strengthened and enriched by the replacement of a unified concept of literacy with a more flexible vision of multiple literacies coexisting in parallel, we 18

I should stress that the point of these remarks is not to criticize Pollock for a lack of attention to East Asia. It would be churlish indeed to carp about the absence of sustained attention to an additional region in a work already so compendious, so rich with valuable theoretical formulations, and so careful in the way that it conceptualizes and carries out cultural comparisons. My intention is rather to outline some ways in which his model might be expanded to incorporate the East Asian case.

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might entertain the idea of adjusting the cosmopolitan/vernacular paradigm to accommodate multiple vernacularities, whose development in particular contexts might be in advance of or lag behind the literary variety.19 This line of thinking is suggested by another passage acknowledging cosmopolitan persistence, one that immediately precedes the comment quoted above: The pervasive cosmopolitan influence on grammar, philology, and cultural theory more broadly conceived is symptomatic of the far-reaching dominance that both Latin and Sanskrit would continue to exercise in the intellectual sphere. In neither realm did the vernacular revolution extinguish the cosmopolitan knowledge formation. Information, whether philosophical, scientific, or theological, was less susceptible to vernacularization than imagination. Pollock 2006: 473

Of course, Pollock is here acknowledging the continued vitality of Latin and Sanskrit in scientific and scholarly writing after the “breakthrough” of the vernaculars in literature, but in acknowledging the possibility of a vernacularization of “information”-centered writings that could have a different trajectory than that of those devoted to “imagination,” he opens the door to a notion of plural vernacularities with distinctive histories. Literarization/wen-ification is crucial not just for literary but also for political history: that connection between culture and power is the ultimate concern of Language of the Gods, so one cannot simply swap this aspect of Pollock’s model out for a different notion of vernacularization. Nonetheless, entertaining the idea of non-literary vernaculars provides broader comparative perspectives. For example, non-cosmopolitan logography in Japan and Korea was rarely literarized/wen-ified, but it played a central role in bureaucratic communication, record-keeping, and personal correspondence for many centuries. Styles like Korean idu or Japanese sōrōbun 候文 never became vehicles for literary expression, but they were vital forms of non-cosmopolitan communication, and an expansion of Pollock’s model to incorporate some notion of administrative or commercial vernaculars would help us theorize their relationship with the Literary Sinitic that dominated other spheres of writing in Korea and Japan, and that continued to be used for everyday administration in China and Vietnam.

19

For an overview of the notion of multiple literacies and some of its implications, see Lurie (2011: 33–40).

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The final issue to be considered is technical differences between writing systems, and their potential connections to East Asia’s departure from the second half of Pollock’s model. In a suggestive discussion of potential underlying causes of roughly contemporary vernacularization in Europe and South Asia, he tentatively identifies “a newly flourishing trade network and an expanding agricultural sector” as a factor just before exempting East Asia from his model, concluding that “what was determinative in East Asia was obviously not economic change but the specific character of the imperial polity, its language politics, and its neo-Confucian ideology” (Pollock 2006: 487). All of these are worth considering as potential explanations for lack of full vernacularization (in his sense) in the Sinographic Cosmopolis, but we must also consider the logographic character of its cosmopolitan textuality, which, as stressed above, is one of the most obvious contrasts with the Latin and Sanskrit cases. This is a risky line of argument: speculation about economic, cultural, or intellectual consequences of script difference is rife with flawed determinism and ahistorical question-begging, and it is important to resist any slide towards arguing, for example, that vernacularization was prevented by the absence of a sufficiently phonographic (i.e., “alphabetic”) script in East Asia. Pollock’s own rich cases show clearly that, even in entirely phonographic contexts, the availability of a writing system to represent a (literized) language is a necessary but by no means sufficient condition for vernacularization. Logographic reading/ writing techniques (i.e., kundoku) were used from early in the expansion of the Sinographic Cosmopolis, alone or in conjunction with phonograph characters, to literize local languages, and the long persistence of these techniques (in Japan at any rate) suggests they were considerably less cumbersome than they may initially appear to be. The variety of non-cosmopolitan writing across East Asia also undermines any straightforward attempts at script-determinism: in Japan there is literarized/wen-ified phonography in the case of hiragana writings, but not for the equally phonographic katakana script; and in Vietnam the largely logographic nôm writings are thoroughly literarized/wen-ified, at least in the “golden age” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nonetheless, it seems likely that the logographic nature of Literary Sinitic writing and its multiple localized reading techniques contributed to the longterm persistence of that cosmopolitan register even after the appearance of literarized/wen-ified vernaculars (or quasi-vernaculars if we hew closely to Pollock’s definition). That texts (classic and new) could maintain identical written form while their readings shifted through time and across language borders arguably provided cosmopolitan textuality a greater degree of stability than in the case of Latin or Sanskrit, where phonographic transcription of local variants would be visually distinct. Similarly, the contrast between logography and

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phonography itself may have played a role. The visual and technical departure of kana or han’gŭl from Sinitic logographic writing encouraged what Gregory Evon has called “script apartheid,” in which entirely or partially phonographic writing was kept separate from the logographic cosmopolitan in certain literary genres, potentially making it more difficult to supplant it before the sundry cultural and political disruptions of the modern period.20 Other factors contributed to East Asia’s poor fit with Pollock’s model of vernacularization, but this contrasting textual terrain must have played an important role, and thus accounting for the opposition between logography and phonography is a necessary component of any attempt to expand the global reach of that model. References Amino, Yoshihiko. 2012. Rethinking Japanese History. Translated by Alan S. Christy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies. Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Conlan, Thomas. 2009. “Traces of the Past: Documents, Literacy and Liturgy in Medieval Japan.” In Currents in Medieval Japanese History: Essays in Honor of Jeffrey P. Mass, edited by Gordon Berger et al., 19–50. Los Angeles: University of Southern California, East Asian Studies Center. Duthie, Torquil. 2014. Man’yōshū and the Imperial Imagination in Early Japan. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. Fröhlich, Judith. 2007. Rulers, Peasants, and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Japan: Ategawa no shō 1004–1304. Bern: Peter Lang. Frydman, Joshua. 2014. “Uta Mokkan: A History of Early Japanese Poetry through Inscription.” PhD diss., Yale University. Hartmann, Nan Ma. 2014. “From Translation to Adaptation: Chinese Language Texts and Early Modern Japanese Literature.” PhD diss., Columbia University.

20

When Evon coined the term “script apartheid” in the concluding discussion to the workshop whose papers form the basis of this volume, he intended it to express a premodern Korean reluctance to mix han’gŭl with sinographs in fictional works, in contrast to freer combination of kana and sinographs in the Japanese case. But in Japan as well there was a strong awareness of a contrast produced by the incorporation of phonographs (especially hiragana), so that the titles of texts that made use of them would often include terms like kana or kokuji 國字 (“native graphs”), in contradistinction to primarily logographic texts (the inclusion of marginal katakana recording aspects of kundoku readings in otherwise logographic texts did not provoke such acknowledgement). See Evon in this volume.

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Hedberg, William. 2020. The Japanese Discovery of Chinese Fiction: The Water Margin and the Making of a National Canon. New York: Columbia University Press. Holcombe, Charles. 1999. “Trade-Buddhism: Maritime Trade, Immigration, and the Buddhist Landfall in Early Japan.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 119(2): 280–292. Holcombe, Charles. 2001. The Genesis of East Asia: 221 B.C.–A.D. 907. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Kaiser, Stefan. 1995. “Linguistic Thought in Japan.” In Concise History of the Language Sciences: From the Sumerians to the Cognitivists, edited by E. F. K. Koerner and R. E. Asher, 45–51. Oxford: Elsevier Science. King, Ross. 2015. “Ditching ‘diglossia’: Describing ecologies of the spoken and inscribed in pre-modern Korea.” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 15(1): 1–19. King, Ross. In press. “Editors’ Preface: Vernacular Reading in the Sinographic Cosmopolis and Beyond.” In Literary Sinitic and East Asia: A Cultural Sphere of Vernacular Reading, by Kin Bunkyo (Kim Mun-gyŏng), edited by Ross King, translated by Ross King, Marjorie Burge, Si Nae Park, Alexey Lushchenko, and Mina Hattori. Leiden: Brill. Lieberman, Victor. 2003. Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830. Volume 1: Integration on the Mainland. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lieberman, Victor. 2009. Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830. Volume 2: Mainland Mirrors: Europe, China, South Asia, and the Islands. New York: Cambridge University Press. Lurie, David B. 2011. Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Mair, Victor. 1998. “Tzu-shu or tzu-tien.” In The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature (Volume 2), edited by William Nienhauser, 165–172. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Owen, Stephen. 1992. Readings in Chinese Literary Thought. Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University. Pastreich, Emanuel. 1997. “The Reception of Chinese Vernacular Narrative in Korea and Japan.” PhD diss., Harvard University. Pastreich, Emanuel. 2011. The Observable Mundane: Vernacular Chinese and the Emergence of a Literary Discourse on Popular Narrative in Edo Japan. Seoul: Seoul National University Press. Phan, John D. 2013. “Chữ Nôm and the Taming of the South: A Bilingual Defense for Vernacular Writing in the Chỉ Nam Ngọc Âm Giải Nghĩa.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 8(1): 1–33. Phan, John D. 2014. “Rebooting the Vernacular in Seventeenth-Century Vietnam.” In Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919, edited by Benjamin A. Elman, 96–128. Leiden: Brill.

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Pollock, Sheldon. 2006. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Shang, Wei. 2014. “Writing and Speech: Rethinking the Issue of Vernaculars in Early Modern China.” In Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919, edited by Benjamin A. Elman, 254–301. Leiden: Brill. Shulman, David. 2007. Review of The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India, by Sheldon Pollock. Journal of Asian Studies 66(3): 819–825. Trambaiolo, Daniel. 2014. “The Language of Medical Knowledge in Tokugawa Japan.” In Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919, edited by Benjamin A. Elman, 147–168. Leiden: Brill. Wang, Sixiang. 2014. “The Sounds of Our Country: Interpreters, Linguistic Knowledge, and the Politics of Language in Early Chosŏn Korea.” In Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919, edited by Benjamin A. Elman, 58–95. Leiden: Brill. Wang, Sixiang. 2019. “Story of the Eastern Chamber: Dilemmas of Vernacular Language and Political Authority in Eighteenth-Century Chosŏn.” Journal of Korean Studies 24(1): 29–62. Whitman, John. 2011. “The Ubiquity of the Gloss.” Scripta 3: 95–121. Whitman, John, Miyoung Oh, Jinho Park, Valerio Luigi Alberizzi, Masayuki Tsukimoto, Teiji Kosukegawa, and Tomokazu Takada. 2010. “Toward an International Vocabulary for Research on Vernacular Readings of Chinese Texts (漢文訓讀 Hanwen Xundu).” Scripta 2: 61–83. Yuan, Ye. 2022. “Speaking the Sinitic: Translation and ‘Chinese Language’ in EighteenthCentury Japan.” In Ecologies of Translation in East and South East Asia, 1600– 1900, edited by Li Guo, Patricia Sieber, and Peter Kornicki, 109–142. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Chapter 2

Pollock’s Comparative Wake-Up Call: Towards the Conceptual Modeling of Premodern Literary Cultures and Institutions Wiebke Denecke 1

A Model for Premodern East Asia?

Sheldon Pollock’s vision of a “Sanskrit Cosmopolis,” which spread through South Asia during the first millennium ce, when Sanskrit was reinvented as a code for literary and political expression, and was challenged and transformed during the second millennium ce by the rise of local vernaculars, is a timely gift for scholars of premodern East Asia. Recent debates inspired by Pollock’s The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (2006) are already proving to be a significant inflection point in the study of premodern East Asian literary cultures. In the end, Pollock’s greatest contribution might simply be that he compels scholars to think more seriously about the complex dynamic between “cosmopolitan” and “vernacular” languages in the political, cultural, literary, and religious arenas of premodern East Asia. But this is not a simple “simply”: as Literary Sinitic was used throughout the region into the twentieth century, we are living in East Asia’s first fully-fledged “vernacular” century—which, at least on the level of the written languages, is a world historical novelty. Vernacular revolutions that have diversely swept China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam in script and language, literary culture, political vision and ideology, have led to a rejection and gradual disappearance of Literary Sinitic as East Asia’s lingua (or better, scripta) franca in the twentieth century (Denecke 2014a; Denecke with Nguyen 2017). This has led to an increasing amnesia of the cultural commonalities that it created and the convenient communication across borders that it enabled for almost two millennia in the region. Since the vernacular revolutions have been part of modern national identity formation, triumphal narratives of the victory of the “vernacular” over the once venerable “foreign” Literary Sinitic cosmopolitan language have severely distorted literary historiography in all East Asian countries over the past century. Given that Japan has the oldest, largest, and most continuous extant corpus of vernacular literature of any of the countries on the Chinese periphery, Pollock’s nuanced study of various historical constellations of cosmopolitan and vernacular

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languages and their dynamic interaction in South Asia puts a forceful spotlight on the distinctive symbiosis of vernacular and Chinese-style textual practices in Japan.1 This is a welcome catalyst at a moment when scholars in East Asian literature studies are putting much effort into deploying transnational frameworks (both regional Asian and global) to better situate and understand premodern East Asia. Unfortunately, Pollock’s opus magnum has so far sparked comparatively little debate among scholars of premodern China. This is unsurprising, as Chinese history consists of a succession of multilingual empires comprising people of many tongues, but with a largely “monoliterate” literary culture, where texts were largely produced and consumed in Literary Sinitic. We can certainly point to “colloquialisms” in Tang dynasty texts or Tang “songs” and “ballads” that we could call popular or more “vernacular” in comparison to the older genre of shi 詩 poetry, but the history of premodern Chinese literature does not center around the drama of competing, complementary literary languages. Since that drama is at the heart of premodern Japanese literary culture, and to a lesser degree of Korean and Vietnamese, it is little surprising that Pollock’s vision has struck a major cord with scholars of Japan, Korea and Vietnam, rather than China. Pollock’s work is also a major moment in the study of the non-Western world. He anchors his vision of a Sanskrit Cosmopolis in a contrastive comparison with Roman—militarily enforced coercive—cosmopolitanism. This is certainly a helpful pedagogical analogy for Western readers who want to grasp South Asia’s forms of cosmopolitanism from a more familiar perspective closer to home. The current volume in response to Pollock’s work moves from the more self-assured East–West comparison, which especially for the 1 To avoid the ethnocentric associations of “Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese literature in Chinese,” circumvent the unspecifically hybrid and linguistically-defined “Sino-Japanese/ Sino-Korean/Sino-Vietnamese,” and instead underscore the rich spectrum of different stylistic and literary modes of texts inscribed according to the syntax of Literary Sinitic and closer to vernacular syntax, I use “Chinese-style” alongside “Literary Sinitic,” depending on context. Not unlike chinoiserie in the context of the European reception of Chinese culture, this opens the term “Sinitic” to self-conscious creative self-fashioning that plays with various repertoires of “Chineseness” in political, scholarly, literary, artistic, musical and other forms of cultural expression. “Chinese-style” also highlights the attractiveness for premodern East Asian elites of cosmopolitan culture, which “Sinitic,” charged with the crucial present mission to de-nationalize today’s East Asia and explicitly fight Sinocentrism, risks downplaying. “Chinese-style” also saves us from unnecessarily “nationalizing” the indigenous term used for Sinitic literature throughout East Asia: 漢文 (as in the unfortunate term “Japanese kanbun,” etc.). See in particular Kornicki (2010), Wells (2011), and King (2015), and King’s excellent overview discussion in the introduction to this volume.

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Roman and Mediterranean world can rely on an old and rich research tradition in various European languages, to an East–East comparison, expanding Pollock’s reflections across the entire Eurasian continent from South Asia into East Asia. This move poses a vastly different order of difficulty: with the fracturing of historical research on East Asia into national traditions over the past century, conceptual reflection on the distinctive ways in which script, culture, and power intersected in the Sinographic Sphere is, compared to research on the Greco-Roman world and its European legacy, truly in its infancy. Therefore the editor of this volume is to be all the more congratulated on this pioneering step, especially because Pollock himself is doubtful about the applicability of his model to East Asia, while recognizing the usefulness of such a comparison: “Juxtaposing the cultural and political processes of Sinicization with those of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis would be enormously valuable, most pointedly with regard to places like Champa and Dai-Viet, where the two great alternatives in premodern Asian globalization met toe to toe. But it will become clear … that in the most consequential later phase of the story told here, that of vernacularization, the East Asian parallel breaks down” (Pollock 2006: 259). Thus, Pollock believes that with the exception of Japan, vernacularization in East Asia did not happen in any comparable way until the modern period. This statement is largely commonsensical, as Literary Sinitic indeed retained its power as the authoritative language of political, religious, and educational institutions throughout East Asia into the early twentieth century. But I believe that the major problem with the applicability of Pollock’s model is not the timing of “vernacularization” in East Asia. One crucial factor distinguishing the East Asian region from the Sanskrit Cosmopolis, and which shaped virtually every aspect of its premodern cultures, is completely absent from Pollock’s discussions: the issue of script.2 Script appears to be a non-issue in his hefty tome. However, the strongly logographic character of the Chinese script and its constitutive spread throughout East Asia is culturally so distinctive, in comparison to phonographic scripts and their languages, that Nishijima Sadao 西嶋定生 (1919–1998), a post-war historian of Early China, formulated a broader theory of the “East Asian World” in the 1980s and popularized an influential vision of East Asia as the “Sinographic Cultural Sphere” (kanji bunkaken 漢字文化圏). The logographic nature of the Chinese script, paired with the possibility of using Chinese characters purely phonographically, especially for foreign names and words (based on the “rebus principle” of writing words having the same pronunciation with the same character), enabled regional communicative 2 On this see also David Lurie’s chapter in this volume.

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patterns across languages that are impossible in script worlds constituted by phonographic scripts. First, put simply, it enabled a world without the necessity of translation. Elites in early East Asia were trained in vocalizing Chinese texts in their vernacular thanks to reading techniques like kugyŏl 口訣 in Korea and kundoku 訓讀 in Japan.3 These practices did not produce a “translated” vernacular text to be put next to a Chinese “original,” as with the usual process of translation. They are the very reading of the text and, unless reading marks were applied, they did not alter the Literary Sinitic text on the page. There has been much debate about whether this process constitutes translation or not, but it is important to note that, if we want to call it “translation,” it is a different process from what we mean by “translation” in the context of languages that use alphabets or syllabaries. The logographic nature of the script had profound implications, for example, for the spread of Buddhism in East Asia: would Buddhism have spread throughout East Asia to the extent it did if Koreans, Japanese, and Vietnamese had been forced to mobilize the massive institutional and economic investment various Chinese courts made during the first millennium ce to translate Buddhist texts into their languages? Instead, they all used the Chinese translations from Indic and Central Asian languages, simply applying their vernacularizing reading techniques when voicing the text. Also, East Asian sinographs enabled a distinctive culture of diplomacy characterized by a communicative paradox: Sillan, Japanese, and Chinese envoys typically did not have any shared spoken language and were unable to voice their most quotidian needs without the help of interpreters. But they could grace each other through “brush conversation” with elaborate Chinese-style poems, a practice that also had the virtue of strengthening mutual feelings of belonging to a larger East Asian civilizational order, connected through a scripta franca. This communicative paradox, which is characteristic of logographic script worlds, gave poetry a distinctively important role in East Asia, as a diplomatic language we might say.4 Second, East Asia’s shared script also led to a distinctive “biliteracy” in the cultures on the Chinese periphery. In the case of Japanese literary culture, with the most strongly developed biliteracy, this means that texts were composed in a number of hybrid stylistic modes—depending on occasion, genre, period, authorship—lying between the two poles of Chinese-style logographic inscription (with potentially a cosmopolitan readership throughout East Asia) and phonographic vernacular inscription (accessible only to local Japanese 3 On kundoku see Kin Bunkyō (2010) and chapter four in Lurie (2011). 4 For further thoughts on the cultural implications of script for East Asian cultural history, see Denecke (2014b) and Denecke (2020).

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readers). Biliteracy on the written page was coupled with monolingualism in reading and oral performance, thanks to the gloss reading techniques of kundoku that helped voice a Chinese-style text in the Japanese vernacular.5 Seen from this perspective, one might argue inversely, against Pollock’s commonsensical view of the lack and delay of vernacularization in premodern East Asia, that East Asia was actually vernacularized from its very historical beginnings. Even if our evidence, especially in the case of the Korean states, is scanty and late, we can assume that local courts, for example in Kyŏngju or Asuka, did not adopt any form of spoken “cosmopolitan” Chinese, but probably relied on local reading techniques that produced more or less strongly vernacular readings of Chinese-style texts: in short, a “vernacularized cosmopolitan” (in contradistinction to Pollock’s “cosmopolitan vernaculars”) without the presence and practical awareness of an actual cosmopolitan tongue. If we move from script to language and language ideology, Pollock points out that, whereas the Sanskrit Cosmopolis was “wherever home was,” and with “no single point of production for cosmopolitan culture,” poets in Silla or Japan had a clear sense of China as a stable referent, and reference culture for their own textual culture. True, statesmen and poets on the periphery of the Sinographic Sphere adopted the rhetoric of Chinese topology, thus building small imaginary Chinas on local turf, just as Pollock (2006) shows with the “wholesale appropriation” of Sanskrit toponymy, which made Mount Meru and the Ganges River “locatable everywhere” (16). Although Chinese cultural and textual imports were at any moment highly varied, just as the actual power and presence of various Chinese dynasties waxed and waned, the representation and imagination of Chinese culture as the incarnation of human civilization, a “reference culture,” remained remarkably stable. There is no question that a China, in whatever political form extant at a given moment, stood at the center of representations on the periphery of a kind of cosmopolitan culture. In early Japan the binary aesthetics of wa 和 (Japanese) and kan 漢 (Chinese-style), to which in the medieval period India was added as a third iconic world, pervaded perceptions of space, gender, poetry, painting and various forms of court life and political and religious representation. To draw out another crucial difference in literary culture, Literary Sinitic did not have any other competitors as a cosmopolitan code, unlike the trinity of literary languages, consisting of Sanskrit, Prakrit, or Apabhramsha, that Pollock describes for the Sanskrit Cosmopolis (2006: 94–96). What is more, Chinese script and Chinese textual culture were the sole fountainhead in the 5 For the concepts of premodern Japan’s “monolingualism,” “biliteracy,” and “tricanonical literary culture,” see Denecke (2014a: 45–56).

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development of East Asia’s early literary cultures, in contrast to the fact that Sanskrit spread to places where literacy previously existed. This difference had profound implications for linguistic consciousness and language ideology in East Asia: the Chinese script had an exceptionally high cultural, even cosmic prestige. Since the Han dynasty the Chinese script was “naturalized,” through claims that made it an imitation of nature rather than a human invention. The most prominent example for this language ideology is the myth of Cang Jie 倉 頡, who supposedly invented sinographs by imitating bird track patterns. It appears in the postface to Xu Shen’s Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 (Explaining and Analyzing Characters; ca. 100 ce). During the Six Dynasties period (220–589), script and writing (wen 文) became the manifestation of the cosmic “pattern” of Heaven, Earth, and Humankind, and the “human pattern” (renwen 人文), in particular writing, the culmination of a long process of civilization. The preface to the Wenxuan 文選, Xiao Tong’s 蕭統 (501–531) model anthology of poetry and ornamental prose genres of the past, outlines the stages of this process and, since the Wenxuan quickly became a canonical text for elite education throughout East Asia, the vision of the Chinese script and textual culture as a cosmic manifestation of universal effect was adopted in early poetry anthologies like the Preface to the Kaifūsō 懐風藻 (Florilegium of Cherished Airs; 751), that gives us the first account of the history of Sinitic poetry in Japan. Literacy and writing—of diplomatic, administrative, poetic, or other prestige texts—became thus a hallmark of civilization and governance and the highest ornament for rulers. This also gave literary salons led by ruler-poets iconic status. The model of the earliest such famous salon, that of the Cao family around Emperor Cao Pi of Wei 曹丕 (187–226), his father, general Cao Cao 曹操 (ca. 155–220), and his gifted brother Cao Zhi 曹植 (192–232), was particularly influential in Japan, as evident in the eighth-century imperial collections of Sinitic poetry compiled under Emperors Saga and Junna. But other icons of prosperous rule and prolific literary production, like Emperor Wu of the Han’s 武帝 (r. 141–87 bce) summoning of court poets like Sima Xiangru 司馬相如 (ca. 179–117 bce), who immortalized the Shanglin imperial park in his rhapsodies, or Emperor Taizong of the Tang 唐太宗 (r. 626–649), who centuries later resided at the center of a culture of writing on assigned topics during poetry banquets and at annual festivals, appear repeatedly in early Japanese poetry as models of enlightened literate rule. This leads us to a last crucial divergence, namely a fundamentally different constitution of literary culture in the Sanskrit Cosmopolis and the Sinographic Sphere. While, in Pollock’s words, “Sanskrit was endowed, as every language of the empire form must be, with the dignity and stability conferred by grammar,” grammar study had no comparable place in the East Asian empires and

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kingdoms (2006: 255). There were undoubtedly similarities in the centrality of literary culture to power, namely, as Pollock says, as a “central component of royal competence and distinction, of royal pleasure and civility” (similar to other courtly entertainments, like the “display of weaponry” or “understanding of cockfighting”) (Ibid.: 188). But the venues, purposes, and genres of intellectual and literary pursuits seem vastly different. According to Pollock, courtly culture in the Sanskrit Cosmopolis consisted of “theoretically informed (śāstrika) reflection (vicāra) on normativity (guṇa/doṣa) and thus presupposed knowledge of the categories of literary analysis” (Ibid.). But early East Asian rulers and courtiers cared more for lexicography and phonology than for grammar study, which arguably only took off in a major new way in the nineteenth century under the influence of European models of Greek and Latin grammar and language pedagogy. Instead, the paramount abilities were composition and performance of poetry for court events, the playful and creative use of poetic precedent, attention to proper diction, and the internalized application of certain rhetorical models such as for regulated poetry or examination poetry (which in Japan developed into the distinctive genre of so-called “topic poetry,” or kudaishi 句題詩).6 Thus, taking into account the East Asian logographic script, the centrality and universalization of Chinese writing and textuality, language ideology, and literary culture, we arrive at a radically different cultural constitution of the Sinographic Sphere that makes it hard indeed to find common ground with the Sanskrit Cosmopolis, beyond the acknowledgement that the interplay of cosmopolitan and vernacular codes shaped both macro-regions in their own distinctive ways. What then, could and should we learn from Pollock’s visionary and inspiring work? How can his grand narrative of cosmopolitanism and vernacularization in South Asia put in new perspective the distinctive textual cultures of premodern East Asia and their distinctive historical unfolding? As Sheldon Pollock’s model of a “Sanskrit Cosmopolis” is currently inspiring philologists of other premodern macro-regions bounded by cosmopolitan linguae francae—be they Persianate, Babylonian, slowly also Latin7—to think about 6 Interestingly, Pollock has little regard for Greco-Roman grammar study: “Explicit care for language, in the Roman grammarian as in the Roman overlord, seems to have never attained the conceptual coherence and centrality it acquired in southern Asia. Grammar was a relatively late intellectual enterprise in classical antiquity” (2006: 267). But what about the sophistication of rhetorical studies and their centrality to political and moral leadership? Might that not make for a more fitting comparison with the central cultural role of grammar study in South Asia? 7 See editor’s introduction.

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the configuration of languages, literatures, and power in their worlds of study, scholars of Japan, Korea, Vietnam (and China) struggle to decide whether, or how, Pollock’s model is applicable to premodern East Asia. As discussed above, differences in the mediating function of scripts and languages, the centrality and universalization of Chinese writing and textuality, language ideology, and distinctive features of literary cultures offer significant difference and divergence. Most of the debates among East Asian scholars in response to Pollock have gravitated towards a diagnostics of the various linguistic manifestations of the “cosmopolitan” and “vernacular” across East Asian history. The heuristic stimulus Pollock’s model has provided might indeed be more important than narrow notions of its applicability: most of all, it should serve as a “comparative wake-up call.” This chapter takes inspiration from Pollock’s work on vernacularization processes as a comparative wake-up call for area specialists of various premodern worlds and aims to expand discussions more systematically also to the study of literary cultures and institutions, which shaped the choices we are using in our linguistic diagnostics of vernacularization processes. Scholars working on premodern China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam should systematically do what Pollock has been doing for South Asia: read through the extant corpus of evidence from the various East Asian traditions in conjunction and conceptualize their findings. Unfortunately, researchers engaged in binary comparisons with China, and competent to take up Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean, and Sino-Vietnamese topics are rare enough. But comparing the cosmopolitan/vernacular dynamic in several East Asian traditions in conjunction is a field in the making, spearheaded most recently notably by Peter Kornicki with his remarkable Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia (2018). This is what we need to be doing if we want to take Pollock’s work seriously, as scholars of East Asia devoted to building a field of genuine premodern East Asian studies, rather than, in current “East Asian Studies,” the sum of siloed national studies of East Asia’s current countries. In the spirit of a “comparative wake-up call,” in this chapter I showcase the potential of such comparative work by a specific comparison of early Japanese and Korean literary cultures during the Three Kingdoms and Koryŏ Periods. Many reasons discourage such research: the considerable demands of linguistic training in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean in their various historical incarnations, the forces of current “national (literary) studies” in East Asia and East Asian studies overall, the extreme scarcity of sources preserved from the Three Kingdoms (ca. 57 bce–668 ce) and Unified Silla (668–935) periods, and the focus on historical reception processes between Korea and Japan, with the Korean Peninsula as the—in the early period too often “missing”—link between Japan and Chinese contemporary material and textual

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culture. Here I will adopt a genuinely comparative approach. Setting aside the question of historical influence, we will instead compare early Japan and Korea as parallel case studies of cultural appropriation in premodern East Asia. 2

Thinking through Japan and Korea Comparatively: Poetry in Early Japanese and Korean Chronicles

2.1 “Early Song” Historical chronicles played a vital role in preserving early poetry in Japan and Korea. Japan’s earliest chronicle, the Kojiki 古事記 (Record of Ancient Matters; 712), contains about 112 songs, while the Nihon shoki 日本書紀 (Chronicles of Japan; 720) features 128 songs, of which about a half do not appear in the Kojiki or only in quite different versions. They are placed in the mouths of gods and deities, emperors and their empresses and concubines, court officials, and more generically, commoners, children, or on the rare occasion of a wedding banquet for the legendary Emperor Ōjin (trad. fourth century), in the mouth of a juicy crab on the dinner table.8 The songs in the chronicles are the center of the corpus of what scholars have labeled “early songs” ( jōdai kayō 上代歌謡, therefore also called Ki-Ki kayō 記紀歌謡), representing Japan’s earliest textualized poetic record. Scholars variously define the corpus of kayō based on a combination of criteria: first, based on their appearance in historical chronicles and gazetteers, which was the main venue of transmission before songs were collected in separate poetry anthologies like the Man’yōshū 万葉集 (Collection of Myriad Leaves; ca. 759) and the Kokin wakashū 古今和歌集 (Collection of Japanese Poems, Ancient and Modern; 905). This adds another twenty poems from the Fudoki 風土記 (Records of Customs and Locales; 713) and eight poems from the Shoku Nihongi 続日本紀 (Chronicles of Japan Continued; 797). This second of Japan’s Six National Histories, all court chronicles compiled during the eighth and ninth centuries, is the last to contain “songs.” Second, in terms of form and meter, kayō “songs”9 are vernacular Japanese poems, most often recorded phonographically by using one sinograph per syllable; many are still not fitted perfectly into the later standard length of 5–7 syllables-per-line and their length varies from the brief 13-syllable katauta 片歌 (5-7-7, half a sedōka 旋頭歌 8 Kojiki song no. 42. I rely on Tsuchihashi and Konishi (1957). 9 I use the quotation marks here to distinguish kayō from uta 歌 (“song”), which can refer to any kind of vernacular poetry, but is used in particular for the standard poetic form of waka (in 31 syllables) after the Nara Period.

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poem), often used in poetry exchanges between several speakers, to long and line-variable “long songs” (chōka 長歌). Third, due to the linguistic similarity and temporal overlap between the dates of composition claimed for the “songs” in the chronicles and the earliest Man’yōshū poems, many poems noted as anonymous in the Man’yōshū belong also to the corpus of “early songs,” in particular poems in volumes 13 (in a courtly context), 14 (songs from the East) and 16 (from the South and North); this also adds epigraphic sources, like the 21 “Buddha Footstone Poems” (Bussokuseki uta 仏足石歌, in the characteristic 5-7-5-7-7-7 meter, that overshoots the later canonical tanka/waka meter by an additional 7-syllable line) recorded on a slab of slate at the Yakushiji Temple in Nara. Fourth, because the “early songs” represent the beginning of Japan’s vernacular poetic tradition, scholars at least since the Edo period have projected their nostalgia for native and primeval origins onto them: they are elemental song and music, giving us a fresh breath of untouched orality; they express feelings from the heart; they, if anything in the early courtly tradition, can supposedly show the soul of the people. True, kayō is also used as a generic term for popular forms of singing and versifying (like min’yō 民謡, dōyō 童謡, saibara 催馬楽, imayō 今様, etc.), and the sexual frankness, carnal pleasure, and popular sentiment expressed in many of the early songs clearly disappeared from the waka tradition with the Heian period in the ninth century. But when reading these poems, we need to keep in mind that this song corpus has a central ideological function in the nativist narrative of the emergence of the Japanese soul in poetry and its interpretations are still often tinged by the nostalgia for pristine orality and simplicity.10 Poetry preserved in the earliest extant Korean chronicles, the Samguk sagi 三國史記 (History of the Three Kingdoms, namely Koguryŏ, Paekche, and Silla; 1145) and Samguk yusa 三國遺事 (Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms; ca. 1280), has a yet more overdetermined position in the modern national imagination, because the fourteen of the only surviving twenty-five vernacular poems (hyangga 鄕歌) from the early period are preserved thanks to their inclusion in a chronicle. Because this tiny corpus of vernacular texts happens also to be central evidence in the very scant surviving material documenting the Old Korean language, they are under yet greater pressure to furnish 10 It is important to note that these supposed qualities disappear already from the latest examples of the kayō genre, as we can see in the sixth and seventh poems of the Shoku Nihongi. They describe a great song feast (utagaki 歌垣) of 770 hosted under the auspices of Empress Shōtoku; what had earlier been popular festivals bringing the sexes together in music and poetic exchanges, auspicious prayers, and romantic or marital pursuits had turned visibly into a solemn court event by the late eighth century.

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answers to linguists’ and historians’ multitude of questions about early Korean language and literature. With his Samguk sagi, compiled at the behest of Koryŏ’s King Injong 仁 宗 (r. 1122–1146) in 1145, Kim Pusik 金富軾 (1075–1151) intended to legitimize Korean history within the Sinographic Sphere, providing examples of virtuous behavior and Confucian governance in Korea to be put on a par with Chinese official historiography. He also strove to legitimize both his own Koryŏ dynasty (935–1392) and the Three Kingdoms (rather than other early states on the peninsula) as the legitimate lineage of the dynastic mandate in Korea. Kim Pusik lived more than a millennium after the beginnings claimed for poetry and song. The second king of Koguryŏ, King Yuri 琉璃明王 (trad. 19 bce–18 ce) is associated with the beginnings of song and poetry on the peninsula. The Sinitic poem attributed to him is the sigh emerging from a drama of jealousy between his two wives who fought while he was away on a hunting trip. When his Chinese wife (漢人) runs away to return home he tries to hold her back with a “Song of the Orioles” (Hwangjo ka 黃鳥歌; dated 17 bce), supposedly composed on the spot when catching sight of flocks of flying orioles flying. But his spontaneous response in song (感而歌) is quite learned, as it emerges from his mouth as a tetrasyllabic quatrain, in the venerable meter of the Chinese Book of Odes (Shijing 詩經; ca. 600 bce) and is clearly inspired by a poem from the canonical Confucian collection where the speaker complains about poor treatment in a foreign country and his or her plans to return home (Shijing no. 187; “Huangniao” 黃鳥).11 Thus, this earliest datable poem, at least as attributed by Kim Pusik and given consciously in Chinese-style, not vernacular form, taps into the ancient tradition of early verse in China, which in China by King Yuri’s time had become a subject of intense commentarial attention and activity associated with scholars (boshi 博士) appointed to the Imperial Academy founded by Emperor Wu of Han (r. 141–87 bce). If the Samguk sagi has Chinese-style poetry begin implicitly with the second king of Koguryŏ, the beginning of native vernacular song is emphatically grafted onto the third ruler of Silla, another Yuri (Yuri Isagŭm 儒理尼師今; trad. 24–57 ce).12 He does everything expected of a Chinese-style Confucian ruler, including performing rituals at the ancestral temple, granting amnesties, and going on royal tours to observe the needs of his people and support the weakest elements in society. Intriguingly, it is precisely this Confucian impulse that starts off the vernacular 11 Samguk sagi, kwŏn 13, King Yuri, Year 3 (Kim Pusik 1977: 1:132). For an English translation of the episode, see Kim Pusik (2011: 44). 12 Isagŭm, like maripkan, was a vernacular Sillan ruling title used before Silla adopted the Chinese-style royal title of wang 王.

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tradition of song. One day in the winter of 28 ce, on one of his tours he meets a starving woman on the verge of death, confesses, in yet another Confucian trope, his crime of not ruling benevolently enough, gives the woman clothes and food and commands his officials to do the same with all widows and widowers, orphans, the old, and the sick. Hearing this, people come streaming in great numbers, enjoy a happier life that year and the “king for the first time composed Tosol ka, which mark the beginning of music and songs” (始製兜 率歌　此歌樂之始也).13 Because no lyrics are included, it is hard to say what exactly these songs were, but, despite the extensive debates about the origin and meaning of the terms, it is safe to say that Tosol ka, together with hyangga, tonnorae or turinnorae (also written 兜率歌) and saenaennorae (alleged vernacular readings of the sinographic renderings 詞腦歌, 思內歌) refer to forms of vernacular song and poetry. Although the Samguk sagi is giving us an implicit origin story for Sinitic poetry in Korea and an explicit one for vernacular song, it contains little poetry in comparison to the Japanese chronicles. In fact, it includes no vernacular poetry at all, in striking contrast to the Japanese histories, which, in diametric opposition, only feature vernacular poetry and no Chinese-style kanshi. This is understandable, considering that Kim Pusik modeled his chronicle so consciously on Sima Qian’s Shiji 史記 (Records of the Grand Historian; ca. 109 bce), which also has comparably little poetry, given that it was written before the rise proper of classical Chinese poetry during the late Han dynasty and the early Six Dynasties. Also, he wrote in old-style prose (rather than ornamental parallel prose) and in the spirit of didactic, prosaic historiography praising good and blaming evil as a model for future action. Thus, regardless of what sources he might have had at his disposition when compiling the Samguk sagi, poetry had little place per se in the vision of his project. In contrast, the Samguk yusa, attributed to the monk Iryŏn 一然 (1206–1289), contains about seventy poems. In a historical chronicle passionate about romantic lore, miracle stories, and story-teller type suspense narrative, coupled with Iryŏn’s desire, as a monk, to enshrine Buddhist hagiography for the early period, poems function as important carriers of action and plot. Iryŏn’s chronicle is most famous for transmitting fourteen precious vernacular poems, hyangga, recorded in hyangch’al 鄕札, inscribing Korean language with a mixture of phonographically and logographically used sinographs. This number (which yields a total corpus of twenty-five hyangga composed between roughly the seventh and tenth centuries, including the eleven poems from 13 Samguk Sagi, kwŏn 1, Isagŭm Yuri, Year 5 (Kim Pusik 1977: 1:5). For an English translation of the episode see Kim Pusik (2012: 36).

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the biography of the Flower Garland scholar-monk Kyunyŏ 均如 (923–973)) stands in sad contrast to the several thousands of vernacular poems preserved in Japan even just from the seventh and eighth centuries. The Man’yōshū features more than 4,500 poems alone, and although we know that an extensive compendium of hundreds of poems, called Samdaemok 三代目 (Collection of Three Periods) and compiled in 888 by the monk Taegu and Prime Minister Wihong during the reign of Queen Chinsŏng 眞聖女王 (r. 887–897), probably bore witness to a thriving vernacular poetry culture, it is lost. Unlike vernacular poetry in Japan which became closely attached to court culture, the tradition of hyangga and its inscription method, hyangch’al, became extinct after the early Koryŏ period. Not only do we have only a tiny corpus of extant poems, but they have come down to us without any history of reading, interpretation, and annotation. The feverish attention hyangga poetry has received as representative of earliest Korean language and literature has detracted from the consideration of the place of poetry and song in the Samguk yusa as a whole. By far the most frequent type of poetry in the chronicle are “eulogies” that Iryŏn attaches to biographies of protagonists, Buddhist sculptures or pagodas, or certain events. These are Chinese-style heptasyllabic quatrains introduced with the formula “the eulogy says:” (讚曰). They summarize the noteworthy elements of the story in poetic language. But the collection contains a great variety of poetry, both in the vernacular and in Chinese-style forms. They pass praise or blame on certain protagonists, work as magic talismans against plague spirits (when written down and pinned to one’s door), shoo away baleful comets, or show plot-bending effect in difficult situations, namely when encountering malevolent spirits, bodhisattva Guanyin 觀音, or sea monsters kidnapping beautiful ladies, or when plucking azaleas from a neck-breaking cliff for a noble lady, expressing one’s desperation upon being thrown into prison, or winning the hand of a princess through free invention and popular circulation of an offensive children’s ditty (tongyo 童謠). 2.2 Comparing Poetry in Chronicles Comparing poetry in the two earliest extant Japanese and Korean chronicles is fraught with seemingly insurmountable obstacles. First, there is the dramatically different temporal and cultural distance between the period of the compilers and the times during which the poetry is set in the narrative and was presumably composed. The early Japanese chronicles give us a comparatively close view of vernacular poetic composition practice of the centuries immediately preceding the eighth century: although the first song in the Kojiki is set during times immemorial and put in the mouth of God Susano-o, the stormy

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brother of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, to celebrate his new palace and his new wife in Izumo (the center of a cult devoted to him and his descendants), the inscription of this poetry and other poems attributed to early legendary emperors cannot have happened much before the sixth, or really, the seventh century. The compilers of the Japanese chronicles were dealing with and defining a flourishing, living tradition of a world whose poetic culture they could relate to and they still largely inhabited. Kim Pusik and Iryŏn (or the compilers of the Samguk sagi and Samguk yusa) were many more centuries removed from the composition of the poems they included in their compilations. To speak nothing of the earliest poems attributed to semi-legendary figures, even the hyangga that we know must have belonged to a flourishing, mature tradition thriving during the seventh through tenth centuries were distant historical relics by the time Kim Pusik and Iryŏn began their tasks. This meant not just that the compilers had much fewer sources at their disposal because more time had passed and fewer had survived, but their worlds—the middle and later period of the Koryŏ dynasty, and in particular the time of Mongol invasions and domination in Iryŏn’s case—was a politically, socially and culturally radically different world from the Three Kingdoms period invoked in their chronicles. By the 1280s, hyangga had been a defunct tradition for some time and must have been almost a curiosity for Iryŏn’s contemporaries. So how can we even hope to control the vast asymmetries I have only begun to sketch between the available Japanese and Korean sources, let alone expect any deeper insight from the comparison? Looking at poetic cultures through historical chronicles has unexpected advantages over looking at separate poetry collections: we can become witnesses of actual (though of course narrated) poetic performance, often in extreme emotional states of joy, despair, demise, or sex rather than just being readers of a poetic text. (True, in Japanese collections “prefaces” explaining the place, time, and circumstances of the composition [kotobagaki 詞書] sometimes contextualize poetry to a high degree, but obviously much less extensively than in the case of poetry featured in chronicles.) Also, we can deduce a kind of immanent “embedded poetics,” an early culture of poetic appreciation and judgment, as we witness the audience’s reactions and responses to the narrated scene or read comments inserted by later editors of the text. It is not far-fetched to claim that, with the application of careful and flexible interpretive filters, we can learn much about possible differences between early Japanese and Korean literary culture and poetic practice when looking at Japanese and Korean poetic culture through their earliest preserved historical chronicles. What we compare, in the end, are certainly not the poetic cultures of Asuka and Nara Japan on the one hand, and those of the Three Kingdoms

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and Unified Silla on the other. These are only accessible anyway through the fragmented glimpses the surviving sources afford us, while the strong asymmetry in source preservation for early Japan and Korea throws the comparison further off balance. Instead, what we ultimately compare are the vantage points of the compilers of these chronicles, facing in two directions: backwards and forwards. Gazing backwards, we attempt to capture the past and its particular relevance to the present. This direction gives us a view of the early eighth century—the early Nara period—for the Japanese chronicles, and the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—the middle and later periods of the Koryŏ dynasty—for the Korean chronicles. Obviously, the Korean compiler-authors faced a considerably larger distance from the periods they captured in their chronicles. But there is also a vector facing forward, in the direction of reception history. Since all four chronicles were highly influential in their respective traditions, how their compilers might have painted and imagined the past had a deep impact on what writers in successive generations took their tradition and their past to be. So, what visions of poetic performance and poetic culture are Ō no Yasumaru and Prince Toneri, and Kim Pusik and Iryŏn, together with their co-compilers, projecting in their respective chronicles, the Kojiki, Nihon shoki, Samguk sagi, and Samguk yusa? In what follows I will only touch on a few salient examples of distinctive differences between the Japanese and Korean chronicles rather than attempting the much more extensive task of exploring these visions individually. 2.3 Sinitic and Vernacular Forms That the earliest Japanese chronicles only included vernacular poems means not just that the compilers had many samples available from an increasingly flourishing vernacular poetic production, but that they considered these songs as constitutive of early Japanese divine speech, of early Japanese heroes and rulers, and their deeds. It also means—and this is too little noticed—that the compilers, probably for temporal and ideological reasons, did not accord Sinitic poetry a constitutive role in projecting the words and deeds of early gods, heroes, rulers, and other authoritative protagonists. In the Kaifūsō, the earliest extant kanshi anthology, we have poems from court banquets during the reign of Emperor Tenji 天智天皇 (r. 661–671), and the Nihon shoki links the beginning of Sinitic poetry to Prince Ōtsu (663–686), but it does not include any poetry samples. It is remarkable—and again too little noticed, because only comparison with the Korean case makes this suddenly clear—how much in early Japan poetry was considered a domestic medium, not a cosmopolitan code allowing access to the larger world of the Sinographic Sphere. We see this in the absence of Sinitic poetry in the chronicles. But the degree to which Sinitic poetry, at

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least in the extant corpus, emerges as a domestic medium, rather than a tool of transnational diplomacy, is striking. The Kaifūsō does feature poetry composed at banquets hosted for Silla envoys and thereby shows the use of Sinitic poetry as a cosmopolitan code in East Asian diplomacy. But it celebrates the beginnings of Sinitic poetry composition at the court of Emperors Tenji and Tenmu (while lamenting the loss of texts during the succession war, the Jinshin War (672), that broke out after Tenji’s death) and it overall showcases the domestic uses to which Chinese-style poetry was put during its first eighty years up until the compilation of the Kaifūsō. The contrast with the Samguk sagi makes this strikingly clear. Kim Pusik takes a “cosmopolitan” stance and his chronicle is certainly an attempt to (self-)consciously situate Korea and Korean history in relation to contemporary China and Chinese historiography, which does impact his exclusively, indeed, “Chinese-style,” cosmopolitan language choice: no vernacular poetry is included. And Chinese-style poems appear overwhelmingly in the context of diplomacy with China. Iryŏn’s approach in the Samguk yusa is pluralistic and hybrid.14 Though most of the epideictic praise poetry is delivered in the form of Sinitic “eulogies” (ch’an 讚), praise can be equally well delivered in vernacular hyangga, as with the eight-line hyangga in praise of Chukchi, a Hwarang 花 郞 (“Flower Knight”) who served as state minister under four sovereigns, by his follower Tŭgo, dating to around 700; or the ten-line hyangga in praise of the knight Kip’a, again a member of the Hwarang, by Master Ch’ungdam, dating to around 750. The well-known connection between the Hwarang, Silla’s elite corps of knights, Buddhism, and vernacular poetry is remarkable here and one that should allow us to grasp early Japanese vernacular poetry from a fresh perspective.15 The most revealing passage in this regard is the story of the monk Wŏlmyŏng 月明 (dates unknown) in the Samguk yusa. When in 760 two suns suddenly appear and remain in the sky for ten days, King Kyŏngdŏk 景德王 (r. 742–765) settles on Wŏlmyŏng as the meritorious monk who should drive away the evil omen with a prayer on “Strewing Flowers” before the Buddha. The monk first refuses, explaining that, being a Hwarang, he is “only versed in hyangga and does not understand much about Sanskrit chanting” (只解鄕歌，不閑 聲梵).16 The king agrees, Wŏlmyŏng sings his hyangga (Turinnorae 兜率歌), and the omen disappears, but the compiler does not refrain from giving us 14 15 16

On the broader underpinnings of pluralism in Koryŏ society see Breuker (2010). On this connection see McBride (2010). For the entire episode see Iryŏn (2002–2003: 4:275–276); and in English, Iryŏn (1972: 352–354).

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an adaptation of the four-line hyangga into a Chinese-style quatrain (解曰…). The occasion seemingly demanded for a Chinese-style language choice.17 The power of hyangga singing is showcased again in the next part of the story, where Wŏlmyŏng offers a hyangga to the spirit of his dead sister (作鄕歌祭之). At once a frightening whirlwind arises and whisks the paper money away to the West, which the monk had just evoked in his closing line, “Ah, I will polish the path/ Until I meet you in the Pure Land”:18 the offering has clearly reached its addressee. That the various episodes in Wŏlmyŏng’s story are designed to highlight the power of hyangga is summarized in the poignant general conclusion: “Indeed many people in Silla loved hyangga—they are just like Chinese-style poems and hymns! Thus have they often had the power to touch and move Heaven and Earth and the spirits and gods” (羅人尙鄕歌者尙矣。蓋詩頌之類 歟。故往往能感動天地鬼神者非一). Even the pious eulogy for Wŏlmyŏng that concludes this hagiographic portrait, praises again the power of vernacular song rather than simply the monk—but in a Sinitic quatrain. Wŏlmyŏng’s story bears suggestive resemblance to the famous episode of Abe no Nakamaro in Ki no Tsurayuki’s Tosa Diary (Tosa nikki 土佐日記; ca. 935). A Japanese envoy to Tang China with the mission of 717, Nakamaro is said to have taken the civil service examinations and served at the Chinese court, dying in the capital of Chang’an after almost half a century in China and several failed attempts to return to his homeland. Tsurayuki, chief compiler of the Kokin wakashū 古今和歌集, invokes the power of native song to “move heaven and earth and stir the feelings of the invisible gods and spirits” (天地を動か し、目に見えぬ鬼神をも哀れと思はせ…) in his Japanese Preface (Kanajo 仮名序) to the imperial anthology (Kojima and Arai 1989: 4).19 Obviously, both Japanese and Korean authors borrowed this powerful phrase from the “Great Preface” to the Book of Odes, thus mobilizing the power that a Han dynasty commentator ascribed to shi poetry in the canonical collection for the elevation of Japanese and Korean native song. Tsurayuki’s Tosa Diary tells the story of how Nakamaro, at a farewell banquet on the eve of one of his failed attempts to leave China in 752, composed poetry with his Chinese hosts on the radiant moon that night. Inspired by the moment, he composes a vernacular waka, remembering the moon that 17

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Since this is the only occasion where Iryŏn gives a Chinese-style adaptation of a hyangga, we cannot simply explain this away by saying he was worried his readers would not understand. It is clear from the narrative that the king had expected a Chinese-style Buddhist prayer. Translation by Peter Lee (2003: 75). In closer parallel to the Samguk yusa episode, it appears as 感天地, 動鬼神 in the Sinitic Preface to the Kokinshū (Manajo 真名序) (Kojima and Arai 1989: 338).

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rose over Kasuga Shrine, where he attended farewell prayers in Japan before coming to China over thirty years previous. Aware that his Chinese audience might not understand, he “translates” the poem into Chinese and explains its meaning. He receives praise for this “translation” of his vernacular poem and the episode ends on making a point of universal human understanding: while languages and speech might differ, the moon and the human heart are just the same everywhere. As in Wŏlmyŏng’s story we have a vernacular song followed by a Chinese-style translation or adaptation. But three fundamental differences are revealing: Nakamaro is in China and translates the poem for his Chinese audience, whereas Iryŏn gives a Sinitic adaptation for a domestic audience, aware that the occasion had called for a Sinitic language choice. Nakamaro proudly, almost arrogantly, promotes Japanese vernacular poetry in China, in an attempt to pique the Chinese hosts’ interest in what to them appeared to be the distant and relatively unimportant tribute nation of Japan. Conversely, Iryŏn feels compelled to defend vernacular song even back home among compatriots, and he therefore includes an adaptation of the hyangga into Literary Chinese and eagerly claims, in a pedagogical analogy trying to convince them of the importance of the genre, that hyangga were just like Chinese “shi poetry” and “hymns.” Another difference is that Wŏlmyŏng is a monk and Nakamaro is a courtier. The Korean monk is linked to the Sinitic language world of Buddhism, but the particular institution of the Hwarang in Silla, a legendary male elite corps whose guardian patron was Maitreya and who in the sources appear as the greatest supporters of hyangga composition, binds him also to the world of vernacular song. The “courtier” Nakamaro (who admittedly served mostly at the Chinese court but is certainly portrayed by Tsurayuki as a Heian courtier of sorts) is the promoter of vernacular “songs of Yamato” and embodies thereby the institution that, like the Hwarang in Silla, patronized waka: the imperial court. Just as the linkage of waka to the Japanese court guaranteed in the end the genre’s remarkable longevity, even to this day, the Hwarang patronage of hyangga spelt death for this tradition, as the institutions of Silla society and culture waned. The last, very significant difference is that Wŏlmyŏng’s hyangga are both clearly Buddhist prayers, powerful spells which bring about their desired effect—the disappearance of the evil omen and the approach of Wŏlmyŏng’s dead sister. By contrast, Nakamaro’s waka is written in the literary vein of poems devoted to the beauties of the moon. He explicitly compares the moon in China that night to the moon over Kasuga when long ago he departed for China, making a point of the universality of human appreciation of nature’s beauties and the moon.

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So we have here an inverse situation: the content of Wŏlmyŏng’s hyangga underscores the universal, cosmic power of Buddhism, but in consciously choosing the local hyangga form, Wŏlmyŏng (and the compiler) make a point of elevating the power of local song; in contrast, Nakamaro’s waka has local content: it evokes the moon over Kasuga, the site of prayers to the Japanese gods for safe travel, and thus introduces local knowledge that was probably lost on his Chinese audience. The Nakamaro in Tsurayuki’s diary also uses local form, namely waka, but he uses it to make a point of the universality of the human heart and the appreciation of nature—a certainly fitting claim in the setting of foreign relations and diplomacy. We see here suggestive glimpses of the configurations and histories of the intersection of “cosmopolitan” and local codes that give us deeper insight into distinctive differences between early Japanese and Korean literary cultures and their institutions. Certainly, the connection between Buddhism and hyangga in Korea makes for an interesting intersection of vernacular with Chinese-style, and Buddhist with literary themes and tropes, which for Japan’s early period is rare except, for example, in the Buddha Footstone poems or occasional Buddhist overtones in poems such as those by Yamanoue no Okura 山上憶良/山於億良 (ca. 660–ca. 733). If one looks from the—admittedly minuscule—Korean record, 18 of 25 preserved hyangga have explicitly Buddhist inspiration and content. By contrast, the early Japanese songs, and indeed the entire Man’yōshū, even its ample corpus related to the most Buddhist of moments—death and its rituals—looks, in comparison, strikingly devoid of Buddhist verbiage and rhetoric. 2.4 Further Angles of Comparison I have showcased above the fruitfulness of systematically comparing early Japanese and Korean literary cultures by exploring stories from chronicles that thematize the intersection of “cosmopolitan” and “vernacular” poetic modes. But the comparison of poetry in these earliest Japanese and Korean histories might help us discover a host of other thought-provoking potential divergences in the literary cultures that cry out for further study. Take for example the issue of historiography and diplomacy: the Nihon shoki includes many episodes involving foreign affairs, whereas the Kojiki is suggestively silent on any realms beyond Japan. Taken together, because of their distinctive form, their exclusive inclusion of vernacular poetry, and the frequent display of confidence in the Japanese gods and soil, they take a rather domestic perspective on how to tell and remember history. It is a history for a confident eighth-century imperial court that is not co-constitutive with the fates of Chinese dynasties. In

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contrast, confidence in the Samguk sagi stems from a self-conscious positioning vis-à-vis Chinese precedents: unlike the Japanese chronicles, Kim Pusik shaped the Samguk sagi in explicit dialogue with models of Chinese official historiography, adopting for example the traditional format of “Basic Annals,” “Chronological Tables,” “Treatises,” and “Biographies” and inserting didactic comments in the voice of the “Grand Historian,” practices that ultimately originated with Sima Qian’s Shiji. In addition to the adaptation of historiographical form, diplomacy has a much more prominent plot function in the Samguk sagi than in the Japanese chronicles. Kim Pusik generously drew on Chinese dynastic histories, included much diplomatic correspondence between China and the Three Kingdoms, and prominently featured close personal interactions between Chinese rulers and rulers of the Korean states. Rather than putting the peninsula into a subservient vassal position, many episodes highlight the Korean states’ privileged relationship with China and the appreciation Chinese emperors had for rulers of those states. There are striking moments of poetic diplomacy that hardly appear in the Japanese record. On the eve of Silla’s conquest of Paekche and the imminent unification of the peninsula under Silla with the help of Tang armies, Queen Chindŏk 真德女王 (r. 647–654) embroiders on silk an expansive 22-line pentasyllabic Chinese-style eulogy, the “Song of Great Peace” (T’aep’yŏng ka 太平歌), and sends it to the Chinese emperor, praising the greatness of the Tang, warning barbarians who would go against the Chinese mandate of heaven, and affirming loyalty as vassals to Tang splendor. Both the Samguk sagi and the Samguk yusa give this poem and episode great weight (with Kim Pusik giving us much more of the diplomatic backstory) and the queen’s “cosmopolitan” Chinese-style poem, which views her homeland Silla from the outside perspective of the radiant Tang capital of Chang’an, makes for a thought-provoking comparison with a “domestic” version of a song explaining how to bring peace to the people back home, the “Song of Peace” (Anmin ka 安民歌, ca. 765) that Master Ch’ungdam composes at the royal command of King Kyŏngdŏk. The political significance of the topic of domestic order and peace might explain why this is the only hyangga in the Samguk yusa that is explicitly composed by royal command. We should certainly not forget that there is a short four-line gātha verse that Prince Nagaya 長屋王 (684–729), the grandson of Emperor Tenmu 天武 天皇 (r. 673–686) who fell victim to the intrigues of the Fujiwara clan and was forced into suicide, had embroidered on the hems of monk robes and sent to the court of Emperor Xuanzong 玄宗 (r. 712–756). The poem nicely puns on the last word of the poem, 緣, which refers both to the “hem” of the robes and the “karmic connection” that will hopefully tie together the future fates of

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the Japanese gift givers and the Chinese recipients of the robes (Zhang 1984: 215–216).20 This is a famous and exceptional example of poetic diplomacy in the early Japanese sources. But, as noted above, the uses of poetry as showcased in the early Japanese sources are strongly focused on Japanese exigencies, serving concrete purposes of domestic displays of power and eloquence: both the songs in the chronicles and the Sinitic and vernacular poetry preserved in the Kaifūsō and Man’yōshū often feature emperors as poets or emperors having courtiers compose poems at imperial command. In contrast, poetry and song has a prominent role in the Samguk sagi in a diplomatic context, in a display of “cosmopolitan” values of friendly cooperation, cultivation, and eloquence. And the presence of Chinese-style poetry as a whole obviously also highlighted Korea’s participation in the larger Sinitic world order. When, for example, Silla’s King Sŏngdŏk 聖德王 (r. 702–737) thanks Emperor Xuanzong for his gifts with a poem, gifts which had included a pair of white parrots, he imagines them “singing the songs of Chang’an” or “bestowing the grace(ful words) of his Majesty, the Sage ruler.”21 When hearing of King Sŏngdŏk’s death, Emperor Xuanzong sends an envoy with condolences to Sŏngdŏk’s successor, King Hyosŏng 孝成王 (r. 737–742), and has the envoy present a collection of poetry from a party hosted by the Tang crown prince, adorned with a preface by his very Majesty. Xuanzong says that he considers this an appropriate gift because Silla “is called a country of gentlemen, pretty knowledgeable in matters of writing and texts” (新羅號爲君子之國　頗知書記).22 The label of “country of Confucian gentlemen” was a standard phrase of praise and the states that were fortunate enough to hear it from a Chinese ruler could feel proud to be part of the “Sinographic Sphere” and the cultural capital it bestowed on its participants. In 753, Xuanzong also addressed the Japanese ambassador Fujiwara no Kiyokawa 藤原清河 (?–778) as a “Confucian gentleman,” yet, to our knowledge, Kiyokawa was not graced with a poetry collection from the coterie of the crown prince and a personal preface by his Majesty. But the most striking, slightly surreal, poetic exchange between rulers of the Korean states and a Chinese emperor comes a few years later under Hyosŏng’s successor, King Kyŏngdŏk 景德 (r. 742–765). When in 756 the rebel An Lushan takes the Tang capital and Emperor Xuanzong (r. 712–756) flees to Shu, in today’s Sichuan, King Kyŏngdŏk, hearing of this, hastens to send an envoy with tribute 20 Quan Tang shi 全唐詩 (Complete Tang Poetry), 732.21. 21 或稱長安之樂　或傳聖主之恩. Samguk sagi, kwŏn 8, Sŏngdŏk, Year 32 (Kim Pusik 1977: 1:32). For an English translation of the episode see Kim Pusik (2012: 283). 22 Samguk sagi, kwŏn 9, Hyosŏng, Year 2 (Kim Pusik 1977: 1:90); and in English, Kim Pusik (2012: 292).

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gifts to the emperor in distress and exile. Deeply moved, Xuanzong composes a lengthy pentasyllabic poem in twenty lines, in which he profusely thanks the Silla envoy for the gifts and for putting up with the hardships of travel. He inscribes the poem in imperial calligraphy, and, strikingly, still posits Chang’an as East Asia’s splendid tribute capital rather than admitting to his current exile and the dire situation of the Tang empire (business as usual—what could he do?). What is more, a few centuries later under Emperor Huizong of the Song 宋徽宗 (r. 1119–1125), a Koryŏ envoy offers a woodblock print of this very poem to the Song emperor at Kaifeng. After careful study by court officials and scholars it is indeed confirmed as an original poem of Xuanzong to everybody’s warm applause.23 We have no record in early Japan of comparably high-status, sustained, and careful—even personal—diplomatic interaction through poetry. If it existed—which is questionable due to Japan’s lower prestige from a Chinese perspective—no author or compiler cared much about recording it. For Kim Pusik, however, poetry was a powerful tool for dramatizing transnational diplomacy and enhancing the cosmopolitan standing of Korea. One last brief example of significant divergence between the Japanese and Korean chronicles is the role of poetry exchanges. Whether one looks at the eighth-century Man’yōshū, the three ninth-century imperial anthologies from the Saga period, or the burgeoning vernacular tale literature beginning in the tenth century, which culminated in works like Murasaki Shikibu’s eleventhcentury Tale of Genji, poetry in early Japan was a dialogic art, a communicative code, a language distinct from everyday speech, but used in everyday situations for powerful effect. This role of poetry is already firmly in place in the early songs in the Japanese chronicles. Song can be used to exchange opinions on the most embarrassing topics, as when the fierce Yamato Takeru complains to his bride Miyazuhime about stains of menstrual blood he spotted on her robe. (He marries her nevertheless, perhaps even thanks to the poetic wit she exposes in the response poem, which puns on the moon and the time spent waiting for him.) But it can also be used for forceful battles of minds about perennial topics, as in one of the most remarkable poetic exchanges from the chronicles, the tête-à-tête of Emperor Nintoku 仁徳天皇 (trad. 313–399) with his empress that unfolds when he tries to bring his lover-cum-half-sister Princess Yata into the household (Tsuchihashi and Konishi 1957, Nihon shoki songs 46–50). Although Nintoku is the first Japanese monarch to be explicitly praised for his Confucian governance and benevolence, the poems in the chronicles tell extravagant stories 23 Samguk sagi, kwŏn 9, Kyŏngdŏk, Year 15 (Kim Pusik 1977: 1:93); and in English, Kim Pusik (2012: 301).

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about his many love affairs. In the course of this sequence of five poems the couple grills each other, fighting over whether it is right or not to have other spouses and be jealous. Although the empress falls silent in the end, she is intent upon never giving in. This is perhaps the most argumentative example of poetic exchanges from a prolific tradition of poetic dialogue between the sexes. Interestingly, in the Korean chronicles poetic exchanges are rare, certainly not couched in the vernacular, and, if happening at all, involve the exceptional realm of supernatural cross-dressing. The lone gender-crossing exchange occurs in the hagiography of the two hermits Pakpak and Pudŭk.24 After a happy marital life they retreat into a valley deep in the mountains. One day in 706 they are each visited by a beautiful woman, who first tempts Pakpak with a heptasyllabic quatrain, asking for shelter, but he shoos her away in brisk prose, telling her not to contaminate the place with female passion and desire. The same woman then addresses Pudŭk, who is more virtuous and ultimately quicker in gaining enlightenment, with a gātha verse, again asking poetically for shelter. Pudŭk grants it with hesitation, only to be forced to witness her disrobe, give birth, and ask him to jump in the bathtub with her. Given the extraordinary progress of events, it is no surprise she turns out to be Guanyin, the bodhisattva of mercy, who has come to help both hermits gain enlightenment. The narrator of the episode in the Samguk yusa explains that she only succeeded in helping them gain enlightenment because she used “dharani” speech rather than the vulgar language of a singsong girl. Thus, this episode is actually precisely not an example of using poetry in amorous exchanges between the sexes, but a religious parable of how to use Buddhist verse-speech to help human beings along on their paths towards salvation. 3

Outlook: A Sinographic “Cosmopolis”?

Even just a brief exploration of one particular window into early Japanese and Korean literary culture of the Three Kingdoms and Koryŏ Periods—the uses of poetry in chronicles—has given us a perspective on the divergent agendas of Japanese and Korean compilers in their time and some glimpses into the divergent literary cultures of the past that they were reconstructing and reimagining from their historical moment in time. Were these authors 24 Samguk yusa, kwŏn 3, “Nambaegwŏl i sŏng Nohil Pudŭk Taltal Pakpak” [Nohil Pudŭk and Taltal Pakpak, Two Sages of South Paegwŏl Mountain] (Iryŏn 2002–2003: 3:216–219); in English, Iryŏn (1972: 237–243).

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and compilers part of a “Sinographic Cosmopolis,” as one might dub it when applying Pollock’s model for South Asia? The answer to this question obviously depends on the definition of “cosmopolis” and “cosmopolitanism” one chooses to adopt. Defining “cosmopolitanism” has itself been a quite cosmopolitan pursuit, and it has varied depending on what historical model the definer universalized from and what local historical inflections he or she allowed to impact the definition. Pollock recognizes that variability himself. From this angle any connections between different polities mediated by translocal languages and codes can conveniently be declared a cosmopolis of sorts. But that might take the conceptual edge off the notion of “cosmopolis”—a “cosmopolis” must certainly be different from a translocal “region”? When talking about the emergence of Prakrit and Apabhramsha as “cosmopolitan languages” on the model of Sanskrit, Pollock pinpoints the essence of linguistic cosmopolitanism: a conscious, self-reflexive awareness among the language users of their own “cosmopolitanism.” Pollock says that “what in the first instance qualified these few translocal codes for literary work was some sense that literature itself must be a translocal phenomenon for a translocal public” (Pollock 2006: 103). In this sense, linguistic cosmopolitanism requires, philosophically, a thinking and writing subject, and has, grammatically, something of a “putative” modality. The authors needs to “consider” themselves as cosmopolitan, or at least as a subject, writing for a translocal audience. This definition also works well for cosmopolitan elites in the Hellenistic world or the Roman Empire, and the high mobility of these elites across the Mediterranean region, for education, office, or through simple migration made cosmopolitanism a highly palpable physical, linguistic, and psychological experience. It made it easy for them to imagine their implied reader as a translocal subject, as Horace braggingly does in the Second Book of his Odes, where he imagines Colchians, fierce Dacians, Geloni (“at the ends of the earth”!), and, not the least, learned Iberians and Celts, in love with his works. But this is exactly where a close analogy to premodern East Asia, in particular the early and medieval periods, is questionable. Demographic flows between the various East Asian states were low compared to let’s say the Roman Empire. The contingent of students that Silla sent to China for education is insignificant compared to the Roman routine education in the Greek provinces and migrations due to military campaigns. And the number of Japanese envoys and monks sent to the continent is even less significant. While Kim Pusik’s attention to diplomacy with China in the Samguk sagi belies a cosmopolitan perspective, he seems less interested in engaging a cosmopolitan readership than in creating a work of Korean history on a par with official Chinese historiography that will teach his compatriots their own traditions. Even less “cosmopolitan,”

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the strongly domestic form and focus of early Japanese chronicles and poetry anthologies, that we can grasp as such in contrast with Korean sources, reveal hardly any desire to reach a translocal readership. True, the desire to show off one’s books in China is as old as the legends around Prince Shōtoku’s 聖徳太子 (574–622) introduction of his sutra commentaries to the continent. It is a trope with a number of famous examples, but it is hard to think of any longer Nara or Heian text that was explicitly and seriously written for a translocal readership rather than for Japanese and their domestic concerns. Similarly true, some, albeit very few, Japanese had very cosmopolitan experiences. The monk Ennin 圓仁/円仁 (793 or 794–864), who studied in China in the mid-ninth century around the time of the Buddhist persecutions under Emperor Wuzong 唐武宗 (r. 840–846), was obviously thoroughly “cosmopolitanized” by this experience of life abroad. Yet ironically, his diary shows not so much how his cosmopolitan awareness had grown during his stay but highlights in repeated episodes how much less “cosmopolitan” the Japanese in China were compared to Sillans, who enjoyed relatively high status in Chinese society and operated quite freely on the continent as a naturalized expatriate community of sorts. There is one other complication here in transtemporal perspective: cosmopolitan experience (and relatedly, imagination) of Japanese and Koreans varied greatly not just by period, but was also highly individual: Nakamaro and Ennin were obviously highly “cosmopolitanized,” but they were exceptions in Nara and Heian Japan. Given this great variability depending on period, discursive context (e.g., the trope of gifting books to China from the periphery), or personal experience, is a qualitative concept of East Asia as a “cosmopolis” not in danger of washing over significant historical changes and different constellations of premodern East Asia? True, we can consider the criterion that a “cosmopolis” needs writers to be self-conscious of their participation in that cosmopolis and write for a translocal audience as Eurocentric—simply too Roman. In this sense, positing a “Sinographic Cosmopolis” is a timely and urgent task to diversify our notions of the cosmopolitan, which is still, inevitably, predicated on the universalization of the Western historical experiences with “cosmopolitanisms.” Thus the assumption of a “Sinographic Cosmopolis” can have an important heuristic role in detecting divergence and difference across various macro-regions of the premodern world, rather than proving literal comparability and washing over those differences. Whether we scholars of older worlds talk of “cosmopoleis” and “cosmopolitan centers,” “spheres,” “macro-regions,” “script worlds” (based on David Damrosch), or, most neutrally and descriptively, of “premodern XXcontemporary geographical term” (as in “premodern East Asia”), we all share the same purpose: to make culturally visible the premodern metageographies obfuscated or even repressed in the technocratic

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geographical terminology that defines our twenty-first century world and world order. Together with the notion of a “Sinographic Cosmopolis” these concepts can all somehow contribute to that purpose. Pollock’s work is inspiring for East Asian scholars on various accounts. It urges us to grapple with finding culturally meaningful terminology that honors the metageography of the world’s premodern macro-regions. It encourages us to conceptualize the linguistic spectrum and dynamic of the “cosmopolitan” and “vernacular.” And it also calls on us to heed the “comparative wake-up call” to develop, as I proposed in this chapter, a genuinely comparative conceptual modeling of East Asian literary cultures and institutions. References Breuker, Remco E. 2010. Establishing a Pluralist Society in Medieval Korea, 918–1170: History, Ideology, and Identity in the Koryŏ Dynasty. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Denecke, Wiebke. 2014a. Classical World Literatures: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Comparisons. New York: Oxford University Press. Denecke, Wiebke. 2014b. “Worlds without Translation: Premodern East Asia and the Power of Character Scripts.” In Companion to Translation Studies, edited by Sandra Berman and Catherine Porter, 204–216. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Denecke, Wiebke. “Suffering Everlasting Sorrow in Chang’an’s ‘Everlasting Tranquility’: The Poetics of Japanese Missions to the Tang Court.” East Asian Journal of Sinology 東亞漢學硏究 14 (2020): 253–390 (in English and Korean). Denecke, Wiebke (with contributions by Nam Nguyen). 2017. “Shared Literary Heritage in the East Asian Sinographic Sphere.” In The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (1000 BCE–900 CE), edited by Wiebke Denecke, Wai-yee Li, and Xiaofei Tian, 510–532. New York: Oxford University Press. Denecke, Wiebke, Wai-yee Li, and Xiaofei Tian, eds. 2017. The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (1000 BCE–900 CE). New York: Oxford University Press. Iryŏn (Ilyon). 1972. Samguk Yusa: Legends and History of the Three Kingdoms of Ancient Korea. Edited and translated by Ha Tae-Hung and Grafton K. Mintz. Seoul: Yonsei University Press. Iryŏn (Ilyon). 2002–2003. Yŏkchu Samguk yusa [Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms, Annotated]. 5 vols. Edited and translated by Kang Ingu et al. Seoul: Ihoe munhwasa. Kim Pusik. 1977. Samguk sagi [History of the Three Kingdoms]. 2 vols. Edited and translated by Yi Pyŏngdo. Seoul: Ŭryu munhwasa. Kim Pusik. 2011. The Koguryo Annals of the Samguk sagi, edited by Edward J. Shultz and Hugh H. W. Kang. Translated by Kenneth H. J. Gardiner, Daniel C. Kane, Hugh H. W. Kang, and Edward J. Shultz. Seongnam-si, Korea: Academy of Korean Studies Press.

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Kim Pusik. 2012. The Silla Annals of the Samguk sagi. Translated by Edward J. Shultz and Hugh H. W. Kang, with Daniel C. Kane. 2012. Seongnam-si, Korea: Academy of Korean Studies Press. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng). 2010. Kanbun to Higashi Ajia: Kundoku no bunkaken [Literary Sinitic and East Asia: A Cultural Sphere of Vernacular Reading]. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. King, Ross. 2015. “Ditching ‘Diglossia’: Describing Ecologies of the Spoken and Inscribed in Pre-modern Korea.” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 15(1): 1–19. Kojima Noriyuki et al., ed. 1994–. Nihon shoki [Chronicles of Japan]. SNKBZ 2–4. Tokyo: Shōgakkan. Kojima Noriyuki, and Arai Eizō, eds. 1989. Kokin wakashū [Collection of Japanese Poems, Ancient and Modern]. SNKBT 5. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Kornicki, Peter. 2010. “A Note on Sino-Japanese: A Question of Terminology.” SinoJapanese Studies 17: 29–44. Kornicki, Peter. 2018. Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lee, Peter. 2003. A History of Korean Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lurie, David B. 2011. Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. McBride, Richard. 2010. “Silla Buddhism and the Hwarang.” Korean Studies 34: 54–89. Pollock, Sheldon. 2006. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Quan Tang shi [Complete Tang Poetry]. 1999. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Tsuchihashi Yutaka, and Konishi Jin’ichi, eds. 1957. Kodai kayōshū [Collection of Ancient Songs]. NKBT 3. Tokyo: Iwanami shoten. Wells, William Scott. 2011. “From Center to Periphery: The Demotion of Literary Sinitic and the Beginnings of Hanmunkwa—Korea, 1876–1910.” MA thesis, University of British Columbia. Yamaguchi Yoshinori, and Kōnoshi Takamitsu, eds. 1997. Kojiki [Records of Ancient Matters]. SNKBZ 1. Tokyo: Shōgakkan. Zhang Buyun. 1984. Tangdai zhong ri wanglai shi jizhu [Annotated Collection of Chinese and Japanese Exchange Poetry from the Tang Period]. Xi’an: Shanxi renmin chubanshe.

Chapter 3

Vernacularizing the Cosmopolitan? Regional Sanskrits, “Stuffed Latin,” “Variant Sinitic,” and the Problem of Hybridity Ross King 1

Introduction: Regionalizing Cosmopolitan Codes1

This chapter is inspired by the work over the past twenty years of Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock on questions of “cosmopolitan and vernacular” in comparative perspective and in particular on the question of vernacularization—the processes by which individuals or royal courts choose to write down, and (eventually) to write literature in, previously unwritten (“unliterized,” i.e., never having been committed to writing) and “unliterarized” (i.e., never having been used for belle-lettristic writing) languages. Much of Pollock’s own research, as well as other research inspired by it, has focused on the ways in which linguistic codes previously subordinated to superposed translocal cosmopolitan written languages have been consciously remade in the image of cosmopolitan languages in order to become, in Pollock’s well-known phrase, “cosmopolitan vernaculars.” For Pollock, a “cosmopolitan vernacular” is a local language “aspiring to cultural dominance through the appropriation of features of a superposed language” (Pollock 2006: 261) and a “synthetic register of an emergent regional literary language that localizes the full spectrum of expressive qualities of the super-posed cosmopolitan code” (Ibid.: 322). However, in this chapter I wish to focus on what might be conceived of as a reverse process or the flip side of the coin: ways in which ostensibly cosmopolitan languages and texts can either mask or be infused with, infected/co-opted by, or otherwise mixed and hybridized with vernaculars. One of the many achievements of Pollock (2006) is its in-depth comparison of the historical processes of vernacularization in Latinate Europe and the Sanskrit Cosmopolis, with two substantial chapters dedicated to Latinity (Chapter 7, “A European Countercosmopolis” and Chapter 11, “Europe 1 This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOE) (AKS-2011-AAA-2103).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163

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Vernacularized”), in addition to numerous other comparative discussions scattered throughout the book. But Pollock has relatively little to say about the question of regional admixture in either Latin or Sanskrit in his various works on vernacularization. For example, in Pollock (1996: 201) he writes: “I will not here address the idea of ‘vernacular Sanskrits’ or even such phenomen[a] as so-called Epigraphical Hybrid Sanskrit.” Ten years later, citing Deshpande (1993a) and Salomon (1989), he again challenges the notions of “so-called vernacular Sanskrits” and Sanskrit and Prakrit as “mere ‘poles of a dialectic spectrum’” (Pollock 2006: 64), noting later in the book that “no one ever postulated regionalized Sanskrits for the production of literature” (Ibid.: 408), while admitting that “vernacular Sanskrits,” which “existed in spoken and certain written registers,” were nonetheless “completely restricted” from the kāvya and praśasti genres central to one of his main arguments: “the ‘conservatism’ and ‘uniformity’ of Latin literary culture were as characteristic of Sanskrit as its ‘widespread geographical diffusion’” (Ibid.: 269). My point here is not to challenge Pollock on questions of Sanskrit linguistics and philology, but to ask how his overall framework might enable a more nuanced and comparatively informed examination of cases where the alleged “conservatism and uniformity” of a cosmopolitan code like Sanskrit, Latin, or—in our case in this volume, Literary Sinitic—is breached or undermined. What metaphors have modern researchers deployed to understand such cases? More importantly, how did local actors conceptualize such cases of regionalized (or locally marked) versions of a cosmopolitan code in traditional literary cultures, and how have such metalinguistic conceptions changed over time? How are modern-day scholars to understand cases of “hybridization” (a term I use with some trepidation) between a local vernacular and a superposed cosmopolitan code? And how do questions of script and writing system complicate our comparisons? In particular, how does the distinction between morphographic2 vs. phonographic writing affect “written language intertwining,” to borrow a useful term from Johanson (2013), and what roles can multiple scripts play?

2 Following Schreiber (2019: 9), I prefer “morphographic” to “logographic” as a more accurate characterization of Chinese writing: “since words are defined as free morphemes, the term ‘logography’ appears to be inappropriate for the writing system of every language that is typologically not exclusively characterized as an isolating language.”

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Regionalized~Vernacularized Sanskrits

Although Pollock has little to say about the topic, there is nonetheless substantial discussion of vernacularized or regionalized forms of Sanskrit in the scholarly literature. Hertel (1922) is dedicated to the Śvetāmbara authors of Gujarat, who wrote in a “colloquial Sanskrit in their stories in order to make them intelligible to their public” (Hertel 1922: 17).3 Hertel takes issue with Sanskritists like Georg Bühler (1837–1898) who claim that the Jaina authors used incorrect Sanskrit out of ignorance, and notes that “popular Sanskrit, whose study has quite unduly been neglected by the scholars, widely differs from that of the classical authors” (Ibid.: 21). Thus, “a certain knowledge of the Gujarati language is absolutely necessary for every scholar who wishes to read Sanskrit works written in Gujarat” (Ibid.: 18). In his Histoire de la language sanskrite, Louis Renou ([1956] 2005) first draws attention to the “diversity” of Buddhist Sanskrit (“to pretend to describe Buddhist Sanskrit as a single entity is quite illusory”), its simplified morphology and its “short clauses”—“disarticulated and deprived of syntax…. In the least carefully composed works, one has the impression of the use of a ‘kitchen-Sanskrit’” (Renou 2005: 184, 186–187).4 In this latter context, he even supposes that Buddhist Sanskrit could be likened to “‘Sanskrit of the Church,’ as the utilisation of Sanskrit by the Buddhists strongly resembles that of Latin by Christians, keen to ‘popularize’ a literary language” (Ibid.: 282). Renou also describes what he calls “Hybrid Sanskrit,” as exemplified by Jaina writers with its “disturbing … multiplicity of nominal and verbal endings: … The hybrid language could not be the work of insufficiently cultured authors who were incapable of acceding to the usage of correct Sanskrit. This is a literary language without a real base, as so many others at the Middle-Indic level” (Ibid.: 190–191). Renou singles out tales and narratives in particular, “a domain where the Jainas acquired a great mastery and which assumed the most diverse forms. As 3 My citations of Hertel are taken from Deshpande (1993b). Barnett (1924: 298), in a short review of Hertel (1922), describes the language of this text as “more or less soaked with the vernacular.” 4 It is unclear to me as a non-Sanskritist whether Renou’s culinary metaphor here is based in the characterizations of local premodern South Asian commentators themselves, or is simply his own application of a widespread Western European metaphor for derogated language varieties. The other culinary (or at least comestible) metaphors I have seen deployed for regional varieties of Sanskrit seem to owe themselves to modern scholars and their readings of literary texts rather than to indigenous practice: “coconut and honey” for the interactions of Sanskrit in medieval Andhra (Rao 1995) and (Kashmiri) saffron in South Indian/Dravidian rasam, the “the prototypically southern broth of pepper and tamarind,” in Whitney Cox’s discussion of the reception of Kashmiri Sanskritic culture in the Dravidian south (Cox 2011: 181).

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among the Buddhists, it is here that traits relating to morphology, syntax and vocabulary are the most striking” (Ibid.: 193). Deshpande (1993b) is dedicated to the question of what he calls “vernacular Sanskrit” and begins with the observation that already in the grammatical commentaries of Patañjali in the second century bce, it is clear that “even the most learned speakers of Sanskrit spoke Prakrits as their first languages and used Sanskrit only in the context of learning and ritual” (Deshpande 1993b: 33). Thus, “interference from the mother-tongue can be observed in every province of India…. the person basically thinks in the mother-tongue and then puts the cloak of Sanskrit on his thoughts” (Ibid.: 37). As examples of texts in regionalized/vernacular Sanskrit, Deshpande cites “the Sekaśubhodayā from Bengal [16th c.], the Bharaṭakadvātrimśikā from Gujarat [ca. 15th c.], and the Gīrvāṇavāṅmañjarī of Dhuṇḍirāja Kavi [fl. ca. 1690–1710] from Banaras” (Ibid.: 37). In citing such texts alongside his summary of Hertel’s work, Deshpande aspires to “a true understanding of the reality of the Sanskrit language as it existed, rather than that of the Sanskrit language as it is expected to be” (Ibid.: 40). In another attempt to answer the question “What is regional about regional Sanskrit?” Bronner and Shulman shift the discussion to India’s south and interactions between Sanskrit and Dravidian languages: “First and foremost, a regional Sanskrit work aims at a local audience…. Nearly all ‘regional’ Sanskrit texts show evidence of local linguistic materials, from the purely phonological stratum to morphology, lexis and syntax. The latter domain is perhaps the most salient” (Bronner and Shulman 2006: 6). Bronner and Shulman extend their discussion to verse and prosody, analyzing how “vernacular metrical schemes penetrate into Sanskrit … the Dravidian technique of head-rhyme becomes prevalent in some Sanskrit poetry composed by speakers of south Indian languages.” They also wonder “to what extent these linguistic entities that we think of as so neatly bounded and distinct—Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, etc.—were truly separate in the minds of those who used them” (Ibid.: 7). The Dravidian south, and especially the historical profile of Tamil, poses a number of challenges to Pollock’s overall narrative of developments in the interactions between Sanskrit and local languages. One particularly spectacular case of the blending of vernacular with cosmopolitan is that of maṇipravāḷa, defined by Brough (1947) in his study of Līlātilaka, a fourteenthcentury “Sanskrit tract on Malayalam grammar and poetics,” as a style of literature characterized by “a mixture of the vernacular and Sanskrit. An exact parallel is therefore to be seen in the European macaronic style, which mixed, for example, Latin and Italian, Latin and English, and so forth.” But quite unlike medieval European Latinate macaronics, which were parodic, comic,

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and subversive, maṇipravāḷa “was a serious art form, employed for high poetic expression” (Brough 1947: 148–149). The guiding metaphor behind this highly theorized blend of Sanskrit and Dravidian literary language (with its own specialized terminology for Dravidian words with Sanskrit inflectional endings) was lapidary: Freeman explains maṇi-pravāḷam as traditionally having meant “pearls and coral,” “where the more valued pearls were traditionally understood to be the Sanskrit and the coral to be the elements of some vernacular speech or other literary language interspersed with it.” However, in the new theorization of the Līlātilaka commentary the gems (maṇi) are likened not to pearls, “but by a more obscure meaning to red rubies. The aesthetic result is therefore not one of red and white variegation, but rather a harmonious blend of the same red hues” (Freeman 1998: 58). Maṇipravāḷa is actually discussed by Pollock in some detail—not as a “vernacularization of the cosmopolitan” but as a pioneer case of what he calls the “cosmopolitan vernacular”—for it “embodied the very process of localization of the Sanskrit universal, in both political discourse and literature, that was occurring across southern Asia from this moment on, with the vernacular at first supplementing Sanskrit and later taking on an ever-increasing proportion as vernacularization gained power and confidence” (Pollock 2006: 323). This begs the question of how to differentiate between a “vernacular[ized] cosmopolitan” and a “cosmopolitan vernacular,” but Rao (2015) follows Pollock in understanding maṇipravāḷa as a “cosmopolitan vernacular” and adds considerable detail. For example, we learn from Rao that tenth-century Kashmiri polymath Abhinavagupta in his Bhārati commentary on the Nāṭya Śāstra gives a theoretical account of known forms of linguistic hybridity within the technical categories of Sanskrit grammar, according to which “half-Sanskrit in Abhinavagupta’s native Kashmiri is called Śātakula, [whereas] it is called Maṇipravāḷa when the combination is with southern languages” (Rao 2015: 16–17). In the Kerala region, Maṇipravāla composition was so widespread that it actually paved the way for the amalgamation of Sanskrit into the western dialects eventually termed Malayalam, as distinguished from the standardized Tamil of the east…. Linguistic hybridity was a novel factor apparent even in the orthography: ‘Maṇipravāla was generally written in Tamil script with grantha characters for those sounds not in Tamil, or else it was completely written in Telugu script with the addition of the Tamil characters for the two sounds peculiar to Tamil (underline 1 and underline r) …’ ibid.: 18, citing Venkachatari (1994–1997)

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Rao further elaborates that Śrivaisnava Maṇipravāla can be thought as a kind of linguistic register or situational variety, and that “the presence of idiomatic vocabulary recognizable only to Śrivaisnavas renders Maṇipravāla the ultimate ‘insider’ register, one that would be opaque to those not participating in the Śrivaisnava temple” (Ibid.: 18–19). Ultimately, “[a]bsorbing vernaculars into Sanskrit was not seamless but involved suturing and dislocation, creating an effect of ‘haunting’ … and this very incompleteness drew greater attention to the evocation of the vernacular” (Ibid.: 64). The final word on Maṇipravāla must go to Herman Tieken, a specialist in both Tamil and Sanskrit who is considerably more critical of Pollock than the scholars cited above: “Pollock’s treatment of Tamil, which with its early date does not fit the historical sequence he tries to establish, is curious. In fact, he tries as best as he can to sweep Tamil under the carpet” (Tieken 2008: 342). With regard to Maṇipravāla (“in which Sanskrit and vernacular lexemes were used pell-mell”) and Pollock’s understanding of it, Tieken writes: “I am not certain, though, if Pollock is right in seeing Maṇipravāla as an initial stage in the process of vernacularization…. rather than with a gradual process of a vernacular encroaching upon a well-established literary language, we seem to be dealing with a piece of linguistic bravura, which as such presupposes two languages of equal status” (Ibid.: 344). At the end of his long critique of Pollock (2006), Tieken presents his own radically different six-stage model of vernacularization in South Asia and rejects Pollock’s overall narrative for vernacularization in the Sanskrit Cosmopolis: “[T]he process of vernacularization may thus be characterized as a form of Sanskritization, with the vernaculars taking on the cloak of Prākrit or Apabhraṃśa … the Prākrits and Apabhraṃśa(s) partake of the translocal character of Sanskrit. … It would seem that each of these literary languages in its own way tried to avoid the impression of being connected with only one specific dialect of the regional language concerned. They are ‘little’ Sanskrits, doing what Sanskrit does, on a local or smaller scale” (Tieken 2008: 379). For Tieken, then, vernacularization in South Asia “probably only started in the colonial period,” a conclusion that gives added urgency to comparisons with vernacularization in Vietnam and Korea, given Pollock’s dismissal of these two cases as the “project[s] of a derivative modernity” (Pollock 2006: 487). 3

Regionalized~Vernacularized Latin

The time period in the history of Latin of most immediate relevance to comparisons between Latinate Europe and the Sinographic Cosmopolis is the Middle Ages, by which we mean Medieval Latin after the Carolingean reforms of the

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eighth century. This is because, as Carin Ruff explains, “From the eighth century on, no one who writes Latin does so without having come to the language by conscious endeavor. There is, therefore, no default Latin, and there are no unmarked stylistic choices. All the literate communities of Europe in a sense occupy an even playing field” (Ruff 2012: 59). Although there was of course regional variation and admixture in the classical Latin of antiquity (see Adams [2003] for a thorough overview), it is in the post-Carolingian centuries when modern-day scholars can speak of “manifold Latins,” and Ruff finds in William of Malmesbury’s (ca. 1095–ca. 1143) discussion of Aldhelm’s (ca. 639–709) Latinity that “William’s recognition of the existence of national styles and tastes in Latin is also proof of a fully developed medieval regime of Latin” (Ruff 2012: 56, 58). For Löfstedt (1959: 58), these “latins médiévaux” constitute “a vast field for research, and one which has only just begun to be mapped.” Research on regionalized varieties of Latin appears nonetheless to be thicker on the ground than comparable research on vernacularized Sanskrits, and the authors of articles and monographs on the topic over the past century are united in their complaints about the general neglect of Medieval Latin in favor of the classical Latin of high antiquity. In her article on “Vulgar Latin, the Latin of Christians, and medieval Latin,” Christine Mohrmann characterizes Medieval Latin as “the language of an ‘Ideengemeinschaft’ [community of ideas/ideological community]”5 and asks two basic questions: how are we to characterize Medieval Latin as a linguistic phenomenon, and what norms should one use to judge and appreciate Medieval Latin (Mohrmann 1955: 36)? “We should ask ourselves if Latin became a free and autonomous instrument of medieval thought. One will find in this mature medieval Latin classical elements alongside specifically Christian elements; one will find a certain number of medieval neologisms; and one will flag elements that owe to the influence wielded by the national languages: but all these elements are fused and welded together to form a novel unity—medieval Latin” (Ibid.: 50). 5 The expression seems to owe itself to Bieler (1949: 98 ff.), who characterizes Medieval Latin as “neither a national language nor a world language nor international auxiliary language, although it had this function throughout the entire Middle Ages and beyond. It was also neither an exclusively church language nor a class language. It is a language without a speech community, and yet not a dead language … Middle Latin is the language of a community of ideas … the mother tongue of western civilization [… weder eine Nationalsprache, noch eine Weltsprache, noch auch eine internationale Hilfssprache, obwohl es das ganze Mittelalter hindurch, und darüber hinaus, diese Funktion hatte. Es ist weder ausschliesslich eine Kirchensprache, noch eine Standessprache. Es ist eine Sprache ohne Sprachgemeinschaft, und doch keine tote … Das Mittellatein ist die Sprache einer Ideengemeinschaft … die Muttersprache des Abendlandes].”

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Where (in what genres) does one find this Medieval Latin with its national admixtures? Franz Blatt finds that it is “in administration in the broadest sense of the word that the local persists most tenaciously” (Blatt 1970: 6). Thus, administrative documents; the language of the law; references to “nationale Produkte” and local clothing; words for weights, measures, and currencies; and place names all tend to incline to the vernacular, and (in the German contexts which Blatt examines) “sometimes even the entire sentence structure is Germanic,” while elsewhere the “national lower substratum” peaks through in the orthography (“loss of aspiration, q for qu, y for i, ch for h (michi, nichil), p̲̲ ͟h̲ for f (prophanus), d instead of syllable-final t,” etc.) (Ibid.: 11, 13, 16). Whereas Sanskritists like Deshpande and Tieken discussed above saw either Sanskrit (Deshpande) or Prākrits and Apabhraṃśa(s) as “little Sanskrits” (Tieken) “cloaking” local vernaculars, Vandvik (1944: 99) in his study of Nordic admixtures in Medieval Latin writes of cases where “the Latin idiom encompasses the vernacular like a thin shell”; such linguistic environments are the easiest in which to determine the regional provenance of texts. In the case of Medieval Latin, this notion of cosmopolitan Latin imperfectly “cloaking” or “encasing” vernaculars that lurk just beneath the surface seems to have its ultimate source in a long history of culinary metaphors used in Europe to characterize (and pejorate) various kinds of Latin that fail to meet the standards of classical Augustinian or Ciceronian Latinity. One of the earliest modern studies of the term “Kitchen Latin” is Lehmann (1928), who asks “Since when and why do we speak of Kitchen Latin?” For Lehmann, “From the perspective of the classical philologist the disparagement of medieval Latin is understandable. But it was a shame for general cultural understanding that many were so blinded by the sun of antiquity that they could only see the Middle Ages as dark” (Ibid.: 206). Lehmann supposes that the term “Kitchen Latin” must have originated at the latest in fifteenthcentury Italy: “The kitchen—culina—occasionally likewise the latrina—and kitchen personnel have since antiquity been frequently invoked, when one wanted to designate something common, low, or contemptible” (Ibid.: 210). More recently, Peter Burke has dedicated an entire monograph to questions of hybridization (“‘hybridization’ is preferable to ‘hybridity’ because it refers to a process rather than to a state”) in the Renaissance, including the vernacularization of Latin: “individuals showed their consciousness of hybrid forms by describing them, usually negatively, by terms such as ‘mish-mash,’ in the case of religion, ‘mingle mangle’ in the case of language or ‘bastard,’ in the case of handwriting, and by metaphors drawn from the domains of clothing, such as ‘patching,’ or from cooking, including fricassée de mots, evoking a dish of small

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fragments of chicken, or ‘hotchpot,’ a kind of pudding, from which the word ‘hotchpotch’ is derived” (Burke 2016: 1–2, 37). Another manifestly culinary metaphor connected to Medieval Latin is that of “macaronics,” a practice and term that seems to have originated in Italy in the 1490s with a kind of subversively humorous poem in Latin and Italian favored by Italian humanists in Padua. Wenzel (1994: 3) cites Teofilo Folengo’s (d. 1544) description of this playful and parodic practice as follows: This poetic art is called “macaronic” from macarones, which are a certain dough made up of flour, cheese, and butter, thick, coarse, and rustic. Thus, macaronic poems must have nothing but fat, coarseness, and gross words in them.6 And as a typical example of an English-language macaronic poem, Wenzel (1994: 3) cites this little jingle: Boyibus kissibus pretty girlorum Girlibus likibus, wanty somorum. Macaronic poems quickly spread elsewhere throughout Europe. For Burke (2016: 103), “the term ‘macaronic’ … illustrates the ubiquity and the power of the culinary metaphor for hybridity” and as Johanson (2013: 300) explains it, macaronic texts (typically poems) that mixed Latin with different vernaculars “were composed to ridicule the broken Latin written in certain learned circles.” For Johanson (Ibid.: 302), who also discusses similar bilingual Hebrew-Romance texts, Manchu-Chinese mixed poetry, and Ottoman mulammaʿ with their mixture of Turkic and Perso-Arabic elements, such mixed verses “may mark the multilingual starting-point of a literary development … The language is, typically, first practised for humorous or folkloristic purposes, then adopted by lyric writers, and finally used by prose narrators.” But macaronic texts were not necessarily playful or subversive. Wenzel (1994) studies macaronic sermons from late-medieval England in order to challenge “the traditional view of a strict separation of Latin versus vernacular preaching according to audience.” Thus, “[t]he element of humor or burlesque that is characteristic of 6 “Ars ista poetica nuncupatur ars macaronica a macaronibus derivata, qui macarones sunt quoddam pulmentum farina, caseo, botiro compaginatum, grossum, rude et rusticanum; ideo macaronices nil nisi grassedinem, ruditatem et vocabulazzos debet in se continere.” Cited in Wenzel (1994: 3) from Ugo Paoli’s classic monograph on the topic (Paoli 1959: 5); Paoli notes that in the sixteenth century, macaroni probably referred to gnocchi.

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humanistic macaronic verses … does not occur in these sermons at all; they are not sermons joyeux but instruments of serious moral exhortation” (Wenzel 1994: 119, 11). The preachers of the later Middle Ages that Wenzel studies “continued the practice, attested from earlier centuries, of preaching in the vernacular and then writing out their own sermons in Latin, usually in a more polished form” (Ibid.: 120). The most explicitly culinary metaphor to have emerged concerns “latin farçi,” or “stuffed Latin,” a term first used in Brunel (1922) to refer to the mixture of Latin and local vernaculars (Provençal and Occitan) in charters of the tenth through twelfth centuries in southern France. According to Belmon and Vielliard (1997), the “symbiosis” between Latin and vernacular in “deeds such as oaths of allegiance, conventions, contracts for the transfer of rights or administrative documents” owed not to a “deficient knowledge of Latin” (which the scribes were perfectly capable of wielding correctly in other genres) but to the “ritual strength of the words effectively spoken” in the vernacular. Generally speaking, it is the language of the medieval chanceries and charters across Europe that contains the most interesting cases of hybridization and that has attracted the attention of scholars. For example, in his study of interferences between Latin and vernacular in charters from western Switzerland, David Vitali concludes that “the image of the uncultivated scribe stammering in Kitchen Latin [latin de cuisine] seems too simplistic” (Vitali 2003: 130). In the texts that Vitali examined, it was primarily the orthography and phonology that violated classical norms, as well as the “patent and massive” lexical interference from the vernacular, that marked the Latin in these charters. Brunner (2009: 68) likewise concludes that “the Romance phenomenon of charters in stuffed Latin is no longer perceived as the result of incompetence in classical Latin on the part of certain clerks, but as the invention of novel solutions in specific communicational situations.” But it is the work of Roger Wright that has offered the most interesting—if still somewhat controversial—understanding of hybridized texts akin to the “stuffed Latin” of southern France, and he does so from a grammatological perspective relevant to sinography in East Asia. In essence, Wright argues that some post-Carolingian texts in Medieval Latin were read morphographically. That is, he asks us to imagine “what happens to writing systems that survive into periods when both (a) the speech with which they were originally intended to correspond has developed markedly, and also (b) the proportion of people in society who are able to write has decreased appreciably, such that the skill may have been the province only of professionals” (Wright 1994: 126). In the case of tenth-century Christian Spain—“a society which functioned on a basis of written texts (documents of sale…, charters, sermons, letters, saints’

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lives, laws, liturgy, and so on) which were intended to be read aloud”—Wright assumes that what was once a phonographic orthography for Latin was by this time “probably taught and learnt in an essentially logographic manner (as in modern Britain): that is, one word at a time, rather than one letter at a time” (Ibid.: 126, 125). Thus, “[t]he teacher in tenth-century Castile … might have held up a card or slate or plank or piece of bark or stone or leaf or parchment bearing the written letters ipsa and said ‘this is [esa]’; held up a card inscribed super (or even perhaps its abbreviation sup) and said ‘this is [soßre]’;·held up a card with the letters petrus and said ‘This is [peðro]’” (Ibid.: 132). In his seminal book, Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France, Wright presents a short text concerning a sale of land near Asturias (León) in May of 908 ce and shows how a text that once led scholars to postulate a “Leonese Vulgar Latin” because of its mixture of Latin legal terminology and Romance elements, “could easily have been read aloud by the notary in vernacular Leonese.” The first lines of the text along with Wright’s reconstructed vernacular rendition look like this (Wright 1982: 166–167; bold typeface is from Trotter [2009: 155]): In Dej nomine. Ego Splendonius tiui Fredesinde In Domino salutem. Ideo placuit mici [endíenwémne. íoesplendóɲo tíefɾedzínde endwéɲosalúde. Íjoplógomíe] atque conuenit, nunlljusque cogentis Inperio neque suadentjs artjculo set probria mici [ekombíne  núʎjoskekodʒjéntesempérjoniswaðjéntesaɾtéʎo sepɾóbɾjamíe-] acesi uolontas ut uinderem tiui Iam dicte Fredesinde terra In uilla Uiasco suber Illa [atsézevoluntáde ovendjéretíejaðíjtafredzínde  tjéraenvíllavjásko sobɾela-] senrra domniga lloco predicto Agro rrodundo. [sérnaðoɲíga  ʎwégopɾeðíjto áɣrorodóndo.] For Wright, the point here is not the exact phonetic reconstruction of the vernacular Leonese reading, but that “reading aloud could have used Old Leonese phonetics even for such apparently Latinate material as a legal document” (Ibid.: 167). In his discussion of the same Leonese text, Trotter (2009: 155) finds that the forms “in bold type are phonetically apparently at least some way to

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being Romance (tiui, vinderem, suber) or frankly already Romance (senrra, domniga, lloco, rrodundo). For me, then, this is simply another piece of latin farçi, albeit with a stuffing that follows a Leonese, not an Occitan, recipe.” As for Wright again, in a more recent study of a similar late tenth-century text from Galicia with spellings that aspire to traditional Latin orthography while otherwise writing “incipient Ibero-Romance,” he opines: “In contrast to the view of many Latinists, who tend to judge these texts as ‘bad’ or ‘corrupt Latin,’ and from whose perspective these texts have been written with astounding ignorance, incompetence and stupidity, the author would like to show that the scribes worked intelligently in a difficult context where the written language as taught was ever diverging from the one they spoke” (Wright 2013: 71). 4

Summary So Far

Before moving on to a discussion of Variant Literary Sinitic in Japan and Korea, let us extract some of the key points and shared issues from the sections on regionalized/vernacularized varieties of Sanskrit and Latin above. 4.1 First Languages For the period relevant to comparisons between the three translocal cultural formations surveyed in this chapter, the cosmopolitan languages in question served as “mother tongues” (itself a problematic concept) or first languages for nobody: writing in Sanskrit or Latin was possible only after years of training that was based in the knowledge of one or more spoken vernaculars. There were no “native speakers” of Sanskrit or Latin (or Literary Sinitic). 4.2 Neglect, Then and Now Both in premodern and modern times, scholars have tended to neglect texts and genres in ostensibly cosmopolitan codes that evince admixtures of regional vernaculars, in favor of texts and genres in the highest and most prestigious registers and genres. This neglect is accompanied by (and typically based in) a denigration of what is perceived as hybridization. 4.3 Metaphors of Mixing The pejoration of admixture is frequently expressed through various metaphors, typically culinary or comestible (“kitchen Latin,” “stuffed Latin”). An interesting exception in many ways is South Indian Maṇipravāla, which on the

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one hand was highly theorized and led in the case of Kerala to the eventual codification of Malayalam as a separate literary language, but was also exceptional for its lapidary metaphor, signaling illustriousness. 4.4 Registers on a Cline Modern-day scholars frequently invoke the notion of a spectrum: vernacular Sanskrits, Prakrits, and Sanskrits on a scale from low to high, for example. But were languages that we moderns know to be genetically unrelated “truly separate in the minds of those who used them,” to repeat Bronner and Shulman’s query? Could they be perceived by local actors in premodern literary cultures as lying on one and the same spectrum? 4.5 Script and Writing System Sanskrit was not particularly fussy about script: it was already highly codified and theorized before it was ever first written, and once written, could be written in any number of South Asian scripts, all of which were Brahmi-derived abugidas used phonographically:7 morphography seems never to have developed. In at least one of the South Asian cases of hybridization from south India, script mixing accompanied language intertwining (Tamil script and grantha characters, or else primarily Telugu script with the addition of two special Tamil graphs, for Maṇipravāla). By contrast, Latin was only ever written in one script (the script that bears its name), but as Roger Wright has shown in his impressive body of work, the orthographic reforms of the Carolingian language policy—reforms “specifically directed towards not representing speech” (Wright 1994: 131)—gave birth to Medieval Latin as we know it today and engendered a situation where spellings ossified while the Romance vernaculars developed apace until Latin orthography came to function morphographically, allowing for vernaculars to be represented in what ends up resembling the stuffing leaking out of “stuffed Latin.” 4.6 Linguistic Diagnostics of Regionalized Cosmopolitan Codes It is generally possible to identity tell-tale characteristic features that an otherwise ostensibly cosmopolitan text was meant to be read (or at least could be read) in a vernacular, be they the simplified morphology and short clauses of Buddhist Sanskrit, specific morphological features in, say, nominal and verbal endings, phonological and orthographic features, or (above all) vocabulary (lexis) rooted in the local.

7 “The graphic forms of Sanskrit literature … were innumerable” (Pollock 2000: 605); “The scripts used for Sanskrit changed over time” (Pollock 1996: 232).

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4.7 Rehabilitating Scribes and Their Texts Most modern-day students of texts that evince written language intertwining are at pains to stress the ingenuity of their scribes and defend them against accusations of incompetence: such texts are not the product of stupidity or laziness, but ingenious solutions that make the best of the limited and limiting graphological resources at hand. Many modern-day authors also stress that these same scribes frequently show themselves as capable of writing in more orthodox varieties of the cosmopolitan in other circumstances or genres. By the same token, the scholars who study regionalized Sanskrits and hybridized varieties of Medieval Latin all call for the study and appreciation of these texts on their own terms and free of the prejudices and preconceptions of the highest registers in the most orthodox diction. 4.8 Genres The most hospitable genres for vernacular admixture were administrative, commercial and legal texts (recall the substantial literature on charters in Latinate Europe), with oaths evincing a special affinity for the vernacular, but we also find cases of substantial admixture in tales and narratives aimed at popular audiences. Sermons (and the way they were later polished away from the vernacular) have emerged as an important genre for studying Latin-vernacular admixture, as has verse: in Latinate Europe such verse seems rarely to have progressed beyond parodic ‘macaronics,’ but in the Sanskrit Cosmopolis regionalized forms of Sanskrit verse could often feature local prosodic patterns otherwise unknown in the high-register poetic genres, and Johanson (2013) discusses other literary cultures where language intertwining in verse has even served as the springboard for the development of more elaborated new literary languages. 4.9 Vernacularized Cosmopolitans vs. Cosmopolitan Vernaculars How are we to distinguish these? What factors either expedite or hinder a vernacularized cosmopolitan from going on to emerge as a cosmopolitan vernacular? Is it ascribed prestige or subjection to systematic thought, high-level theorization, codification, and philologization as in the rather exceptional case of Maṇipravāla? Does morphographic vs. phonographic writing make a difference? That is, might morphographic writing make it either unnecessary or more difficult for a vernacularized cosmopolitan to sublimate into a cosmopolitan vernacular? 4.10 Intended Audience Who were vernacularized cosmopolitan texts for? Texts with local admixture were clearly meant for local consumption, but when “cloaked” in the

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superposed cosmopolitan code, this could create jarring effects for outsiders encountering an otherwise “insider” code. A source, no doubt, of the pejoration of such texts. 5

“Variant Sinitic” in Japan and Korea

5.1 Japanese Morphographic Writing Our discussion of “Variant Sinitic” in East Asia is best begun in Japan, where we find a longer tradition of early modern and modern linguistic and philological research on questions of writing and grammatology, and where relevant texts have been preserved in far greater numbers and variety than in Korea. But we immediately confront a serious terminological question: the “Variant Sinitic” that I have rendered tentatively in scare quotes is one possible translation of the Japanese term hentai kanbun 変体漢文/變體漢文, but it needs unpacking. Literally speaking, hentai means something like “changed shape; transformed; variant” but also carries the meaning of “abnormal; deviant.” And kanbun is the vague cover term for any and all texts written in Literary Sinitic, whatever the nativity of the author, with the additional caveat that in Japan (and elsewhere in East Asia) local actors—including modern scholars who in theory ought to know better—frequently conflate language and writing, with the result that in practice kanbun can often mean “any text recorded in sinographs, whatever language it was meant to represent.” According to Schreiber’s recent dissertation on hentai kanbun, the term itself was first used by famous Japanese nationalist grammarian Yamada Yoshio 山田孝雄 (1873–1958) in 1913, and popularized by Hashimoto Shinkichi 橋本進吉 (1882–1945) in an article from 1932, but Schreiber presents a sampling of more than forty competing terms proposed by Japanese scholars since the eighteenth century to characterize different varieties of what is now conventionally referred to as hentai kanbun and which Schreiber would prefer to characterize as Japanese language texts written primarily morphographically in sinographs. Indeed, one of the main goals of Schreiber’s dissertation is to expose the many problems with the term hentai kanbun and research on it to date. Thus, this term “often blurs linguistic borders” while use of the term kanbun implies that the texts are a form of imperfect “Chinese” (i.e., Sinitic). Schreiber’s critique of the Japanese terms carries over to the handful of scholarly works in English dedicated to hentai kanbun, which refer to it sometimes as “modified Chinese” or “hybrid” or “deviations from the Chinese norm,” instead of treating it as “an original writing style of Japanese” (Schreiber 2019: 59).

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The great variety of Japanese terms that have been mooted over the past three centuries fall into a number of groups according to the inspiration or metaphor guiding them. Some refer to some of the genres or texts that are seen as typical of hentai kanbun: e.g., kiroku-bumi 記録ぶみ or kiroku-tai 記録体 for the largely practical, documentary and workaday nature of many of the texts; (nikki) kiroku-bun (日記)記録文 or nikki-tai 日記体 for the hundreds of diaries written by male aristocratic elites or by monks and shogunate officials from the ninth through sixteenth centuries;8 ōrai-tai 往来体 for the books on letter writing and epistolary collections known as ōraimono 往来物; and Azuma kagamitai 東鏡体 for the Azuma kagami (Mirror of the East), an historical chronicle compiled in 1266. Two popular terms that directly reference the mixing of scripts in some types of Japanese primarily morphographic writing are kana majiribun 仮名交じり文 (“writing mixed with kana”) and wakan konkō-bun 和漢混淆文 (“Japanese—Sinitic mixed writing”), where the latter term was first proposed by Konakamura Kiyonori 小中村清矩 (1822–1895) in 1879. A number of terms specifically reference the localized Japanese nature of hentai kanbun: wayō kanbun-tai 和様漢文体 (“Sinitic Style in the Japanese manner”); kokubunmyakuno kanbun 国文脈の漢文 (“Sinitic in a national writing vein”); waka kanbun 和化漢文 (“Japanized Sinitic”); washū kanbun 和臭漢文 (“Japan-smelling Sinitic”); washū kanbun 和習漢文 (“Sinitic according to the Japanese habit”); wafū kanbun 和風漢文 (“Japanese-style Sinitic”), etc. Another set of terms implies that Japanese morphographic writing is somehow (unsuccessfully) imitative of Chinese models: gikanbun 擬漢文 and giji kanbun 擬似漢文 (“pseudo-Sinitic”); jun kanbun-tai 準漢文体 (“quasi-Chinese style”); ese kanbun 似非漢文 (“quasi-” or “sham Sinitic style”), while others index a deviance or irregularity with reference to an implied Chinese standard: henkaku-no kanbun(-tai) 変格の漢文(体) (“irregular Sinitic style”), hikanbun 非漢文 (“non-Sinitic”), mijuku kanbun 未熟漢文 (“immature/unskilled Sinitic”), etc.9 In some ways the most interesting of these terms is washū 和臭, “Japanesesmelling,” because of the new olfactory metaphor it introduces. First mooted by Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 (1666–1728) in his Bunkai 文戒 (Warning against [mistakes 8 For example, Rabinovitch (1996: 115) estimates that “[m]ore than 250 diaries have survived from the pre-sixteenth century alone, while several hundreds more date from Edo times (the 17th to the late 19th century), making this undoubtedly one of the largest unexplored areas in Japanese literature.” 9 See Schreiber (2019: 24–56) for his detailed review of Japanese scholarship on hentai kanbun and its terminological diversity.

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in] Writing) of 1714 as a pun on washū 和習, “according to the Japanese habit,” it originally referred to the “minimal interferences” owing to Japanese that found their way into compositions in Sinitic (and intended to be in Sinitic) penned by Japanese writers. Schreiber lists five such diagnostic interferences of washū (Schreiber 2019: 114): 1) 2) 3)

Writing order of graphs does not conform to Chinese syntax. Lexical items appear that do not exist in Chinese. Lexical items do not appear that would otherwise be expected in Chinese. 4) Lexical items that also exist in Chinese are used differently on a semantic level. 5) Use of kana or sinographic characters invented in Japan (kokuji 国字). Schreiber (2019: 68) insists that it is interferences like these—in an otherwise orthodox Sinitic text—that qualify as “true hentai kanbun,” whereas what is conventionally labelled with this term is just (primarily) morphographically written Japanese. While I cannot claim a wide-ranging familiarity with pre-Tokugawa Japanese primary sources, none of the secondary scholarly literature that I have surveyed seems to make reference to any primary sources prior to Ogyū Sorai that would suggest a local Japanese terminology for what scholars today call hentai kanbun, let alone any metagrammatological discourses or metaphors indexing anxiety or embarrassment about admixture or hybridity or otherwise undesirable qualities in the Sinitic texts produced in Japan. This forms a marked contrast with the situation in Korea, as we shall see in the next section. In any case, modern scholars of hentai kanbun materials agree that they are “a form of written Japanese” (Alberizzi 2011: 77)—“Japanese language texts (Nihongobun) written on the basis of the appropriation of sinographs … without relying on glossing (kunten 訓点)” (Yamamoto 2008: 285), and “a deliberate choice for a scribe [that] did not develop out of a lack of proficiency of Literary Chinese” (Schreiber 2019: 189). This form of “primarily morphographic notation” was “not a niche phenomenon limited to special occasions or genres, but is of eminent importance for the history of writing and text production in Japan and can be found abundantly during all historical periods” (Ibid.: 75). Because his analysis is so comprehensive, grammatologically precise, and also helpful for approaching analogous materials on the Korean Peninsula, let us review for a moment the parameters that Schreiber lists for characterizing the writing style of a Japanese text (adapted from Schreiber [2019: 24]):

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1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7)

Script choice: sinographs, hiragana, katakana Calligraphic script style of sinographs: regular, semi-cursive, cursive Size of graphs: regular size, half size Function of graphs: phonography, morphography Choice of phonograms: monosyllabic, disyllabic, ongana, kungana, etc. Writing order: sequential writing, non-sequential writing Specificity: underspelling, overspelling

Of most interest here is Schreiber’s discussion of “non-sequential writing” or the “non-sequential arrangement of characters, i.e., a visual imitation of Chinese syntax on the graphic surface level” (Ibid.: 49), which he exemplifies with the phrase 不知 (“does not know”), read in premodern Japanese as sir.azu and “perceived as if it is one unit in writing, to be read en bloc” (Ibid., 90). In fact, there was a large number of Japanese bound morphemes (suffixes and enclitics) like the negation marker -azu, the translational equivalents for which in Sinitic precede the modified constituent, triggering orthographic non-sequentiality and en bloc reading in hentai kanbun (Ibid.: 89): 不~ -(a)zu ‘negative’ 被~ -(r)ar.u ‘passive’ 将~ -(a)m.u ‘tentative’ 応~ id. 於~ ⸗ni ‘locative, dative’ 自~ ⸗yori ‘ablative’ 毎~ ⸗goto(⸗ni) “every” 未~ [imada …] -(a)zu “not yet”

令~ -(a)sim.u ‘causative’ 為~ -(s)as.u ‘causative’ 可~ ⸗be.si ‘debitive’ 如~ ⸗goto.si “as, like” 与~ ⸗to ‘comitative’ 従~ id. 乍~ ⸗nagara “while” 須~ [s.u⸗be.kar.aku …] ⸗be.si “should

by all means”

Crucially, and unlike the way in which these elements are deployed in Sinitic, in morphographic Japanese these graphs “generally stay in immediate proximity to the modified graph” (Ibid.: 90). Even in other cases that did not involve non-sequential writing, the Sinitic grammatical element could trigger rather elaborate reading algorithms in Japanese, e.g.: 雖~ for the adversative pattern in ⸗to ip.e⸗do⸗mo and 欲 for the volitional pattern in -(a)m.u⸗to omop-. Overall there is a spectrum of writing styles, ranging between phonography and morphography (with phonograms in general being avoided in texts traditionally labeled as hentai kanbun), which Schreiber’s “Table 3.10: Degrees of underspelling of omop.an.aku⸗ni” (“unthinking; not expecting”) from the Man’yōshū (Collection of Myriad Leaves) illustrates nicely (adapted from Schreiber [2019: 101]):

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Fully phonographic 於毛波奈久尓 念羽奈九二 念奈久尓 不念國 不念尓 不念

Fully morphographic

omop.an.aku⸗ni omop.an.aku⸗ni omop.an.aku⸗ni omop.an.aku⸗ni omop.an.aku⸗ni omop.an.aku⸗ni

MYS XIV/3392 MYS XI/2581 MYS VIII/1438 MYS IV/711 MYS VII/1320 MYS XI/2399

With respect to the genres most hospitable to hentai kanbun, we have already noted the many courtier diaries, and Alberizzi (2011: 77–78) describes this style of writing Japanese as “a compact and functional form of writing especially ideal for bureaucratic and private records.” He calls for more attention to drafts of Buddhist sermons, imperial proclamations, and “ancient letters and bureaucratic documents” (Ibid.: 89). Yamamoto (2006) has drawn attention to Buddhist textual genres like temple histories, confessions (hyōbyaku 表白) and prayers or written vows (ganmon 願文), while Yamamoto (2008) calls for more attention also to sōjō 奏状 or mōshibumi 申文 (reports and petitions), which were frequently included in the literary collections of Japanese literati and which Persiani (2013: 19) describes as “desperate prose compositions in literary Chinese” submitted by Heian court officials “to their superiors prior to the biannual conferral of appointments ( jimoku 除目) in the hope of increasing their chances of receiving an appointment.” On the other hand, mokkan wooden tablets are of less use (if only because of their short length) and there is little in the way of belles lettres recorded in primarily morphographic Japanese. In terms of gender considerations, Schreiber (2019: 188) notes that “we can hardly find any morphographically written texts by a female scribe.” The question remains as to how Japanese readers actually read morphographically written texts and how we can recover those readings today. For example, Schreiber presents the following two typical examples (adapted from Schreiber [2019: 81, 82]): 入夜、甚雨如沃。

enter-night, exceedingly rain like soak yoru⸗̲ n̲ i̲ iri.̲t̲ e̲ ziñu yokus.̲u̲ r̲ u̲ ⸗̲ g̲ a̲ ⸗goto.̲ s̲ i̲ night⸗loc enter.cont exceedingly soak.attrib⸗adnom⸗like.concl ‘During the night it was pouring with heavy rain.’

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従昨日悩目。

from [yester-day] ache eye kinofu⸗yori me⸗̲w̲ o̲ nayam.̲ u̲ yesterday⸗from eye⸗acc ache.concl ‘My eyes have ached since yesterday.’ How do we know with certainty that Japanese readers of, say, the twelfth century read these sentences as Schreiber renders them? As texts written in Japanese meant to be read by other Japanese, hentai kanbun texts were typically not glossed with reading marks, and we have to assume that the protocols for reading them as Japanese were widespread and internalized from an early date. The coexistence of parallel wholly or partially phonographically written passages in early texts like the Man’yōshū is of course one way to recover vernacular reading protocols or algorithms. Yamamoto (2008) notes that no kunten-glossed hentai kanbun texts can be found before the twelfth century, but draws attention to two different types of glossed texts extant from the twelfth through fourteenth centuries: one type with glosses entered for the purpose of correct declamation/reading aloud (J. sendoku 宣読), and another type where glosses are entered for pedagogical and/or scholarly contexts like teaching, exegesis, and other forms of philological practice. Finally, throughout his dissertation Schreiber provides detailed and valuable information on the important post-Heian genre of manabon 真字本—exclusively sinographic but primarily phonographic renditions of earlier primarily morphographic texts in Japanese (often modeled on the orthography of the Man’yōshū), providing, in essence, parallel versions of many texts. Such manabon often appear centuries after the original kana versions, so cannot be treated as exact parallels, but provide useful evidence of possible reading protocols nonetheless. Ultimately this “means that we are not only unable to ever reconstruct the definitive version of the originally intended text, but moreover that one perhaps never existed to begin with” (Ibid.: 81). Let us conclude this section on Japanese morphographic writing with another look at “hybridity” and “writing style.” Throughout his excellent dissertation, Schreiber inveighs against Japanese and Western scholars alike for their linguistically and grammatologically naïve conflation and confusion of language and writing, and reserves special scorn for the way these notions are used in recent English-language research. For example, concerning the pesky modern Japanese term buntai 文体 or -tai 体 (meaning something like “[writing] style; inscriptional style”): “terms such as kanbun-tai 漢文体 ‘Chinese style’ … with supposed reference to a specific style of the Japanese language are

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highly misleading and ultimately meaningless” (Ibid.: 14) and “the notion of tai ‘style’ is particularly prone to evoke confusion when it comes to differentiating the linguistic dimensions of writing on the one hand and language as such on the other hand” (Ibid.: 32). Schreiber takes Lurie (2011) to task for making frequent use of the term buntai “without however giving any further explanation” (Ibid.: 14) and for claiming that while Chinese and Japanese do of course exist as separate languages, they “at times are in fact indistinguishable in writing” (Ibid.: 57). Schreiber is particularly harsh on Lurie for claiming he wants “to overcome the outmoded opposition between inherently Chinese-language and inherently Japanese-language writing” (citing Lurie [2011: 204]) and contending that “texts were potentially unaffected by such linguistic differences” (Ibid; Lurie’s emphasis).10 Quips Schreiber: “[Lurie] ultimately goes one step further and prefers to speak merely of a difference in style rather than language … it is not entirely clear, if he is in fact referring to a hybrid language or to the level of writing alone.” Schreiber continues in the same vein against Denecke (2006), who writes “Due to the lack of direct exposure to China, Japanese literature developed a unique trilingual constellation, in which literacy consisted of the mastery of Chinese, Sino-Japanese, and Japanese literary idioms. Sino-Japanese is a highly hybrid language … It is impossible to describe this Sino-Japanese ‘third space’ on pure linguistic grounds” (Denecke 2006: 280). Schreiber fundamentally rejects any notions of “a linguistic continuum with Chinese and Japanese as the extreme pole and hentai kanbun as various shades in the middle ground” (Schreiber 2019: 66)—there can be no hybrid third space, and what was written has to be (or has to have been intended to be) either Japanese or Chinese. But Schreiber’s impatience with his grammatologically challenged colleagues engaged in more literary studies is in many ways misplaced. On the one hand, Schreiber seems to imply that the lack of kundoku glosses in hentai kanbun texts makes them somehow different from the case of kanbun kundoku, even though much of his data show that morphographically written Japanese texts were read with the same kinds of algorithms—internalized, but not written out: a truly interesting and valuable finding. But grammatology and the modern linguist’s insistence on a methodologically strict separation of language and writing overlook two things. What scholars like Lurie and Denecke (and Kornicki) are trying to emphasize is that—in principle, at least—sinographically written texts always had the potential of being read in another language (assuming the existence of vernacular reading protocols, whether indicated in inked or dry glosses or not); 10

Both citations from Schreiber (2019: 61).

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the relative opacity of unglossed Sinitic texts would depend on the extent to which they were localized (vernacularized). Schreiber therefore strikes me as overly focused on grammatology and writing at the expense of reading practices and especially vernacular reading (kundoku 訓読) traditions. The other point I would stress is that we should also be careful to seek out and pay heed to traditional/premodern indigenous metalinguistic (metagrammatological) discourse, especially since attitudes about language and writing often persist into the present and even into the scholarly work of modern-day scholars in Japan and Korea. Teasing apart language and writing is clearly difficult when the first script and writing system that a language encounters and then uses for hundreds of years is a morphographic one like Chinese. Ultimately, even Schreiber seems ambivalent about hybridity: in his “Conclusions” he writes, “The term ‘hentai kanbun’ can be discarded without substitution. There is no substantial reason to believe that there existed a Chinese—Japanese hybrid language of any sort. However, this also depends on how exactly ‘hybrid language’ is defined” (Ibid.: 189). 5.2 Korean “Variant Sinitic” Korean scholars estimate that sinography was imported to the Korean Peninsula as early as the third century bce. Among the ancient Korean Three Kingdoms, Koguryŏ established the first state-sponsored educational institution in 372 ce, followed by Paekche in the early fifth and Silla in the mid- to late seventh century. Inscriptions from Koguryŏ begin to appear from the fourth century, from Paekche in the late fourth century/early fifth century, and from Silla in the mid- to late fifth century. And Korean mokkan wooden tablets, though considerably fewer in number at 700 or so than the thousands available from Japan, date to the mid-sixth century, making them older than the finds in Japan from the seventh and eighth centuries by a century and more. Nonetheless, surviving Sinitic sources in general are much thinner on the ground in Korea than in Japan, and as a result evidence for localized Sinitic writing grows scarcer the further back we go in time. In this section, I survey terminology used to discuss “Koreanized” Literary Sinitic, summarize traditional premodern attitudes toward such styles of Sinitic (for which we seem to have relatively more metagrammatological commentary compared to Japan), and conclude with a sketch of just the pre-Chosŏn genres where “Korean-style Literary Sinitic” can be found. A detailed account of the history of research to date on Koreanized Literary Sinitic, along with illustrative examples of the more abundant sources and genres from the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1897), can be found in chapter 12 in this volume.

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5.2.1 Modern-Day Terms for Korean Variant Sinitic The terms used to refer to Koreanized forms of Literary Sinitic by modern Japanese and Korean scholars are considerably less diverse than those found for hentai kanbun. Japanese scholar Ayukai Fusanoshin (1972 [1934]) used the term zokukanbun 俗漢文 (“vulgar/popular hanmun”), which is honored to a certain extent by the work of Mori Hiromichi (1999; 2010), who discusses the influence of Chōsen zokukanbun 朝鮮俗漢文, or “Chosŏn vulgar hanmun,” on the language in certain sections of the Nihon shoki. Mori attributes these latter influences to Sillan influence on these portions of the Nihon shoki, which he dubs “Rashū 羅習 Literary Sinitic” or “kanbun according to the Sillan habit.” Fujimoto Yukio’s seminal article of 1978 uses simply “Chōsen kanbun.” In more recent research, Okimori Takuya (2007: 125) has used the terms p’agyŏk (ŭi) kanbun 破格(의) 漢文 (“irregular hanmun”) and hanhwa hanmun 韓化漢文 (“Han-ified/Koreanized hanmun”) in reference to materials from the Three Han period, while Itō Hideto (2018) prefers to speak of pyŏnch’ik hanmun 變則 漢文 (“irregular hanmun”). Scholarship in post-liberation Korea on “Koreanized” Variant Sinitic was slower to materialize, and much of the terminology follows Japanese precedent. Nam P’unghyŏn (1985) writes simply of Han’guk hanmun 韓國漢文, and one has to fast-forward another generation before Kim Yŏnguk (2004: 69) moots the term hanmun 韓文 (“[Peninsular] Han writing,” an unfortunate choice, and one that has found no purchase, given the homophony with hanmun 漢文). South Korean scholarship on Koreanized varieties of Literary Sinitic gained considerable momentum around 2005–2006 when two prominent scholars of Korean literature in Literary Sinitic—Hwang Wiju and Sim Kyŏngho—began writing on “Korean-style hanmun” at virtually the same time. Hwang Wiju (2005) used the term Han’guksik hanmun 韓國式漢文 (subsequently used also by Kim Kijong [2012] and An Sŭngjun [2016]), while Sim (2006; 2008) used pyŏnkyŏk hanmun 變格漢文 (“irregular hanmun”; though later in Sim [2017: 7] he admits this is “for lack of a better word”). Ch’oe Yŏnsik (2015) follows Sim in using pyŏnkyŏk hanmun, but also specifies Sillasik hanmun 新羅式漢文 (“Silla-style hanmun”) in his article on Silla materials (Ch’oe Yŏnsik 2016). In subsequent research Sim Kyŏngho has complicated matters further by essentially equating pyŏnkyŏk hanmun with idusik hanmun 吏讀式 漢文 (“idu-style Literary Sinitic”) (Sim Kyŏngho 2014; 2015; 2017)—idu being the specialized vernacular clerkly or documentary register produced entirely in sinographs, but in Korean word order and with some characters used phonographically to represent Korean grammatical elements. Kim Kijong (2012; 2013) and Pak Sŏngjong (2018) both use pyŏnch’e hanmun 變體漢文 in parallel with Japanese hentai kanbun. North Korean scholars have used the term

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Chosŏnsik hanmun 朝鮮式漢文 (“Chosŏn-style hanmun”) consistently since at least Ch’oe Tongŏn (2002), and some South Korean scholars use this term as well (e.g., Sim Kyŏngho [2014] and his student Pak Sŏni [2015; 2016], but also Hŏ Chiŭn [2008] and Kim Chup’il [2015] in their studies of the documents exchanged between Korean interpreter officials and their Japanese counterparts on Tsushima). Putting to one side Ayukai’s zokukanbun 俗漢文, which has found relatively little traction even in Japan, most of the modern-day terms for Koreanized Literary Sinitic index either their localization in Korea (referencing Han’guk/ Chosŏn(-sik) or occasionally Silla for materials originating in Silla) or their irregularity or deviance (pyŏnch’ik 變則/pyŏnkyŏk 變格) vis à vis Orthodox Literary Sinitic—with the latter usually identified as chŏnggyŏk hanmun 正 格漢文. However, the terminology is by no means settled, and South Korean authors struggle with the question of how to draw a line between “Korean-style Variant Sinitic” and idu. In his discussion of interpreter officials’ documents from the Tsushima archive, Kim Chup’il (2015) waffles between Chosŏnsik hanmun and idumun, while An Sŭngjun (2014; 2016) and Sim Kyŏngho in his most recent papers simply define “Korean-style hanmun” and idu as one and the same thing. But Ch’oe Yŏnsik (2016: 40) cautions against those who would treat early pyŏnkyŏk hanmun as simply a form of early-stage (Silla-era) idu, because the former continued to be used in later periods separately from idu. Pak Sŏngjong (2018: 75) has taken an important first step in trying to draw this line, by insisting that we distinguish pyŏnch’e hanmun from idu on the basis of whether or not a Korean sentence is being written, but following Schreiber’s grammatological approach, we might instead (or also) insist that idu has to include phonographic idu graphs, while pyŏnch’e hanmun is only ever morphographic, but such distinctions are rarely ever observed strictly in practice in the materials before us. 5.2.2

Pre-twentieth Century Ideologies of Language and Writing on the Korean Peninsula What then of traditional Korean attitudes toward localized versions of Literary Sinitic? The earliest examples we have of metalinguistic or metagrammatological statements about Koreanized forms of Literary Sinitic come from the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1392), during which period civil service examinations were first instituted (in 958) and by which time Sinitic ideologies of language and writing were firmly entrenched among the literati. According to these views, the most orthodox Literary Sinitic of the Chinese Classics was aŏn 雅言 “eleg ant~elevated~refined~cosmopolitan (written) language” and was juxtaposed with pangŏn 方言 “regional~local speech” or sogŏn 俗言 “customary~vernac

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ular~vulgar~popular speech.” When the Buddhist master and founder of the Ch’ŏnt’ae school, Ŭich’ŏn 義天 (1055–1101), discussed transcriptions like the Chit’ong ki 智通記 recorded by disciples of the great Silla monk Ŭisang 義湘 (625–702) on the basis of his lectures, he disparaged the compilers as “inept in their literary style (munch’e 文體), with the consequence that the phraseology was uncultured and uncultivated. They mixed in local speech…. Somebody should tidy them up.”11 When recording the marvelous signs and omens associated with the great golden statue of the Buddha at Wangnyunsa Monastery, Koryŏ poet and statesman Yi Kyubo 李奎報 (1168–1241) referred to vernacular Korean as pangŏn iŏ 方言俚語 “local language, rustic words” and remarked that it was impossible for anything recorded in Korean to be transmitted for any length of time.12 Plassen (forthcoming: 8–9) reports two other instances of Koryŏ Buddhists censuring the use of vernacular Korean in lecture notes. For example, “The postface to the first kwŏn of the Sŏk Hwaŏm kyŏng kyobun ki wŏnt’ong ch’o” 釋 華嚴旨歸章圓通抄 lists four records, prepared by three disciples, of lectures held at various monasteries during the period from 959 to 962. One of these records—completed several months after the corresponding lecture—reads: “the vernacular annotations having been removed” (sak pangŏn sŏk 削方言釋). The postface to the same early-Koryŏ Sŏk Hwaŏm chigwi chang wŏnt’ong ch’o “states that Ch’ŏn’gi 天其 (fl. mid-13th c.) rediscovered the underlying record (completed in 987) in the archives of Kaebong-sa upon having moved there in the year 1234 and would always base his own lectures on it. After his death, Ch’ŏn’gi’s disciples in 1248 asked another group of other monks to join and ‘… remove the pangŏn in order to be in the position to bestow the text upon learners’ (sakkŏ pangŏn i si hagin 削去方言　以施學人), reportedly in compliance with their deceased teacher’s will. The extant text dates to the year 1251.” These same keywords—chap 雜 for “admixture,” pangŏn iŏ 方言俚語 for “local speech and rustic words,” and sak(kŏ) 削去 for “pare; trim; excise; purge,” recur over and over in Chosŏn-era materials right up to the twentieth century. For example, Kwŏn Kŭn 權近 (1352–1409) faults Kim Pusik 金富軾 (1075–1151) and his Samguk sagi 三國史記 (History of the Three Kingdoms, 1145) as follows: “In recording the events of those times he was insufficiently detailed and clear, and moreover, mixed in lots of local speech, such that the diction is 11 “但以當時集者．未善文體．遂致章句鄙野．雜以方言． … 宜加潤色” (cited in Ch’oe Yŏnsik [2016: 52]). 12 “皆方言俚語，而不可久其傳.” Tongguk Yi Sangguk chip 東國李相國集, “Wangnyunsa changnyuk kŭmsang yŏnghŏm susŭp ki” 王輪寺丈六金像靈驗收拾記, Han’guk munjip ch’onggan 1 kwŏn, p. 548, cited in Kang Min’gu (2007: 12).

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inelegant … sometimes he would divide the same year between two different annals, or record the same event twice, and he failed to get rid of all the local speech and rustic words.”13 The Chosŏn dynasty also marks the appearance of the term ŏn 諺 to refer to local, vernacular language and writing, as in ŏnmun 諺文, one of the traditional terms for the Korean alphabet.14 Yi Chun 李埈 (1560–1635) wrote with concern about the need to keep vernacular elements out of official documents: “Because people insist on using local speech and vulgar language to get their point across in the diction of our nation’s governmental affairs and civil service examinations, they even use the vernacular (ŏnŏ 諺語) in many places in written briefs to their superiors, with the result that some are unfit to pass on to subsequent generations. … This is why I propose to replace local speech with other graphs, like changing the ch’ŏng 淸 of yuch’ŏng 油淸 with the graph mil 蜜 [“honey”]; [and] the character tap 畓 of chŏndap 田畓 with t’o 土 [“earth; soil”] … The reason I want to remove local speech (pangŏn 方言) from collected writings (munjip 文集) is that generally speaking the collected works of our nation’s famous writers will be sought out for purchase by Chinese and will not circulate exclusively domestically.”15 Yi Chun is concerned here with made-inKorea Sino-Korean vocabulary like yuch’ŏng 油淸 meaning “[sesame] oil and honey,” where the use of the sinograph 淸 for “honey” is peculiar to Korea, and made-in-Korea sinographs like tap 畓 meaning “wet field; paddy” and glossed as non in Korean. The notion that literary collections by Korean literati would circulate outside of Korea and even be purchased by Chinese was mostly fantasy, but the anxiety of literate Chinese looking over Chosŏn literati’s shoulders is palpable all the same. Korean literati were also concerned (even embarrassed) about the use of (sinographically rendered) indigenous place names and administrative titles in older Korean historical sources. For example, Yi Chonghwi 李種徽 (1731–1797) 13 “錄其時事，未克詳明，且多雜以方言，辭不能雅，…以一歲而分紀，以一事而再 書，方言俚語，未能盡革…” Yangch’on sŏnsaeng munjip 陽村先生文集, “Samguksaryak sŏ” 三國史略序, Han’guk munjip ch’onggan 7 kwŏn, p. 197 (cited in Kang Min’gu [2007: 14]). 14 Modern-day scripto-nationalist claims that the term ŏnmun was disparaging and should be understood as the ‘vulgar (or despicable) script’ are misguided and owe to the desire to create a David and Goliath narrative of the triumph of the downtrodden native script over sinographs. 15 “且我國公事場文，須用方言俗語該通，故獻議數處，亦用諺語，有不合傳後 者．…玆就方言欲換以他字，如油淸之淸，易以蜜字，田畓之畓，易以土字…生之 欲去方言於文集中者，蓋以我國名家文集，爲華人所購見，不但流傳於國中而巳 也…” Ch’angsŏk chip 蒼石集, “Yŏ Pyŏngsan Sŏwŏn sau” 與屛山書院士友, Han’guk munjip ch’onggan 6 kwŏn, p. 418 (cited in Kang Min’gu [2007: 14–15]).

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described the vernacular traces in the central administrative terminology of Korean states prior to Koryŏ as “commingled with local speech (ch’am i pangŏn 參以方言), extraneous, adulterated, indecent, and lowly (yongjap oesoe 冗雜猥 瑣), and unpraiseworthy (mak ka ch’ingsul 莫可稱述),”16 while Yi Kyugyŏng 李 圭景 (1788–?) criticized Three Kingdoms-era vernacular terms for government posts like 大兄, 乙支, 阿飱, and 州干 as “mixed up with local speech; they are all course and crude (iru 夷陋). Only with Sŏngjong of Koryŏ were they able to fix the names of government posts.”17 Made-in-Korea Sino-Korean terminology and made-in-Korea sinographs were considered beneath the dignity of proper Literary Sinitic, but continued nonetheless to be tolerated throughout Chosŏn. As Pak Sŏni (2015: 62) notes in his excellent study of the “Chosŏn-style hanmun” in field reports to the court from the time of the Imjin Wars, negative attitudes toward localized varieties of Literary Sinitic tended to harden as the dynasty wore on, even while Koreanized hanmun continued to be produced in certain genres. But what was truly frowned upon was the use of phonographic idu characters in proper Literary Sinitic. Kim Ch’unt’aek 金春澤 (1670–1717) put it quite succinctly: “When [we] Easterners write [in Literary Sinitic] … and when we call high officials in our country taegam 大監 and yŏnggam 令監, or call leaders satto 使道, these are understood everywhere throughout the land, so there is nothing wrong with using them in Literary Sinitic. And I have never seen the use of appellations like hyŏngju 兄主 [“esteemed elder brother” with vernacular honorific -nim -主] or sukchu 叔主 [esteemed uncle] in letters cause any harm to writing in Sinitic. But so-called idu should never be used under any circumstances. This is because, generally speaking, individual names cause no damage to a composition, but if you use idu, Sinitic cannot be true Sinitic [lit. 文 cannot function in a 文-ly way].”18

16 Susan chip 修山集, “Koryŏsa chi, Paekkwan chi” 高麗史志，百官志, Han’guk munjip ch’onggan 247, p. 570 (cited in Kang Min’gu [2007: 18]). 17 “雜以方言，悉皆夷陋，至於麗朝成宗，始定官號.” Oju yŏnmun changjŏn san’go 五洲  衍文長箋散稿, “San’gwan chŭnggu pyŏnjŭng sŏl” 散官拯捄辨證說 (cited in Kang Min’gu [2007: 18]). 18 “ 東 人 爲 文 ，… … … 如 我 國 之 稱 官 高 者 ，爲 大 監 令 監 ，稱 主 將 爲 使 道 者，乃擧世所通行，取用於文，無所不可，如書札之用兄主叔主之稱，亦未見其爲 文之病．惟所謂吏讀，决不可用．盖名號則無傷於文，而苟用吏讀，文不能爲文 矣．…” “Non simun: Pu chapsŏl” 論詩文：附雜說, Pukhŏn kŏsa chip 北軒居士集, kwŏn 16, “Suhaerok mun: San’go” 囚海錄文：散藁 (cited in Pak Sŏni [2015: 62–63]).

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5.2.3 Where to Find Korean Variant Sinitic in Pre-Chosŏn Sources Let us conclude now with a sketch of the genres where examples of “Koreanstyle Variant Sinitic” can be found. For the sake of brevity, I include only pre-Chosŏn materials here and save the Chosŏn period for chapter 12. PreChosŏn materials can be divided between mokkan wooden tablets, epigraphy, and Buddhist texts on paper. As is the case with mokkan in early Japan, mokkan in early Korea are of limited utility for studying Variant Sinitic: like Japanese mokkan they tend to be quite short, and there are considerably fewer of them extant. Nonetheless, wooden tablets yield interesting evidence of some of the earliest adaptations of sinographs to record vernacular Korean elements (basically, Korean word order and/or sinographs deployed phonographically to record vernacular elements) as well as made-in-Korea sinographs. Pre-Chosŏn epigraphy affords more examples of longer connected texts evincing vernacular elements. Ever since North Korean scholar Hong Kimun (1957) claimed to have identified vernacular elements (labeled by him as “idu” in the broad North Korean sense of anything written in sinographs that reflects vernacular Korean elements) in the Koguryŏ Kwanggaet’o stele (Kwanggaet’o wangnŭng pi 廣開土王陵碑) erected in 414 ce,19 there has been controversy and continued research on how to understand several controversial passages in what is otherwise a substantial text written almost entirely in orthodox Literary Sinitic. For Japanese scholar Itō Hideto, the earliest inscription in Variant Sinitic in all of East Asia is the Chungwŏn Koguryŏ stele (Chungwŏn Kogyuryŏ pimun 中原高句麗碑文), erected in 495 by Koguryŏ in recently conquered Silla territory. Itō cites the following example: □□國土太位諸位上下衣服₁來₂受₃敎₄ □□國土의太位와諸位의上下는[옷을]₁[와서]₂[받으라고]₃[敎示하였다]₄.

[The King] gave orders that the highest worthies of the land, as well as the various grandees, high and low, come to receive clothing. Here the word order is clearly Korean (Itō Hideto 2018: 33). In another study of this inscription, Kim Yŏnguk (2007) cites additional vernacular elements: the sentence-final declarative ending in 之 (presumably read as -ta) and locative 中 (read as -kŭi -긔, and soon generalized to all nouns and even used as a dative on animate nouns), as well as the postposition 節 (“at the time when”): 19

For a study of North Korean claims about vernacular elements in the Kwanggaet’o stele and other North Korean research on “Chosŏn-style hanmun,” see King (forthcoming).

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King 東來之 跪營之 五月中 共看節

… came to the east. … [made them come and] kneel at his encampment. in the fifth month when they were watching together

Of the more than 270 epigraphs that survive from the Three Kingdoms and Unified Silla (668–935 ce) periods, the most interesting materials from the perspective of “Koreanized Literary Sinitic” are concentrated in the Three Kingdoms period (and primarily in Silla), but overall relatively few contain idu/Variant Sinitic elements and even fewer are written out entirely in Korean word order. As Ch’oe Yŏnsik notes, “Extremely few Variant Sinitic materials can be found from the Unified Silla period—probably because of the flourishing in usage of Orthodox Literary Sinitic and idu Sinitic (idu hanmun)” (Ch’oe 2016: 56). Kim Kijong (2013: 119–120) identifies 28 sources in Variant Sinitic from Unified Silla, of which 23 are Buddhist inscriptions. For epigraphy from the Koryŏ period, Kim Kijong counts 35 Buddhist inscriptions featuring Variant Sinitic elements, along with three non-Buddhist inscriptions from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Still, “[w]hen one considers that there are more than 360 Koryŏ Buddhist inscriptions, we can say that the percentage of Variant Sinitic has contracted considerably compared to the Silla period. In fact, no Buddhist-related Korean Variant Sinitic materials after the Porisa Monastery Plate Inscribed in the Kiyu Year (Kiyumyŏng Porisa Panja 己酉銘菩提寺盤子, 1369) have been discovered to date” (Kim Kijong 2013: 129). In this regard, it is also interesting to note another epigraphic genre that leapt to the fore during Koryŏ: myojimyŏng 墓誌銘 (epitaphs/funerary inscriptions). Such epitaphs begin to appear in the early eleventh century with the intensification and spread of Confucian ideology in Koryŏ and some 325 myojimyŏng remain from this period, but as Kim Kijong notes, there is not a trace of Variant Literary Sinitic to be found in any of them (Kim Kijong 2013: 140). Extremely few Buddhist texts on paper survive from pre-Chosŏn times, and only a fraction of these evince Korean Variant Sinitic. The single most notable case is the Hwaŏm kyŏng mundap 華嚴經問答 (Catechism of the Flower Garland Sūtra). As Kim Sanghyŏn (1996; 2013) has shown, the text by this name that circulated in Japan and was presumed there to be the work of Chinese Huayan master Fazang 法藏 (643–712) is in fact the record of a series of lectures given by Silla monk Ŭisang and recorded by one of his disciples, Chit’ong 智通 (dates unknown), in the late seventh century.20 Here are two examples showing Korean word order (cited in Pak Sŏngjong [2018: 52–53]): 20 Ch’oe Yŏnsik notes that Japanese scholar-monk Gyōnen 凝然 (1240–1321) had already commented on the peculiar and difficult-to-read style (buntai 文體) of the work and cast

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5a. 皆無所殘此經內在

남은 것 없이 다 이 經 안에 있다.

‘Everything, with no remnants, resides within this sūtra.’ (華嚴經問答 上, 大正藏, 45 kwŏn, 599a)

5b. 緣合不有　緣散不無故

緣이 모여도 있지 않고 緣이 흩어져도 없지 않기 때문이다. ‘[This] is because 緣 [affinity; condition] is neither gathered together nor

scattered.’ (華嚴經問答 上, 大正藏, 45 kwŏn, 606a)

As Pak Sŏngjong notes, in (5a) the orthodox Sinitic word order would be 在此 經內 with the adverb 皆 preceding 在, and the 故 at the end of the sentence in (5b) (there are numerous examples like this throughout the text) also violates Literary Sinitic word order. Besides numerous examples like these with Korean word order, Pak Sŏngjong (2018) adduces numerous examples of other Korean vernacularisms like locative and dative uses of postpositional -中, postpositional instrumental use of -以 (corresponding to Korean -(ŭ)ro), postposition -每 mada, clausefinal copula -是 i, and postnominal uses of -爲 that can only be read as the Korean verb hă- (“do; be”), while in addition to these Ch’oe Yŏnsik (2015) adds confused uses of sinographs that have the same vernacular gloss in Korean like the verbs of existence 有/在, 餘/殘, meaning “remain; be in excess,” 與/同 (“together with”), 及/至 (“up to; as far as; including”), 共/竝 (“together”), and the negation markers 不/勿/非. For Koryŏ, there are considerably more documents, although the overall numbers are still quite small. Kim Kijong lists 32 Koryŏ documents with Variant Sinitic, of which ten are Buddhist in nature and the rest are administrative documents. Unlike the Koryŏ-era Buddhist inscriptions, which are concentrated in the early part of the dynasty, the administrative documents evincing Variant Sinitic are concentrated in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (Kim Kijong 2013: 126). After Koryŏ, the Variant Sinitic in Buddhist texts is replaced by orthodox Literary Sinitic (Ibid.: 121), and this major cultural shift in Korean Buddhist Sinitic texts is already well underway by mid-Koryŏ. For example, it is well known that early Koryŏ Buddhist master Kyunyŏ 均如 (923–973) recorded his lectures on Buddhist sutras in the vernacular (pangŏn 方言) and that he even composed Buddhist hyangga 鄕歌 songs in the vernacular (the “Pohyŏn sibwŏn ka” 普賢十願歌). But when preparing his lectures for printing doubt on Fazang as the author, supposing instead that it was a forgery by a Japanese monk (Ch’oe Yŏnsik 2015: 54).

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a century and a half later in 1250–1251, the editors and compilers of his Perfectly Comprehensive Record of the Composition on the Ten Passages (Sipku chang wŏnt’ong ki 十句章圓通記) “personally excised the local speech (親削方言),” and the postface to his Perfectly Comprehensive Account of the Composition on the Three Jewels of the Flower Garland Sūtra (Hwaŏm kyŏng Sambo chang wŏnt’ong ki 華嚴經三寶章圓通記) notes of “excising the Sillan speech (削羅言)” in it. Thus, by the mid-thirteenth century, vernacularized Literary Sinitic had come to be perceived as a kind of literary relic from Silla times (cited in Kim Kijong 2013: 139). 6

Conclusions—With a View to Korean-Style Variant Sinitic

What can we learn from this comparative survey of regionalized Sanskrits, “Stuffed Latin,” and Variant Sinitic in Japan and Korea? Clearly the localized versions of the erstwhile cosmopolitan codes of Sanskrit, Latin, and Literary Sinitic were perceived everywhere as inferior and hybridized varieties of (or approximations to) the superposed prestige literary languages. The audiences were always local, and sometimes the intent was for more popularized reception or consumption. The result was often a kind of “insider register” accessible only to local writers and readers but opaque to outsiders. Perceptions of hybridization (and the assumption that it was undesirable) emerge as a common theme and metagrammatological commentary—both traditional and modern—frequently deploy metaphors of mixing, ranging from culinary, to lapidary, to olfactory, to simple labeling as “mixed” (K. chap 雜). But degrees of self-consciousness about admixture could vary. By Koryŏ and Chosŏn times we see ample evidence of anxiety about localized Sinitic in Korea and concern for maintaining the translocal and transtemporal currency of Sinitic texts produced there, as evidenced by the embarrassment around pre-Koryŏ vernacular place names and administrative posts rendered in sinographs and anxiety about what was fit for bequeathing to subsequent generations or circulating beyond Korea. By contrast, I have been unable to uncover evidence of similar anxieties about Variant Sinitic in Japan. Careful analysis can pinpoint linguistic diagnostics for determining whether a text could have been (or was “meant” to be—but note that authorial intention is difficult to ascertain) read in the vernacular, but the very fact that such forensics are required in the first place seems to have led many observers (then and now) to label such texts as “defective” versions of the relevant cosmopolitan code. Modern-day scholars of such texts often appeal to the notion of registers on a spectrum; this comes with the danger (from a strictly modern-day

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linguistic and grammatological perspective) of confusing language and writing, but also forces us to confront the fact that local/contemporary actors tended to perceive their inscriptional practices as lying on one and the same cline, ranging from local/vernacular on one end to the orthodox and pristine cosmopolitan at the end. Everybody writing in Sanskrit, Medieval Latin, or Literary Sinitic was doing so in an acquired/non-“native” language that took at least a decade of intensive study to master, but this did not necessarily mean these codes were perceived as “foreign languages” or as existing on some other plane separate from some a priori and well-defined vernacular. Writers could drift in and out of the cosmopolitan code, and not just inadvertently—just as Pollock emphasizes that vernacularization is a conscious choice, writing in localized Sanskrit or Variant Sinitic could also be a willful act. Another point that emerges is that modern-day scholarship appears to have been just as negligent (and sometimes equally dismissive) of texts in regionalized cosmopolitan codes as were commentators in traditional times. Rather than let ourselves be “blinded by the sun of antiquity,” we should turn more attention away from the very highest and most prestigious genres and texts to more mundane works, and recall that many of them were in fact created to be read for enjoyment, i.e., as a form of literature (if not perhaps belles lettres). Ultimately, the phenomena we have observed here take us back to bigger questions of the social and cultural history of vernacularization in these regions, and to Pollock’s ideas about cosmopolitan vernaculars. The key features of cosmopolitan vernaculars posited by Pollock apply only piecemeal and/or very belatedly (if at all) to the cases of Variant Sinitic in Japan and Korea: “philologization and the production of difference” (Pollock 1998: 25; 2006: 384); “literary exaltation of the vernacular” (through, e.g., localizations of the Sanskrit epics) (Pollock 2006: 359); and “literary territorialization” (Ibid.: 236n20) or “miniaturization of the cosmopolitan within the new vernacular worlds” (Ibid.: 380). Pollock’s “strategic appropriation” (Ibid.: 357) of the cosmopolitan as a feature of cosmopolitan vernaculars of course is relevant, but requires careful study of what gets appropriated and when. In the case of Korea, and until the opening of the country in the last decades of the nineteenth century, there was only one source from which to “strategically appropriate”—Literary Sinitic (whether one was writing in sinographs or the Korean script). Just as Tieken (2008), in his critique of Pollock’s account of vernacularization in South Asia, suggests that vernacularization was really just Sanskritization until colonial times, we need to consider whether vernacularization in Korea until the 1890s—at least among sinographically literate elites—was really just sinification, with the superposed cosmopolitan code and its script serving as a cloaking mechanism for the vernacular—morphographic

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writing, after all, is a much more effective cloak for vernacular elements than phonographic writing. Under this view, whereas the Sanskrit cosmopolis and Western Europe under Latinitas both saw the self-conscious, politically motivated creation of “cosmopolitan vernaculars” through the deliberate crafting of new local literary languages on the model of superposed Sanskrit and Latin, late-Chosŏn Korea saw exactly the opposite. Reigning Neo-Confucian language ideologies and political configurations at the Chosŏn court led instead to a situation where the only self-conscious vernacularization that occurred in the officially sanctioned public sphere did so in the form of attempts to incorporate vernacular Korean into sinographically written, Sinitic literary production. The (ironically, unwitting) result was a form of Literary Sinitic known as Chosŏnsik hanmun or “Chosŏn-style hanmun,” a form of hanmun that is as scandalously unstudied and untheorized as is vernacularization more generally, and is also the topic of chapter 12. References Adams, J. N. 2003. Bilingualism and the Latin language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Alberizzi, Valerio Luigi. 2011. “Sino-Japanese hybrids between writing systems: Wakan Konkōbun seen through grammatology.” Scripta 3: 61–94. An Sŭngjun. 2014. “Chosŏn sidae hanmun, han’gŭl pyŏngyong komunsŏ samnye ŭi koch’al” [Three Examples of Chosŏn-era Old Documents that Mix Sinographs and Han’gŭl]. Kugŏsa yŏn’gu 18: 119–159. An Sŭngjun. 2016. “15 segi idu p’yŏnji sarye yŏn’gu: Yi Pŏn ŭi kanae sŏgan ŭl chungsim ŭro” [An Example of Fifteenth-Century Letters in idu: The Letters of Yi Pŏn’s Household]. Komunsŏ yŏn’gu 48: 405–435. Ayukai Fusanoshin 鮎貝房之進. [1934] 1972. Zakkō zokujikō, zokubunkō, shakujikō 雑考 　俗字考・俗文考・借字考 [Varia: Korean Vernacular Sinographs, Korean Vernacular Sinitic, Korean Borrowed Graphs]. Tōkyō: Kokusho kankōkai. Barnett, L. D. 1924. Review of On the literature of the Shvetambaras of Gujarat, by Johannes Hertel; Bharaṭakadvātrimśikā: The thirty-two Bharaṭaka stories, by J. Hertel; The Pañchākhyānavārttika Part I, by J. Hertel; Prinz Aghata. Die Abenteuer Ambadas, by Charlotte Krause; Kaufmann Tschampaka von Dschinakîrti. Pâla and Gôpâla von Dschinakîrti. Ratnatschûda von Dschânasâgara, by J. Hertel. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2: 297–299. Belmon, Jerome, and Francoise Vielliard. 1997. “Latin farçi et Occitan dans les actes du Xie siècle.” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes 155(1): 148–183.

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PART 1 Beginnings: Origins and Early Centuries of the Sinographic Cosmopolis

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Chapter 4

The Space of Cultivated Speech (Yayan 雅言): Writing and Language in the Sinographic Sphere Saitō Mareshi 1

Introduction

Here is an important question: how do we link a received written text with a regional language and use it effectively in the region in which kanji (sinographs) circulate, that is, in the “Sinographic Sphere” (C. Hanziquan, J. Kanjiken 漢字圏)? In Japan, kanji were domesticated by means of the two techniques of kundoku 訓讀 and kana 假名, and texts were composed in due course using kanji and the kana syllabary derived from kanji. According to Sheldon Pollock’s framework, these two techniques carry the meaning of “vernacularization” in opposition to the received written text, that is, kanbun 漢文 or wenyan 文言 (Literary Sinitic). This “vernacularization” was not limited to the peripheral regions of the Sinographic Sphere—the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese Archipelago—but occurred essentially everywhere in the Sinographic Sphere, including in China itself. Since it is also a fact, however, that techniques of kundoku and kana characterize Japanese written expression, it is necessary to consider why they were continuously handed down in Japan.1 Jumping forward to the conclusion, I claim that it was probably because in the process of “vernacularization,” a “cosmopolitan language” capable of claiming the same universality as Literary Sinitic was invented as a special kind of voice (J. onsei 音聲). Here I call this cosmopolitan language “cultivated speech” (C. yayan, J. gagen 雅言) and examine its historical status in the Sinographic Sphere.

1 See also Chapter 1 of this volume by David Lurie and Chapter 5 by Torquil Duthie for kundoku and kana.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163

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Rendering Writing into Speech and the Formation of the Written Language

2.1 The System of Writing There is no need to confirm that language existed before writing. There are no societies without language, but there are of course those without writing. Therefore, it is generally thought that writing was created to express language. To be sure, what distinguishes writing from signs in general is the close connection with language. Writing is recognized as writing rather than signs alone when it becomes a written text arranged according to a specific system. As a rule, its arrangement system is somehow connected with language. The first motive for developing a system of written text to follow the syntax of a language is not so much to reproduce spoken language in writing, so much as the fact that following a set syntax is the most efficient way of conveying meaning. In order to understand a written text that expresses meaning structured in a complex way, one has to understand the arrangement rules for the written text, and thus the best way is for these rules to follow the syntax of the language that one has acquired while growing up. Conversely, in cases where there is a mismatch, a technique like Japan’s kundoku glossing becomes necessary. Consequently, the fact that the system of a written text imitates a language’s syntax does not mean of course that it is the same as the spoken language itself. It also does not mean that writing was created to express spoken language in writing. For example, let us consider the writing engraved on tortoise shells and oracle bones to record divinations. Writing engraved on tortoise shells for use in divination during the Yin 殷 (Shang 商) period (1600 bce–1046 bce) is considered the ancestor of sinographs. Although it is possible to clarify the meaning of this writing, it is difficult to know how it was pronounced. Since the time of the Eastern Zhou (771 bce–256 bce), characters with both semantic and phonetic elements (C. xingshengzi 形聲字) suddenly increased and it is possible to infer their approximate pronunciations, but oracle bone writing has few such characters and there is no way of reconstructing the pronunciations. Even if one completely deciphered their meanings and pronunciations, it would not mean that one would understand how people of the Yin period communicated in daily life. It can be presumed that oracle bone writing originally contained esoteric ceremonial qualities and was used exclusively in sacred or political activities rather than in daily use. If we consider, following the explanation of Shirakawa (2002), that oracle bone writing came into being with the function of a magic

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spell, then its use for divination records is its original form. Thus, it is appropriate to consider oracle bone writing, along with many other ancient writing systems, as a system that originated as something quite distinct from everyday language. 2.2 From the Yin to Zhou Periods The Zhou 周 dynasty (510 bce–314 bce) that adopted Yin writing established kingly authority by means of religious rites and military campaigns, thereby expanding the territory under its control. In this process bronze vessels played an important role. Ceremonial vessels, as the standard assets of authority, were produced, and on their interior were cast inscriptions recording the reasons for their production, such as a reward from one’s lord or appointment to an official position. As these were inscriptions on metal, advanced technology was necessary for casting them (Miyamoto and Ōnishi 2009: 58–59), and together with the technology for making bronze vessels, the technology of writing itself supported the authority of Zhou. The transition from oracle bone writing to metal inscriptions was epochal in two ways. First, the Yin and Zhou dynasties were of different ethnic backgrounds and it is therefore possible that they had different languages. If this were indeed the case, it would mean the same writing was used across different languages. Second, as Zhou expanded its territorial control by means of a feudal system, accounts of rewards, official appointments, or the subjugation of barbarian tribes became gradually more detailed, and the activity of casting writing on bronze vessels also spread to all the regions of the continent. Moreover, when they came to value more the documentary aspect (J. kirokusei 記錄性) than the performative aspect of writing, they started to make records on bamboo and silk, rather than on bronze vessels that functioned as assets of authority. There was an expansion of written materials and written media, and of the region where writing was used. As a result, the character of writing was greatly transformed. Even though the privileged nature of writing in the Yin period meant that it maintained a certain authority during the Zhou period, there was a shift toward the use of writing for administrative purposes. Writing acquired a multiplicity of uses. It is thought that, compared with oracle bone writing, the form of the characters in these metal inscriptions reveals a “regression in symbolism,” “stability in character forms and decrease in variant characters,” “simplification and joining of brush strokes,” and “an increase in characters with both semantic and phonetic elements” (Ibid., 60–63). These features show that priority was given to the efficiency of graphic symbols; that is, the uses and circulation of writing

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increased, and a closer correspondence with language was facilitated. In other words, progress was made in the conversion from writing into speech. Among the traces of the conversion from writing into speech, we should probably also mention—in addition to the increase in characters with both a semantic and a phonetic element—the increase in phonetic loan characters (C. jiajiezi 假借字). In Xu Shen’s 許慎 (58–ca. 147 ce) Shuowen jiezi 説文解字 (Explaining and Analyzing Characters; ca. 100 ce), phonetic loans (C. jiajie 假借), one of the “Six Categories” (C. liushu 六書) of characters, are described as “ben wu qi zi, yi sheng tuo shi (xu)” 本無其字、依聲託事 (序); that is, in order to record a word for which there are no characters, one borrows a character that has the same pronunciation as that word. It should be noted that this method was conspicuously used for such words as pronouns and auxiliary words (C. zhuci 助詞), for example, wo 我, ye 也, and wu 無.2 These are “function words” expressing grammatical functions in the language, and the fact that characters expressing them are phonetic loans is evidence that the characters existed previously and attained their present meaning via the process of the change from writing into spoken (vocalized) language. The range of application for phonetic loans was wide, extending to words other than function words, and the use of this technique increased with the change from Yin to Zhou, and from Zhou to the Warring States (475 bce–221 bce). 2.3 The Birth of the Sinographic Sphere The progress in the conversion of writing into vocalized speech shifted writing from a sacred context to a secular one. As it came to be used in the administrative systems of the Warring States, writing was not only cast on bronze vessels, but also came to be recorded on bamboo strips, seals, and coins. In contrast to the writing cast on bronze vessels, later dynasties were willing to simplify this kind of writing because they relied on writing primarily for its practical use. Particularly in the Qin 秦 state, which promoted a legally based bureaucratic administration, a practical style of writing was developed for handwriting that became the scribes’ style of writing (C. lishu 隷書), or the Qin scribal script (C. qinli 秦隷), while the seal-engraving style (C. zhuanshu 篆書), or the Qin seal script (C. qinzhuan 秦篆), was maintained as a ceremonial style, continuing the tradition of metal inscriptions (Miyamoto and Ōnishi 2009: 119). After 2 Negative particles and pronouns are given as examples of phonetic loans following Shirakawa Shizuka. Shirakawa criticizes Xu Shen for giving names of official posts like ling 令 and zhang 長 as examples of phonetic loans. He considers them merely cases of expanded or transferred meaning, since 令 and 長 are also used with their original meaning. He indicates that proper phonetic loans are characters never used with their original meaning, such as the negation particle 不 and first-person pronoun 我. See Shirakawa Shizuka (1976).

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the Qin unification (221 bce), these two styles gained the status of standard styles of writing in China. We thus see a divergence between the importance attached to the occult or mantic quality or authority of writing, on the one hand, and to the efficiency of writing in terms of practical communication, on the other. There were also various divergences created in terms of the correspondence between written signs and vocalized speech. Regional dialect variation in China is pronounced even in the present day, yet in the ancient period ethnic groups were even more diverse and there were cases when basic linguistic structure varied from one language variety to the next. Once the writing system was disseminated and circulated, however, different regions devised various ways of using writing, and new characters were created using such techniques as joining semantic and phonetic elements, and phonetic loans. Written characters during the Warring States period varied greatly by region. Moreover, these variations were not limited merely to the form of characters. For example, the character “女” (meaning “female”) had noticeably different forms during the Chu 楚 (706 bce–223 bce) and Qin, but this fact alone can also be said to be no more than a variation in character form. At the same time, however, it is known that the word written with the character “如” (meaning “to be like”) in Qin was expressed by the phonetic loans “女” or “奴” in Chu (Ibid.: 129).3 That is, diversity of writing was not merely a question of variation in character form, and different regional systems formulated different correspondence relations between the local language forms and the written characters. Consequently, the standardization of writing in the Qin Empire was not limited to the standardization of character forms, but was a unification of multiple and increasingly diversified regional written languages. It is appropriate to see this as the establishment of a single writing system compatible with (incorporating correspondence relationships with) diverse spoken languages. Moreover, it is undeniable that bureaucratic administration of its vast territory was the central factor in Qin’s unification of writing. Indeed, since documentary administration is carried out via a unified writing system, one becomes oblivious to the nature of the spoken language. Even if the spoken languages remain diverse, it is sufficient that the writing system be unified. The written language-vs.-spoken language dualism in the Sinographic Sphere was established in this way.

3 The character “如” also existed in Chu, but it is thought to have carried the meaning “to be like” only rarely.

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In case a close connection between writing and spoken language is sought, as typically seen in modernity, unification of language is pursued simultaneously with the unification of writing. In the ancient period, however, while the writing system maintained a certain series of correspondence relationships with the spoken language system, writing was writing, and the spoken language was the spoken language. The conversion of written language into speech brought about regionalization; when this process was reversed and the unification of writing was brought in, writing then assumed the central position, and each of the regional languages constructed its own correspondence rules with writing. Thus, the resulting written graphs, whose prototypes can be found in the inscriptions on earlier oracle bones and bronzes, were named “Han characters” or hanzi 漢字. This is because they acquired a multiplicity of uses and an ever widening sphere of circulation during first the Spring and Autumn (771 bce–476 bce) and then the Warring States period (475 bce–221 bce), eventually achieving universality as the writing of the unified Qin 秦 (221 bce– 206 bce) and Han 漢 (202 bce–220 ce) dynasties dominating a vast territory. To put it in slightly extreme terms, the written signs on tortoise shells and metal inscriptions were not yet hanzi/“Han characters” from the point of view of the multiplicity of functions and universality. The writing used at the Yin and Zhou royal courts became hanzi. This process was synonymous with the formation of a “China” that dominated the continent, and this epitomized the formation of the Sinographic Sphere. 3

Written Language and the Ceremonial Voice

3.1 The Eloquence of the Scholar-Officials (shi 士) In the Sinographic Sphere that gradually took shape throughout the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, many words were committed to writing and textualized. The Sinographic Sphere formed by governance based on bureaucratic administration was simultaneously a sphere of circulation for Chinese books (C. hanji 漢籍). A class called scholar-officials (C. shi 士) played an important role within this sphere. Originally low-level nobility, they acquired a new status as the class in charge of reading and writing, and it was they who maintained the existence of the Sinographic Sphere. The shi also played a significant role in both the vocalization of written texts and the literization of speech. In order for the shi to serve the king as subjects responsible for governance, they were required to have not only the ability to read and write, but also the art of eloquence. The works of the Hundred Schools of Thought (Zhuzi baijia 諸子百家) often took the format of an attempt to

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persuade by means of questions and answers, and a style was established that was suitable for spoken eloquence. The style that frequently uses auxiliary words for expression of tone and intonation was carried on in later classics as well. Nevertheless, we should not think that these texts directly reproduced everyday language. Their style is quite ordered with many instances of parallelism and attention to rhythm. The lines at the beginning of the Analects (C. Lunyu 論語) that read, “子曰、学而時習之、不亦説乎。有朋自遠方 来、不亦楽乎。人不知而不慍、不亦君子乎”4 are written in a style that was certainly read aloud, but it was not everyday language reproduced verbatim. The intonation carried by locutions like “而” and “不亦…乎” must have been that of performative vocalizations executed with a certain amount of stylization. The basic style of the Chinese classics was formed in the Warring States period, and it is certainly possible to view it as a product of the performative envocalization of writing, but in order to think about the reality of this envocalization, verbally performed spoken language has to be considered. 3.2 Ceremony and Performance Actually, the documentary style based on direct speech representations of spoken language did not originate in the works of the Hundred Schools of Thought at all. It has been pointed out that not only the “書” or Book of Documents (C. Shang shu 尚書; a chronicle of early kings’ words and deeds), but even inscriptions cast on bronze vessels, which at first simply recorded the reasons behind the vessels’ creation, gradually saw an increase in the formula of quotations of the words of kings and their vassals using the sinograph “曰” (“said”) (Matsui 2009). These inscriptions were records reproducing, for example, ceremonies of conferrals of official appointment (C. ceming 冊命 or 策命) that granted official positions, and the words uttered during these ceremonies had an effect different from that of everyday language.5 The character “曰” marking direct speech originated from records of this kind of ceremonial spoken 4 James Legge translates: The Master said, “Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application? Is it not delightful to have friends coming from distant quarters? Is he not a man of complete virtue, who feels no discomposure though men may take no note of him?” Cited from the Chinese Text Project, https://ctext.org/analects/xue-er (last accessed July 9, 2020). 5 In his work, Kominami Ichirō states as follows: “In all the events devoted to the granting of appointment orders (冊命), the words uttered in the context of ceremonies carried great power. The content of an ‘order’ (命) first acquired its effect by being uttered as the words of the king of Zhou. The congratulatory speech was also probably chanted aloud in unison by the participants. Although the central focus of the ceremony was on the transfer of the written document, the character of the occasion differed greatly from what may be called the silent administration of documentary communication of later ages” (Kominami 2006: 147).

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language, and it is conjectured that “words of the king cast on bronze vessels and presented during ancestor rituals were also not read silently merely as a record of facts, but were repeatedly read aloud as a reproduction, re-enactment or re-performance of the ceremonial context in which the validity of the political status of the vessel’s maker was confirmed” (Matsui 2009: 173). The above discussion illustrates the origins and core nature of the activity of reading aloud. Special words uttered orally were transmitted in written form, and their effect was demonstrated by reading them aloud again. It is not difficult to imagine that the eloquence of the thinkers of the Hundred Schools of Thought, as a kind of art, involved vocalization and intonation that differed from everyday speech. The format of the triple repetition of “不亦…乎” at the beginning of the Analects, for example, is closer in nature to the language of performance than to everyday speech. For example, let us consider the following question-and-answer dialogue in the Analects, Zilu book (C. Zilu pian 子路篇). In this passage, Zigong 子貢 (born 520 bce) has asked Confucius what kind of person can be called a scholar-official (shi 士). The Master said, “He who in his conduct of himself maintains a sense of shame, and when sent to any quarter will not disgrace his prince’s commission, deserves to be called an officer.” Zigong pursued, “I venture to ask who may be placed in the next lower rank?” And he was told, “He whom the circle of his relatives pronounce to be filial, whom his fellow villagers and neighbors pronounce to be fraternal.” Again the disciple asked, “I venture to ask about the class still next in order.” The Master said, “They are determined to be sincere in what they say, and to carry out what they do. They are obstinate little men. Yet perhaps they may make the next class.” Zigong finally inquired, “Of what sort are those of the present day, who engage in government?” The Master said “Pooh! they are so many pecks and hampers, not worth being taken into account.”6 子貢問曰、何如斯可謂之士矣。子曰、行己有恥、使於四 方、不辱君命、可謂士矣。曰、敢問其次。曰、宗族称孝焉、郷党称 弟焉。曰、敢問其次。曰、言必信、行必果、硜硜然、小人哉。抑亦 可以為次矣。曰、今之従政者何如。子曰、噫、斗筲之人、何足算也。

Reading this chapter, one first notices that Confucius’ answers are arranged first in four-character phrases, then in five-character phrases, then in 6 Translation of James Legge, cited from the Chinese Text Project, https://ctext.org/analects /zi-lu (last accessed July 9, 2020). All English translations from the Analects below are cited from the same source.

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three-character phrases, and finally in four-character phrases. Moreover, the passages “宗族称孝焉、郷党称弟焉” and “言必信、行必果” reveal clear parallelism. The repetition of the question “敢問其次” also anchors the rhythm of the whole chapter. Moreover, auxiliary words are abundantly used in expressions such as “何如斯可謂之士矣” and “抑亦可以為次矣,” resulting in an increased sense of presence. Finally, even a sigh “噫” is added. It is conjectured that the phrase “何如斯可謂之士矣,” also appearing in other chapters of the Zilu 子路 book, is a conventional expression. These are words of performed dialogue in the context of Confucius’ teaching, and demonstrating proficiency in them was also an important requisite for a scholar-official. The phrase “使於四方、不辱君命,” itself consisting of arranged words, also indicates that a scholar-official has a duty as an envoy to utter ordered, arranged words. In the Zilu book, there is another chapter that contains the phrase “使於四方”: The Master said, “Though a man may be able to recite the three hundred odes, yet if, when intrusted with a governmental charge, he knows not how to act, or if, when sent to any quarter on a mission, he cannot give his replies unassisted, notwithstanding the extent of his learning, of what practical use is it?” 子曰、誦詩三百、授之以政、不達、使於四方、不能専 対、雖多、亦奚以為。

This saying of Confucius is probably based on his thinking that the poems of the Book of Odes should not simply be recited by heart, but are a collection of words that should be applied in practice. In his commentary, Xing Bing 邢昺 (932–1010) explains, “When the men of old sent an envoy to go in any direction, they had a meeting where all composed odes and poems; thus could they see their intentions” (古者使適四方、有会同之事、皆賦詩以見意), and when we actually examine works like the Zuo Zhuan 春秋左氏伝, we find no shortage of such examples. Taking this into account, it would seem that “專對” (“dealing with one’s own judgment”) carried the meaning of “using phrases from the Book of Odes (Shijing 詩經) according to diplomatic context.” The phrase “授之 以政” probably meant “to perform administrative work with documents and proclamations,” and “不達” probably meant “the inefficient use of words from the Odes in the actual process of creating documents.” 3.3 Poetry and Cultivated Speech (C. yayan 雅言) The Book of Odes is based on four-character lines of poetry, and in the ancient period it was the most ordered voice of all. Scholar-officials were required to use it freely, and recitation was a form of training for this. The famous words

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of Confucius to his son Bo Yu 伯魚: “If you do not learn the Odes, you will not be fit to converse with” (不学詩、無以言; Analects, Ji Shi pian 季氏篇), also suggest what kind of concept this “言” (speech) was. The character “言” meant to utter the right words in an official setting, and this concept was probably a successor to words used in ceremonies. It appears that one of the four subjects of Confucianism, language (yanyu 言語), had the meaning of eloquence, referring not simply to being good at speaking, but to the ability to use ordered words according to circumstances. Zigong, who was considered excellent in the deployment of “言語,” replied once to Confucius using a phrase from the Odes: “As you cut and then file, as you carve and then polish” (如切如磋、如琢如磨; Odes of Wei, Qi Yu 詩, 衛風, 淇奥), and was praised by Confucius who said: “With one like Ci, I can begin to talk about the odes. I told him one point, and he knew its proper sequence” (賜也、始可与言詩已矣。告諸往而知来者也; Analects, Xue Er pian 學而篇). In addition, there is also the following exchange between Confucius and Zixia: Zixia asked, saying, “What is the meaning of the passage—‘The pretty dimples of her artful smile! The well-defined black and white of her eye! The plain ground for the colors?’” The Master said, “The business of laying on the colors follows (the preparation of) the plain ground.” “Ceremonies then are a subsequent thing?” The Master said, “It is Shang who can bring out my meaning. Now I can begin to talk about the odes with him.” 子夏問曰、巧笑倩兮、美目盼兮、素以為絢兮、何謂也。子曰、絵事 後素. 曰、礼後乎。子曰、起予者、商也、始可与言詩已矣。 Analects, Ba Yi pian 八佾篇

The expression “与言詩” seen in these examples is usually interpreted as meaning “to discuss the Odes together,” and is said of a person who truly understands the Book of Odes. Is it not the case, however, that “言詩” here rather directly means to recite and use phrases from the Odes, while “与言詩” means to converse with each other by reciting the Odes? One could be praised with the phrase “可与言詩” when one could appropriately use the phrases of the special language that was the Odes. Thus, simply being able to recite three hundred odes by heart was no good. Further, in the Shu Er pian 述而篇 of the Analects there is a chapter that states, “The Master’s frequent themes of discourse were: the Odes, the History, and the maintenance of the Rules of Propriety. On all these he frequently discoursed” (子所雅言、詩書執礼、皆雅言也). All the commentaries largely agree that the expression “詩書執礼” here refers jointly to the classics of the

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Odes, the Documents (Shujing 書經 or Shangshu 尙書), and the Rites (Liji 禮記), but the understanding of the word “雅言” differs in old and new commentaries. According to the commentary of Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (127–200), it meant, “he read using correct pronunciation without changing the reading out of respect/ reverence (敬避),” whereas in the commentary of Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200), it is interpreted as, “he frequently talked about them; he always made them a topic of conversation.” There is also a view according to which “雅言” means that Confucius read them not in his native Lu 魯 pronunciation, but in the pronunciation of the royal capital of Zhou.7 There is sound reasoning behind each of these arguments, but it is also fully possible to interpret it, based on the above discussion, as “he read them aloud in a correctly arranged intonation and rhythm (音調).” As we have already seen, phrases from the Odes were undoubtedly recited in contexts of public ceremony (primarily diplomacy), and the Documents also quotes the words of kings in ceremonial settings. The Rites is obviously deeply related to ceremonies. In other words, all of these texts are connected to the language (speech) of ceremonial contexts. Among the Five Classics, the Book of Changes (Yijing 易經) and Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu 春秋) are not mentioned here, probably because they were not exactly texts to be recited in ceremonial contexts. Thus, it is surmised that techniques of recitation and vocalization did not grow out of everyday colloquial speech, and that instead were transmitted in ceremonial settings. It is possible that such recitational performance was actually based on the standard of Zhou pronunciation, but this was certainly perceived not as a regional difference in pronunciation, but as the correct sounds, duly transmitted. It is even possible that the pronunciation was entirely artificial or constructed. The term “cultivated/refined speech” (yayan 雅言) must have referred to this kind of performative recitation. 3.4 Between Writing and Language Thinking in this way, it is possible to consider that the (en)vocalization of written language was not accomplished solely on the basis of everyday colloquial speech, but rather through correspondence relations with another, different layer, namely: a voiced language imbued with qualities of ceremony and performance. The aforementioned diverse regionality seen in the Warring States period was perhaps also brought about by ceremonial languages used mainly in the royal courts of various states. The spread of writing to various states, in metal or bamboo inscriptions and on wooden tablets ( jiandu 簡牘), 7 See Liu Baonan, Lunyu zheng yi 論語正義, book 8.

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occurred in the context of official ceremonies and government affairs and was not meant for or tied to everyday face-to-face communication. When thinking about the relationship between writing and speech, we should probably first consider the nature of the voice in the context where writing is being used. Much is unclear about the properties of ceremonial language at the courts of the various Warring States, but it is still possible to investigate, for example, the form of speech at the court of Chu using sources such as the Chu Ci 楚辭 (Songs of Chu). In this connection, it seems that this kind of mediation of spoken language in the context of ceremonies contributed substantially to the characteristic features of the prose of the ancient classics, such as the basic rhythm of fourcharacter phrases and the development of parallelism. The rhythm of writing was produced not only from the internal features of writing, but had much to do with the fact that written texts were imbued with the characteristics of a text to be recited. Viewed from a different angle, the orally transmitted ancient ceremonial spoken language (J. gireiteki onsei gengo 儀礼的音声言語) was standardized through its transformation into writing, which in turn reinforced its character as a textual language. Thus, the written language (書記言語) of texts that were meant to be recited aloud—that is, the language of the classics (古典文)—arose in the space between writing and speech (Kinsui et al. 2008).8 4

The Transmission of Written Language and the Reconstruction of Vocalized Language

4.1 Recitation of Writing According to the Kojiki 古事記 (Record of Ancient Matters; 711), during the reign of Emperor Ōjin 応神天皇 (r. 270–310) the first books brought to Japan were the Analects (論語) and the Thousand Character Classic (C. Qianziwen, J. Senjimon 千字文), but it is difficult to accept this as historical fact. Perhaps this has something to do with the wide use of the Analects and the Thousand Character Classic as introductory literacy textbooks at the Nara court (Tōno 1977). That is, the books put at the beginning of the curriculum were placed by analogy at the very beginning of the historical transmission. Incidentally, the Suishu 隋書 (History of Sui; 636), in its “Record of the Wa” (Woguo zhuan 倭 國傳) records that writing was first brought to Japan in the form of Buddhist sutras, as follows: “They [Japanese] did not have writing, and only carved wood 8 Note in particular the “phenomenon of recitation of written language as a form linking spoken language and written language” (Kinsui et al. 2008: 7).

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and tied ropes. Having respect for Buddhist teachings, they requested and received Buddhist sutras from Paekche, and this is how they first came to have writing” (無文字、唯刻木結繩。敬仏法、於百済求得仏経、始有文字). The Thousand Character Classic, as becomes clear from its four-character lines of verse, is a book that was meant to be recited. The Analects, too, was made for recitation, being a collection of performative question-and-answer conversations. Originally, literacy and recitation were essentially two sides of the same coin. Jijiu pian 急就篇, a basic literacy primer produced in the Han period listing personal names and objects, consists mainly of seven-character lines mixed with three- and four-character lines that also rhyme in order to facilitate recitation. It is clear from excavated materials that the no-longerextant character dictionary Cangjie pian 蒼頡篇 was also written in fourcharacter lines of verse (Fukuda 2004). The opening passage of the Cangjie pian as reconstructed from the excavated remains of tablets contains the line, “勉力諷誦、昼夜勿置” (“exert your strength in recitation [諷誦], do not set it aside day or night”) (Ibid.: 113–114). It is thus known that writing was first recited. Moreover, the “Treatise on Arts and Letters” (Yiwen zhi 藝文志) in the Hanshu 漢書 (History of Han; 82 ce) says about the Du Lin commentaries (Du Lin Cangjie Xunzuan 杜林蒼頡訓纂 and Du Lin Cangjie gu 杜林蒼頡故)9 that there were many old characters in the Cangjie pian that ordinary teachers did not know how to read, and then in the time of Emperor Xuan 宣帝 of Han (r. 74–49 bce), having summoned a person from the state of Qi 齊 who could read the characters correctly, Zhang Chang 張敞 (d. 48 bce) received the readings and transmitted them to his great-grandson Du Lin 杜林, who then composed the commentaries.10 This record, too, shows that reading aloud was important for the Cangjie pian and that there were also parts gradually transmitted orally. Reciting aloud (C. fengsong, J. fūju 諷誦, or C. fengdu, J. fūdoku 諷讀) was taken seriously in the transmission of documents not only at the center, but also on periphery. Laws transmitted from the center “were read aloud by everybody. In this way even those who could not read characters were fully informed of their contents through a kind of ritual activity that aimed at enforcing the orders” (Tomiya 2010: 418). It was generally accepted that writing displayed its power through the act of being read aloud—through ritualized vocalization.

9

These books are already described as “lost” in the bibliographic “Treatise on the Imperial Library” (Jingji zhi 經籍志) of the History of Sui. 10 蒼頡多古字、俗師失其読、宣帝時徴斉人能正読者、張敞従受之、伝至外孫 之子杜林、為作訓故、并列焉。

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And it is worth noting that this practice was firmly maintained even at the lowest levels of documentary administration. Thus, recitation in the context of literacy education was done not only to ease memorization, but because recitation was also deemed necessary for situations wherein writing was actually used in practice. As seen in the passage from the History of Han’s “Treatise on Arts and Letters,” “Confucius selected only poems of Zhou, from Yin down to Lu, 305 sections in all. The reason why [the Book of Odes] completely [survived] under the Qin [i.e., it was not burned] is that it was recited [from memory] and was not found only [written] on bamboo and silk” (孔子純取周詩、上采殷、下取魯、凡三百五篇、遭秦 而全者、以其諷誦、不独在竹帛故也), the classics were also recited from the very beginning. In general, in cases where writing was involved in official matters, from the classics transmitted over the ages to administrative documents on the frontiers, there was a need for a voice to make writing resound. Insofar as the language(s) in use on the Japanese archipelago differed in both syntax and pronunciation from the language(s) of China, the transmission of books like the Thousand Character Classic or the Analects meant the transmission of an entirely new language. Nevertheless, that new language did not correspond to what we would today call a “foreign language.” Without a doubt there was intense contact and cohabitation with people speaking regional languages of China and the Korean peninsula even before the transmission of written texts. The written language and the ceremonial voice that accompanied it, however, were of a different status from that of everyday language. Transmission of texts meant both the transmission of writing and at the same time the transmission of the notion that a special voice was required with which to vocalize texts, something surely implied in the description of the Paekche scholar Achiki 阿直岐 in the Nihon shoki 日本書紀 (Chronicles of Japan; 720 ce) when it notes that “he [Achiki] could also read the classics” (亦能讀經典). Note also in this regard that the passage “[Achiki] learned various classics and records from Wani” (習諸典籍於王仁) also carries the sense of “Achiki learned to read (i.e., recite) texts following Wani,” and not that he simply received explanations about texts. 4.2 Extension of Kun (訓) Glossing Meanwhile, interpreting and understanding the meaning of written texts is also indispensable. Numerous texts accompanied by commentaries (J. kunko 訓詁) were also transmitted for this purpose. There is a commentary by Xiao Ziyun 蕭子雲 (487–549 ce) of Liang 梁 for the Thousand Character Classic and a commentary by Zheng Xuan on He Yan’s 何晏 (190–249 ce) Collected Explanations (He Yan jijie 何晏集解) of the Analects. Although the Five Classics

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were originally texts for basic character literacy, they required commentaries since they were not written in everyday language. With the expansion of the Sinographic Sphere, as texts were transmitted to regions where the local languages were characterized by syntactic structures and phonologies quite different from the language(s) of China, or even to regions with no writing at all, situations naturally arose wherein interpretations were added in a form based on the local language. For example, on wooden strips (mokkan 木簡) from the Kitaōtsu 北大津 excavation site dated to approximately the latter half of the seventh century, it is possible to see examples of annotations like “取” (“take”) added to the sinograph “采” (“gather, pick”) and “田須久” (phonograms for J. tasuku) added to “賛” (“help, support”) (Okimori 2009: 61–62). The former gloss is analogous to “訓” glossing as used in China, while the latter gloss is the new type of “訓” vernacular glossing seen on the Korean peninsula and in the Japanese archipelago providing an interpretation using the local language of place. One has to take note of the difference between “訓” (gloss) and “譯” (translation; interpretation). Originally, a “訓” gloss is used for a single character or word in a written text. It is used neither for spoken language, nor for converting an entire text into another text. However, as stated in the following passage in the “Royal Regulations” (Wangzhi 王制) section of the Book of Rites, the situation with “譯” is different: The languages of the people in the five regions are not mutually understood, and they also have different aspirations and desires. Making one’s intentions and desires understood is called “寄” in the east, “象” in the south, “狄鞮” in the west, and “譯” in the north.11 五方之民、言語不通、嗜欲不同。達其志、通其欲、東方曰寄、南方 曰象、西方曰狄鞮、北方曰訳。

The “譯” here originally means interpretation between languages, and the presence or absence of writing matters little. The fact that the translation of Buddhist sutras was classified not as “訓” but as “譯” probably has to do with the transmission process that involved Chinese 11 Legge’s translation reads: “In those five regions, the languages of the people were not mutually intelligible, and their likings and desires were different. To make what was in their minds apprehended, and to communicate their likings and desires, (there were officers)—in the east, called transmitters; in the south, representationists; in the west, Di-dis; and in the north, interpreters.” Cited from the Chinese Text Project, https:// ctext.org/liji/wang-zhi (last accessed July 9, 2020).

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monks transcribing and arranging translations dictated by foreign monks. The process for the most part was a chain of activities that consisted of: a) the recitation in a Central Asian or Sanskritic language (Huyu 胡語), b) the dictation of that translation, and c) the correction of the resulting written records. This could certainly be termed “譯,” which refers to the translation of a spoken language, rather than “訓,” which refers to an annotation, comment, or gloss on a written character. The original written text was not preserved; it was transferred into a completely different language system and became a written text again. This is precisely “譯.” Consequently, the interpretation of sinographic texts (C. hanziwen, J. kanjibun 漢字文) carried out on the Japanese archipelago was at first entirely “訓” and not “譯.” It came to be perceived as “譯” only after a register or recitational voice came into existence that corresponded not to individual phrases, but to stretches of sinographic writing in entire sinographically rendered texts. Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 (1666–1728) could assert in Yakubun Sentei 譯文筌蹄 (A Mechanism for Translation, 1714) of “和訓” (J. wakun: kundoku/“Japanese annotation”) that it “takes its meaning from the word ‘annotation’ [J. kunko 訓詁] but in effect it is actually a ‘translation’”12 (其實譯也) because by the seventeenth century the language of kundoku 訓讀, the glossed renderings of sinographic texts, was already perceived as homorganic with the Japanese language. It should be noted, however, that it was not the everyday kind of Japanese language, but a special form of Japanese created by kanbun kundoku 漢文訓讀; in origin it stemmed from the cultivated speech performed in the ceremonial voice. 4.3 The Voice of Kundoku It is possible to say that the method of applying local language to interpret sinographs is a phenomenon widely seen in the Sinographic Sphere (Kin 1988). Indeed, it is a common phenomenon across the Sinographic Sphere, thought to be a natural extension of the kun 訓 method. When correspondence relations are fixed between written characters and kun glosses in a local language, and when rules of word order inversion (返讀) are also established to create syntactical (word order) correspondences, the glossing of entire sentential units becomes possible. This is kundoku 訓讀: “reading by gloss” or “vernacular reading.” Kun glossing as the “vernacularization” of writing can also work in the reverse direction; that is, it can be deployed as a “cosmopolitanization” of (the 12

English translation cited from Pastreich (2011: 301).

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local) language. One example is the kun glossing appearing in the preface to the Kojiki 古事記 by Ō no Yasumaro 太安万侶 (?–723): Hereupon, regretting the errors in the old words, and wishing to correct the misstatements in the former chronicles, She [the Empress], on the eighteenth day of the ninth month of the fourth year of Wa-dō, commanded me Yasumaro to select and record the old words learnt by heart by Hi[y]eda no Are according to the Imperial Decree, and dutifully to lift them up to Her. In reverent obedience to the contents of the Decree, I have made a careful choice. But in high antiquity both speech and thought were so simple, that it would be difficult to arrange phrases and compose periods in the characters. To relate everything in an ideographic transcription (訓) would entail an inadequate expression of the meaning; to write altogether according to the phonetic method (音) would make the story of events unduly lengthy. For this reason have I sometimes in the same sentence used the phonetic and ideographic systems (音訓) conjointly, and have sometimes in one matter used the ideographic record (訓) exclusively. Chamberlain 1982: 4–5

於焉惜旧辞之誤忤、正先紀之謬錯、以和銅四年九月十八日、詔臣安万 侶、撰録稗田阿礼所誦之勅語旧辞以献上者、謹随詔旨、子細採摭。然上古 之時、言意並朴、敷文構句、於字即難。已因訓述者、詞不逮心、全以音連 者、事趣更長。是以今或一句之中、交用音訓、或一事之内、全以訓録。

Yasumaro composed this work after receiving the imperial order of Empress Genmei 元明天皇 (r. 707–715) to select, record, and present the “old words of imperial decrees” previously recited by Hieda no Are, in order to correct errors in “old words” and “former chronicles.” In a paragraph preceding the cited passage there is a record about Emperor Tenmu 天武天皇 (r. 673–686) ordering Hieda no Are to commit to memory through repeated recitation (J. shūshū 誦 習) the “chronicles of the emperors” (J. teiki 帝紀), “former chronicles” (J. senki 先紀), and “original/old words” (J. honji 本辭, kyūji 舊辭) kept in various families. Thus, Yasumaro heard the voice of Hieda no Are reading texts aloud, and aimed to convert these again into a written text. Since he stated that “both speech and thought were so simple, that it would be difficult to arrange phrases and compose periods in the characters” (言意並朴、敷文構句、於字即難), he was strongly aware of the gap between speech and writing. To describe it in a different way, he supposed spoken language to be distinct from writing. He

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then stated that the two techniques for converting spoken language to writing were “kun” 訓 and “on” 音. Thus, in this case kun is neither an interpretation of a written character, nor an interpretation of a written character according to the local language of place, but—going completely in the opposite direction—refers to a method of recording local language that consists in using sinographs in accordance with the interpreted local language. The conversion of spoken language into writing was devised on the basis of the same technique that allows the vocalization of written texts. At the same time, it is necessary to note that the language indicated in the opposite direction by means of kun 訓 had the privileged quality of “high antiquity” (J. jōko 上古). By stating that he made records (錄) based on Are’s recitation (誦), Yasumaro let readers understand that the written text of the Kojiki was a written record of a previously existing (spoken) language. Kun as a reading technology was used as a device to lend voice to (envocalize) the flipside of writing.13 In the context of this conversion of kun, kundoku in Japan came to possess a certain authority as interpretation and, at the same time, as a way to vocalize in a voice (ceremonially) appropriate for the flipside of the original text. That is, kun(doku) mediates between writing/written text and (authoritative) speech: writing < > kun < > voice/speech. As if copying exactly the link between written and ceremonial language in mainland China, the language of kundoku also came to function as a kind of ceremonial language or register. An extreme example of this is the kundoku of the Nihon shoki 日本書紀. Unlike the Kojiki, the Nihon shoki was not expected to be read in Japanese (Wago 和語), but was rather a text intended for China.14 From the early ninth to the tenth century, however, there were “lectures on the Nihongi” (Nihongi kōsho 日本紀講書), that is, sessions of textual explication (kōdoku 講讀) of the Nihon shoki held at the imperial court, “during which the kanbun text of the Nihon shoki was read out completely in Japanese. For example, ‘日本書紀巻第一’ was read ‘yamato fumi no maki no tsuide hitomaki ni ataru maki’ ヤマトフミノマキノ

13 Kōnoshi Takamitsu (2007: 182) states as follows: “What is important is not to view the formation of the Kojiki by relating it to Are’s committing it to memory through repeated recitation (誦習), but to inquire about the meaning of the (surely fictional) claim that the ‘speech and thought’ of ‘high antiquity’ were put down in writing based on that recitation.” 14 Eleven volumes out of thirty are estimated to have been written by immigrant scribes whose native language was a language of the continent. See Mori (1999).

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ツイデヒトマキニアタルマキ” (Kōnoshi 2009: 185).15 Thus, it was thought that an ancient voice stood behind the text of the Nihon shoki, and the task of the “lectures” was to restore that voice. These lectures also held significance as court ceremonies. The circumstances of such a lecture are recorded as follows in the Saikyūki 西宮記 (Record of the Western Palace; ca. 969 ce) of Minamoto no Takaakira 源高明 (914–983) describing court ceremonies of the tenth century:

Then, the professor, the assistant, and the minister were seated and all of them opened the texts. The assistant chanted the text aloud, his style was elevated and continuous, and then the professor explicated the text. When the assistant finished reading, he and the professor left. 次博士尚復大臣已下皆披書巻、次尚復唱文一声音、其体高長之、次博士 講読了、尚復読訖、尚復博士退出。 Kojitsu sōsho 故実叢書 [Library of Ancient Customs and Practices], scroll 15, “講日本紀事”16

A minister, a professor, an assistant and others took their seats, opened the texts, and the assistant recited in a loud voice. Thus, it is clear that ceremonial recitation was indispensable for the program of lectures. It follows that the Nihon shoki, as a classical text written in Chinese parallel-prose style (C. pianliti 駢儷體), was read aloud in the restored ancient Japanese language with an authority that was expected to compete with this Chinese style. This Japanese language, with a higher status and greater prestige than individual kun 訓 (“reading by gloss/vernacular reading” glosses), came into existence as another “cosmopolitan language.” This particular world of Japanese language was contrived not as “vernacular,” but as “cosmopolitan” (or its equivalent). It is possible that the same procedure was used at the time of the kundoku reading of Chinese texts introduced from China. Recitation by means of kundoku was carried out with the assumption that it carried value and weight equal to the “cultivated speech” (雅言) practiced by Confucius and others, and it was perceived as higher in value than mere gloss or interpretation. This is one of the reasons why kundoku activity was handed down, eventually leading to sodoku 素讀 (rote recitation; reading the classics aloud in kundoku) and shigin 詩吟 (recitation of Chinese poems in kundoku) in the early modern period. Ogyū Sorai, despite viewing Japanese kun “和訓” as a form of “translation” 15 16

From the private notes (J. shiki 私記) cited in the “Secret Readings” (Hikun 秘訓, 1) section of Shaku Nihongi 釈日本紀 (Annotated Text of the Nihon shoki; 1274–1301). Cited from Imaizumi and Kawabata (1951–1957).

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(譯), still made a distinction between kun 訓 and yaku 譯 as follows in his Yakubun sentei: But Japanese kun issued from the mouths of scholar-official gentlemen of antiquity, and imperial tutors recited it in the offices at the Golden Horse [Gate] and in the Jade Hall. That is why they strove to select cultivated speech, and eschew the vulgar and the rustic.17 但和訓出於古昔搢紳之口、侍読諷誦金馬玉堂之署。故務揀雅言、簡去鄙俚 from Yakubun sentei, “Prefatory Remarks in the Form of Ten Guiding Principles, Principle Number Four” 譯文筌諦、題言十則第四則

This distinction probably did not seem substantial to Sorai. Based on the above discussion, however, it should be considered very important that the voice of kundoku issuing from recitation was none other than “cultivated speech.” 5

Concluding Remarks

In this chapter I have discussed techniques deployed in the “vernacularization” of sinographic writing (C. hanziwen, J. kanjibun 漢字文) in Japan with a focus on kundoku, and pointed out that “cultivated speech” (C. yayan 雅言) was the basis supporting the transmission of kundoku “reading by gloss/vernacular reading.”18 Although linked with writing, “cultivated speech” was a “cosmopolitan” form of voice that came into being in each region in contrast to the local everyday “vernacular.” Future research needs to investigate not only how this notion of “cultivated speech” spread throughout the region, but also how it acquired universality within the historical tradition, as well as what significance this concept has for understanding the nature of the “cosmopolitan” in the Sinographic Sphere.

17 Pastreich (2011: 308) translates: “Kundoku was the system by which a scribe read aloud documents for scholars at the palace. For this reason, the scribes made every attempt to speak in florid language and avoid the vulgar or banal.” 18 The basic contents of this chapter are based on my previously published work (Saitō 2010). In addition, I would like to refer readers to my other work (Saitō 2011) about kana (the extension of phonetic loans, J. kashaku, C. jiajie 假借), another technique of “vernacularization.” Portions of the present chapter also repeat some contents of this latter work.

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References Chamberlain, Basil Hall. 1982. The Kojiki: Records of Ancient Matters. Rutland, VT: C. E. Tuttle Co. Fukuda Tetsuyuki 福田哲之. 2004. Setsumon izen shōgakusho no kenkyū [A Study of Elementary Primers Prior to the Shuowen]. Tokyo: Sōbunsha. Imaizumi Teisuke 今泉定介, and Kawabata Sanahide 河鰭實英, eds. 1951–1957. Kojitsu sōsho 故実叢書. Tokyo: Meiji Tosho & Yoshikawa kōbunkan. Kin Bunkyō (Kim Mun’gyŏng) 金文京. 1988. “Kanji bunka-ken no kundoku genshō” 漢 字文化圏の訓読現象 [Kundoku Phenomena in the Sinographic Cultural Sphere]. In Wa-Kan hikaku bungaku kenkyū no shomondai 和漢比較文学研究の諸問題 [Issues in Wa-Han Comparative Literary Research], edited by Wa-Kan Hikaku Bungakkai, 175–204. Tokyo: Kyūko shoin. Kinsui Satoshi 金水敏, Yoshihiko Inui 乾善彦, and Katsumi Shibuya 渋谷勝己. 2008. Nihongoshi no intafēsu [The Interface of Japanese Linguistic History]. Tokyo: Iwa­ nami shoten. Kominami Ichirō 小南一郎. 2006. Kodai chūgoku: tenmei to seidōki [Bronze Vessels and the Heavenly Mandate in Ancient China]. Kyōto: Kyōto daigaku gakujutsu shuppankai. Kōnoshi Takamitsu 神野志隆光. 2007. Kanji tekisuto to shite no Kojiki [The Kojiki as a Kanji Text]. Tokyo: Tōkyō daigaku shuppankai. Kōnoshi Takamitsu 神野志隆光. 2009. Hensō sareru Nihon shoki [Variations on the Nihon shoki]. Tokyo: Tōkyō daigaku shuppankai. Liu Baonan 劉宝南. 1965. Lunyu zheng yi 論語正義 [Explanatory Notes on the Analects]. Taipei: Zhonghua shuju. Matsui Yoshinori 松井嘉徳. 2009. “Kinseki chikuboku ga kataru kanji shakai: Nari­ hibiku moji” [The Sinographic Society Recounted by Metal, Stone, Bamboo and Wood: Reverberating Graphs]. In Kanji no chūgoku bunka [Kanji’s Chinese Culture], edited by Tomiya Itaru, 159–189. Kyōto: Shōwadō. Miyamoto Tōru 宮本徹, and Katsuya Ōnishi 大西克也. 2009. Ajia to kanji bunka [Asia and Kanji Culture]. Tokyo: Hōsō daigaku kyōiku shinkōkai. Mori Hiromichi 森博達. 1999. Nihon shoki no nazo o toku: jussakusha wa dare ka [Solving the Mystery of the Nihon shoki—Who was the Main Author?]. Tokyo: Chūō kōron shinsha. Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠. 1980. Yakubun sentei: dōkun igi jiten fu sakuin, fu Tōgai Yōjikaku 譯文筌蹄:同訓異義辞典附索引，附東涯用字格 [A Mechanism for Translation: Dictionary of Sinographs with the Same Kun Gloss but Different Meanings, with an Index]. Edited by Koizumi Hidenosuke 小泉秀之助. Tokyo: Meicho fukyūkai. Okimori Takuya 沖森卓也. 2009. Nihon kodai no moji to hyōki [Graphs and Writing in Ancient Japan]. Tokyo: Yoshikawa kōbunkan.

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Pastreich, Emanuel. 2011. The Observable Mundane: Vernacular Chinese and the Emergence of a Literary Discourse on Popular Narrative in Edo Japan. Seoul: Seoul National University Press. Saitō Mareshi 齋藤希史. 2010. “Dokushō no kotoba―gagen to shite no kundoku” [Recited Words: Kundoku as Cultivated Speech]. In Zoku “kundoku” ron: Higashi Ajia kanbun sekai no keisei [“Kundoku,” Continued: The Formation of the East Asian Literary Sinitic World], edited by Nakamura Shunsaku, 15–46. Tokyo: Bensei shuppan. Saitō Mareshi 齋藤希史. 2011. “Washū to kana—kanji-ken ni okeru moji to gengo” [The “Japanese Style” and Kana: Language and Writing in the Sinographic Sphere]. In Koten Nihongo no sekai II: Moji to kotoba no dainamikusu [The World of Classical Japanese II: Dynamics of the Written Word and Language], edited by Tōkyō Daigaku Kokubun Kanbungaku Bukai, 3–30. Tokyo: Tōkyō daigaku shuppankai. Shirakawa Shizuka 白川静. 1976. Kanji no sekai 1: Chūgoku bunka no genten [The World of Kanji 1: Origins of Chinese Culture]. Tokyo: Heibonsha Tōyō Bunko 281. Shirakawa Shizuka 白川静. 2002. Ju no shisō: Kami to hito tono aida [The Ideology of Incantation: Between the Gods and Humankind]. Tokyo: Heibonsha. Tomiya Itaru 冨谷至. 2010. Bunsho gyōsei no Kan Teikoku: mokkan, chikukan no jidai [Administration by Document in the Han Empire: The Age of Wooden and Bamboo Slips]. Nagoya: Nagoya daigaku shuppankai. Tōno Haruyuki 東野治之. 1977. Shōsōin monjo to mokkan no kenkyū [A Study of Wooden Slips and Documents in the Shōsōin]. Tokyo: Hanawa shobō.

Chapter 5

Waka Poetry as a Cosmopolitan Vernacular in Early Japan Torquil Duthie 1

Cosmopolitan Writing and Poetry

What is a “vernacular”? In sociolinguistics the term usually refers to spontaneous forms of native speech and is distinguished from “standard” forms of spoken language.1 In the field of literary studies, however, it is used in a different sense to refer to a native language that has been standardized and formalized through writing and thus become an alternative medium of expression to a dominant cosmopolitan or classical written language. My focus in this essay is on this second sense of vernacular as a language that is defined on the one hand against unstandardized local native languages that only exist in the form of speech, and on the other against cosmopolitan or classical languages whose authority derives primarily from their written form. “Writing” in seventh-century East Asia was for almost all practical purposes synonymous with the Sinoscript. I use this term rather than the more common “Chinese writing system” in order to avoid the confusion between speech and script that afflicts many discussions of “Chinese writing,” in which “Chinese” is used in the sense of “representing the Chinese language.” While in many contexts this is not necessarily inaccurate, my use of the Latinate term “Sino-” refers not to a language, but to the trans-dynastic lineage of imperial states that developed and standardized the script. What I call the Sinoscript thus refers to the writing that originated from Shang oracle bone inscriptions ( jiaguwen 甲骨文), was modified and expanded into the seal script of the Zhou dynasty’s bronze inscriptions, developed further and diversified in the documents written on bamboo, silk, and other materials at the various courts of the Warring States period, was standardized by the state of Qin, was modified in the Han 1 This is the sense defined by William A. Stewart as the first of five types of spoken language: vernacular (the unstandardized native language of a speech community), standard (a vernacular that has been standardized), classical (a standard that has died out as a native language), pidgin (a hybrid language), and creole (a hybrid that has become a native language). See Stewart (1968).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163

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dynasty into clerical script (lishu 隷書), and then developed into distinct calligraphic styles from the Late Han through the Six Dynasties period: namely, “true” (zhen 眞) or “correct” (zheng 正) clerical script (known as “standard script” [kaishu 楷書] from the Song dynasty onward), and “draft script” (caoshu 草書). While sinographic writing (meaning all and any writing that employs sinographs) may have originated in the form of signs inscribed onto bones to record pyromantic ritual procedures, the Sinoscript did not develop as a sacred language. Rather, it took shape as a written language of royal power that served to document, order, and envision a universal political space. This written language, which I refer to as Literary Sinitic,2 was the cultural foundation of Sinitic imperial authority, in all of its administrative, legal, and aesthetic dimensions. Its writings, books, and libraries were what defined the imperial realm in both transregional and trans-dynastic terms. Literary Sinitic can thus be usefully described as what Sheldon Pollock calls a “cosmopolitan” language, that is, a supraregional language for “the public literary expression of political will” that endured over time and provided a sense of cultural continuity through dynastic changes (Pollock 2006). Literary Sinitic was not simply a written language to document the empire, but a literary language capable of envisioning the realm as well as of celebrating its sovereign and his court. The most exemplary form of this literary language was poetry. This is stated unambiguously in foundational texts such as the Analects (Lunyu 論語), where Confucius describes the Odes (Shijing 詩經) as epitomizing the powers of literate rhetoric: studying the Odes enables one to excite people’s interest, be observant, engage with society, articulate one’s complaints, be a morally upstanding person by serving one’s father and ruler, and learn about the world.3 The Mao preface to the Odes famously claims that there is nothing better than poetry to “correct rights and wrongs, move heaven and earth, and stir the gods and spirits” and that the virtuous rulers of old used poetry to regulate all forms of human relations.4 In the early medieval period, 2 “Literary Sinitic” is a term popularized by Victor Mair to refer to what is more commonly referred to as “Classical Chinese” or “Literary Chinese.” See Mair (1994). 3 See Analects 17:9. The Master said, “Young masters, why do you not learn the Odes? The Odes will enable you to provoke interest, to make observations, to engage with society, and make your complaints heard. You will be able to serve your father close by and serve your ruler afar. And you will learn many of the names of birds, beasts, grasses, and trees.” 子曰。小子、何莫 學夫詩。詩可以興、可以觀、可以群、可以怨。邇之事父、遠之事君。多識於 鳥、獸、草、木之名。 (Analects 2000: 269–270). 4 “thus to correct rights and wrongs, move heaven and earth, and stir the gods and spirits, there is nothing more useful than poetry.” 故正得失、動天地、感鬼神、莫近於詩。 (Mao Odes 2000: 11).

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with the development of a notion of literature as distinct from other kinds of writing, poetry continued to be placed at the top of a hierarchy of literary skills. For instance, Liu Xie’s Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍 (J. Bunshin chōryū; The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons; ca. 507 ce) remarks on a relatively recent distinction between two types of writing: wen 文, defined as that which has rhyme (you yun 有韻, i.e., writing that employs sound patterns), and bi 筆, defined as that which has no rhyme (wu yun 無韻). The distinction between these two categories is then further subdivided throughout the treatise into various genres, suggesting that the category of wen refers to refined literary writing, and bi to more functional or “documentary” forms of writing.5 Yet this distinction is not always clear, as the sound patterning that is such a defining feature of poetry is also present in many other types of what would normally be considered to be functional texts (Behr 2005). In both ideal and practical terms, therefore, “rhymed” language characterizes poetry as the most skillful form of literate expression, but also permeates all forms of writing to a greater or lesser degree. It is this superior ability to form rhetorical patterns to lend expression to imperial authority that made Literary Sinitic so useful, as is illustrated by a famous citation attributed to Confucius in the Zuo Zhuan 左傳 (Zuo Tradition): “Speech is used to assist sentiment, and patterning is used to assist speech. Without speech, who will know the sentiment? As for words without pattern, they will travel but will not go far.”6 As Pollock notes in the case of Sanskrit, the reason Literary Sinitic endured and became a classical language was not due to a belief in its sacred character, but rather to its literary power. Yet, if in some senses Literary Sinitic was a “cosmopolitan” language similar to Sanskrit, Latin, or Arabic, in other ways it was remarkably different. Unlike Latin, Literary Sinitic did not start out as a vernacular language that was standardized through writing and then became classical when it ceased to be spoken as a native vernacular. And unlike Sanskrit, it was not a cosmopolitan spoken language before it was ever written down. Sinographic writing originated as a system of signs and only became a written language when it developed a correspondence with speech, became formally separate from the ritual objects it was inscribed on, and moved beyond the specialized group of scribes whose task it was to record pyromantic rituals. Literary Sinitic was primarily

5 今之常言、有文有筆、以爲無韻者筆也、有韻者文也。 See quan 44 of Wenxin diao­ long (1980: 267). 6 Zuo Zhuan, Duke Xiang, 25:9. 言以足志、文以足言。不言誰知其志。言之無文、行而 不遠。 (Zuo Zhuan 2000: 1176).

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a written language, and secondarily a refined “literate speech” (wenyan 文言) derived from the reading and reciting of that written language.7 While it was essential for writing to be readily representable in the form of speech in order to facilitate the process of learning to read and write, the reverse was by no means necessary or even desirable: there was no need to represent people’s speech—in all or any of its varieties—as writing. To put it another way, anything that was written down was by definition important enough to read aloud, recite, teach, and memorize, but very little of what was spoken outside of that literate sphere was important enough to be written down. Most of what was spoken—indeed, most forms of spoken language—remained entirely outside the realm of writing. Speech that was transmitted without leaving a physical trace was subject to constant change across different geographical areas and historical periods. It was writing, and the representation of writing in the form of speech (not the reverse), that made it possible to standardize speech into a literate language that would be understood across regions and endure over time. In fact, as Saitō Mareshi argues in his chapter in this volume, it is likely that this was the primary function of early writing—to create a ceremonial form of “cultivated speech” (yayan 雅言) modeled on the Odes and on the sayings of ancient kings in the Book of Documents (Shang shu 尙書) that would serve as the cosmopolitan language of government.8 This cultivated speech was not a native vernacular language that could be learned naturally. It was a literate language that people had to learn how to read, write, and recite from books, dictionaries, and teachers. The relationship of cosmopolitan writing to both formal and colloquial vernacular forms of speech in a primarily logographic writing system such as the Sinoscript is very different from that of other writing systems. While it is certainly the case that Literary Sinitic can be adequately described as a “cosmopolitan” written language, it is difficult to find cases of vernacular languages in the sinographic sphere that are conceived as existing independently of it. Instead, what we find are vernacularized written styles that depart from Literary Sinitic to varying degrees but remain tethered to its lexical and syntactical standards.9 7 In this section I draw upon several of the arguments in Saitō Mareshi’s book Kanji sekai no chihei: watashi tachi ni totte moji to wa nanika (2014). 8 See Analects 7.18. 子所雅言、詩、書、執禮、皆雅言也。 (Analects 2000: 101). 9 John Jorgensen’s chapter in this volume discusses several examples of these vernacularized written styles, including the “recorded sayings” (yulu 語錄) of Zen monks and Neo-Confucian masters, the Dunhuang “transformation texts” (bianwen 變文), and “clerical writing” (liwen 吏文), a specialized documentary and epistolary style used by officials. All of these are styles that incorporate colloquial language. Yet it should be emphasized that this colloquial language is very rarely a demotic colloquial register. The colloquial language of clerical writing is

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Even the styles of writing that modern scholars have often described as a premodern Chinese vernacular, the styles that came to be referred to as baihua 白 話, or “plain, unadorned speech” or “plain writing,” are in effect vernacularized forms of Sinitic writing that gesture toward spoken colloquial language but do not function independently of Literary Sinitic, as Shang Wei has eloquently argued.10 There were no binary distinctions between cosmopolitan and vernacular written languages. Rather, vernacularized styles of writing that incorporated or represented colloquial forms of syntax and diction were developed along a spectrum of deviation from what at a given time was considered the standard or orthodox classical style of Literary Sinitic, without ever becoming completely independent of this standard. 2

Writing and Vernacular Reading in Japan

In some senses, the vernacularization of the Sinoscript in non-Sinitic language contexts functions in a similar way to what occurs in Sinitic contexts. Different styles of reading and writing are created through the interaction of the Sinoscript with colloquial languages and this interaction in turn works to standardize the corresponding forms of speech. An important difference, however, is that the context of non-Sinitic vernaculars, in particular that of agglutinative or inflected East Asian languages, means that Literary Sinitic itself—the orthodox cosmopolitan style of the Sinoscript—is radically vernacularized in the act of reading. This kind of reading is known as kundoku, or “reading by gloss,” a process that involves associating sinographs with vernacular words, transposing these into a vernacular word order, and adding the necessary grammatical elements to form vernacular phrases and sentences.11 Such a process is facilitated by the fact that the Sinoscript is not inherently linked to any particular language. In fact, as David Lurie notes, the Sinoscript developed as a cosmopolitan script capable of adapting and engaging with different vernacular languages. The process of reading by gloss was an extension of a practice

10

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highly technical, that of the “recorded sayings” is often stylized, and the colloquial language of transformation texts is not a representation of demotic colloquial language per se, but rather is a stylized literary gesture towards the demotic. Shang Wei refers to such forms as “written colloquial,” which he defines as “a wide range of linguistic registers dated to medieval times that gestures toward the spoken but does not actually correspond to actual speech or to any specific language or dialect” (Shang 2014: 254–296). For a fuller description of kundoku, see Lurie (2011: 175–179).

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that already existed in Sinitic reading contexts, where the words and in some cases syntax of both ancient classical and regional vernacularized texts often required glosses. To use Lurie’s words, kundoku “is less a warping of or addition to a Chinese writing system than an extension of one of the system’s fundamental engines: the addition of Japanese translations to the exegetical network’s series of synonymical equivalents” (Lurie 2011: 339). As Saitō Mareshi notes in his chapter in this volume, while on the one hand Literary Sinitic was vernacularized through kundoku reading, the courtly vernacular of the Japanese court was also “cosmopolitanized” through the reading of Literary Sinitic. For instance, the first phrase in the Analects, “to learn and at times to practice that [which one has learnt]” (學而時習之) is traditionally given the vernacular Japanese kundoku reading of manabite toki ni kore o narafu, which involves reading the sinograph 學 as the verb manabu (learn) and conjugating it to combine with the Literary Sinitic conjunction 而 in order to read 學而 as manabite (“to learn and”); reading 時 as toki (time) and supplying the vernacular temporal particle ni to form the phrase toki ni (“at times”); reading the two final graphs 習之 as narafu (“practice”) and kore (“that” [which was previously mentioned]), inverting them to follow Japanese syntax and supplying the vernacular direct object particle o, to form the phrase kore o narafu (“practice that [which one has learnt]”). In this way kundoku reading vernacularizes the phrase 學而時習之 into manabite toki ni kore o narafu. But this phrase is not a natural vernacular, since the use of the word kore to refer to the preceding action clearly derives from the Literary Sinitic usage of the graph 之. Saitō argues that this artificial vernacular created by kundoku reading thus became its own form of “cultivated speech,” and came to function as a cosmopolitan style of literate language throughout the archipelago used to read and recite Sinitic classics as well as locally produced texts written in Literary Sinitic. Just as was the case for Literary Sinitic in China, there were of course significant variations in this literate language produced by kundoku depending on its specific textual context, as well as important changes and developments over time. Although the earliest extant Japanese manuscripts with reading marks (kunten 訓点) date from the late eighth century, there is direct evidence of kundoku reading practices on mokkan wooden slips (Lurie 2011: 185–187). Extant texts from the early eighth century also contain signs of kundoku practice, as can be seen in the following passage from the first volume of the Nihon shoki 日本書紀 (Chronicles of Japan; 720), in which the god Susano-o, after having been banished from heaven, descends to the earth to the land of Izumo and helps a local deity by killing an unruly serpent:

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時素戔鳴尊乃拔所帶十握劔 、寸斬其蛇 。至尾劔刄少缺 。故割裂 其尾視之、中有一劔。此所謂草薙劔也。草薙劔、此云俱娑那伎能都留 伎。一書云、本名天叢雲劔。蓋大蛇所居之上、常有雲氣。故以名歟。至日本武 皇子、改名曰草薙劔。

素戔鳴尊曰、是神劔也。吾何敢私以安乎、乃上獻於天神也。 然後行覓將婚之處 、 遂到出雲之清地焉 。 清地 、 此云素鵝 。 乃言 曰、吾心清清之。此今呼此地曰清。於彼處建宮。或云、時武素戔鳴尊歌 之曰、夜句茂多菟　伊都毛夜覇餓岐　菟磨語昧爾　夜覇餓枳菟俱盧　贈廼夜覇 餓岐廻。 Kojima et al. 1994: 92–93

At this time the divine Susano-o immediately unsheathed the ten span long straight double-edged sword which he mightily wore and cut the serpent into pieces. When he came to the tail the sword’s blade cracked a little. So he divided and separated the tail and examined it, and there was a sword inside. This is the so-called Grass-mowing sword. Grass-mowing sword

is here called kusanagi no turugi. One book says the original name was “the Heavenly Clusters of Clouds Sword.” Perhaps it was named thus because there were always clouds and vapors around the snake. It is said that in the time of Prince Yamato the Brave it was renamed the Kusanagi Sword. The Divine Susano-o said, “This is a wondrous

sword, why would I keep it for myself?” and straightaway presented it to the Heavenly Gods. Shortly after he went in search of a place to get married and eventually reached the Fresh Region in Izumo. Fresh Region is here called Suga. Then he said, “My mind is refreshed (sugasugashi).” This is why this region is now called Suga. In that place he built a palace. One source says, “At that time the divine brave

Susano-o sang, saying, ‘Rising eight clouds / Izumo eightfold fences / to keep my wife / eightfold fences I build / ah yes those eightfold fences.’”12

The episode represents a foundational moment in the Nihon shoki mythology in which the god Susano-o descends from heaven, slays a rebellious deity, finds a marvelous sword (which will later be used by Prince Yamato Takeru to conquer the eastern and western lands), and composes the first short vernacular poem in the history of the realm of “Nihon.” My focus here, however, is on the interlinear glosses that are prefaced by the phrase “is here called” (此云) and 12 This translation and all others here are mine. The original text’s interlinear annotations are represented in a smaller font size in the citation as well as the translation and hereafter.

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spell out words and names written in Literary Sinitic by using so-called “borrowed graphs” (shakuji 借字), that is, graphs used for their sound with no regard for their meaning. In this passage, “grass mowing sword” (草薙劔) is glossed as kusanagi no turugi 俱娑那伎能都留伎 and “fresh place” (清地) as Suga 素鵝. The phrase “is here called” introduces all but a small handful of the over three hundred annotations in the Nihon shoki. There is some debate over what it means exactly. On the surface, it appears to be simply an annotation indicating how to read the preceding graphs in the context in which they appear. Thus, when the graph 清 is glossed as Suga, this also indicates that the following word 清清之 can therefore be read in the vernacular as sugasugashi. The graph 之 after 清清 is a relatively rare case in the Nihon shoki of borrowed graph usage to represent a word inflection (the adjectival ending -shi), and thus points unequivocally to the fact that the writers of the text were anticipating kundoku reading. In the context of the Nihon shoki narrative in which the words and acts of the gods and ancient emperors provide etymologies for the names of various places in the realm of Nihon, the vernacular reading of the name “Fresh Place” as Suga is explained as originating from the vernacular word sugasugashi (refreshed). It has also been suggested, however, that the graph 此 (“here”) is not an intratextual reference, but rather means “here in this land,”13 given that the formula “is here called” (此云) is also used in the Sinitic Buddhist canon when annotating Sanskrit terms, as in the following examples: 有二大徳。一名怛他掲多毱多。此云如来密。 14 There are two Great Virtues. The first is named Tathāgata-gupta. Here it is called the Hidden Thus Come One.

梵云伽佗。此云諷誦。 15 In Sanskrit it is called gātha. Here it is called recitation. Read in this way, the Nihon shoki annotations could be interpreted as being directed to a continental audience that would read the Nihon shoki in Literary Sinitic. There are, however, important differences between the two contexts. In the Sinitic Buddhist canon, the Sanskrit terms are presented in the context of 13 This was first proposed by Tsukishima Hiroshi (1963). 14 See Volume 3 of Daciensi Sanzang fashi zhuan 大慈恩寺三藏法師傳 (Biography of Tripitaka Master of the Great Ci’en Monastery), no. 2053, 240, 1: 4. 15 See Volume 33 of Renwang huguo boreboluomiduo jing shu 仁王護國般若波羅蜜多經 疏 (Humane Kings Perfection of Wisdom Sutra Commentary), no. 1709, 471, l: 29.

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a Literary Sinitic text as words that must be written by transcribing their original sounds as phonographs, and these are glossed with their Sinitic equivalents. They are presenting Sanskrit terms to a readership that can read Literary Sinitic and is familiar with Sinitic Buddhist terminology. The formula “here it is called” is thus being used in the context of the translation of Buddhist terminology between two cosmopolitan languages with a broadly established historical and geographical reach. In the Nihon shoki, the phrase appears in the rather different context of glossing certain specific Sinitic words with phonographs to represent the vernacular words that correspond to them. The significance of the phrase “here it is called” thus depends on the question of who wrote the Nihon shoki and for whom. Although variations in the styles of different volumes suggest it was written by at least two different scribes—one of whom was probably a Tang native, and the other a native of Yamato or the Korean peninsula (Mori 1999)—for the most part the Nihon shoki is written in a style consistent with orthodox Literary Sinitic. In other words, there is no doubt that the Nihon shoki is, at least ostensibly, a cosmopolitan text: it would certainly have been possible for a Tang native with no knowledge of Japanese to read the Nihon shoki in the “literate speech” of the Tang court according to the received Sinitic pronunciations of the graphs. In this case the “is here called” glosses and the sometimes unorthodox usage of sinographs would function to provide some local linguistic color to the text (as indeed would the poem by Susano-o about Izumo recorded in the variant source at the end of the passage). On the other hand, for a Yamato courtier reading the Nihon shoki, while the practical function of the glosses may have simply been to aid a vernacular kundoku reading of the text, they also point to a self-conscious attempt to establish a correspondence between Literary Sinitic and a vernacular court language that originated with the words of the gods and ancient emperors “here” in Yamato, as well as to the valorization of that vernacular court language through the implicit comparison with the writing out of Sanskrit words in Tang texts.16 3

Vernacularized Writing in Japan

The refined language of kundoku reading also gave rise to vernacularized forms of writing—the styles that are conventionally referred to by modern scholars 16

In a sense, we can perhaps think of these “is here called” notes as an early instance of the kind of formalization and ritualization of Nihon shoki kundoku reading that was carried out through the lectures on the Nihon shoki from the mid-Heian period onwards. On the Nihon shoki lectures, see Kōnoshi (2009).

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as “Variant Literary Sinitic” (hentai kanbun 変体漢文). This is a term that has often implied a negative definition of vernacularized writing as being an incorrect, impure, or incompetent form of Literary Sinitic. Due to this connotation, some scholars have abandoned the term altogether and suggested that it is more productive to think of such texts as a form of Japanese writing (Yamaguchi 2005). In my view, although the writing of Literary Sinitic in Japan sometimes did involve mistakes, there is nothing incorrect or incompetent about the deliberate transformation of Literary Sinitic through vernacularization. However, to think of vernacularized forms of Literary Sinitic simply as attempts to “write in Japanese” is both misguided and unproductive, as David Lurie, Kin Bunkyō, Saitō Mareshi, and others have shown. Here I regard such vernacularized forms as “Variant Literary Sinitic” in the more positive sense of being adapted or “optimized”—to borrow a term from David Lurie—to a vernacular context. Broadly speaking, there are three main ways in which writing can be vernacularized: 1) by syntactical rearrangement; 2) by the adapted use of certain sinographs to represent vernacular parts of speech; and 3) by using “borrowed graphs” to write words phonographically in the main text (which happens most often in citations of speech). We can see the two latter of these in the following section about Susano-o and the serpent in the Kojiki 古事記 (Records of Ancient Matters; 712), one of the earliest texts written in a self-consciously vernacularized form of Literary Sinitic. 爾、速須佐之男命、拔其所御佩之十拳劔、切散其蛇者、肥河、變血而 流 。 故 、 切其中尾時 、 御刀之刄 、 毀 。 爾 、 思怪 、 以御刀之前 、 刺割 而見者、在都牟羽之大刀。故取此大刀、思異物而、白上於天照大 御神也 。 是者 、 草那藝之大刀也 。 那藝二字以音 。　 故是以 、 其速須 佐之男命 、 宮可造作之地 、 求出雲國 。 爾 、 到坐須賀 此二字以音下 效此 。 地而 、 詔之 、 吾 、 來此地 、 我御心 、 須賀須賀斯而 、 其地作宮 坐。故、其地者、於今云須賀也。 Yamaguchi and Kōnoshi 1997: 70–72

And so the divine Haya-Susano-o unsheathed his ten-span long sword that he mightily wore and hacked that dragon to pieces until the Hi River’s flow was transformed into blood. Then, when he cut off the middle tail, the blade of his mighty sword cracked. And so he thought this was very strange and with the point of the sword he pushed in and opened up and when he looked there was a tumupa [folded blade?] great sword. Then he took this great sword and thinking it a wonderful thing he offered it up to the Great Mighty Goddess Amaterasu. This was the great sword Kusanagi

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草那藝. Take the two graphs 那藝 for their sound. Then after this, that divine Susanoo sought in the land of Izumo for a place where a palace could be built. And so he arrived in a place called Suga Take these two graphs for their sound and follow this below. and proclaimed, “I, having come to this place, feel my mighty heart refreshed (sugasugashi),” and in that place he built his palace and dwelled there. Thus, that place is now called Suga.

At first sight this text does not look very different from a text written in a Sinitic language context, given that on the whole, syntactical order is consistent with Literary Sinitic, and often requires an elaborate reordering of the graphs of the text to produce a vernacular reading. Such is the case, for instance with the gloss on Suga, in which the conjunctive 而 at the end has to be reunited with the honorific verb 到坐 at the beginning to form the reading itarimasite “arrived and”: 到坐須賀此二字以音下效此。地而… 須賀此の二字、音を以てす。下此れに効ふ。といふ地に到り坐して… Suga kono niji, oto wo mote su. Sita kore ni sitagafu. to ifu tokoro ni itarimasite So he arrived in a place called Suga (take these two graphs for their sound and follow this below) and … However, there are numerous lexical peculiarities, starting with the honorific marker 御 for nouns such as (mi-kokoro 御心) or “mighty heart,” and verbs such as (mi-hakaseru 御佩) or “mightily wore,” that refer to actions and objects belonging to Susano-o, and the usage of the graph for “sit” (坐) to write the supplementary honorific verb masu. The second lexical oddity is the unusual use of the graph 爾 (translated here as “and so”), which appears three times in the brief passage. In its orthodox Literary Sinitic usage, the graph 爾 has numerous different senses, among which the most common are 1) as a secondperson pronoun (similar to 汝), 2) as a demonstrative pronoun (“this,” “that,” etc.), or 3) as an adverbial meaning “in this way,” or “thus.” In the Kojiki passage above it is clearly being used in the third of these senses, in a similar way to the graph 然. However, in Literary Sinitic 爾 is generally used in the middle of a sentence, not by itself to begin a statement, as it is here. One interesting suggestion (Sema 2000) is that this usage may derive from the kundoku reading of binomes such as er nai 爾乃, er ji 爾即, er ze 爾則, or er qi 爾其, which are often used as conjunctions to begin sentences in fu 賦 rhapsodies (the Nihon shoki also uses the phrase 爾乃 in this way on at least three occasions). According to this view, the kundoku reading of the two graphs 爾乃 as two words—for

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instance, as sikasite sunahati—would have led to the independent usage of the first graph 爾 to write the conjunction sikasite. In other words, this would be a case of what David Lurie refers to as the “reversible” aspect of kundoku that can produce new literate idioms through vernacular reading (Lurie 2011: 180). The third non-orthodox aspect of the passage is the presence of words written with “borrowed graphs,” that is, graphs used with no relation to their meaning to represent the sound of a word, such as the obscure term tumupa 都牟 羽 (meaning perhaps “folded blade”) to describe Susano-o’s sword. This use of “borrowed graphs” to write non-Sinitic words is of course an essential feature of Literary Sinitic. However, in this case the word is not annotated (as one would expect it to be in a text created in a Sinitic-language context). Whether the term was a familiar one to its contemporary audience, or alternatively, a deliberate archaicism meant to suggest that the speech of ancient times cannot be adequately represented by Literary Sinitic, there is no question that the Kojiki represents itself as a text that should be vocalized in the vernacular language of the Yamato court. If we compare the Kojiki interlinear gloss on the name of the sword Kusanagi with the Nihon shoki gloss, we see that the word Kusanagi is written in a mixture of logographs and phonographs as 草那藝, whereas in the Nihon shoki the name was written entirely in logographs as 草薙 and the gloss in phonographs as 俱娑那伎. This is typical of how the Kojiki text uses phonographs in the main text for an uncommon word whose precise pronunciation it wants to emphasize (nagi), but sees no need to do so for a common graph with an unequivocal reading like 草 (kusa). In the case of the place name Suga, whereas in the Nihon shoki it was written logographically as 清地 in the main text and annotated with phonographs as 素鵝, in the Kojiki Suga is written in phonographs as 須 賀 in the main text with an accompanying gloss indicating that these graphs should be read as phonographs and not for their meaning. The presence of such interlinear glosses in the Kojiki indicates that reading graphs for their Sinitic sounds is an exception to the general rule that graphs throughout the text should be read for their meaning, that is, with the vernacular words that correspond to them. The Kojiki is thus a text that is primarily intended to be read in the vernacular language of the Yamato court—it is not an ostensibly “cosmopolitan” text like the Nihon shoki.17 Another aspect of the Kojiki that marks it as decidedly different from orthodox Literary Sinitic is its naïve style of narration characterized by limited vocabulary and repetitive conjunctions, such as “And so … and so” (爾…爾…), 17

For more on the stylistic differences between the Nihon shoki and Kojiki, see Lurie (2011: 213–253).

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or “Then … then” (故…故…). Its unsophisticated style has been traditionally attributed to the fact that the Kojiki claims to be a recording of ancient oral narratives. However, as Kōnoshi Takamitsu (2007) has shown, the Kojiki is very much a literary text through and through. The naïve style is not a remnant of a pre-existing oral narration, but rather a self-conscious and deliberate evoking of oral narration as a literary strategy to legitimize the text. This is the case with the repeated use of the graph 其 (“his,” “that,” etc.), which appears no less than six times in the passage above, in some cases used in a manner consistent with orthodox Literary Sinitic, but in others simply as a kind of refrain to gesture towards oral narrative. In Kōnoshi’s view, the Kojiki represents a conscious attempt to carve out an idealized vernacular space of writing that sets itself apart from Literary Sinitic and the kind of cultural authority it represents. He thus refers to the style of the Kojiki as “non-Sinitic writing” (非漢文) (Kōnoshi 2007: 28–35). Although I largely agree with the main point of Kōnoshi’s argument, I find his term “non-Sinitic” somewhat confusing, given that as Kōnoshi himself acknowledges, the Kojiki relies upon the rules of Literary Sinitic in order to be read. Moreover, even in phrases in which the Kojiki text uses phonographs to represent vernacular words, it still retains forms of the grammar of Literary Sinitic that have no function or counterpart in a vernacular reading. A telling example of this is the following phrase from the beginning of the Kojiki, describing the creation of the earth: 次國椎如浮脂而、久羅下那州多陀用弊琉之時、琉字以上十字以音。 如葦牙因萌騰之物成神名 、 宇麻志阿斯訶備比古遲神 。 此神名以 音 。 次天之常立神 。 訓常云登許訓立云多知 。 此二柱神亦並獨神成坐 而、隠身也。 Yamaguchi and Kōnoshi 1997: 28

Next, when the earth was young, resembling floating oil and drifting like a jellyfish, take the ten graphs above and inclusive of 琉 for their sound something like reed shoots sprouted forth and became the god whose name was the god Umasi asikabihiko. Take this god’s name for its sound. Next was the god Heavenly Eternally Standing God. Read “Eternally” by saying toko, read “Standing” by saying tati. These two gods came into being as single gods, and concealed their bodies. Even as the phrase “when drifting like a jellyfish” (kurage nasu tadayoheru toki) is written in phonographs as 久羅下那州多陀用弊琉之時, thus suggesting that it has no suitable equivalent in Literary Sinitic, it still retains a deliberate link

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to Literary Sinitic syntax by using the attributive 之 before 時 (toki), which is entirely superfluous in the vernacular reading.18 This suggests that the Kojiki style is only “non-Sinitic” in certain formal and stylistic aspects. A more exact way to think of it is as a kind of “variant” Literary Sinitic that has been selfconsciously adapted for vernacular reading. It departs both formally and stylistically from Literary Sinitic while remaining attached to its lexical and syntactical framework. If there is an unequivocally “non-Sinitic” vernacular discursive space within the Kojiki, it is in the passage immediately following Susano-o’s killing of the dragon and building of his palace in Suga, when he recites the first song in the Kojiki: 茲大神、初作須賀宮之時、自其地雲立騰。爾、作御歌。其歌曰、 yakumo

tatu

Idumo

yapegaki

tumagomi

ni

yapegaki

tukuru

sono

夜久毛多都　伊豆毛夜弊賀岐　都麻碁微爾　夜弊賀岐都久流　曾能 yapegaki

wo

夜弊賀岐袁 於是、喚其足名椎神、告言、汝者任我宮之首。 Yamaguchi and Kōnoshi 1997: 72

Then when the great god first built the Suga Palace, there were some clouds rising over the region. And so he composed a song. The song said: Rising eight clouds / Izumo eightfold fences / to keep my wife / eightfold fences I build / ah yes those eightfold fences. He then summoned the god Ashinazuchi and spoke to him saying, “You will be the steward of my palace.” Like all of the poems in the Kojiki (and indeed in the Nihon shoki) Susano-o’s song is written entirely in phonographs. The equivalent of this notation in the Sinitic Buddhist canonical texts that annotate Sanskrit words are the dhārāṇi, the sacred spells that cannot be represented in Literary Sinitic because their efficacy depends on the exact pronunciation of their sounds. These are, therefore, the definition of a language and writing that is “non-Sinitic”: that which will not retain its meaning when represented logographically. In the case of both the Kojiki and Nihon shoki, while the words of the gods and the ancient rulers can be written in Literary Sinitic and can be read through kundoku in a formal vernacular, the songs are distinguished from the prose text by their phonographic notation. In the space of the kundoku reading of either text, the separation between prose and poems is not so great: the language of the kundoku reading of the prose sections and the language of the poems may belong 18

This was pointed out by Enomoto (2000), in the context of a different argument.

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to different registers, but both fall within the continuum of the vernacular language in which the texts are being read. But in the space of the written text, the phonographic notation of the poems sets them apart from the Literary Sinitic text of the Nihon shoki, or the Variant Literary Sinitic text of the Kojiki, and marks them as a ritual performance of an explicitly non-Sinitic vernacular recitation. 4

The Writing of Vernacular Poetry

In one sense, the all-phonograph writing of poetry appears to represent the establishment of an alternative poetic sphere and a powerful statement of independence from Literary Sinitic. It is necessary to emphasize, however, that the all-phonograph notation of uta in the Kojiki and Nihon shoki is a deliberate choice and a strategy of those texts. Uta do not have to be written in such a non-Sinitic phonographic style, as we know from the Man’yōshū 万葉 集 (Collection of Myriad Ages), where they are often written logographically. Moreover, even in cases where the text seeks to reproduce an exact vocalization of the poem, there are alternatives to all-phonographic notation. Later histories such as Shoku Nihongi 続日本紀 (Chronicles of Japan Continued; 797) and Nihon kōki 日本後紀 (Later Chronicles of Japan), for instance, use all-phonograph notation for tanka 短歌 poems, but write poems with irregular meter (including chōka 長歌) in senmyō 宣命 style,19 a form of inscription named after imperial edicts that uses interlinear phonographs to supplement a primarily logographic text in order to ensure that a specific vocal rendering could be reproduced in a precise manner from the written text. The earliest example of this form of notation is Monmu’s 文武 (r. 697–707) senmyō of accession at the very beginning of the Shoku Nihongi, dated the seventeenth day of the eighth month of 697, which begins as follows: 現御神止大八嶋國所知天皇大命良麻止詔大命乎、集侍皇子 等、王等，百官人等、天下公民、諸聞食止詔。 Aoki et al. 1989: 2–5

To the great command of the heavenly sovereign who rules the Great Land of Eight Islands as a manifest god, those who are gathered to serve, princes, lords, hundreds of officials, and subjects of all under heaven, let all of you listen. 19

On the writing of waka poetry in the context of histories written in Literary Sinitic, see Inui (2006).

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The text is written in Sinitic logographs but is vernacularized through syntactical rearrangement and interlinear phonographs indicating the precise vernacular parts of speech (particles, auxiliary verbs) that should be added to the kundoku reading of the logographic text in order to produce the exact words of the sovereign. This is a case where both the exact vocalization of the text and the semantic overtones of the sinographs with their connection to the authority of Literary Sinitic are essential parts of the efficacy of the edict.20 The long poems collected in imperial histories, which usually celebrate the ritual and political authority of the sovereign, are written in senmyō-style for similar reasons: in order to record the words of the sovereign while visibly displaying the vocabulary of government that is embedded in Sinitic writing. The issue of logographic versus phonographic writing is much more complex in the Man’yōshū, where six out of twenty volumes are written primarily in phonographic style (volumes 5, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20), thirteen out of twenty (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16) in logographic style, and one volume (19) in a mixture of the two styles. The fact that, with the single exception of volume 19, all the other volumes in the Man’yōshū (MYS) can be clearly characterized as primarily phonographic or primarily logographic suggests that this choice was made during the compilation of each volume, rather than at the moment of composition or copying of each individual poem (Inui 2005). This is also suggested by a number of instances in which the same poem appears in both kinds of volumes, written logographically in one and phonographically in the other. Such is the case with the following poem, one of four in the initial sequence of “Old Poems” (koka 古歌) in the Silla envoy sequence in Volume 15 (a phonographic volume) that is cited from Kakinomoto no Hitomaro’s 柿本 人麻呂 “Eight Poems on Travel” (Kiryoka hasshu 羈旅歌八首) from volume 3 (a logographic volume).21 The later poem (MYS 15:3608) has tweaked the last line of the earlier poem (MYS 3:255): MYS 3:255

amazakaru pina no nagati yu

天 離　夷之長道従 kopi kure ba akasi no to yori

戀 来者　自明 門 Yamatosima miyu

倭 嶋所見

ipe no atari miyu

一本云　家門 當見由

On the long road far from heaven through wilderness I come longing when from the Akashi Pass I see the Isle of Yamato One book says “I see the place of my home”

20 On senmyō, see Lurie (2011: 250–253). 21 For a detailed analysis of the Silla sequence, see Horton (2012).

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MYS 15:3608

amazakaru

hina no



kopikureba

akasi

175

nagati wo

安麻射可流　比奈乃奈我道乎 On the long road far from heaven through wilderness no to yori

孤悲久礼婆　安可思能門欲里 I come longing when from the Akashi Pass ipe no

atari

mi yu

伊敝乃安多里見由 柿本朝臣人麻呂歌曰 Yamatosima mi yu

夜麻等思麻見由

I see the place of my home

Kakinomoto no Asomi Hitomaro’s poem says “I see the Isle of Yamato”

The reading of the two poems is identical except for the last measure, which reads Yamato shima miyu (I see the Isle of Yamato) in the first poem and ipe no atari miyu (I see the place of my home) in the second. Interestingly, each of the versions quotes the alternative version in the other volume, but does so according to the notation style of the volume in which the note is written. Thus in volume 3, the alternative last measure ipe no atari miyu, which is written as 伊敝乃安多里見由 in volume 15, is rewritten logographically as 家門當 見由. Similarly, in volume 15, the alternative last measure Yamato shima miyu, written originally as 倭嶋所見 in volume 3, is rewritten phonographically as 夜 麻等思麻見由. The poem in volume 3 (天離夷之長道従戀来者自明門伊敝乃安多里見由) is written in a highly vernacularized form of Literary Sinitic. That is to say, the graphs for nouns, verbs, and adjectives are all designed to be read in kundoku as words that correspond to their Sinitic definitions. On the whole the use of particles or “empty words” follows the usage of Literary Sinitic: 之 as a modifier, 従 meaning “by way of,” 自 meaning “from,” and 所 making the verb following it into a passive (“can be seen”). The graph 者, often used in Literary Sinitic to generalize a statement, is vernacularized here in the phrase 戀来者 to indicate a specific event. Given that it is a poem, the overall word order follows a vernacular Japanese syntax, but at the level of simple phrases, such as 自明門 or 所 見, the order is still recognizable as that of Literary Sinitic. The variant line 家門 當見由 (ipe no atari miyu) is also written in vernacularized Literary Sinitic, but uses the graph 由 (yu) as a supplementary phonograph following the graph 見 (“to see”) to make the passive miyu. By contrast, the poem in volume 15 (安麻射可流比奈乃奈我道乎孤悲久礼婆 　安可思能門欲里伊敝乃安多里見由) is written entirely in phonographs that have no relation to the meaning of the poem. At least ostensibly, this style of inscription gestures towards a literary language that is “non-Sinitic.” There are, however, a couple of subtle but significant exceptions. The first is the

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conventional playful writing of kopi (longing) with graphs pronounced as ko-pi that mean “alone and sad” (孤悲).22 This does not affect the vocalization of the poem but it introduces shades of meaning based on the Sinitic definitions of the graphs into the written form of the poem that other graphs (say, 故非) would not. The second exception to the phonographic notation of the poem is the word miyu (appear/can be seen) at the end of the poem, which is written as 見由, exactly the same way as it was in the variant to the poem in volume 3. The graph 見 can function as a vernacular phonograph (i.e., a graph used for its kun reading without regard to its meaning), but in the phrase miyu its use is clearly logographic. The choice of logographic or phonographic inscription is thus not an absolute one. Poems are written in a style that is primarily, not exclusively, one or the other: throughout the Man’yōshū, poems written logographically regularly employ phonographs both to supplement logographic writing and to write entire words, and the poems in phonographic volumes are often interspersed with logographs. The writing of poetry thus occurs in the space between two ideals: that of logographic inscription, the most orthodox form of which is Literary Sinitic, and that of phonographic inscription, which represents itself as an “other” to orthodox Sinitic writing. Thus, if the phonographic writing of poetry is an ostensible claim to represent a language that is non-Sinitic, logographic writing makes it possible for poems to establish a direct connection to Sinitic poetic diction, as is clearly illustrated by the case of the following poem (MYS 8:1606), attributed (in all likelihood apocryphally) to Lady Nukata 額田王: 額田王思近江天皇作歌一首 kimi matu to

a ga kopiwore ba

君 待跡　吾 戀居者 wa ga yado no sudare ugokasi

我 屋戸乃　簾 令動 aki no kaze puku

秋之風 吹23

A poem composed by Lady Nukata thinking of the Ōmi Heavenly Sovereign As I await while longing for my lord the bamboo blinds of my room are moved by blowing autumn wind

Except for the phonographic use of 跡 to write the conditional particle to and of 乃 to write the attributive particle no, this poem is written in a form of 22 23

This is a conventional graph play that appears another twenty-one times in the phonographic volumes, and six times in the context of logographic poems. The poem also appears as MYS 4:488, written slightly differently: 君待登吾戀居者我屋 戸之簾動之秋風吹.

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vernacularized Literary Sinitic. The motif of a waiting woman mistaking the wind moving the blinds for her lover having arrived is one that appears in Six Dynasties poetry, as illustrated by the following line from a “Wu voice song” (呉声歌) called “The Hua Shan Suburbs” (華山畿) in volume 46 (in the “Pure Tones Songs” [清商曲辞] section) of the Yuefu shiji 樂府詩集 (Collected Songs of the Music Bureau): 夜相思 風吹窗簾動 言是所歡來。

At night as I think of him, The wind blows and my window blinds move. Say, does this mean to my delight that he has come?

We do not know whether the author of the Nukata poem had in mind the precise line in this song, “the wind blows and my window blinds move” (風吹 窗簾動), which would be rendered in kundoku reading something like kaze no mado wo pukite sudare ugoku, when he composed the measures “the blinds of my room are moved by the blowing autumn wind” (sudare ugokashi aki no kaze puku 簾令動秋之風吹). But there is little doubt that both the two written phrases and their possible kundoku renderings resemble each other enough not only to say that they are written and can be read in the same “language,” but also that the Nukata poem is conceived as being part of the same broader poetic language. There is a sense, therefore, in which the reading of tanka poems that are written logographically can be conceived of as a kundoku reading of a vernacularized Literary Sinitic text that has to adhere to a 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic pattern. This is certainly the case in the following poem, in the voice of a man expressing his affection to a woman (“sister” is a term of endearment for a lover) in somewhat dramatic terms: MYS 11:2377

nani semu ni inoti tugikemu

何 為 　命 継

wagimoko ni kopisenu saki ni

吾 妹

不戀 前

sinamasi mono wo

For what reason have I continued living? with you, sister before I fell in love

死 物

I wish that I had died

This poem is marked in the Man’yōshū as originating from the “Kakinomoto Asomi Hitomaro Poetry Collection.”24 Poems from the Hitomaro Collection tend to be written in an extremely sparse logographic style, either with very 24

This poem is also discussed in Lurie (2011).

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few supplementary phonographs and particles, or with practically none, as is the case here.25 As such, they present something of a paradox: if vernacular poetry is by definition a form of writing that requires a precise vocalization, why do these poems eschew the use of supplementary phonographs in a way that seems to deliberately resist any clear correspondence with a vocal performance? There is no doubt that the string of graphs 何為命継吾妹不戀前死物 represents a highly vernacularized form of sinographic writing, even if phrases such as 何為 or 不戀前 are perfectly understandable according to the lexical and syntactic rules of Literary Sinitic. However, except for the final graph 物, which represents the emphatic particle mono wo, the only vernacularizing strategy the poem uses is syntactic reordering, which helps the reader follow the overall sense of the poem, but does not provide any explicit guidance on how to vocalize it. Nevertheless, knowing that this is a tanka poem with five measures allows us to break up the string of graphs into five units, 1) 何為, 2) 命継, 3) 吾 妹, 4) 不戀前, 5) 死物, which we can then attempt to read in kundoku style as five phrases with an ear to recreating a 5-7-5-7-7 pattern. For instance, the first phrase 何為 is usually read in the Man’yōshu as nani semu ni. We know this in large part thanks to other poems in the collection where the phrase is written either with supplementary phonographs as 何為牟尓 (16:3886) or entirely in phonographs as 奈尓世武尓 (5:803). These three options, those of writing nani semu ni in simple Literary Sinitic as 何為, in Literary Sinitic with supplementary phonographs as 何為牟尓, or entirely in phonographs as 奈尓世武尓, summarize the choices available to a late seventh- or eighth-century poet. Written as 何為, the phrase exists in the same linguistic world as the Analects, in which Confucius asks “For what reason should he do so?” (何為其然也) when Zai Wo suggests to him that a benevolent man can be fooled into going down a well if told that someone has fallen in.26 It is only its context in a poem that prevents us from reading it in other ways (the traditional kundoku reading of 何為 in the Analects is nani sure). The phrase 何為牟尓, on the other hand, retains the connection to Literary Sinitic by keeping the graphs 何為, but adds the supplementary phonographs mu 牟 and ni 尓, to ensure that the phrase is interpreted as corresponding exactly to the specific vernacular reading nani semu ni. By contrast, the all-phonographic phrase 奈尓世武尓 represents itself as part of a vernacular language that exists beyond or outside the world of Literary Sinitic. 25

For a detailed study of the issues and debates over the Hitomaro Collection, see Lurie (2004). 26 See Analects (2000: 89).

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It is important to note, however, that there is nothing straightforward about this reading: for instance, the slight addition to 何為 of the graph 而 to make 何為而 (MYS 7:1222) produces a phrase with the similar meaning but very different vocalization of ika ni shite, also attested in phonographs as 伊可尓思弖. Reading these phrases as verse measures thus requires several levels of expertise: 1) competence in Literary Sinitic and of kundoku reading; 2) previous knowledge of the conventions of vernacular poetic language; and 3) an ability to interpret the correspondences between 1) and 2). The problem of readability is exemplified further by the second and fourth phrases of the poem above, which can potentially be read in a number of different ways. The graphs 命継 can be read as inoti tugikemu (“have I continued living”), inoti pa tugamu (“do I continue living”), or inoti tuginamu (“should I continue living”), whereas 不戀前 can be read as kopi senu saki ni (“before I fell in love”), kopizaru saki ni (“before falling in love”), or kopinu saki ni mo (“before ever falling in love”). Given the fact that neither 命継 nor 不戀前 appear as phrases anywhere else in the Man’yōshū, it is clear that reading this poem requires more than just knowledge of kundoku reading and of the 5-7-5-7-7 pattern and conventional poetic diction of vernacular poetry. One can think of several possibilities here: were the poems written for readers who had previous knowledge of the poems? Or were they written to test aesthetic competence—given multiple possible readings, which is the one that produces the “best” poem? Or, alternatively, was the text designed to leave some of the final touches of the poem—the modal and aspectual nuances—to its readers, who could thus adopt the voice of the poem as their own? In any case, all of these possibilities imply the existence of an established vernacular poetic language and a group of literate people with sufficient competence either to memorize the poems beforehand or to deduce how to vocalize them from a text that does not provide explicit instructions on how to do so. As I have noted elsewhere, this poetic language was not a natural or spontaneous vernacular. It was a form of the literate Sinified language of the Yamato court that included neologisms produced through the kundoku reading of Literary Sinitic and thus existed within a common linguistic space together with the language in which Sinitic classical texts were read. At the same time, however, it was versified according to strict phonological features of the Yamato court vernacular and further stylized to deliberately avoid Sinoxenic vocabulary (words originating from on readings of sinographs), and moreover to include archaizing epithets (so-called pillow-phrases such as amazakaru, or “far from heaven,” in MYS 3:255/15:3608 cited earlier). Thus, even as it existed in a continuum with the linguistic space with Literary Sinitic, the vernacular

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poetry known as uta consciously adopted what in the context of the Sinified literate language of the Yamato court was in effect an artificially “non-Sinitic” sound (Duthie 2014: 203–222). The complex relationship between vernacular poetry and Literary Sinitic is perhaps expressed most articulately in volume 5 of the Man’yōshū, which was probably the earliest phonographic volume to be compiled, and is also the volume that contains the longest Literary Sinitic prose sections in the entire anthology. The example I cite here is the first poem in volume 5, attributed to Ōtomo no Tabito 大伴旅人 (665–731), MYS 5:793: 大宰帥大伴卿、報凶問歌一首 禍故重疊、凶問累集。永懐崩心之悲、獨流断腸之泣。但、依兩君大 助、傾命纔継耳。筆不盡言古今所歎。

The Governor of Dazaifu Lord Ōtomo, a poem in response to receiving sad news: Ill fortune piles up, and sad news accumulates. Utterly full of heartbreaking grief, all I can do is shed gut-wrenching tears. It is only with the help of you two lords that I have managed to continue living. The fact that my brush cannot express my words is a lament both old and new.

yo no na ka pa

munasiki

siru

iyoyo

mono to

余能奈可波　牟奈之伎母乃等 toki si

masumasu

志流等伎子　伊与余麻須万須

kanasikarikeri

加奈之可利家理 神龜五年六月二十三日

Now that I know that living in this world is worth nothing, the sadness that I feel increases all the more Fifth year of Jinki, sixth month, twenty-third day.

Judging by the headnote, the context of the poem appears to be a letter. The phonographic style in which the poem is written contrasts explicitly with the preface, which is written in Literary Sinitic parallel prose style. The poem that follows this, Yamanoue no Okura’s 山上憶良 famous Nihon banka 日本挽歌 (“Japan-style elegy”) on the death of Tabito’s wife (which is probably the “sad news” alluded to in the preface of Tabito’s poem above) is preceded by a long preface in Literary Sinitic and a Sinitic poem on the same theme. The self-conscious parallel drawn throughout Volume 5 between the realm of Sinitic poetry and Literary Sinitic on the one hand and the local realm of vernacular poetry on the other, is often articulated explicitly in the terminology used in the headnotes and prefaces to the

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poems. Volume 5 includes the earliest instance of the term waka 倭歌27 (in the headnote to 5:876) as a term meaning “Yamato song” to refer to a vernacular poetry that is explicitly defined as an equivalent to the cosmopolitan style of Sinitic poetry (C. shi 詩). Similarly, in the preface to the famous plum blossom sequence (5:815–846) the term tan’ei 短詠, or “short recitation,” a synonym for tanka, is explicitly contrasted with shi 詩, and in the Matsura River sequence (5:853–863) vernacular poems are referred to in headnotes as 歌, but also on occasions as 詩.28 As this terminology suggests, the vernacular poetic world of uta in volume 5 of the Man’yōshū is represented as a parallel universe devoted to similar themes as Sinitic poetry, with Tabito, Okura, and their circle inhabiting both the cosmopolitan and vernacular realms at the same time, and moving back and forth between them as they juxtapose them. Yamato song (waka 倭歌) was thus formed as a new geo-cultural space both distinct from and yet still part of the larger literary world defined by Literary Sinitic. It could exist in a continuum with Sinitic poetry and tap into the political and cultural authority of the most refined and patterned forms of Literary Sinitic, while at the same time carving out the fantasy of a discrete vernacular realm. In this sense, we can perhaps think of Yamato song as something akin to what Sheldon Pollock refers to as a “cosmopolitan vernacular,” insofar as it was a prestige literary language of the imperial court that became transregional within the Japanese islands but did not travel beyond the shores of the Japanese realm. In the Man’yōshū, however, this courtly vernacular language only exists in the form of poetry—it does not extend to the prose contexts or annotations on the poems, all of which are written in the cosmopolitan language of Literary Sinitic. In other words, both the literary vernacular itself, and the juxtaposition and mingling of the vernacular and Sinitic cultural realms that would later be referred to as wakan 和漢, were first developed as exclusively poetic styles of language. It was only later, with the development of cursive kana writing in the Heian period, that the literary vernacular gradually expanded from the poems

27

From the Heian period onwards the word waka was usually written as 和歌. However, in the Man’yōshū 和歌 is a term meaning “a poem in response” (and is given the vernacular reading of kotauru uta), whereas waka in the sense of “Japanese poetry” is written as 倭歌, with the earlier graph for “Japan” (倭). Even after the adoption of the graph 和 to mean “Japan” in the eighth century, both graphs continued to be used interchangeably until the mid-Heian period. 28 This terminology is primarily a feature of volume 5, but it also appears later in the Man’yōshū, such as in the preface to MYS 17:3967 where there appears the phrase 垂倭詩, or “tracing Yamato poems,” which also indicates an equivalence between Sinitic poetry and uta.

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themselves to their narrative, epistolary, and biographical contexts, thus giving rise to the first ostensibly non-Sinitic vernacular genres of literary prose.29 References Analects. 2000. Lunyu zhushu [Commentaries and Explanations to the Analects]. Shisanjing zhushu [Commentaries and Explanations to the Thirteen Classics]. Volume 23. Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe. Aoki Kazuo, et al. 1989–1998. Shoku Nihongi [Chronicles of Japan Continued]. SNKBT 12–16. Tōkyō: Iwanami shoten. Behr, Wolfgang. 2005. “Three sound-correlated text structuring devices in pre-Qín philosophical prose.” Bochumer Jahrbuch für Ostasiatische Forschung 29: 15–34. Duthie, Torquil. 2014. Man’yōshū and the Imperial Imagination in Early Japan. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. Enomoto Fukuju. 2000. “Kojiki no ‘si’ no jissō o ou” [An Inquiry into the True Nature of the graph 之 in the Kojiki]. In Jōdaigo to hyōki [Early Language and Inscription], edited by Nishimiya Kazutami, 199–225. Tokyo: Ōfū. Horton, H. Mack. 2012. Traversing the Frontier: The Man’yōshū Account of a Japanese Mission to Silla in 736–737. Boston: Harvard University Asia Center. Inui Yoshihiko. 2005. “Man’yōshū kanagaki uta maki ron josetsu” [A Preliminary Theory on the Kana Volumes of the Man’yōshū]. Ōsaka joshi daigaku kiyō (March): 61–70. Inui Yoshihiko. 2006. “Kodai uta hyōki no ichitenkai: kanbunchū no uta no kisai hōhō o megutte” [One Aspect of the Development of Ancient Poetry Inscription: Methods of Writing Poetry in the Context of Kanbun Texts]. Gengo bunkagaku kenkyū (March): 55–66. Kojima Noriyuki, et al. 1994–1998. Nihon shoki [Chronicles of Japan]. SNKZ 2–5. Tōkyō: Shōgakukan. Kōnoshi Takamitsu. 2007. Kanbun tekisuto to shite no Kojiki [Kojiki as a Kanbun Text]. Tōkyō: Tōkyō daigaku shuppankai. Kōnoshi Takamitsu. 2009. Hensō sareru Nihon shoki [Historical Variations on the Nihon shoki]. Tōkyō: Tōkyō daigaku shuppankai. Lurie, David B. 2004. “On the Inscription of the Hitomaro Poetry Collection.” Man’yōshū kenkyū 26. Tōkyō: Hanawa shobō. 29

Needless to say, the key word here is “ostensibly.” Even as these genres—diaries and tales written in cursive kana—were written in styles that eschewed certain linguistic forms used in the increasingly formalized kundoku readings of Literary Sinitic, they featured many syntactical and lexical forms that originally derived from kundoku reading and had become naturalized into the literate court vernacular.

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Lurie, David B. 2011. Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Mair, Victor. 1994. “Buddhism and the Rise of Written Vernaculars in East Asia: The Making of National Languages.” Journal of Asian Studies 53(3): 707–751. Mao Odes. 2000. Maoshi zhengyi [Correct Meanings of the Mao Odes]. Shisanjing zhushu [Commentaries and Explanations to the Thirteen Classics]. Volume 4. Beijing daxue chubanshe. Mori Hiromichi. 1999. Nihon shoki no nazo o toku: josakusha wa dare ka [Explaining the Puzzle of the Nihon shoki: Who Were Its Writers?]. Tōkyō: Chūkō shinsho. Pollock, Sheldon. 2006. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Saitō Mareshi. 2014. Kanji sekai no chihei: Watashi tachi ni totte moji to wa nani ka [Horizons of the Sinographic World: What Is Writing to Us?]. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. Sema Masayuki. 2000. “Kojiki ‘ji’ sairon.” [Revisiting the graph 爾 in the Kojiki]. In Jōdaigo to hyōki [Early Language and Inscription], edited by Nishimiya Kazutami, 365–377. Tokyo: Ōfū. Shang, Wei. 2014. “Writing and Speech: Rethinking the Issue of Vernaculars in Early Modern China.” In Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919, edited by Benjamin A. Elman, 254–301. Leiden: Brill. Stewart, William A. 1968. “A Sociolinguistic Typology for Describing National Multilingualism.” In Readings in the Sociology of Language, edited by Joshua A. Fishman, 531–545. The Hague: Mouton. Tsukishima Hiroshi. 1963. Heian jidai no kanbun kundokugo ni tsuite no kenkyū [Research on Kanbun Kundoku in the Heian Period]. Tōkyō: Tōkyō daigaku shuppankai. Wenxin diaolong [The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons]. 1980. Edited by Wang Liqi. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe. Yamaguchi Yoshinori. 2005. Kojiki no hyōgen to kaishaku [Language and Meaning in the Kojiki]. Tōkyō: Kazama shobō. Yamaguchi Yoshinori, and Kōnoshi Takamitsu. 1997. Kojiki [Records of Ancient Matters]. SNKZ 1. Tōkyō: Shōgakukan. Zuo Zhuan. 2000. Chunqiu Zuo zhuan Zhengyi [Zuo Tradition on the Spring and Autumn Annals]. Shisanjing zhushu [Commentaries and Explanations to the Thirteen Classics]. Vol. 18. Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe.

PART 2 Medieval and Early Modern Cases from China, Japan, and Vietnam

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Chapter 6

Secondary Cosmopolitan Language(s): Non-literary Chinese and Its Use in Pre-modern Korea John Jorgensen 1

Introduction

Literary Sinitic (C. wenyan 文言) became the cosmopolitan language of all East Asia as states began to form on the periphery of China. Han Chinese settlers introduced Literary Sinitic into Manchuria and the northern Korean Peninsula from as early as 85 ce (Hŏ 1984: 1; Gardiner 1969: 21). This written language spread south to the Korean kingdom of Paekche by 369 ce (Hŏ 1984: 3). It probably reached Japan soon thereafter, and it had been present in northern Vietnam (the Red River valley and delta) from the Han dynasty when this area was settled by Han Chinese (Holmgren 1980). Literary Sinitic fits Sheldon Pollock’s definition of a cosmopolitan language. It was literary, “available across region, ethnie, sect, and time,” but was not tied to any specific place or people. It was dominant over the other languages in the regions of its use, and had a political dimension; that is, it was used by courts and ruling elites (Pollock 2006: 12–14, 100–101). To take a term from the Lunyu 論語 (Analects), Literary Sinitic was “this culture of ours” (C. siwen 斯文). Therefore, it was not simply a language, but a core cultural code. Because of its cultural prestige, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese and Vietnamese continued to write in Literary Sinitic well into the twentieth century, with Yi Nŭnghwa 李能和 (1869–1943), for example, publishing his three-volume Chosŏn pulgyo t’ongsa 朝鮮佛教通史 (Comprehensive History of Korean Buddhism) in Literary Sinitic in 1918. There are varieties of Literary Sinitic, such as Classical Chinese, the artificial written language of the period 500 to 100 bce (Harbsmeier 1998: 26–27),1 and Buddhist Hybrid Sinitic,2 which were only marginally different grammatically

1 Not all scholars agree, but there are grammatical differences. 2 The term used by Victor H. Mair (1994: 712), and clearly based on Edgerton’s Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit. Edgerton stated that Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit was a Middle Indic written language originating in north India that “partially yielded to the prestige” of Sanskrit but was “only partially, and it seems haphazardly, Sanskritized” (Edgerton 1953: 5).

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(Kanaoka 1978: 43–114).3 These varieties were generally readable by those versed in Literary Sinitic. However, other forms of Sinitic were so different grammatically and in vocabulary from Literary Sinitic that they may be described as different languages. (See Appendix 6.1 comparing Literary Sinitic and the language of Chan yulu 語録.) If would-be readers of these forms of Sinitic knew only Literary Sinitic they would not understand much of the text. Some of these forms were close to spoken Chinese languages of north and central China, and so educated speakers of a Chinese language may have been able to understand more of texts in these non-Literary Sinitic forms. However, these texts would not be understood by speakers of Korean, Japanese, or Vietnamese, who were versed only in Literary Sinitic. Yet most of these forms of Sinitic were read and written beyond China in Korea, Japan and Vietnam. These forms of non-Literary Sinitic are the language of the Chan and later Neo-Confucian yulu 語録 (K. ŏrok, J. goroku), the language of bianwen 變 文 transformation texts and the language of popular novels, the liwen 吏文 (K. imun), or clerks’ documentary language, the colloquial of the textbooks for interpreters, and the language of the zhijie 直解 (K. chikhae), or direct translations of the (Confucian) Classics. Each of these forms of Sinitic had different roles in Korea: the language of the ŏrok for religious or moral instruction; the novels for entertainment; the imun for diplomatic exchanges; the textbooks for interpreting in trade and diplomatic receptions; and the chikhae for popularizing the Classics. Were these forms largely the same language, to be subsumed under the descriptors written Vernacular Sinitic, colloquial Chinese, or baihua 白話 (plain language)?4 How do they fit into Pollock’s classification of languages? Were they cosmopolitan vernaculars, “that register of the emergent vernacular that aims to localize the full spectrum of literary qualities of the superposed cosmopolitan code” (Pollock 2006: 26); a language that could also be spoken, or were they merely a “documentary language” that had no literary function (Ibid.: 322, 24–25)? Or were they a koiné, a common language that was 3 Kanaoka provides information that assists in the differentiation of Literary Sinitic, Buddhist Hybrid Sinitic, and the Chan koiné. 4 Mair writes of Vernacular Sinitic, or written vernacular and baihua, as having a “close correspondence with spoken forms of living Sinitic” Mair (1994: 707–708). Harbsmeier (1998: 26) glosses baihua as “colloquial Chinese.” Many writers use suyu 俗語 (J. zokugo), or “vulgar language,” or in a Buddhist context, “lay/worldly language.” Hu Shi (1891–1962) made clear that baihua was “plain language” and not vernacular language or colloquial language (Nakajima 2005: 107–109). Hu said baihua was used in the Chan yulu (“Wenxue gailiang quyi,” in Hu [1962: 16]). Moreover, Hu said it was the bai of the stage, a language understood when heard, plain and unadorned, clear and fluent (Hu 1959 [1927]: preface, 9).

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used for functions such as trade, religion, popular entertainment and other specialized forms of communication? 2

The Forms of Non-literary Sinitic and Their Relations

The first of these forms of Chinese to emerge was the language of the yulu used by Chan and later by Neo-Confucians to teach their doctrines. Initially, this language was not standardized and used various characters to represent the same sounds. Although heavily influenced by Literary Sinitic and Buddhist Hybrid Sinitic, where it tried to represent speech, it is very colloquial. This colloquial language appears in dialogues (not just the occasional word or isolated phrase as was the case earlier) from the early eighth century, especially in the works attributed to Shenhui 神會 (684–758).5 It became standardized with the Jingde chuandenglu 景徳傳燈録 (Transmission of the Lamp) of 1104. The Jingde chuandenglu had status because it was sponsored by the Song dynasty court, and its chief editor, the academician Yang Yi 楊億 (974–1020) wrote of the original by the Chan monk Daoyuan 道原 (dates unknown) that “in some cases the ordering of the words was confusing and in some cases the language used was coarse—all of this we deliberately removed in order to make it of imperial quality” (Welter 2006: 180). Yang was part of the Song court’s attempt to champion Chan and record it in a language different to that of the preceding Tang and Wu-Yue dynasties (Ibid.: 173–178).6 Yet this standardization was not complete, for we find traces of the languages (Min) of the former Wu-Yue region in some Song dynasty Chan compilations (Lu 1998: 91–94), and in the Zuting shiyuan 祖庭事苑 of ca. 1100, written by Muan Shanqing 睦庵善卿 (fl. 1088–1108) to gloss some of the difficult passages in a number of the works that were precursors to the gongan 公案 (J. kōan) collections, we find challenges to the Jingde chuandenglu “standard.” The register that likely formed the basis for popular novels was the language of the bianwen transformation texts found at Dunhuang. These texts date mostly from the early ninth century and after (Wu 1996: 1). These texts were largely popular lectures delivered by monks. They relate Buddhist stories and folk legends in a half-literary, half-plain (C. banwen banbai 半文半白) language 5 For example, 喚作是没物。答、不喚作物。問、異没時作物生: “What (thing) do you call it?” “I do not call it anything/a thing.” “At such a time, what is it (or what then)?” (Yang 1996: 69). 6 No study has been made of how these modifications were related to the language of the Song chancery. For chanceries and hybridization, see the chapter by King in this volume, 379.

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(Ibid.). The language of the bianwen was a mixture of styles, even containing a prose style that is very Literary Sinitic. It was written by lower level intelligentsia who partly imitated the four styles of Literary Sinitic used in the official examinations (Kin 2000: 243–265). The fiction and drama of the Song dynasty and later periods “is intimately related to popular Buddhist storytelling of the T’ang period” (Mair 1989: 40). For example, “the similarity in language (tending to the colloquial with little use of literary language particles), style (frequent grouping of characters in units of four), imagery (chiefly concrete), the Buddhist theme, and so on, all point to a close relationship with Tale Interspersed with Poetry on Tripitaka of the Great T’ang Dynasty Retrieving Buddhist Sutras 大唐 三蔵取経詩話 and transformation texts” (Ibid.: 26). The Tale is a product of the Southern Song and was one of the sources for the famous novel, Xiyouji 西遊記 (Journey to the West) by Wu Cheng’en 吳承恩 (ca. 1500–1582) (Wu 1955: preface, 5).7 Thus, the bianwen transformation texts were precursors of the popular novels in register and partly in theme. Liwen 吏文 was a particular written register of Chinese used by the law courts and in diplomatic letters, especially during the Yuan and Ming dynasties. It was neither Literary Sinitic nor spoken Chinese (Yi 1979: 241; Chŏng 2010: 375). While it generally followed the Literary Sinitic form of four-character units, as well as Literary Sinitic grammar, liwen used much language derived from the colloquial.8 This was an administrative, documentary language. The bestknown text of examples was the Liwen zhinan 吏文指南 of 1301 compiled by Xu Yuanrui 徐元瑞. This compilation was introduced into Korea, probably in the late Koryŏ (Liang 2010: 142–143). According to Xu, this was the register used by the assistants to the regular or elite officials (those who had passed the examinations on the Classics and composition in Literary Sinitic). The users were the clerks and lower-ranking officials, especially those administering the law and punishments. Liwen, which likely has its beginnings in the Tang dynasty,9 came to prominence because the Mongols, the rulers of Yuan-dynasty China, did not value education in Literary Sinitic for administration and preferred the documentary language, thereby giving the clerks and other petty functionaries better chances of promotion. Hence the compilation of such guidebooks by Xu Yuanrui and the traces of the Mongolian influence on Chinese grammar 7 Hu Shi, in the preface to his critical edition of Xiyouji, quotes a number of passages from Da Tang sanzang qujing shihua (Wu 1963: 3–5). 8 See “Ribun to Ribun shūran,” www.for.aichi_pu.ac.jp/museum/pdf/ribun.pdf, accessed October 28, 2014. 9 Liwen is mentioned in the Xin Tangshu’s 新唐書 (New History of Tang; 1060) biography of Pei Yanling 裴延齡 (727–795) but we have no example of any of its texts or its language from that period.

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(Ibid.: 181–184). The first mention of training in this language in Korea comes from 1352 or 1389 (Liang 2010: 391–392; Yi 1979: 245). Yet its use in Chosŏn was really restricted to the writing of “official letters to be sent to the Chinese government,” (Song 2001: 13n31, but see also King in this volume, 379, who calls this “chancery style,” and Park, this volume, 443) and the reading of official correspondence sent to the Korean government by the Chinese. The language of the textbooks for interpreters was for the most part colloquial. The Nogŏltae or Lao Qida 老乞大 (The Old Cathayan) was possibly written ca. 1350 by a Koryŏ prisoner-of-war who had lived in northeast China for a long period of time (Chŏng 2010: 9, 398–399; Liang 2010: 224). The Pak T’ongsa 朴通使 (Interpreter Pak) contains more of the elegant or elite colloquial and again may have been written by a Koryŏ resident of the Liaoyang region of Yuan-dynasty China, probably soon after 1352 or 1353 (Liang 2010: 255–258).10 These textbooks of conversations between Koryŏ people, mainly merchants, and Chinese of the northeast were likely introduced into Koryŏ and were printed in 1423 by the Chosŏn court (Liang 2010: 52). The zhijie were translations from the Classics in Classical Chinese into the plain language or written vernacular. The first of these was the Daxue zhijie or Luzhai daxue 魯齋大學 by Xu Heng 許衡 (1209–1281) of the Yuan dynasty. The second was the Xiaojing zhijie or Chengzhai xiaojing 誠齋孝經 by Guan Yunshi 貫雲石 (1286–1324), a sinicized Uighur.11 The next text was the Zhijie xiaoxue 直解小學 compiled by another Chinese of Uighur ancestry who came to the Koryŏ court in 1359, Xie Changshou/Sŏl Changsu 偰長壽 (1340–1399). This was followed by the Hunse p’yŏnghwa 訓世評話 by Yi Pyŏn 李邊 (1391–1473) of 1473, which retains some traces of the Mongolian-influenced Chinese seen in the textbooks (Liang 2010: 357–375; Song 2001: 57–58). These registers of Chinese have different origins and functions, but they also share considerable basic grammatical features and vocabulary that link them to varieties of colloquial Chinese or a simplified Literary Sinitic, demonstrating a spectrum from plain Literary Sinitic to the very colloquial. Most significantly, they have a basis in colloquial Chinese (see Appendix 6.2). There are differences between these languages due to the time they were recorded and the dialect of the region where they were written. The Chan language dates from the eighth century through to the twentieth century; the 10 Song Ki-joong describes the work’s language as, “formalized language … related to the high culture of contemporary Peking” (2001: 66). The Pak T’ongsa does, however, contain dialogues in everyday language on such mundane topics as horse fodder, food, and shopping. 11 For Guan, see Ge Liangyan (2001: 20).

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bianwen date from the ninth to tenth centuries; and the liwen, zhijie and textbooks were written from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. The Chan and Neo-Confucian yulu language was possibly related to the Song official spoken language (guanhua 官話) and retains traces of southern Chinese origins, just like some of the novels (Wu 1996: 249). The original of the Jingde chuandenglu (1104) was compiled by Daoyuan of the kingdom of Eastern Wu and the Zutangji 祖堂集 was compiled in Fujian in 952 (but revised in Koryŏ). The differences between these two Chan texts show the imposition of the official language in the Jingde chuandenglu (Lu 1998: 4). Moreover, some Chan texts retain dialect preferences, mostly from South China.12 On the other hand, the bianwen has a northern origin, like the very early Chan texts such as those of Shenhui (Lu 1998: 147). The earliest versions of the textbooks come from the Beijing/Yanjing area and contain a dialect that was heavily influenced by Altaic languages, especially Mongolian, the language of the rulers of the Yuan. It has even been called a kind of creole,13 for it possessed features directly adapted from Mongolian to form a Mongolian style of Chinese. During the Chosŏn, these Mongolian influences were mostly removed from the texts in an attempt to approach the Ming-dynasty guanhua, possibly the official language used in Nanjing (Chŏng 2010: 403n20), although this was largely achieved by questioning Chinese from northeast China.14 Despite these differences in language that were the products of the time and place where they were written, and of the genre they were written in, each with their own jargon (such as Buddhist and monastic terms, the initiates’ language of the gongan for Chan, or the merchant speech of the traders in the textbooks), these languages shared a base in colloquial Chinese, probably that of the guanhua, or speech of the officials. There is evidence of an awareness of this common base as seen in references in the Pak T’ongsa to Chan/Sŏn monks and to the pinghua 評話, the ancestors of the novels. The Pak T’ongsa has an account of listening to a sermon by the Koryŏ Sŏn monk (T’aego) Pou 普愚 (1301–1382) and refers to his activities in 1346 to 1348 in Yanjing (Wang et al. 2012: 155–158; Chŏng 2010: 398–399; Liang 2010: 256–257). This textbook also contains a long quote from the Xiyouji pinghua, which it 12

See Lu Liehong (1998: 40, 42, 72, 91–92, 94, 241, 254, 256–257, 261, 269), on the use of ru 汝 in Fujian dialects, but with respect to Huineng and Shenhui, this rather reflects an earlier time period. Note that Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) also came from the south, and his language is similar in some respects to that of the Chan yulu (Lu 1998, 149). See also Lei (2010: 129, 177–195). 13 See Chŏng (2010: 386) and Liang (2010: 71–83, 126–136, 292–321). 14 See Chŏng Kwang (2010: 401, 404, 443–445), for a table of the changes, and 445 ff. for examples and discussion; also Liang (2010: 120–125, 224–252).

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titles Tang sanzang xiyouji 唐三蔵西遊記 (Record of the Journey West by the Tang Tripitaka). This was purchased by one of the Koryŏ protagonists in the textbook (Wang et al. 2012: 325–337; Chŏng 2010: 271–272). The Pak T’ongsa even contains the praises of an image of the bodhisattva Guanyin 觀音 (K. Kwanŭm) written in a kind of parallel prose (Wang et al. 2012: 202–207; Chŏng 2010: 269–270). This demonstrates that the author of the Pak T’ongsa was aware of, and possibly had read, some Chan yulu, and that he had definitely read popular Chinese fiction. This may explain why Ch’oe Sejin 崔世珍 (1468–1542), in his Korean gloss-translation of the Pak T’ongsa and the Nogŏltae, the No Pak chimnam 老朴集覽, referred to the Jingde chuandenglu, several Buddhist texts, liwen texts, and the Xiyouji (Liang 2010: 118).15 Similarly, the Zen monk and philologist, Mujaku Dōchū 無著道忠 (1653–1745), who produced editions of many Chan texts, compiled dictionaries of Chan terms and annotated lists of colloquial particles and vocabulary, tried to reconstruct the original meanings of vocabulary items in Chan texts by consulting popular Chinese novels such as the Shuihuzhuan 水滸傳 (Iida 1976 [1942]: 169, 178–179).16 In like vein, the Japanese translator, Okajima Kanzan 岡島冠山 (1674–1728), who learnt his Chinese from the trade interpreters at Nagasaki, also used the Shuihuzhuan, other Chinese popular novels, and the zhijie to create textbooks for those Japanese who wanted to speak Chinese and read more than the Literary Sinitic material (Okumura 2001: 291–292, 296, 302–303). Ch’oe Sejin, Okajima, and Mujaku clearly understood that there was a common base to these registers of Chinese. 3

Compartmentalization of the Registers of Chinese in Korea

However, there is evidence of compartmentalization of these registers of nonLiterary Sinitic Chinese in Koryŏ and especially Chosŏn. The earliest clear evidence of any of these registers in Korea dates from late Silla, when monks who went to study in China returned, some after decades. Between 818 and 911, at least eight Silla monks returned from study in Tang China, the first three having studied with Mazu Daoyi’s heir, Xitang Zhizang 西堂智藏 (735–814),17 and there were several monks who remained in China and never returned to Silla. These monks appear in the Chinese “lamplight histories” (chuandenglu) 15 16 17

For the reference to the Jingde chuandeng lu and to a line from the Platform Sutra, see Wang et al. (2012: 78). I am currently writing a book on Mujaku’s philology. See the table in Buswell (1983: 10–11).

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and so some are given dialogues that feature the Chan koiné or colloquial.18 Some of these monks must have learnt spoken Chinese, for the first, Toŭi 道 義 (d. 825) was in China from 784 to 818, and all eight of the Silla monks stayed well over a decade. Yet they probably could not use the language when they returned to Silla or Koryŏ, for they would not have been understood. Although they are almost our only source, the funerary inscriptions for these eight monks contain virtually no traces of the Chan koiné (no doubt in part because the genre usually demanded the most elaborate Literary Sinitic). This was so until an inscription dating to 940 for Ch’ungdam 忠湛 (869–940), in which a master is reported as saying, “Do you recognize its arrival at this stage?” (汝還認其到此階梯).19 The koiné is even more obvious in the stele of 943 for Hyŏnyŏng 玄影 (d. 941), who went to China in 906 and returned in 924. At Mt. Juefeng in Fujian, he visited a Master Daoqian. Hyŏnyŏng asked the Master, “Ācārya, your head is white.” Daoqian replied, “Your eyes do not know me. Why don’t you know yourself?” (自己為什勿不知). The counter was, “My own head is not white” (CKS 1:153; Sørensen 1987: 253–256). The “為什勿” here is Tang colloquial, compared to the Song Chan koiné of “為甚摩.” This stele has some other Chan koiné relating what Hyŏnyŏng said just before he died: “The master said, ‘Each lamp itself has a youth to light it. How does that youth display this?’ ‘In the stars flung across the black sky, how can you know him among them?’” (青天裏於中那 得知) (CKS 1:155). This first was a report about a dialogue held in China, and so may have been aimed at showing authenticity, and the latter was supposedly a report of the master’s last words (translated from Korean?). However, in a stele for Chŏlchung 折中 (826–899), who did not go to China, a dialogue is reported. Chŏlchung pointed at a water bottle in front of him and said, “What about when the bottle is not a bottle?” The other monk said, “What is your name?” (汝名什摩). The master said, “Chŏlchung [broken in the middle].” The senior monk said, “When you are not Chŏlchung who are you?” (阿誰) “When I am not Chŏlchung, nobody asks a question like this.” The Sŏn master said, “The name is not something empty, you cannot help being Chŏlchung. In my experience of people, I know a few, but not many like you” (閲人知幾個如汝者無多) (CKS 1:158; Sørensen 1987: 233–234). In the stele for National Teacher Hongbŏp 弘法國師 (ca. 910–1000), written in 1017, there is Chan koiné such as, “‘Why have you come here?’ (儞來這 裡作什摩) … The Master said, ‘Ācārya, your parents are in Korea. Why do you 18 This material has been conveniently collected by Kim Yŏngt’ae (1977: 267–309). 19 Chōsen sōtokufu, ed., Chōsen kinseki sōran, 2 vols. (Keijō: Chōsen sōtokufu, 1919, hereafter CKS), 1: 146. See also, Sørensen (1987: 370–372).

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say your parents serve you?’” (尊親在東國、為什摩道親奉) (CKS 1:236; Sørensen 1987: 412–413). Most of the koiné appear in the dialogues, fictitious or otherwise, between the Korean students and their Chinese teachers, as with those between Chijong 智宗 (930–1018) and Yongming Yanshou 永明延壽 (904–975), but also sometimes between Koreans, as between Chijong 智宗 and Hyŏngch’o 逈超 (CKS 1:155–156; Sørensen 1987: 338). There is a gap though in the use of such koiné in inscriptions between 1085 until 1224.20 There are various reasons for this, including the waning of Sŏn during this period. This Chan koiné reappears in greater frequency in the stele for Chinul’s chief disciple, Hyesim 慧諶 (1178–1234), written by Yi Kyubo 李奎報 (1168–1241) in 1235. In 1197, Chinul 知訥 (1158–1210) read one of the works of Dahui Zonggao 大慧宗杲 (1089–1163), which inspired Chinul to introduce the huatou 話頭 (K. hwadu) method of Chan practice. Hyesim further stressed this method, thereby entrenching it in Korean Sŏn (Buswell 1983: 28). While Yi Kyubo must have drawn upon Sŏn records, the fact that he, like other stele inscription authors, quoted Chan koiné probably implies that he expected some readers to have some understanding of it. In this stele, Chinul accepts Hyesim’s verse of, “Formerly [the fan] was in 在 the elder master’s hand 手裏 / Now it has come into my palms.” Later Chinul points to a pair of worn-out shoes and says, “The sandals are here, where is the person?” (鞋在遮裏　人在什摩處) Hyesim replied, “How did you not see them then?” The National Teacher was very pleased. Again he raised the story of “Zhaozhou’s dog having no Buddha-nature,” and in that regard continued by raising Elder Dahui Zonggao’s ten types of defects [in meditation] to question them […] “Where does a person with three kinds of defect breathe out?” (向什摩處出氣) cks 1:46221

For the remainder of the Koryŏ period, especially as Koryŏ students went to study in China, the use of this koiné was firmly established in Sŏn circles, and if the stele inscriptions were meant to be read outside of the monastic environment, it must also have been partly comprehensible to some of the Koryŏ intelligentsia,22 who may have learnt some of it as a means of understanding 20 21 22

For the 1085 inscription, see CKS 1:285; it resumes with CKS 1:452. See also, Buswell (1983: 31). Examples in the stele of 1295 for Iryŏn 一然 (1206–1289): such, in that way (伊摩), only this (只遮個), where (甚摩處), this is not something painful (這個是不痛底)

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the Mongol threat, as the Mongol rulers adopted some colloquial Chinese for communication. Yet, in contrast to the stele inscriptions, with the exception of the ambiguous case of the Zutangji or Chodangjip 祖堂集, there are virtually no other records of Sŏn masters from Silla up until Chinul using the koiné. While Chinul often used the koiné in his later works, it rarely appears in works before his time. It appears Korean Sŏn monks only became active users of the koiné from the 1190s, leaving little evidence of it before this time. Although a few traces of the koiné appear in inscriptions written by laymen between 940 and 1085, it reappears more robustly from the 1190s when Chinul introduced Zonggao’s kanhua 看話 Chan, which demanded more accuracy in the language of the gongan. Sŏn in Koryŏ probably went into decline due to the influence of the former prince, Ŭich’ŏn 義天 (1055–1101), who returned from Song China in 1085 to promote a more doctrinal emphasis on Huayan and Tiantai, as well as the more philosophically oriented branch of Chan, the Fayan (Jorgensen 2005: 84–85). This may well have dampened any enthusiasm for the Chan koiné, and Ŭich’ŏn’s scholarly work further promoted Literary Sinitic. Moreover, it has been suggested that the increasing use of verse and the “abstruseness of the dialogues may have limited the readership of the [yulu] genre to Chan Buddhists themselves” in China (Ge 2001: 19).23 However, it is not as if the Silla and Koryŏ intelligentsia had a shallow understanding of Buddhism, for the evidence of sophisticated interpretation of doctrinal Buddhism is there aplenty. It was not this abstruse dialogue that prevented the Koreans from producing any Chan literature of consequence before the 1190s, or at least between the time of Sunji 順之 (d. 893) and Chinul. I suspect that the problem of mastering the Chan koiné was part of the problem, although the lay stele writers did incorporate small snippets of it in reported conversations, which were no doubt quoted to give an aura of authenticity to the hagiography and perhaps to illustrate the ability of the master by verifying his enlightenment experiences. Once the Yuan gained dominance over Koryŏ, numbers of Koryŏ monks went to study Chan in China. This led the Chan koiné to be used more widely,

23

(CKS 1:471); examples in the 1229 inscription for Chigyŏm 至謙 (1145–1229): What is your reverence’s lone practice/walking? (作摩生是和尚獨行處) (CKS 1:577); and an example from the 1286 stele for Ch’ŏnyong 天英: Having escaped the shell, where do you see it? Which is the person who will take off their clothes? (脫却穀漏子，向什麼處相見　那 個是着脫底) (CKS 1:596). However, many eminent Neo-Confucians read Chan texts in order to refute their ideas. Zhu Xi was a prime example, reading the works of Zonggao in order to find what he thought were philosophical and moral weaknesses in Chan.

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or at least to be read. Those monks who went to China and left records of their dialogues did not use the Mongolian-influenced Chinese of the north as is found in the textbooks. In fact, most of these monks studied in the south and Chinese yulu writers, both Buddhist and Neo-Confucian, despised that “barbarian Chinese” (Chŏng 2010: 386–387) of the north.24 This explains why T’aego Pou 太古普愚 (1301–1382), for instance, did not adopt this “creole.” Furthermore, when members of the school of Yi T’oegye’s 李退溪 (1501–1570) orthodox Zhu Xi version of Neo-Confucianism compiled dictionaries or glosses of the “colloquial” vocabulary of Zhu Xi’s Zhuzi yulei 朱子語類, they do not appear to have consulted Chan/Sŏn texts or monks. These “dictionaries” are the ŏrokhae 語錄解. They appeared as Yi T’oegye and Yu Hŭich’un 柳希春 (1513–1577) began to study the yulu of Zhu Xi and other Chinese Neo-Confucians. They encountered difficult vocabulary, mostly colloquial, and so in 1657 Chŏng Yang 鄭瀁 (1600–1668) compiled a list of such vocabulary. In 1669, on royal command, Nam Isŏng 南二星 (1625–1683) revised Chŏng’s work. These gave brief explanations of such vocabulary (Liang 2010: 410; Song 2001: 80–81; see also Park, in this volume, 450–451). They differ from the textbooks in part because the textbooks were for the chungin functionaries and technicians, while the ŏrokhae were for the upper-class yangban readers who could ignore the contemporary spoken pronunciation of Chinese (Song 2001: 80). Generally, the Nam Isŏng text (the only one available to me) reflects a consensus on the meaning (that is, with the dictionaries of Chan vocabulary, the popular novels, and liwen). There are occasional errors (or deviations from the consensus), such as the gloss for 坐却, glossed as 坐在 (sit in/sit!), which should be 挫却 (cut away, eliminate).25 References are occasionally made to Confucian texts, histories, and poems that have included fragments of the colloquial (there is a reference to a poem by Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 [1007–1072] for 笑殺, for example)26 and one reference is made to liwen for 所有, but for obvious Chan/Sŏn technical terms, such as huatou 話頭 (glossed as “theme” 題目) or yinke 印可 “to seal,” which is glossed as “Buddhist word: correct 올타” (although it is found in the Lunyu yishu by Huang Kan 皇侃 [488–545], which precedes Chan) no reference is made to Chan texts, possibly because Zhu Xi was so critical of Chan.27 24

See also Yuan and Kang (2010: 171b–172a), but compare this to Iriya and Koga (1997: 117b) for a slightly earlier use, which shows the term used was not restricted to a reference to Mongolian-influenced Chinese. 25 See Iriya and Koga (1997: 152b–153a, 156b) for 在, also Yuan and Kang (2010: 548a). 26 This sha here has the same sense as the modern Korean vb + 죽겠다. 27 Yun (2000: esp. 390 ff.), from Zhuzi yulei, fascicle 126.

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Sometimes it appears that the Confucian lexicographers not only ignored Chan texts but also found nothing helpful in the translations into Korean (ŏnhae 諺解) of the Chan texts. For example, babi 巴鼻 (something to grasp; clue; grip),28 is glossed in the Nam Isŏng text as “a tail to be grasped. A tail and a nose, seems to mean to be without a head or tail. Also, a snake is called ba. If you hit the nose of a snake, you will cause it to die. Probably nowhere to cut/nowhere” (다힐 ᄃᆡ 잡을 ᄃᆡ．巴尾鼻頭似是無頭無尾之義．又蛇謂巴．打蛇 鼻便死．恐是無切/所處). This term is frequently found in Chan and Korean Sŏn texts and has a Chan origin, being found first in Chan texts and only later in popular novels and verse.29 However, the Sŏn translations into Korean are literal: “無巴鼻” is translated as “no tail and nose” (귿고히 업소되) in Mongsan hwasang pŏbŏ yangnok ŏnhae 蒙山和尚法語略録諺解 of ca. 1459 (reprinted in 1577).30 Here even Mengshan’s central topic, the huatou 話頭 (K. hwadu), is not translated. The Korean-court-sponsored interpreters and liwen specialists were separated from 1340 or 1389 until 1459 (Kang 1978: 13). Moreover, these interpreters and translators were few in number and despite passing examinations from 1202 onwards, were of low rank and generally despised by regular bureaucrats.31 It appears that the examinations for liwen (and spoken Chinese?), after being instituted in 1462 as part of the civil service examination (Hwang, this volume, fn9), were cancelled between 1502 and 1522 (An 2007: 38–39), probably because these specialists did not live up to expectations and with a few exceptions, could not fully understand the Chinese emissaries or translate the diplomatic letters properly (Song 2001: 20–25, 27). The one outstanding exception was Ch’oe Sejin, who understood spoken Chinese and liwen texts,32 as is evidenced in his No Pak chimnam 老朴集覧 (ca. 1515), glosses on the difficult vocabulary in the Nogŏltae and Pak T’ongsa; his Imun chimnam 吏文輯覧, glosses on the vocabulary from selected examples of liwen; and his Sasŏng t’onghae 四聲通解 (1517) on Chinese pronunciation (Liang 2010: 109–110, 152–154).33 Ch’oe was the exception that proved the rule. As a descendant of translators, he was likely of the chungin class, but by dint of his extraordinary linguistic skills he was able to take the literati examinations, 28 Iriya and Koga (1997: 374a), see also meibabi 没巴鼻 “clueless, nothing to grasp,” 451b; Yuan and Kang (2010: 5b and 284a), “beyond words.” 29 Zhang (1975: 378), “a means”; and Tien (1984: 246a), “can find no way out, without basis.” 30 Kim (2002: x, xxiv, 68); for original text, see 108 reverse. 31 See Kang (1978: 30–31, 46, 61–66); Song (2001: 4–5, 12–13, 18–19, 30); Liang (2010: 15–18, 150); Chŏng (2010: 390–395). 32 Liang (2010: 42–46); Song (2001: 29n40); and Kang (1978: 24, 89–95). 33 For Sasŏng t’onghae, see Yu (1974: 27–28, 204–206).

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normally not possible for non-yangban, and become a literati minister (munsin 文臣), and on at least four occasions to travel as a member of delegations to the Ming court (An 2007: 11–14, 41–49). Yet there was lingering disparagement from the yangban literati (Ibid.: 12, 39–40, 43), a hint that even though Ch’oe had proved his worth there was still a disdain for interpreters and for those who used non-standard Chinese. Contemporary observers stressed that Ch’oe was competent in both spoken Chinese and liwen (An 2007: 33, 38, 67), suggesting that this ability was rare and that there was a compartmentalization between spoken and written Chinese and between Literary Sinitic and nonstandard written Chinese. Indeed, it was largely due to the skills of Ch’oe Sejin and several others such as Kim Chajŏng 金自貞 (fl. 1453–1497) that such studies of spoken Chinese and liwen continued, but there had been a sharp decline in standards, with fears expressed that if Ch’oe fell ill the court would find it difficult to manage its diplomatic relations with China (Kang 1978: 15–18, 78). In 1557, the court felt that the liwen specialists were incompetent and that it had wasted its money on their training for twenty years (Ibid.: 25–26). There was a temporary revival in standards due to the need for translators and interpreters of Chinese during the Hideyoshi invasions (Ibid.: 19–20), but true translators like Ch’oe were rare. It is doubtful, for example, that the compilers of the ŏrokhae found the translators worth consulting, for they thought “translators are not the equals of the gentry” (Ibid.: 67). Even Ch’oe Sejin, acknowledged as the person most versed in spoken and written Chinese of the non-standard varieties, shows little sign of having consulted the Chan/Sŏn literature. Ch’oe had to consult Buddhist works when translating and glossing works like the Pak T’ongsa that contained material related to Buddhism, even Chan. For the passage centered on T’aego Pou, the Koryŏ Sŏn monk, which contains distinctively Chan phrases, references to Pou’s Chinese Chan teacher, and to the Chan theory of the transmission of the robe and bowl, Ch’oe did not explicitly refer to Pou’s texts, nor to his master’s works, but to secular texts and to a Buddhist sutra commentary (Wang et al. 2012: 157–158). Ch’oe did gloss the word “Chan/Sŏn” with a reference to the Jingde chuandenglu (used in Chosŏn as a textbook for Sŏn monks) (Vermeersch 2008: 199) and to the Platform Sutra attributed to the sixth patriarch of Chan (a text widely available in Chosŏn Korea), but elsewhere Ch’oe has strange or nonBuddhist glosses on the Buddhist term heshang 和尙 (“reverend”), for example (Wang et al. 2012: 77–78). Ch’oe’s chief source for information about Buddhist terms was the Fanyi mingyi ji 飜譯名義集 (Clarification of the Meanings of Translations), compiled by Fayun 法雲 (1088–1158) in 1143, that defined over two thousand terms. This was written in Buddhist Hybrid Sinitic. Strangely,

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Ch’oe did not consult Chan gloss-texts that dealt with Chan and Chinese colloquialisms, such as the Zuting shiyuan of ca. 1100, that had been widely used by Koryŏ Sŏn monks (Jorgensen 2009: 100–101, 106–107). It is clear then that there was limited or no interchange between the Korean users of these registers of vernacular Chinese, such as interpreters and translators, the Sŏn monks and the Neo-Confucians. This meant that the colloquial elements of these registers were understood by very few Chosŏn-dynasty people, not even enthusiasts for Chinese fiction such as Prince Yŏnsan 燕山君 (r. 1494–1506) and Yun Ch’unnyŏn 尹春年 (1514–1567).34 Thus, although Chosŏn-period Koreans imported Chinese popular novels and fiction, glosses were needed by most readers in order to understand them. These glossaries were probably only available in mid-to-late Chosŏn, and they are supposedly “insignificant as to the history of the study of colloquial Chinese in the Chosŏn dynasty” (Song 2001: 82–83). One example of such a glossary, the Sŏyugi ŏrok Sŏsanggi ŏrok Samgukchi ŏrok Imun ŏrok 西游記語錄　西廂記語錄 　三國志語錄　吏文語錄 (Glossary to the Xiyouji, Xixiangji and Sanguozhi, plus to the Liwen), glosses even simple words like xie 些 (as cwokkum “a little”), wo 我 (as cye “I”), zhe 這 (as i phyen “here”), zen 怎 (as esci “how”), ma 麽 (as kuli hol kesnunnya mwoshol kusnunna [sic] “is it this or that”) or niang 娘 (as 母 “mother”), as well as more complex vocabulary such as rudeshuo zuo youde 汝的説做有的 (as hol mal i upse “having nothing to say/complain of”), jiaozhengxie 較爭些 (as ceki nasta “a bit better”)35 and tazhidao 他知道 (as nwu ka aliywo “someone knows/who knows?”).36 This suggests a widespread ignorance among literate Koreans of that time of the Chinese vernacular. Given that the user constituencies differed and that the uses or genres were largely unrelated, this means that the language registers existed in isolated compartments despite the fact that these registers had a common basis in colloquial Chinese and showed varying influences of the superposed Literary Sinitic. However, in the late Chosŏn period, this compartmentalization largely disappeared as social changes occurred with the weakening of central government control and the spread of education led to the breaking down of the rigid social compartmentalization that had been maintained earlier. By the 34 Cited in the chapter by Greg Evon. 35 Like jiaozaoxie 較早些, “a little earlier,” (Zhang 1975: 236). Also, 較些子, in Sŏnmun yŏmsong sŏlhwa 禪門拈頌說話 (1686) by Hyesim and one of his pupils, “relatively (better),” see Ahn (2012: 314). 36 Cited from http://shop.kongfz.com/show_pics.php?shopId=15003&bookId=101400854, accessed February 5, 2012. 朝鮮“罕見　珍本”西游記語錄 西廂記語錄 三国志 語錄　吏文語錄.

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eighteenth century many itinerant intellectuals appeared, as ruined yangban, sons of concubines of yangban families, and commoners denied the chance to take the civil service examinations, set up private academies and practiced prognostication, medicine, geomancy, and fortune-telling (Paek 2011: 97–98). This trend aided the breakdown of the exclusive social hierarchy and prompted reading outside of the Confucian canon, for the Confucian canon was primarily used as material for the civil service examinations and to maintain the social hierarchy. We even find rebels using the term ka 哥 or “older brother” for each other, even in the official reports found in the Chosŏn sillok of a 1785 planned rebellion (Ibid.: 119). This seems to reflect the usage in the popular Chinese novel about rebels and bandits, the Shuihuzhuan 水滸傳 (Water Margin), where ge 哥 is used frequently to address fellow rebels. Therefore, the compartmentalization of the various forms of non-standard Chinese in Korea may have broken down by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when many more ŏrokhae appeared.37 4

Hybrid Languages

The continued prestige of Literary Sinitic plus an increasing desire to reflect the spoken vernacular in texts led to the formation of hybrid languages. The Chan and Sŏn yulu, for example, contain the most elaborate Literary Sinitic in the encomia, written in the 4–6 parallel prose style and also the very colloquial, including scatological references and swear-words, where there were representations of dialogues between masters and students. The influence of Literary Sinitic appears least in a textbook of spoken Chinese like the Nogŏltae, but is present in the Pak T’ongsa that contains more elevated speech. Even a novel such as the Shuihuzhuan, seemingly by the hand of one author, is heterogeneous in its language, for the novel was formed over a long period from the Song to the early Ming dynasty, and so the author was only adding to it and revising it. Regional dialect forms are thus retained (Kōsaka 1987: 1; Ge 2001: 142). Moreover, like Chan yulu and the bianwen transformation texts, the novels alternated between verse (or song) and prose, and are marked by heteroglossia, “a representation of the diversified and stratified linguistic reality,” mixing Literary Sinitic and various registers of the colloquial (Ge 2001: 196–197). These then resemble the hybrid/polyglot genres found in India, where the cosmopolitan language of Sanskrit was mixed with cosmopolitan vernaculars even 37

See the chapter by Si Nae Park in this volume.

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in the same sentences (Pollock 2006: 322 ff.). This is also clearly evident in East Asia when the vernacular was combined with Chinese, both Literary Sinitic and the colloquial or plain language. For example, see the mixture in the Sŏn’ga kwigam ŏnhae 禪家龜鑑諺解 published in 1569: The Sixth Patriarch asked, “I have a thing that supports heaven above and below props up the earth, between which humans always function. What then is it?” Chan master Shenhui immediately came out of the assembly and said, “It is the original source of the Buddhas and is my Buddha-nature.” The patriarch said, “My one thing cannot even be named, so how can you again name it original source and Buddha-nature?” Because Shenhui had stained it with his words he became the bastard son of the Sixth Patriarch. Also, Chan master Huairang came to pay his respects to the Sixth Patriarch. The patriarch asked him, “Where have you come from?” He told him, “I have come from Mt. Song.” The patriarch asked, “What thing came in this way?” (Huairang) investigated this for eight years (and said), “Even though you say it seems to be a single thing that does not hit the mark.” And so Chan master Huairang approved himself and nodded his head (in assent) and became the legitimate son of the Sixth Patriarch. “From its origin”; because the life-breath of this is limitless, it itself does not have a beginning. “Very bright and very numinous” (means) it is not based on the cultivation of realization. Pak and Pae 2003: 31–32

六祖 i nilo·sya·toy: “一物 y isywu·toy wu:h ulwo ’n ha·nol 六祖 이 니ᄅᆞ·샤·ᄃᆡ 一物 ㅣ 이슈·ᄃᆡ 우:흐론 하·ᄂᆞᆯ

kwoy·wokwo alay 괴·오고

아래

lwo ’n sta pa·thye 常例人人動用中: ey inno·ni·i·ke:s i 론

·ᄯᅡ 바·텨

mu·sukes kwo?”

常例人人動用中: 에 인ᄂᆞ·니·이·거:시 므·스것고

神會禪師 y ·cukcay 衆中·ey ·na sol.wo·toy: “·i nun 諸佛 ·uy 神會禪師 ㅣ ·즉재 衆中·에 ·나 ᄉᆞᆯ오·ᄃᆡ ·이는 諸佛·의 本源 ysi·mye 神會 本源ㅣ시·며 神會

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·uy 佛性 ilwoswoyng·ta.” 祖 i nilo·sya·toy: “·nay 一物 y·la il:hwum ·의 佛性 ㅣ로쇵·다

cihe two 지허도

祖이 니ᄅᆞ·샤·ᄃᆡ ·내

一物ㅣ·라 일:훔

mas·ti anikhe·tun :ney es·tye 本源 yni 佛性 yni kwu·le il:hwum 맛·디 아나커·든 :네 엇·뎌 本源ㅣ니 佛性ㅣ니 구·러 일:훔

cinnon·ta?” 진ᄂᆞᆫ·다

神會禪師 non 言語 lwo 漏洩 honi 六祖 ·uy 孽子 yla. ·stwo ·ᄒᆞ시니 ·이 神會禪師ᄂᆞᆫ 言語로 漏洩ᄒᆞ니 六祖·의 孽子ㅣ라 ·ᄯᅩ

·hosini, ·i

懐讓禪師 y :wa 六祖 ·skuy 參禮·hozowa·nol 祖 i mwulosya·toy: 懐讓禪師ㅣ :와 六祖·ᄭᅴ 參禮·ᄒᆞᅀᆞ와·ᄂᆞᆯ 祖ㅣ 무ᄅᆞ샤·ᄃᆡ

“e:tulesye

어:드러셔

won·ta?” 師 i solwo·toy: “嵩山 ·no lwosye :woyngta.” 祖 i mwu·losya·toy: 온·다

師이 ᄉᆞᆯ오·ᄃᆡ

嵩山·ᄂᆞ로셔

:욍다

祖이 무·ᄅᆞ샤·ᄃᆡ

“Mu·suke:s i ·ili ·wotenyo?” ·hoyasi:nol, 師 i 八年窮究·hoya sol.wo·toy: 므·스거:시 ·이리 ·오더뇨 “一物 yla 一物ㅣ라

·ᄒᆞ야시:ᄂᆞᆯ 師이 八年窮究·ᄒᆞ야 ᄉᆞᆯ오·ᄃᆡ

呈似·hozowa two mas:ti ani ·hozowoyngta” honi, ·i 懐讓禪師 non 呈似·ᄒᆞᅀᆞ와도 맛:디 아니 ·ᄒᆞᅀᆞ욍다 ᄒᆞ니 ·이 懐讓禪師ᄂᆞᆫ 自肯點頭hol·soy 六祖·uy 嫡子 yla. 自肯點頭ᄒᆞᆯ·ᄉᆡ 六祖·의 嫡子ㅣ라

A partial reconstruction of the Chinese original based on the Jingde chuandenglu and the Deyi version of the Platform Sutra: 六祖問曰，吾有一物　上柱天下柱地 […] 神會禪師即（時）出（衆） 曰，諸佛之本源，神會之佛性．師曰，吾一物 […] 汝便喚作本源佛性 […] 此所以為六祖之孽子也．懐讓禪師自嵩山【來】至禮拜．六祖問 曰，甚【麽】處來．曰，嵩山來．

204

Jorgensen 六祖問曰，什麽物恁（伊）麽來．師罔措至八年，‘説似一物即不 中．’懐讓禪師方自自肯點頭，以）為六祖之嫡子也．

In the ŏnhae text most of the nouns and some of the verbs are in sinographs, and a few phrases such as 常例人々動用中 (“between which humans always function”) and 自肯點頭 (“approved himself and nodded his head”) require some knowledge of Literary Sinitic. Even when all the words were written in Korean script, the reader still often required knowledge of Chinese to read the text. For example, see Sinmi’s “translation” below of the Wŏn’gak kyŏng ŏnhae 圓覺經諺解 of 1464 (corresponding words in Chinese and ŏnmun transcription are bolded): 善男子

一切菩薩 及 末世衆生 應當 션남쟈이 일쳬보살와 밋 말셰즁ᄉᆡᆼ이 응당 syennamcya i ilchyey pwosal wa mis malsyey cywungsoyng i ungtang 遠離一切幻化

虛妄境界   일쳬환화와 허망경계를 멀리 여희리니 ilchyey hwanhwa wa hemang kyengkyey lul melli yehuylini Sinmi 1973: 34

Excellent men, all bodhisattvas and sentient beings of future ages, should distance themselves from all illusory and false realms, and because the mind that is distanced from firmly grasped opinions, that mind is [still] like an illusion, it also [should be] further distanced. Here many words, such as “all bodhisattvas” (一切菩薩) and “should distance themselves from all illusory and false realms” (應當遠離一切幻化虚妄 境界), are not translated, but rearranged, and merely transcribed into Korean pronunciation. Therefore, even in the ŏnhae translations, knowledge of Literary Sinitic was required, and indeed many of the early compositions in ŏnhae were accompanied by a translation in Literary Sinitic. An example is the Yongbi ŏch’ŏn ka 龍 飛御天歌 (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven; 1447) (Kim 1969: 308), which still needed a knowledge of Literary Sinitic and all the allusions that belonged to “this culture of ours” (Canto 124): 洙泗正學·i 聖性·ey polko·sil·ssoy 異端·ol 排斥·hosi·ni 洙泗正學·이 聖性·에 ᄇᆞᆯᄀᆞ·실·ᄊᆡ 異端·ᄋᆞᆯ 排斥·ᄒᆞ시·니

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205

裔戎邪說·i 罪福·ol ce·hi·zopke·tun ·i ·ptu·t ul nis·ti :ma·losywo·sye 裔戎邪說·이 罪福·ᄋᆞᆯ 저·히·ᅀᆞᆸ거·든 ·이 ·ᄠᅳ·들 닛·디 :마·ᄅᆞ쇼·셔

The correct teaching of Shu and Si (Confucius and Mencius) enlightens the sagely nature, and (in so doing) expels the heresies. Since the perverse theories of the border barbarians [of the West, Buddhism] create fear [via] sin and good fortune, do not forget this meaning. This was true even of the earliest official document written in the vernacular script, that by King Sejo 世祖 (r. 1455–1468), the “Odaesan Sangwŏnsa chungch’ang kwŏnsŏnmun” 吾臺山上院寺重創勸善文.38 The case in Japan was similar. The second Japanese founder of Zen, Dōgen 道元 (1200–1235), began teaching after his return from China in 1227. He had learnt some colloquial Chinese during his stay in China. He sometimes wrote in a hodge-podge of Japanese, Buddhist Hybrid Sinitic, and the Chan koiné, as we see in the following record of a conversation (Chinese and Japanese romanized as pointers): The elder hall chief seems to have something like it there. Later, if you kindly request its divulgence, you will probably get to see it (tangtou laohan, nali you xiangsi. Nochi ni shinshutsu nengoro niseba, sadamete misuru koto aran 堂頭老漢，那裏有相似．のちに請出ねむごろにせば、さだ めてみすることあらん). Nakamura 1972: 2:228

Such hybrid language resembles the early forms of Kannada and Tamil that Pollock calls “cosmopolitan vernaculars” (Pollock 2006: 332–333). And, like some of the Kannada texts that “would have been unintelligible to any reader without serious knowledge of Sanskrit” (Ibid.: 343), the vernacular Chinese texts and the hybrid Korean-Chinese texts were also incomprehensible without knowledge of Literary Sinitic. Yet can we call these registers of vernacular Chinese and hybrids “cosmopolitan vernaculars”? The answer depends on how we classify these registers of vernacular Chinese and hybrid Korean-Chinese languages, and on how we define literature or literary qualities.

38

I have not seen Anja K. Haftmann, Das Odaesan Sangwŏnsa chungch’ang-kwŏn sŏnmun: Die älteste Handschrift in der koreanischen Buchstabenschrift (Hamburg: LIT, 1998).

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The Issue of Literary versus Oral

If we treat the vernacular or plain Chinese from the viewpoint of wen 文, or culture, even the popular novels and some Chan texts would not qualify as literary, for they contained elements derived from the spoken language. Wen was supposed to be natural, like Sanskrit, yet “patterned,” which allegedly separated it from “straightforward speech” (Ge 2001: 12–14). The written word of Chinese is a “schematization of aesthetic pattern.” Therefore, “a faithful adherence to natural language, the living language as used by people in society, was considered not only unnecessary but also undesirable in literary composition” (Ibid.: 16). Thus, until recent centuries, Literary Sinitic was considered by East Asian elites to be the only appropriate vehicle for the expression of literature. Similarly, in the Indic realm, kāvya, or literature, could not be “purely oral” (Pollock 2006: 4). Kāvya was the only aesthetic form of language (Ibid.: 5), but it could be written in Sanskrit, Prakrit, or Apabhramsha (Ibid.: 90), not just with the one language of Literary Sinitic as in East Asia. These Indic languages were vehicles for literature—cosmopolitan languages—because they were available “across region, ethnie, sect, and time,” tied to political power, and had a scholarly apparatus of grammars and dictionaries (Ibid.: 100–101). However, Prakrit and Apabhramsha were “second-order codes” because they did not spread beyond India as Sanskrit had and were not “permitted a role in articulating political discourse of any stripe” (Ibid.: 104). On the other hand, the vernacular or plain text Chinese spread beyond China into Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, and certainly much of it had connections with the courts. However, because of its oral-derived elements, from the elites’ perspective it could not be classed as literary (wen). Moreover, some of it, such as the liwen, was decidedly documentary in nature, dealing with diplomacy and the law, but not with political theory or praise. Other works, such as the Nogŏltae, were entirely practical and oral-based, compiled for the purposes of trade and diplomatic receptions. As with the Tōwa 唐話 spoken Chinese materials of Japan, as language, it could be identified with a place, region, and dialect, and so resembled the deśabhaṣa of India and could be called fangyan 方言 (K. pangŏn, “local speech”).39 However, the Pak T’ongsa, an advanced language textbook, contains some elements in elegant and refined prose (some primarily in Literary Sinitic, such 39

For Tōwa, see Okumura (2001: 291–297); for deśabhaṣa, or “languages of place,” see Pollock (2006: 93–96), and for them being mleccha, or “uncultured,” restricted in genre and “subliterary” (Pollock 2006: 95, 299). Compare also the Chinese use of biyu 啚語 and suyu 俗語.

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as a long verse praising Guanyin (Liang 2010: 269–270), but others containing colloquial elements). This challenges some of Pollock’s distinctions between the literary and the documentary uses of language, as is noted by Evon in his chapter in this volume (Evon, 354). I abandoned that banquet of the profit seekers [merchants?] (我棄了這 名利家筵), loaded up a small fishing skiff with alcohol, lute and fishing

net. I plucked out a tune of flowing waters and tall mountains, restoring my brocaded mind and embroidered stomach [elegant thoughts and feelings], and submerged them into that watery kingdom and fishy realm. Wearing a bamboo hat and straw raincoat (被着這箬笠簔), I just interacted with the cross-winds and fine rain […] Facing these sounds of the water, the mountain hues and pale mist, I relaxed between the two shores of green rushes and red smartweed next to a sandbank, and lowered a net from the tethered boat. Or I poled through the lotus kingdom and flower castle, when I suddenly had thoughts of pure songs and refined dances. I sought them where the reeds were thick [below] the craggy precipices (巖頭石崖). When I gently lowered the hook into the water (慢慢的将鉤 児垂下水裡去時), the silver line and hook broke the ripple pattern. In the blink of an eye, I hooked out an old golden carp. The taste of the old fisherman without doubt does not think of Li Bo 李白 grabbing for the moon and does not learn of Qu Yuan 屈原 (ca. 340–278 bce) throwing himself into the river. So I am a lesser Taigong 太公 who likewise does not wish to meet King Wen 文王, for I want to learn from Fan Li 范蠡 who took refuge in the lakes. Wang et al. 2012: 392–394; Liang 2010: 268

Not only does this Daoistic depiction of the mental state of a gentleman fisherman resemble Tao Yuanming’s 陶淵明 (ca. 365–427) “Peach Blossom Spring,” an acknowledged masterpiece, it also contains colloquial elements and allusions usually found in Literary Sinitic. It mentions Li Bo, who according to legend drowned when he drunkenly tried to embrace the moon reflected in a river, and Qu Yuan (ca. 340–278 bce), who committed suicide out of resentment that his ruler did not acknowledge his talents. Taigong is Lü Shang 呂尙 (fl. 11th c. bce), the teacher of King Wen of Zhou, a Confucian paragon. Lü Shang was fishing when King Wen encountered him. Finally, Fan Li (515–448 bce), who had served the King of Yue and defeated Yue’s rival state of Wu, realized he had wasted most of his life and so drifted in a boat over the rivers and lakes. However, the presence of colloquial elements (indicated by the sinographs in the above excerpt), would, in the minds of the elites, have disqualified this

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passage from consideration as literature. Such attitudes inhibited the development of vernacular literature in Korea to a much greater extent than in Japan. For example, even the early attempts by Kyunyŏ 均如 (923–973) to write verse and commentaries in Korean through the use of sinographs borrowed for sound to represent the vernacular words and grammatical endings or particles were judged by Ŭich’ŏn 義天 (1055–1101) to be “nonsensical/fallacious books, their language not forming literature 文, their meanings lacking communication of the changes 通邊,40 confusing the path of the patriarchs and deluding later people. There is nothing worse than this.”41 While Kyunyŏ humbly admitted that the type of song he was using was a “worldly amusement,” he stated, “if you do not rely on worldly ways, you will have no means to attract those of inferior capacity, and if you do not depend on the vulgar speech, you will not reveal the path of the universal cause.” He was conceding that this was propaganda and that it could not be counted as literature (Kim 1973: 62; Buzo and Prince 1993: 94). Therefore a contemporary, Ch’oe Haenggwi 崔行歸 (dates unknown), translated Kyunyŏ’s songs into Literary Sinitic so that they would be known beyond Korea and be classed as literature (Buzo and Prince 1993: 5, 67). This was the same view taken when Kyunyŏ’s works were to be incorporated into the Koryŏ Tripitaka (Ibid.: 8–9). The influence of Ŭich’ŏn, the former prince and leader of a different type of Hwaŏm Buddhism, may have been crucial in the elimination of traces of Korean language from Kyunyŏ’s work, for Ŭich’ŏn deliberately omitted Kyunyŏ’s works from his authoritative catalogue of doctrinal works to be included in a Tripitaka (Ibid.: 13). Thus, a number of Kyunyŏ’s commentaries that had contained elements of the Korean vernacular were purged of those elements, which were decried as glosses in pangŏn (“local speech,” i.e., the language of Koryŏ), so that they could be entered into the Tripitaka (Kim 1973: 63–64), probably seen as a repository of “wen/mun.” And thus the hegemony of Literary Sinitic was maintained, and even in later times much vernacular Korean writing has been lost due to this conservative attitude (Evon 2009: 175–177). Works by Kyunyŏ and others were not classified as literature—“this culture of ours”—in particular because of the perceived taint from their vernacular elements. The Chan/Sŏn texts were products of the highly educated elite, many born of eminent families or at the very least local gentry, and despite the rhetoric, these men were cultured scholars capable of writing in the 4–6 style of parallel prose and exchanging verses with prominent officials and Confucian 40 通邊 is the name of a chapter in Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍 (The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons; ca. 507 CE), a famed work on literature. 41 Cited in Kim (1973: 64). It is translated slightly differently in Buzo and Prince (1993: 14n17).

Secondary Cosmopolitan Language ( s )

209

scholars, and even of petitioning the court in the appropriate style. On the other hand, the yulu also contain scatological material and other abuse. “Look, look! Xuefeng has defecated in front of you. Ha! Why don’t you know the smell of his shit?”42 Yet they also contained verse in Literary Sinitic, the equal of that of the Confucian versifiers. The solitary orb shines alone, the rivers and mountains silent. Laughing once unconsciously, heaven and earth are alarmed.43 孤輪獨照江山静，自笑一聲天地驚．

Again, The light of the creek and the color of the wilds infiltrate the towered terrace, A single flute heard in the distance plays the “Falling Plum.” The wind blows the fragmented clouds back over the ranges, The moon accompanies the water flowing past the bridge.44 溪光野色浸樓臺，一箇遙聞奏落梅，風送斷雲歸嶺去，月和流水過 橋來．

The colloquial would thus disqualify the yulu dialogues as literature, but the poems and prose would not. Therefore, given this ambiguity, its geographical spread, and the literary games played with allusions, puns, and oneupmanship,45 this Chan genre seems to be a special case. The Chan language seems closer to Pali, an “artificial” language or “ecclesiastical koiné” that was likewise trans-local (Collins 1998: 46, 52; Pollock 2006: 55). Pali qualifies then as cosmopolitan, for it was used for kāvya or literature and had a philological apparatus (Pollock 2006: 386). Chan language was also trans-regional and had philological apparatus, beginning with the Zuting shiyuan of ca. 1100. The Zuting shiyuan was used widely in Korea (Jorgensen 2009: 100–101, 106–107). In Japan, Mujaku Dōchū compiled dictionaries of Chan colloquial vocabulary, such as the Kattōgosen 葛藤語箋 and encyclopedias of Chan monastic 42 Biyanlu, T48.145a5–6. See also Hyesim and Kagun, Sŏnmun yŏmsong sŏlhwa hoebon, HPC 6.586b13–14. 43 Linji lu, T47.506b17. 44 Rentian yanmu, T48.331a12–13; both verses are quoted in Sŏsan Hyujŏng’s Sŏn’ga kwigam, for which see Pak and Pae (2003: 526, 549). 45 See chapter 4, “The Kōan and the Chinese Literary Game” in Hori (2003).

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terminology such as the Zenrinshōkisen 禪林象器箋. However, Chan language was never used for writing political theory, and the colloquial was not used to praise rulers. On the other hand, Chan monks wrote encomia in Literary Sinitic for emperors and kings on their birthdays, and at a stretch these encomia could be compared to praśasti, the royal eulogistic poetry of the Indic realm.46 Pollock devotes very little attention to Pali despite its wide diffusion and its use in literature, possibly because it does not fit his scheme. The Chan Chinese register does not fit either, for it was not cosmopolitan in the sense of being the dominant language, and it was not a cosmopolitan vernacular, for it had a wider spread than Pollock’s cosmopolitan vernaculars, which were restricted to India. It was not “localized.” Moreover, the Chan language was not simply a documentary language. It was in many respects imaginative fiction, for many Chan dialogues were inventions to suit doctrinal changes and the zeitgeist. Moreover, the yulu, and even some dialogues, contained literary allusions, verse, humor, and religious expression. Yet it was also deeply influenced by the superposed Literary Sinitic, the cosmopolitan language of East Asia. The Chan language is closest in definition to Pollock’s cosmopolitan vernacular, but it was more cosmopolitan in that it spread over a much wider region. If we separate Chan language from the other registers of colloquial or plain Chinese, we could feasibly call the Chan language an “ecclesiastical koiné,” but if we incorporate it into an overarching “colloquial” or vernacular Chinese, this description would be inappropriate. These registers could perhaps be jointly called a cosmopolitan koiné, a koiné in Korea (but less so in Japan), sequestered mainly in the court with the translators and clerks, and in the Sŏn monasteries and a few Neo-Confucian academies. These then were secondary or specialized cosmopolitan vernaculars. 6

Conclusions

Therefore, while Pollock’s scheme of languages from the Indic and European realms is very useful, it does not fit the East Asian Sinitic realm so exactly. The cosmopolitan language of Literary Sinitic spread in a way similar to Sanskrit, but it was not accompanied by more restricted second-order cosmopolitan literary languages or trans-regional koinés like Prakrit and Apabhramsha that did not spread beyond India (Pollock 2006: 13). Unlike Latin, Literary Sinitic was not spread by conquest. On the other hand, the vernacular Sinitic also spread well beyond its region of origin and had a number of registers. Vernacular Sinitic also had a greater geographical range than the Indic cosmopolitan vernaculars 46

See Pollock (2006: 13–14, 119ff. and passim).

211

Secondary Cosmopolitan Language ( s )

or trans-regional koinés, which were more restricted in range, but vernacular Sinitic did not attempt to “localize the full spectrum of literary qualities of the superposed cosmopolitan code” (Pollock 2006: 26), remaining largely apolitical. Yet vernacular Sinitic was not merely documentary. It lies somewhere between Pollock’s cosmopolitan languages (Sanskrit, Latin, Literary Sinitic) and the cosmopolitan vernaculars. Therefore I label it a cosmopolitan koiné or secondary cosmopolitan language in order to distinguish it from trans-regional koinés or cosmopolitan vernaculars.

Appendix 6.1: Comparison of Literary Sinitic and Chan koiné Key Grammatical Indicators

Interrogatives

Personal pronouns

Literary sinitic

Chan koiné

乎 何 何故

摩, 無, 没 甚摩, 什勿 為甚摩, 因甚摩

如何 孰 何處 何得 否 何時 吾

作摩 (勿・没) 生 (阿) 那個 (阿) 那裏, 那頭 那得, 爭得 也無, 為…為 早晩 我

汝 彼 Demonstrative 此

pronouns Location

Locative, dative, accusative

彼 此中 彼中 於

Meaning ? what why (purpose, reason) how, what about which where how can or not? A or B? when (time of day) I

你, 儞 他, 渠 這 (個)

you s/he (it) this

那 (個), 伊 向, 這裏 那裏・辺 向, 在

that here (in), in BHS 此間 therein, over there in, to, → A

著, 似

in (location), accusative

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(cont.)

Literary sinitic

Chan koiné

自 之 如此 如是 AB 也 是以, 以故, 是故, 故

從A來 底, 的 與摩, 伊摩, 異没 恁摩 A是B 所以

Conditional Even if Supposing that Adversives

若, 如使 即 假令 然 顧 只

Verbs

會是・也 直饒 縱使・饒 雖然, 須, 不管 却 只管

Use single characters one or two with prefix such as characters plus verb 嘗, 已, 既, (already), affix and 欲 as prefix for future —了 completion —過 past —起 begin to —來 direction, come —著・住 persistence, in progress —殺 intensive —去 having done, gone 擬 prefix, try to, about to 打 prefix, to do A, make A

Ablative Genitive Manner Copula Consequential

Special verbs

言, 説, 曰 食

道, 道言, 説道 喫

Meaning from of, ’s in this way in that way is, be because, for this reason, therefore, much overlap, BHS esp. uses 是故 if

although, despite but only, just

speak, say eat

213

Secondary Cosmopolitan Language ( s ) (cont.)

Literary sinitic

Chan koiné

能 解 答

解 會 秖對

Vb + 宜

Equalizers

知 (議) 論, (相) 談 示 待 一切, 皆

Adverbs

Time

Conjunction Other

直 比 甚, 大 今 明日 翌朝 既 才 即時 至今 又, 亦, 復 一回 自何處 片目 少 狂人 呼・名A 父 母 目前

Vb + 得

委悉, 知道 商量 呈似 等 一應, 應是, 渾, 都 來, 大都 …地 合下 比來, 近來 不妨, 可殺, 好生 如今 明朝 次早 早 (已・個・是) 待 當下 上來 亦復, 又還, 也 一下 近離甚處, 從那離來 一隻眼 些子 風顛漢 喚 (A) 作 (B) 阿爺 阿孃 當頭

Meaning be able understand answer is OK to do A know discuss indicate wait all, each one

directly recently very now tomorrow next morning already as soon as right now up till now also, moreover once where have you come from? one eye/d few, little madman call A, B father mother in front (in sight)

Note: This appendix excludes notes on the Buddhist Hybrid Sinitic, which is largely simplified Literary Sinitic with some changes in syntax and the use of more compounds. The Chan koiné is usually mixed with the other two forms.

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Appendix 6.2: Comparison of Key Grammatical Indicators in Chan koiné, bianwen, liwen, the Textbook Language, and the Language of the Novels



Pronouns Chan

1st person pronoun 2nd person 3rd person reflexive demonstrative near

demonstrative far

我　吾 兒 你　汝 他　它 伊　渠 自家 自己　自 這　這箇 這裏　者 這般　 只摩/麽 那　那箇 那裏

bianwen

liwen

t’books

zhijie

Novels

我　吾 兒 你　汝 爾 他 伊 自家 自己 這　這箇 這裏　者 這般　遮 只摩/麽 那　那箇 那裏

我　俺

我　俺

我　汝

你　恁

你　恁

你

他 伊 己

他

他

自?

我　吾 俺 你　恁 汝 他 伊 自家

自家 自己 這　這箇 這　這箇 這裏 這裏 這般 這邊

伊 那裏

那　那箇 那 那裏

bianwen

liwen

t’books

zhijie

Novels

麽

誰 那?

摩/麽 誰 那箇

摩/麽/嗎 誰　誰家 　那箇

這　這箇 這箇 這裏 這般

那　那箇 那裏 那邊

Interrogatives Chan

摩/麽 摩/麽 誰　阿誰 誰 那　那箇 那 阿/那箇 where 那　那裏 那裏 what, why, how 什麽　甚 甚没　没 作什麽 何物 為什麽 是物

end who which

那裏 那裏 甚　縁何 甚麽　 什麽 為甚麽 何故

那裏 那裏 甚麽　怎 甚麽 什麽 為甚 因甚 做甚麽

215

Secondary Cosmopolitan Language ( s ) (cont.)

Chan when how much

what about

In this/that way, such

conditional supposition

concession consequential

bianwen

liwen

早晩

早晩 早晩 幾時 多少 多少 幾箇 幾多少 幾多， 幾少 作麽　爭 爭　怎生 恁(麽) 作麽生 做甚麽 恁麽 與麽　恁 如此 恁? 恁麽　恁 只没 只麽 這麽 假饒 設使 遮莫 雖則 雖是 所以

tone, command, 著　好 encourage emphatic 在

假饒 若是 設使 遮莫・不

t’books

zhijie

Novels

早晩 時侯 多少 幾箇

早晩

甚時

幾箇

多少 幾多

怎生 怎麽 怎的 那般 這般

怎 怎生 恁(麽) 恁地 這般

若是

恁地? 假如 若

怎生 怎麽 怎　怎也 恁地・的 恁麽　恁 這麽 這般 這等 那般 若是 設使 遮莫 假如 雖然 雖是 所以 為・因是 因為 著　着 罢 在

雖則 雖然 雖然 雖然 所以 為因　縁 因 因為　因 縁 著 着? 着 在

雖 雖是 所以

着　者

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Jorgensen

Verbal Suffixes

completion past continuity past end sentence change from structural ＋得 nominalize



Chan

bianwen

liwen

t’books zhijie Novels

了　却　著 過 得　著 來

了　却 過 得　著　着 來

了　了當 過 得　着 來

了 過 着 來

了

了

得 來

得　着 來

去 的 的

去 得　的 的　箇

去 的 的

得 的　地

去 去 得 得　底 底　地　的　箇 底　地

Other Special Forms Chan

inside area not anything try to vb is it not vb very know not know

裏頭 田地 没什麽

bianwen

liwen t’books zhijie 以裏 地頭

看 看 看 莫v 不・無・否 莫v 不・無・否 ? 好生 知道 知他

好生 知道

裏頭 地頭 没什麽

裏頭

看

看

好生 知道 知他

好生 知道

novels

無什麽 看 莫不／非v ・ 麽・否 好生

? 知他

Note: This appendix is based on Iriya and Koga (1997), Yuan and Kang (2010), and Lu Liehong (1998) for Chan; for bianwen, on Wu Fuxiang (1996) and Jiang (1965); for liwen, on Liang (2010), Imun chimnam in Suematsu (1962) and Zhang Quanzhen, “Liwen zhongde rencheng daici xitong,” Matsuyama University, available via NII Electronic Library Service (I have not been able to consult Zhang Quanzhen’s “Gudai Chaoxian guanli Hanyu jiaokeshu Liwen de yuyan mianmao,” Guizhou Daxue xuebao (shehui kexueban) [Journal of Guizhou University, Social Sciences] 25(5) [Sept. 2007]); for the textbooks, on Liang (2010), Chŏng (2010), and Wang et al. (2012); for the zhijie, on Liang (2010) and Yi Pyŏn’s Hunse p’yŏnghwa (https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=gb&res=591833, accessed on March 18, 2023); and for the novels, on T. Y. Tien (1984) and Kōsaka (1987). Also useful are Zhang (1975), Kōsaka (1983), and Shimura (1984).

Secondary Cosmopolitan Language ( s )



Abbreviations

CKS HPC T Z

Chōsen kinseki sōran, Chōsen sōtokufu, ed. Han’guk Pulgyo chŏnsŏ, Tongguk taehakkyo, ed. Taishō shinshū Daizōkyō, Takakusu and Watanabe, eds. Xuzangjing, Nakano Tatsue, ed.

217

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Chapter 7

Documents and Fiction in Three Early Edo Biographies of Hideyoshi: Translations to and from Kanbun Alexey Lushchenko 1

Sheldon Pollock, Cosmopolitan and Vernacular, Logography and Kundoku in Premodern Japan

Sheldon Pollock states that “recovering the initiatives, theories, methods, and insights of scholars across time and across the world in making sense of texts is a core task of a future philology” (Pollock 2009: 949). In this article, I recover some of the approaches to editing, translation and language taken by early Edo scholars in the seventeenth century. My discussion focuses on the fluidity of local (Japanese) and supralocal (kanbun) forms of textuality and on the similarity of editing techniques applied to both documents and fiction. Before examining the specific texts I find it helpful to situate my case study within the conceptual framework developed by Sheldon Pollock. Discussing Sanskrit and Latin, Pollock claims that in both cases a period of cosmopolitan literary culture was followed by a period of vernacularity that began in the early second millennium and developed over the following five centuries (Pollock 2000: 392). In the case of East Asia, he acknowledges that Sinicization was a cosmopolitan cultural and political practice that was, however, never followed by vernacularization in the premodern era. Pollock emphasizes that “with the sole exception of Japan there was a complete absence of vernacularization” (Pollock 2006: 486) and that “the breakthrough to vernacularization was absent throughout the Chinese world, including in China itself” (Ibid.: 487). Vernacularization, as defined by Pollock, is “the historical process of choosing to create a written literature along with its complement, a political discourse, in local languages according to models supplied by a superordinate, usually cosmopolitan, literary culture” (Ibid.: 23). I would like to make several observations that I find useful for discussing the cosmopolitan and the vernacular in East Asia, and Japan in particular. First, Pollock overemphasizes the “replacement” of the cosmopolitan by vernacular formations (Pollock 2000: 606–607). He does mention that “literacy in [vernacular] Kannada presupposed literacy in Sanskrit” (Pollock 1998: 21), and that

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163

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“both Latin and Sanskrit preserved a residual force into the nineteenth century, providing a code for the display of scholarship or the cultivation of nostalgic antiquarianism by vernacular intellectuals and writers” (Pollock 2000: 615). Instead of replacement, I believe that vernacularization added new local literary languages that modified the status and functions of the cosmopolitan language that continued to exist in parallel. This is true for Sanskrit, Latin, and Literary Sinitic (kanbun) in Japan, for example. The Japanese texts of the seventeenth century that I discuss below show how the cosmopolitan and vernacular continued to coexist a millennium after the vernacularization began in Japan. Second, Pollock singles out Japan as the only case of vernacularization in East Asia because Japan can be said to follow roughly the vernacularization process in South Asia or Europe in the sense of developing a local written literature in Japanese in the seventh–ninth centuries at the Nara and Heian courts. Both cultural and political aspects of Japanese vernacularization in the form of works such as the Man’yōshū 万葉集 (Collection of Myriad Leaves; ca. 785), Kojiki 古事記 (Record of Ancient Matters; 712), and later prose and poetry at the Heian court, fit perfectly into Pollock’s definition. Moreover, the development of Japanese syllabaries visually represents the literization part of vernacularization.1 I note that the texts I examine below are from the seventeenth century, many centuries after this initial breakthrough into vernacular literary culture, and thus can illustrate only the more remote consequences of vernacularization. Third, the concept of a “high vernacular” among the elites is very useful in discussing Japanese vernacularization. Pollock also uses the terms “highculture vernacular” or “cosmopolitan vernacular,” and defines it as “that register of the emergent vernacular that aims to localize the full spectrum of literary qualities of the superposed cosmopolitan code” (Pollock 2006: 26). This high vernacular corresponds in the Japanese case to kundoku 訓讀 (reading Literary Sinitic by vernacular gloss, i.e. in Japanese). Similar to the example of Kannada vernacular in India, kundoku practice in Japan can be said to be “an attempt to replicate an imperial culture-power formation at the regional level” (Pollock 2000: 612) and in the local language.2 Kundoku style became the “cosmopolitan vernacular” or one of the high registers of Japanese vernacular. Again, this was developed in the early stages of vernacularization and was successfully maintained later on.

1 See, for example, David B. Lurie (2011). 2 See also Duthie (2014).

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Fourth, the key property of Literary Sinitic, shared by neither Sanskrit nor Latin, is its logographic nature. Pollock contrasts Latin literature written in only a single Roman alphabet (although in principle one could imagine other alphabets potentially used for this purpose) with innumerable regional graphic forms of Sanskrit literature (Pollock 2000: 605). The logographic nature of Literary Sinitic made it applicable to numerous regional languages. It seems that logography allowed for or even caused the development of local written vernaculars (whether in the form of kundoku-style vernacular reading traditions or not). Thus, unlike Latin (one language with one script) and Sanskrit (one language with diverse scripts), Literary Sinitic was one inscriptional system for diverse languages.3 In other words, it is difficult and impractical to look at a Sanskrit or Latin text and read it in a different language, such as Kannada or French, but in the case of Literary Sinitic it is both possible and reasonably practical to look at a Literary Sinitic text and read it in Japanese (by kundoku method with the help of special marks added optionally to the text) or some other language.4 Thus, while Sanskrit and Latin are indeed translocal languages, I hesitate to call Literary Sinitic a translocal language since it functions as a translocal inscriptional system fit for different languages. Also, after vernacularization in Japan, which included the development of kundoku, any Literary Sinitic text could be read in Japanese high vernacular. This is why in premodern Japan Literary Sinitic was not considered a “foreign language.” Literary Sinitic and high vernacular (kundoku style of Japanese) practically merged and became indistinguishable as concepts.5 Writing in Literary Sinitic using only sinographs or writing in a vernacular register that mixed sinographs with Japanese syllabaries was a matter of selecting an inscriptional style, or graphic form, of a text. Some texts, whether by tradition, convention, or for stylistic reasons, tended to be written in Literary Sinitic but read in high vernacular. It can even be said that Literary Sinitic became one of the forms of writing down Japanese high vernacular (another available option was to write in a mix of sinographs and Japanese syllabary following Japanese syntactical order). While Literary Sinitic was perceived as one of the ways—a 3 See also the chapters by Lurie, Duthie, and Denecke in this volume. Duthie uses the term “Sinoscript” for Literary Sinitic and Denecke calls it East Asia’s scripta franca. 4 Please note that I am not saying here that sinographs are universal “ideograms” (or “ideographs”) existing independently of language. They are logographs with both sound and meaning. The point is that the “meaning” part is ideally fixed and constant, whereas the “sound” part varies with language. This property makes it possible to read a Literary Sinitic text using kundoku. 5 See the chapter by Saitō in this volume for a discussion of kundoku reading/recitation that functioned as the Japanese equivalent of the cosmopolitan “cultivated speech” (yayan).

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formal and typical way—to write Japanese high vernacular (the “cosmopolitan vernacular”), there also existed a wide spectrum of written vernacular styles or registers that were neither written in Literary Sinitic nor used for reading Literary Sinitic. Some of them, more informal and colloquial ones, were indeed used, however, to comment on, elucidate, and explain texts in Literary Sinitic. The logographic nature of Literary Sinitic and the development of various kundoku-like methods in East Asia, not only in Japan, often hide the vernacularization processes that took place behind the cosmopolitan Literary Sinitic façade. My examination of Japanese texts from the seventeenth century does not add much to the discussion of vernacularization itself, but highlights the relation between Literary Sinitic and written vernacular and illustrates how they were perceived and employed. 2

Introduction

Among premodern Japanese narratives it is not at all rare to find examples recorded in both kanbun and in mixed script, such as various editions of the Hōjōki 方丈記 (An Account of a Ten-Foot-Square Hut; 1212) or Heike monogatari 平家物語 (Tales of the Heike; mid-thirteenth century).6 Usually, kanbun versions of a given work, considered dry and terse, are less known and less studied than Japanese mixed script versions. One of the aims of the present chapter is to consider the value of kanbun materials that do not necessarily repeat the content of parallel vernacular Japanese versions and thus contain textual details worthy of attention. Here I examine three episodes from different biographies of Toyotomi Hideyoshi 豐臣秀吉 (1536–1598): 1) his early years; 2) his letter with peace terms sent to Ming China; and 3) the Ming edict appointing him the “King of Japan.” My analysis of the treatment of these narratives in three different texts created by three different scholars in the early Edo period comprises the core of this chapter. The biographical texts 6 For example, the so-called Hiramatsuke-bon 平松家本 and Atsuta-bon 熱田本 variants of Heike monogatari are written in kanbun. In addition, there is a curious manuscript called the Kohon Heike monogatari 古本平家物語, kept in Kyoto University library and available online, of one volume of the Heike monogatari written in kanbun in 1820 by Ban Nobutomo 伴信友 (1773–1846), a scholar of National Learning (kokugaku). He added a note explaining that he took an old manuscript written in 1446 and rewrote it in “genuine characters” (shinji or mana 真字), i.e., sinographs or kanbun. Even in the nineteenth century the traditional view of sinographs as “genuine characters” versus Japanese syllabaries (“borrowed or provisional characters,” kana 仮字) was upheld and made it possible to experiment with converting texts from one inscriptional style to another without linking them to the nation form. Rewriting the Japanese Heike monogatari in Literary Sinitic did not make it a “Chinese” text.

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compared are: 1) Taikōki 太閤記 (Toyotomi Hideyoshi Chronicle; 1626) by Oze Hoan 小瀬甫庵 (1564–1640); 2) Toyotomi Hideyoshi fu 豊臣秀吉譜 (Biographical Record of Toyotomi Hideyoshi; 1642, published in 1658) by Hayashi Razan 林 羅山 (1583–1657); and 3) Toyotomi Hideyoshi den 豊臣秀吉伝 (Biography of Toyotomi Hideyoshi; 1664) by Asai Ryōi 浅井了意 (ca. 1612–1691). It is noteworthy that the second work is essentially a reworked version of the first, translated into kanbun, while the third work is basically a translation of the second into mixed kanji-kana Japanese. In other words, the three texts form a chain of translations from Japanese into kanbun and then back into Japanese.7 In addition to the choices of inscriptional style, the compilers also decided on the content of their works, adapting, adding, and silencing historical documents as well as fictional elements in accordance with the compilation circumstances and purpose of each work. Thus, the works of Hayashi and Asai follow Oze, reediting his text quite freely into their own personal projects. Such practices of premodern and early modern Japanese writers of history place their works in an ambivalent category of texts having characteristics of both historical chronicles and literary fiction.8 Since the three texts discussed here are all extant, comparison of corresponding passages reveals the changes made by each successive compiler. Focusing on Hayashi’s text, I will trace the process of compilation of this official historical work in kanbun and its later popularization by Asai. Some attention is given to the political context of Tokugawa control over sensitive materials dealing with Hideyoshi that certainly influenced the editorial decisions made by the compilers. I will first briefly describe the properties of the three works. The first, Taikōki, was written by Oze Hoan, a doctor by profession and Confucian scholar serving the Maeda family. Although he relied on earlier works about Hideyoshi, such as Tenshōki 天正記 (the oldest text about Hideyoshi, compiled during his lifetime and on his orders) and Taikō gunki 太閤軍記 (written by a vassal of Hideyoshi), documents of the Maeda family, and Hideyoshi’s letters (Berry 1982: 243), his work contains many apocryphal tales and fictional descriptions. Oze made changes to documents, simplified some records, added fictional 7 Translating Literary Sinitic into vernacular Korean and the other way around is discussed by Evon in this volume. 8 This blurred boundary between history and fiction is common for many premodern historical works. For example, Anne Walthall examines eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century official and unofficial histories about Tokugawa Tsunayoshi 徳川綱吉 (1646–1709) and argues that they call into question the distinction between history and fiction. Walthall shows the existence of a “disjuncture between modern and pre-modern notions of factuality.” A wide continuum of texts with varying admixtures of fictionalized accounts constituted historical writing in the Edo period. See Walthall (2007: 175–199).

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passages for episodes lacking in documentary evidence, and omitted the history of Toyotomi—Tokugawa rivalry (Kuwata 1965: 161). This abundance of subjective elements, even in documents, is appropriate for the critical biography (hyōden 評傳) genre of the work. It should be emphasized that the author’s goal was not to record facts of historical reality, but to critically assess historical events from a Confucian viewpoint (Ibid.: 164–169). As pointed out by Kuwata, Oze’s stance as recorded in the preface—“to record good as good and bad as bad in the matters of Lord Hideyoshi” (秀吉公之事も、善を善とし、悪を悪と し記之) (Hinotani 1996: 4)—indicates that his aim was to produce a kind of Confucian morality treatise based on critically assessed historical examples (Kuwata 1965: 164). The resulting work, a mixture of historical chronicles, gunki narratives and yomihon literature (Hinotani 1996: 667), was well-structured and thorough. Most later-Edo popular works of the “Taikōki” type were based to some extent on Oze Hoan’s Taikōki, which was reprinted often and read in the Edo period by the educated classes (Kuwata 1965: 11). The work is mostly written in kanji-kana mixed script with many documents and letters in kanbun. The Japanese text in mixed script also contains numerous short kanbun phrases or sentences. The second text, Toyotomi Hideyoshi fu, was written by Hayashi Razan, called “the founder of modern historical scholarship” in Japan, who was the leading Neo-Confucian scholar of the early Edo period (Brownlee 1997: 15). For half a century he served the Tokugawa bakufu directly as advisor, historiographer, and scholarly administrator (Ibid.: 16). The text was compiled at the request of the Tokugawa bakufu as a three-volume part of a large historical project to produce the Honchō Shōgun fu 本朝將軍譜 (Biographical Records of Shoguns of Japan), a seven-volume work written in 1642 and published in 1658. According to Kuwata, this work generally follows Oze’s Taikōki and can be said to be its Literary Sinitic translation (Kuwata 1965: 187).9 Notable differences include reworkings of some documents, and a clear pro-Tokugawa bias in parts mentioning Tokugawa Ieyasu. Among the most conspicuous signs of the official status of the work is the honorific orthographic practice of highlighting every single mention of Tokugawa Ieyasu’s name by placing it at the top of a new (vertical) line and one character above the rest of the text. This is a traditional and widespread practice in Chinese and other East Asian books and documents and was used to show respect to rulers in visual form. In addition, 9 This editing of Japanese text (mixing sinographs and kana syllabaries) into Literary Sinitic (kanbun) shares some similarities with the premodern Korean practice of polishing vernacular idu/idumun to produce a cosmopolitan Literary Sinitic text. See the chapter by Park in this volume for details.

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the name of Tokugawa Ieyasu appears anachronistically as daigongen 大權現 (Great Manifestation [Avatar] of Buddha), a posthumous honorific title. The names of Hideyoshi and other rulers, however, are not treated in a similarly honorific format. There is a note by Hayashi Razan that clarifies the process of compilation of this work from various sources: “I have selected and written it by Your Highness’ order. It contains recent miscellaneous records and records of Chinese and Korean matters that I have investigated, as well as [various] explanations that I heard.”10 The work was created by order of the Tokugawa shōgun in 1642 and consists of a selection of recent miscellaneous notes and Chinese and Korean records with added legendary or hearsay explanations. Apparently, there are no details about the circulation of this official work in kanbun, but it was likely intended for educated readers. It was published in 1658 in Kyoto and again in the late seventeenth century (Genroku edition). The third text, Toyotomi Hideyoshi den, is a translation and adaptation of Hayashi Razan’s text into mixed kanji-kana Japanese done by Asai Ryōi, the most prominent of the kana-zōshi writers, a samurai in Edo who became a Buddhist priest and settled in Kyoto in the 1650s. His three-volume text about Hideyoshi is actually part of the larger seventeen-volume work Shōgunki 將 軍記 (Chronicles of Shoguns). Although the Kokinshosekidairin 古今書籍題 林 (Forest of Titles of Old and New Books; 1675) states that “[Asai] changed biographical records [by Hayashi Razan] into the Japanese language” (家譜 ヲ和語ニ改タリ), it is not a literal translation, but a simplified retelling of the kanbun version of Hayashi Razan. It is a work close to historical yomimono intended for wide readership with numerous illustrations accompanying the text (Hasegawa 1997a: 61–64). Moreover, unlike Hayashi’s text, this work was not undertaken under bakufu orders. Incidentally, it is important to keep in mind that in the context of the Tokugawa bakufu, writings and publications about Hideyoshi were politically subversive by default. They were banned and suppressed in order to silence the details of the power shift from Toyotomi to the “divine ancestor” Tokugawa Ieyasu.11 As stated by Kuwata, Tokugawa authorities were against making pre1620s history known; they banned publications that attempted to do so, and 10 奉臺命選著之 。 其所考檢則近世之雜記及中華朝鮮之事記 、 且其所聞説亦 有之。 It is noteworthy that Hayashi Razan does not mention his main source, Oze’s Taikōki. 11 Kornicki (1998: 332) points out that “[a]lthough there is no extant edict explicitly banning books dealing with Hideyoshi and Hideyori, in practice such books invariably got their authors and publishers into trouble. […] Hideyoshi and Christianity were taboo subjects for publishers and were carefully avoided in published works, although manuscripts dealing with such subjects circulated without occasioning any trouble.”

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punished people who broke the ban. Due to this policy, research on Hideyoshi was not conducted and Hideyoshi increasingly developed into a popular hero known mostly from legends and fictional accounts published in abundance in the Edo period (Kuwata 1965: 7). Only since Meiji times when the ban on Hideyoshi was lifted did scientific research based on authentic historical sources begin. Old documents, records, letters, and diaries finally became accessible to scholars (Ibid.: 12). When discussing works of the Edo period, this pro-Tokugawa bias has to be taken into account. Hayashi Razan’s writings, including Hideyoshi’s biography discussed here, openly promote the official bakufu version of events. Hideyoshi’s biographies by Oze Hoan and Asai Ryōi were also created under the Tokugawa and thus show similar bias. There are several details concerning the publication of Asai Ryōi’s work that show the risks and tensions surrounding claims to texts, especially those sanctioned by the bakufu. There might have been a conflict with the Hayashi house about the direct use of Hayashi’s kanbun text. Sometimes Asai Ryōi’s name was deleted from the published texts and even publishers preferred to remain anonymous (probably due to some ties with the Hayashi family). Some illustrations with questionable content concerning Tokugawa Ieyasu were deleted in Asai’s work (Hasegawa 1997a: 64–65). Quite telling are some of the methods employed in Edo-period publications about Hideyoshi in order to minimize risks of censorship: instead of mentioning Taikōki 太閤記 in the title, some books were entitled with a different middle character (e.g., Taiheiki 太平記), or the real name was avoided and different characters were used (Kuwata 1965: 227). 3

Hideyoshi’s Early Years: Repeating Fiction

Let us consider one short passage about Hideyoshi’s early years that is largely fictional and not supported by documentary sources. Oze Hoan’s version outlines the following sequence of events: Hideyoshi’s birth in Owari province; his father Chikuami; his mother’s dream about the sun; his stay in a Zen monastery; his interest in worldly affairs and warrior tales; his conflict with monks; his working as a wandering servant; his serving Matsushita Yukitsuna 松下 之綱 (1537–1598); his appropriation of money provided by his master to buy armor; the advice of his uncle to serve Oda Nobunaga 織田信長 (1534–1582); his appeal to Nobunaga; and his loyal service to Nobunaga. These events are stated as facts, with many plausible details. Dialogues between characters and even their thoughts are revealed to readers. One should be careful when labeling certain passages as fictional. Certainly, the childhood and youth of Hideyoshi are not documented and Oze had to use

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obscure rumors and legends not corroborated by historical sources. It is difficult to distinguish between Oze Hoan’s own imagination and his repetition of legends created by others. For example, the legend of Hideyoshi’s mother seeing sunlight in a dream before giving birth to Hideyoshi may seem to be pure fantasy not worthy of inclusion in scholarly works on history. Oze Hoan, however, had good reason to include this particular detail. The story apparently originated in Hideyoshi’s family and was actively promoted by Hideyoshi himself as a kind of symbolic claim to power. In his diplomatic documents sent to foreign countries Hideyoshi related the legend in detail and likened his power and virtue to sunlight illuminating the “four seas.” Thus, the fantastic content of this legend has real historical significance supported by documentary evidence. Both Hayashi and Asai also include the legend in their works. One has to admit, however, that other realistic details of the early biography were most likely created by Oze Hoan out of the necessity to provide some account of Hideyoshi’s early years not described in reliable sources (Kuwata 1965: 158). Hideyoshi is characterized as a warrior by nature from his childhood: he is interested in worldly matters, likes “tales about the way of the brave” (勇道之物語), equates Zen monks with beggars, and even threatens to kill the monks and burn their temples (Hinotani 1996: 12). This behavior is simply stated as a matter of fact without any criticism. The matter of leaving his master Matsushita and appropriating his money is deemed serious enough to require an explanation. Hideyoshi’s justification is given in the following way. He puts the warrior’s ambition of gaining fame and country using strategic schemes above the Confucian values of etiquette/propriety (礼) and loyalty (忠), and the money appropriated is considered a loan that he will return when he succeeds in the world. Interestingly, Hideyoshi’s uncle approves of these questionable actions and quotes supporting arguments from the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji 史記) by Sima Qian. He suggests serving Oda Nobunaga, who is presented here as a likely candidate to become a sage ruler and master of the land—that is, a strong wise man who hates those who abuse peasants for profit and so on. Serving such a master is the best way to achieve fame and correct the deviant ways of the world. In short, Oze Hoan outlines a compromise between Confucian values and the warrior’s pragmatic views on fame and service: some minor controversial actions are permitted in cases where they are aimed at serving the sage master, achieving fame and improving the disordered world. Let us now examine the same passage in Hayashi Razan’s kanbun biography. In general, the events are described as in Oze Hoan’s Taikōki and given in the same order. The kanbun translation, in this passage, tends to omit details that are not essential to the overall plot, resulting in a concise reworking of Oze’s

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text. Minor details are consistently skipped, but there are also cases where large parts are removed entirely. For example, the long passage wherein a young Hideyoshi justifies his appropriation of his master’s money, the supporting speech of his uncle quoting Chinese examples, and the praise of Nobunaga in Confucian terms, are all reduced to the most basic form: Hiyoshi thought: “Even if I cheat Yukitsuna of this money, the best thing is to become a great man and first go to a good master.” Then he went to meet his uncle and discussed this matter with him. The uncle approved and said: “Nowadays Nobunaga is a good master. Go serve him.” Hayashi 165812

Certainly, the removal of Confucian details in this case influences the representation of Hideyoshi. The abruptness of this simplified passage portrays Hideyoshi (and his uncle) as an ambitious cheater. No mention is made of returning the money in the future. Hayashi Razan’s text is interesting in terms of both content and form. Why did he choose Oze Hoan’s text as the basis for his own work in the first place? The most probable reason is the completeness, thoroughness, and scholarly approach of Oze Hoan’s work. Hayashi Razan’s attitude to Oze’s fictional elements remains unclear, but it is evident that Hayashi did not conduct his own independent research to verify Oze’s statements. Usually he merely edits the existing content. The changes in form and status of the text are especially significant. The shift into kanbun, and the status of an official bakufu historical work raise the text to a very high level in the hierarchy of texts. In short, Hayashi Razan actively participated in the dissemination of Oze’s fictional elements, transformed and hidden under the impressive official format of the work. Were one to study Hayashi’s text unaware of its link to Oze’s Taikōki and its fictional elements, one could easily be misguided by its formal kanbun appearance to associate it with authority and veracity. The third version created by Asai Ryōi is a translation of Hayashi Razan’s text from kanbun into mixed kanji–kana Japanese. The purpose was evidently 12 日吉以為縦以此金欺之綱不如為大丈夫先于良主乃往遇叔父而議斯事叔父 可之曰信長者今時之良君也汝往事之. In the original edition, this Literary Sinitic (kanbun) text is marked with kunten (not shown here) making it easier to read the text in Japanese. The kunten marks guide a reader to generate the following Japanese text, おもへ

た

あざむ

mentally or vocally: 日吉以為らく「縦とひ此の金を以って之綱を 欺 くとも、如かず ふ

りょうしゅ おか

おじ

あひ

こ

ぎ

大丈夫と為りて、先ず 良主 を于さん」には、乃往きて叔父に遇て、 斯の事を 議 か

のぶなが

いまどき

りょうくん

つか

す。叔父之を可として曰く「 信長 は 今時 の 良君 なり。汝往きて之に 事 へよ」.

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to produce a reader-friendly version with illustrations targeting a wide readership. Asai Ryōi’s decision to base his work on Hayashi Razan’s version is significant in and of itself since it disseminated the official bakufu version of Hideyoshi’s biography in an accessible format approaching that of popular fiction. Of course, the general narrative follows Hayashi’s version very closely, but the difference lies in a more simplified vocabulary and clearer sentences. The combination of lively narrative with ease of comprehension likely made Asai’s version more attractive for common readers than Oze Hoan’s thoroughly scholarly text. This is a probable goal of Asai’s project to retranslate Hayashi’s kanbun back into Japanese. In terms of content, Asai’s text usually matches Hayashi’s version almost as a direct translation with occasional rewording. As for the differences in the passage, let us check the same controversial decision of young Hideyoshi (Hasegawa 1997a: 69). In this case, Asai repeats Hayashi’s version and adds some justification for this action that was entirely omitted by Hayashi. A brief comparison with the version of Oze Hoan reveals that the probable source of Asai’s additions is Oze’s text. Hideyoshi mentions the possibility of returning the money in the future and his uncle supports his great ambition. The complexity of Oze’s Confucian argumentation is greatly reduced, but the core of the argument is preserved, thus avoiding the abruptness of Hayashi’s text. So, in this particular passage, Asai adapted Hayashi’s text by consulting Oze’s Taikōki to supply the details. The three biographical texts discussed above present a peculiar case of similar content recorded first in vernacular Japanese (Oze Hoan), then in cosmopolitan Literary Sinitic (Hayashi Razan), and later changed back to a new vernacular version (Asai Ryōi). The choice between two inscriptional styles—cosmopolitan Literary Sinitic and Japanese vernacular—determined to some extent the level of formality, intended readership, and general appearance of a text with the cosmopolitan version being more formal, intended for better educated readers, and resulting in shorter, more compact works. Kornicki states as follows regarding the choice of written language in the Edo period: “[T]here were in fact a plurality of print languages each with their own demands, conventions and social and cultural boundaries … The choice, for example, between kanbun and formal written Japanese was an ideological one as much as a linguistic one, representing a choice made between sinological and nationalistic orientations” (Kornicki 1998: 33–34). Kurozumi Makoto, however, points out that in the Edo period “people who worked with kanbun viewed the relationship between Chinese and Japanese in terms of a difference between formal and colloquial languages. Rather than avoiding the colloquial language, they used it extensively to explain the more formal language of kanbun” (Kurozumi 2001: 211–212). This statement sheds some light on possible motivations behind choices of inscriptional style made by the three compilers

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and editors of Hideyoshi’s biographies. These three works also bring attention to the fact that in seventeenth-century Japan Literary Sinitic and Japanese vernacular were treated as mutually convertible and interchangeable; that is, a work in a vernacular register could potentially be turned into a cosmopolitan work and vice versa. Despite the superficial visual difference, the three works share the overall content and were produced by similar and rather freely applied techniques of adaptation, editing, and compilation. As follows from the above statement of Kurozumi Makoto, and as I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, it is useful to view (as people in the Edo period likely did) Literary Sinitic (kanbun) not as “Chinese” or a foreign formal language, but as a high formal register of Japanese language. In this period, Literary Sinitic was treated as a kind of “cosmopolitan vernacular,” a high-culture vernacular register typically associated with political, intellectual, and official spheres of communication. Writing this high vernacular in Literary Sinitic was a choice of inscriptional style. This choice was determined by tradition, convention, formality, and the status of the work. When read (especially read aloud), this Literary Sinitic text was still rendered into high vernacular Japanese by means of kundoku. Viewed from this perspective, Oze, Hayashi, and Asai were not choosing between Chinese and Japanese or between a sharply differentiated cosmopolitan and vernacular, but deciding which register of Japanese would be appropriate for their work. In my view, Oze selected a semi-formal register used for intellectual historical works (with passages in Literary Sinitic). Hayashi, working on a government project, naturally picked the high formal vernacular that was conventionally written in Literary Sinitic (with optional kundoku marks added). And Asai chose an informal or more colloquial register for general educated readers. This approach to their choices clarifies the strange shift from vernacular (Oze) to cosmopolitan (Hayashi) and back to vernacular (Asai). In fact, the shift made was between higher and lower registers of vernacular Japanese. Hayashi’s Literary Sinitic text is primarily high vernacular, and only “potentially cosmopolitan” in the sense that it could also be accessible and readable for educated readers across East Asia. As for the exegetical function, i.e., using colloquial to explain or gloss Literary Sinitic (kanbun), it is only sensible and rational to use a lower colloquial register to explain a text in a higher register. This is exactly what Asai did with Hayashi’s high vernacular text. He rendered a high vernacular register into a more colloquial and accessible register of vernacular Japanese.13 13

It is an interesting question whether, for example, a French translation of a Latin text can be viewed as its exegesis or colloquial commentary. Of course, usually a high register of

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The relation between registers and inscriptional styles described above can be depicted as follows (solid lines show typical or conventional choices, dashed lines show a potential choice):14 Table 7.1

Relationship between registers and inscriptional styles

Registers or styles of vernacular Japanese by formality, status etc. 1 2 3 4 5 6

Inscriptional styles, graphic forms

Examples

High

{

Literary Sinitic, kanbun

Hayashi

Semiformal

{

Japanese, mix of sinographs and syllabaries

Oze

Informal

{

Japanese, more syllabaries and fewer sinographs

Asai

Source: author

4

Exchange of Documents with Ming China: Editors’ Interference Allowed

Having examined some of the translation and adaptation techniques used by the compilers and editors dealing with largely fictional accounts of Hideyoshi’s early years, let us now trace how the compilers Oze, Hayashi, and Asai approached the documents incorporated in their three works. Here I will only trace changes in corresponding parts of documents appearing in the three

14

French has been used for translations from Latin. I doubt, however, that Latin was ever treated as a high register of French. This diagram is certainly a simplification. I have put registers in pairs to show that there were, for example, several “high” registers. Thus, classical Japanese poetry (waka) had “high” status and has been conventionally written in Japanese syllabary with few sinographs. See the chapter by Duthie in this volume for a detailed discussion of waka poetry functioning as a cosmopolitan vernacular in Japan.

234

Lushchenko

texts without discussing the historical context and complex details of diplomatic negotiations.15 The document outlining Hideyoshi’s terms for peace at the end of the first campaign in Korea in 1593 is one of the most important documents of Hideyoshi’s diplomacy. In Oze’s Taikōki a passage from this document appears as follows: 1. 2. 3.

As our two states for some years have been in discord, maritime trade in recent years was interrupted. At this time it should be changed with official and trade ships coming and going. Having good relations, the Great Ming and Japan should not aim to change them, and ministers from the courts of our two states should mutually swear an oath. I have sent a vanguard to Korea to subdue it. Now, although a good general should be sent in order to further suppress the state and calm the people, if [you] accept the terms of this treaty, [I] will not look back at Korea’s rebellious intention […]. Hinotani 1996: 447–44816

Oze evidently presents the document with all due formality, in its official form close or equal to the original, and in kanbun. Hayashi Razan, on the other hand, decided not to include the full original text of the document and rephrased the main points in his own words as follows: Both countries these years have been biting each other with poison. Therefore, in recent years we do not send trading ships. Now, if peace matters are arranged, we will definitely send them. After good relations have been established, authorized subjects [ministers] will take an oath together. Last year I sent strong generals and many troops, subjugated Korea, pacified its capital and countryside, and killed its people. If your

15

For a detailed discussion of the “King of Japan” title, exchange of letters, and the general context of diplomatic relations between Japanese and Chinese rulers in different periods, see Verschuer (2007) and Mizuno (2003). 16 一　両国年来依間隙、勘合近年及断絶矣。此時改之官船商舶可有往来事。 一　大明日本通好、不可有変更之旨、両国朝権之大臣、互可懸誓詞事。 一　於朝鮮遺前駆追伐之矣。至今弥為鎮国家安百姓、雖可遣良将、此条目  　件之於領納者、不顧朝鮮之逆意。

235

Documents and Fiction in Three Early Edo Biographies

country fully accepts my proposition [of peace], I will not look back at Korea’s criminal rebellion. Hayashi 165817

Instead of formal kangeki 間隙 (discord, disagreement), Hayashi chose dokuseki 毒螫 (bite with poison), which is idiomatic and less formal. The sentences about Korea in Oze’s document translate as: “I have sent a vanguard to Korea to subdue it. Now, although a good general should be sent in order to further suppress the state and calm the people, if [you] accept the terms of this treaty, [I] will not look back at Korea’s rebellious intention.” Hayashi Razan rephrased this passage as follows: “Last year I sent strong generals and many troops, subjugated Korea, pacified its capital and countryside, and killed its people. If your country fully accepts my proposition [of peace], I will not look back at Korea’s criminal rebellion.” Although the main points are conveyed, Hayashi’s rendition omits Hideyoshi’s claim that the first campaign was fought only by a vanguard of the main forces and adds a phrase about killing people in Korea. It is possible that Hayashi sought to summarize the document’s contents in a more literal way without diplomatic embellishments, but in this case the changes emphasize the negative image of Hideyoshi. It sounds as if Hideyoshi himself openly acknowledges and even boasts about killing people in Korea. Asai Ryōi’s version of the same passage is as follows: Since relations between our two countries have been interrupted and hostile for a long time, trade ships were not sent in recent years. Now if there will be peace, they should definitely be sent. After the reconciliation, ministers of the two countries will exchange vows together. Last year I sent several brave generals to subdue Korea, and have pacified the 17 両國年来相為毒螫故近年不贈勘合舩今若和平事就則必可遣之和親終之後両 國之権臣共通誓辞耳我自去年遣驍将数輩征伐朝鮮蕩平其都邑更刘其人民而 今貴國悉取我言則不顧朝鮮之罪逆. In the original edition, this Literary Sinitic (kanbun) text is marked with kunten (not shown here) making it easier to read the text in ねんらい どく せき

あひ な

かん ごう せん おく

Japanese, as follows: 両國 年 来 毒 螫 を 相 為す。故に近年 勘 合 舩 を贈ら な

わしんおはり

けんしん

ず。今若し和平事就らば、必ず之を遣はすべし。 和親  終 て後、両國の 権臣 せいじ つう

のみ

ぎょう しょうすう はい

せいばつ

共に誓辞を通せん耳。我去年自り 驍 将 数 輩 を遣はし、朝鮮を 征伐 し、其の とゆう

とう へい

ころしころ

しか

ことごと

都邑を 蕩 平 し、其の人民を 更 刘す。 而も今貴國  悉 く我が言を取らば、朝鮮 ざい ぎゃく かえり

の 罪 逆 を 顧 みず。

236

Lushchenko

land from the capital on down, killing many people. If your country now accepts my words, four of the eight provinces of Korea […] Hasegawa 1997b: 6918

This simplified text clearly follows Hayashi Razan’s summary of the document and includes the killing of people ( jinmin ohoku koroshinu 人民おほくころし ぬ). Tracing this document excerpt in our three texts shows the technique of rephrasing documents with the potential addition of biased details. Even if much of the content remains the same, the difference in style (loss of formality) influences readers’ perception of Hideyoshi’s stance in the international negotiations. Rephrasing documents gives compilers a chance to interfere with the document. Even the choice to rephrase may be a sign of an editor’s reluctance to show the full text of a document. The technique of rephrasing is a relatively faithful approach to the documentary materials. Next, I will discuss a drastic treatment of the 1596 Ming edict appointing Hideyoshi the “King of Japan” and a vassal of Ming China. This edict supposedly angered Hideyoshi and caused him to launch a second attack on Korea. Oze Hoan’s Taikōki is the only text (of the three examined here) that entirely omits the second campaign in Korea and the Ming edict that caused it (Hinotani 1996: 666). This omission is quite puzzling since Oze had access to Maeda family documents, and the edict in its original and complete form was kept for generations in the same Maeda family (Kuwata 1975: 250). The most probable reason for leaving out the whole document was its political significance and its content that raised sensitive issues. The episode in Taikōki where the edict should be found describes the arrival of two Ming envoys in Osaka carrying gifts and a letter (kansho 翰書) from the Ming emperor (大明之皇帝より御装束紅葉衣色赤袖紫緋大口献翰書) (Hinotani 1996: 485). It seems that this is the only reference to a document or letter from the Ming emperor. After a detailed description of gifts (including curious animals such as a peacock, musk-deer, elephants, and various types of luxury ふ つう

かん がふ

わへい

18 両国久しく不通敵対する故に、近年 勘 合 の舟ををくらず。今もし和平あらば、 しんら

せいやく

必らずこれをつかはすべし。和ぼくなりて後、両国の臣等ともに誓約のこと葉を通 ぶ よう

しやう す はい

てうせん

ぜむ。我去年より 武勇の 将 数 輩 をつかはして朝鮮を征伐せしめ、王城以下 たいら

ことば

てうせん

打 平 げ、人民おほくころしぬ。貴国、今我が 言 をうけがはゞ、朝鮮八道のうち を、四道は…

237

Documents and Fiction in Three Early Edo Biographies

clothing) and a banquet, there is suddenly a somewhat inscrutable sentence about the anger of Hideyoshi, who breaks off relations with the Ming and sends the envoys back without any reply letter. Lord Hideyoshi became angry at the matter of [the Ming] returning Korea’s emperor to [the Korean?] court, and perhaps thinking that the Great Ming were probably also staging a false show like Korea, he did not let the Chinese envoys stay and quickly returned them without even a letter of reply this time. Hinotani 1996: 48619

This sentence is marked as unclear by the editors of the SNKBT (Shin Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei, New Anthology of Classical Japanese Literature) (Ibid.: 486n7). It is not clear what is meant by “returning Korea’s emperor to [the Korean?] court.” Apparently, Hideyoshi suddenly grew suspicious of Ming China staging some “false show” (kyoen 虛演). In any case, this is the point at which the Ming edict should be presented and read to Hideyoshi. Oze Hoan either decided to cut out the controversial scene himself or was forced to do so by some external force such as censorship. The abruptness and unclear meaning of the sentence are traces marking the omission. Hayashi Razan’s work is the only text (of the three examined here) that contains the full text of the Ming edict. Since Hayashi, unlike Oze, described the second war in Korea, he also included the edict that caused it. Showing the full original text to readers was probably also a matter of prestige for the historian, a demonstration of his access to documents. The text itself is valuable as an example of the rhetoric the Ming used to address its vassal states: In the fourth year of the same era, in the first month, the Ming Emperor heard the speech of Shixing [J. Sekisei], and ordered a seal of the King of Japan to be cast. Moreover, they prepared many crown accessories and royal robes. The cost was several tens of thousands in gold. Then, Zongcheng [J. Sōsei], the son of Li Yangong [J. Ri Genkyō], the earl of Jianhuai [J. Kanwai], was appointed as the first envoy, duzhihui [Regional Military Commissioner] Yang Fangheng [J. Yōhōkō] was appointed as the

テウセン テイ

ミン

19 秀 吉 公 朝 鮮 之 帝 王 を 帰 朝 さ せ 給 ひ し 事 、 腹 立 給 ふ て 、 大 明 も 朝 鮮 の ご と キヨ エン ある

ヘンカン

トメ

き虚 演 有べきとやおぼしけん、今度は御 返簡 もなく、唐使をも留給はで早々に 帰し給ひぬ。

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Lushchenko

secondary envoy, and they were sent to Japan carrying the Imperial order and seal. The Imperial edict said: The sacred spirit is spread widely; Heaven covers it and Earth carries it. There is no one who does not kindly respect the Imperial order. It acts, widely reaching the corners of the sea and the sunrise, and there is no one who does not follow it. In the past, our Imperial ancestors greatly raised their children in many lands. The tortoise stamp and dragon banner have we granted to the distant land of Fusō [Japan]. The pure red stone and seal script have we gloriously spread to the land-pacifying mountain [Mt. Fuji]. Continuing the tradition, we raise the waves of the sea to reach once in a while the distant wind domains. In these prosperous times, it is proper to prolong the precious banner. Ah! You, Toyotomi Taira no Hideyoshi, have risen in the sea country. Knowing respect towards the Middle Country [China], you have sent a single messenger to the west. With esteem he came to us, knocking at ten thousand barriers to the north and courteously requesting to serve us [offer subordination]. When [your] thoughts are already firm in allegiance, how can we spare our favor towards conciliation? Hereby especially we enfeoff you as the King of Japan and grant you the Imperial edict [of appointment]. Ah! Affection [patronage] decorates a grass box [sent with the edict], crown and clothes are put on the surface of the sea, wind moves grass clothes, and firm is the defense of domains for the Heavenly court. You [should] discreetly follow the proper ways of a subject’s behavior, think of the pact, and feel the cordial Imperial grace without weakening your devotion. Respectfully obeying Imperial messages, and eternally following Imperial instructions, revere! Hayashi 165820

20 同四年正月大明帝聴石星之言使鑄日本国王之印且多調冠冕法服其弊数万金 即以監淮候李言恭子宗城為正使以都指揮揚方亨為副使齎策命印章遣于日本 其誥命曰聖神廣運凡天覆地載莫不尊親帝命溥將曁海隅日出罔不率俾昔我皇 祖誕育多方龜紐龍章遠錫扶桑之域貞珉大篆栄施鎮国之山嗣以海波之揚偶致 風占之隔當茲盛際宜續彝章咨爾豐臣平秀吉崛起海邦知尊中國西馳一介之使 欣慕來同北叩萬里之関懇求内附情既堅於恭順恩可靳於柔懷茲特封爾為日本 国王錫之誥命於戲寵賁芝函襲冠裳於海表 風行卉服固藩衛於天朝爾其念臣職 之當修恪循要束感皇恩之已渥無替款誠祗服綸言永遵聲教欽哉. In the original edition, this Literary Sinitic (kanbun) text is marked with kunten (not shown here) makみんていせきせい

こと

ing it easier to read the text in Japanese, as follows: 同四年正月大 明 帝 石 星 が 言 いん い

かんべんほうふく ととの

ついへ

を聴きて、日本国王の印を鑄させて、且つ多く  冠  冕  法 服を 調 ふ。其の 弊 数 かん わい こう り げん きょう

そう せい

しんす

と し き よう ほうこう

万金。即ち 監 淮 候李 言 恭 が子宗 城 を以って正使とし、都指揮揚 方亨を

239

Documents and Fiction in Three Early Edo Biographies

The style is highly pompous, ceremonial, and even poetic. One interesting detail is the name used by the Ming ruler to address Hideyoshi. He is called Toyotomi Taira no Hideyoshi. This is no error, but a very common way of referring to Hideyoshi in continental (Ming Chinese and Chosŏn Korean) sources (Zheng 2008: 55). Numerous continental documents regularly use this name, whereas it is rarely found in Japanese texts. For example, as mentioned by Kuwata, an entry for 1583 (Tenshō 11) in the Kuge honin 公卿補任 (Official Appointments of Court Nobles) lists Hideyoshi’s rank, name, and age as “Junior Fourth Rank, Lower Grade, Taira no Hideyoshi, 48 years” (従四位下　平秀吉　四 十八) (Kuwata 1984: 234). In any case, the biography compiled by Hayashi Razan contains this valuable edict and thus supplies information that is not to be found in the texts by Oze and Asai. After all, the full Literary Sinitic text of the document does not stand out in the kanbun text of Hayashi and matches appropriately the official style and form of the work. Asai, however, decided to summarize the edict in one line: In the edict, there is a sentence saying, “Enfeoff Lord Hideyoshi as the King of Japan” (勅書の中に、秀吉公を封じて日本国王とすといへる文あり) (Hasegawa 1997: 82). The full edict would probably be out of place in a plain and popular kana-zōshi work like that of Asai. Some political considerations might have also influenced Asai’s editing decision. In short, this example demonstrates the full range of compilers’ approaches to documents, from total omission (Oze) to inclusion of a full text (Hayashi), to a brief summary (Asai). Oze, ふす

さく めい いん しょう

もたら

つか

こうめい

せい

以って副使とし、策 命 印 章 を 齎 して日本に 遣 はす。其の誥 命に曰く 聖 しん こううん

おお

の

な あまねくおこなふおよび かい

そん しん

神 廣運凡そ天覆ひ地載す。帝命尊 親せずと云うこと莫し。溥  將  暨 海 ぐう にっしゅつ したが

な

こう そおほい

た ほう いく

き ちゅう

隅 日 出、率俾はずと云うこと罔し。昔し我が 皇祖 誕 に多方を育す。龜 紐 りゅうしょう

ふそう いき たま

てい びんだいてんえい ちん こく

ほどこ

つ

龍 章 遠く扶桑の域に錫ひ、貞 珉 大 篆 栄 鎮 國の山に 施 す。嗣ぐに海波 たまたま

あが

へだ

いた

こ

せい さい

あたり

よろ

い しょう

の揚れるを以ってし、偶々風占の隔てを致す。茲の 盛 際 に 當 て、宜しく彝 章 つづ

ああなん

ほう

くっき

とうと

を 續くべし。咨 爾 ぢ豐臣平の秀吉、海邦に崛起す。中國を 尊 ふことを知り、西 いっかい

はせ

きんぼ らい どう

せき たたき

ねんご

ないふ

の方一介 の使を 馳 て、欣慕 來 同し、北の方萬里の関を 叩 て、 懇 ろに内附を しょうすで きょうじゅん かた

おんじゅうかい

おし

べ

ここ

こと なん

ほう

求む。情 既 に 恭 順 に 堅 し、恩 柔 懷 に靳む可しや。茲に特に爾ぢを封し、 こう めい

たま

ああ ちょう し かん

かざ

かんしょう

日本の國王と為し、之に 誥 命 を錫ふ。於戲、寵 芝 函に 賁 る。冠 裳 海表に かさ

きふく おこな

はんえい

かた

なん

まさ しゅう

襲 ぬ。風卉服に 行 はる。藩 衛 を天朝に 固 む (?)。爾ぢ其れ臣職の當に 修 す つつし

したが

よう そく おも

こう おん

すで

あつ

かん せい

べきことを 恪 んで 循 ひ 要 束に念ひ、皇 恩 の 已 に 渥 きことを感じ、款 誠  おとろ

つつし

りん げん

ふく

えい えい せいきょう

したが

つつし

や

を 替 へつること無し。祗 んで 綸 言 に服し、永 々 聲 教 に 遵 ひ、欽 め哉。

240

Lushchenko

however, omitted the document (and description of the second campaign) for reasons unrelated to register or inscriptional style. Hayashi included the full text since it was appropriate in his formal work of high status. Perhaps he also wished to demonstrate his access to diplomatic documents. Asai summarized the main point of the edict and avoided tiring his intended general readers with the tedious and flowery diplomatic document. In addition, changing the entire text of the edict from high vernacular into a colloquial register would perhaps look awkward. It is still noteworthy that inscriptional styles (buntai 文体) change from Japanese mixed script to kanbun and back to mixed script, and yet it is only in the kanbun version that the full document can be found.21 5

Conclusion

This brief comparative examination of several passages in three related biographies of Hideyoshi from the early Edo period is meant to support Sheldon Pollock’s point that the categories, practices, and modes of communication in the cosmopolitan and the vernacular were variable and complex in different parts of the premodern world (Pollock 2000: 593 and 596) and to illustrate this point with a case study from East Asia. I show that in seventeenth-century Japan, 1) similar content was recorded using different inscriptional styles; 2) Literary Sinitic and vernacular Japanese were perceived as different registers of the same language (formal and colloquial, respectively) and not as foreign Chinese versus local vernacular; 3) less formal registers of the vernacular were used as tools for exegesis of the cosmopolitan Literary Sinitic or high “cosmopolitan vernacular” (by this time, or even since the invention of kundoku, the two had merged and were read in the same high vernacular Japanese); 4) a wide range of editorial choices about the content and form of texts was available to 21

Discussing various problems related to premodern documents, such as forgeries, Jeffrey Mass notes that a “fundamental lapse has been the general reluctance of scholars in Japan to subject this ‘last line of defense’ to the critical analysis usually accorded to more narrative sources. Indeed, there seems to be a widespread feeling that to question the historicity of documents, especially for key periods, is to make the writing of history nearly impossible” (Mass 1976: 8). As I show here, copies of documents appearing in Hideyoshi’s biographies were subjected to various kinds of editing that were also applied to fictional narrative passages. This point reinforces the argument about the blurred boundary between history and fiction in premodern texts. Therefore, it is necessary to approach a wide range of premodern texts, including documents, with a careful critical analysis and without assuming the documents’ immutability in the course of transmission, copying, or translation.

Documents and Fiction in Three Early Edo Biographies

241

compilers and editors who modified texts rather freely, irrespective of register and inscriptional style. It is a fortunate circumstance for research that all three texts examined here are extant and accessible, making it possible to trace the changes made by each author-compiler-translator. All three texts form a chain, with the Oze version being reworked into the Hayashi version, which is in turn reworked into the Asai version. Despite significant overlap in content that justifies viewing these texts as translations, none of the compilers openly acknowledged their specific sources and put only their own names to their works. Had only one of these works survived, nobody would have been able to assess what kinds of changes the author-compiler had made, nor would anybody know that it was not an original work. If one were to examine only one of these texts while ignoring the others, it would be easy to arrive at (partially) false conclusions about the text. Thus, superficially judging by the format, language, and style of each work taken separately, one can say that the Oze version is a historical treatise for educated readers and a Confucian critical biography; the Hayashi version a scholarly work of official bakufu history; and the Asai version a work of historical fiction based on Hideyoshi’s biography that targeted general readers. Although this classification is useful to some extent, it exaggerates the differences between these texts. One of the major deceptive features is the choice of kanbun in the Hayashi version. Looking “Chinese” on the surface, this version seems to differ significantly from the other two. We should not forget, however, that Literary Sinitic came to be widely perceived as an ancient and foreign “Chinese” language only in the modern period. In the early Edo period, for example, Literary Sinitic (usually read by kundoku in Japanese) was still treated as a formal register of Japanese. In Pollock’s terminology this corresponds to “cosmopolitan vernacular” or “high vernacular.” This raises an important question: what then was the “cosmopolitan” in this period in Japan? I suggest that due to the logographic nature of Literary Sinitic and the development of kundoku (almost a millennium earlier) the cosmopolitan and the cosmopolitan (or high) vernacular merged into the same category. Only when this high vernacular register of Japanese was recorded using Literary Sinitic did it acquire the potential to be cosmopolitan. I would say that Literary Sinitic in premodern Japan was “potentially cosmopolitan.” That is, only Hayashi’s version in Literary Sinitic was potentially readable for educated people living on the Korean peninsula, in continental China, or Vietnam. At the same time, we should not pass over the fact that, in essence, all three texts are adaptations sharing similar content. The versions by Hayashi and Asai are based on the content of Oze’s work, which is reworded, summarized,

242

Lushchenko

cut, and supplemented according to the preferences and tastes, and the political and literary considerations, of each author-compiler. As was mentioned above, the value of Oze’s Taikōki as historical material is not very high (Kuwata 1965: 161). Oze Hoan, working under Tokugawa control, also compiled earlier sources, made changes to documents, and added fictional elements. The three works thus repeat (sometimes amplifying and sometimes reducing) partial historical truths while also disseminating fiction. It is important to keep in mind that Edo readers did not have access to historical documents and records from the Hideyoshi era and, therefore, could not distinguish between strict historical facts and plausible fiction presented in various publications, unlike modern scholars who study all the available materials comparatively. The techniques of compilation, editing, and adaptation applied quite freely by scholars to documents and fiction were apparently deemed acceptable and legitimate in the context of the fluidity of official and unofficial formats, cosmopolitan kanbun and vernacular Japanese, documents and fiction. Hayashi Razan’s kanbun version, for example, is all of the above simultaneously: it is an official bakufu historical work that is based on unofficial version by Oze, it is inscribed in kanbun that goes back to the vernacular Japanese mixed script version of Oze, and some of its documents and fictional passages were modified through similar editing techniques. In general, since each version of a given text is valuable for research and may contain unique materials not found in other versions, it is important to check all available versions of a text, including especially kanbun materials that are often neglected. Also, it is necessary to be careful with genre categories and various assumptions about the languages, registers, and inscriptional formats of premodern texts. As demonstrated in this study, fluid textual content can sometimes take multiple interrelated surface shapes that tend to be erroneously classified into different unrelated categories. References Berry, Mary Elizabeth. 1982. Hideyoshi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brownlee, John S. 1997. Japanese Historians and the National Myths, 1600–1945: The Age of the Gods and Emperor Jinmu. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Duthie, Torquil. 2014. Man’yōshū and the Imperial Imagination in Early Japan. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. Hasegawa Yasushi. 1997a. “Tōkyō kokuritsu hakubutsukanzō ‘Shōgunki’ kaidai to honkoku (sono ichi): Toyotomi Hideyoshi den” [Explanatory Notes and Text of

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Chronicles of Shoguns kept at the Tokyo National Museum (Part One): Biography of Toyotomi Hideyoshi]. Hiroshima keizai daigaku kenkyū ronshū 20(1): 61–102. Hiroshima University of Economics, Hiroshima Associated Repository Portal (HARP), http://harp.lib.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/handle/harp/2400. Hasegawa Yasushi. 1997b. “Tōkyō kokuritsu hakubutsukanzō ‘Shōgunki’ kaidai to honkoku (sono san): Toyotomi Hideyoshi den” [Explanatory Notes and Text of Chronicles of Shoguns kept at the Tokyo National Museum (Part Three): Biography of Toyotomi Hideyoshi]. Hiroshima keizai daigaku kenkyū ronshū 20(3): 59–105. Hiroshima University of Economics, Hiroshima Associated Repository Portal (HARP), http://harp.lib.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/handle/harp/2397. Hayashi Razan. Toyotomi Hideyoshi fu [Biographical Record of Toyotomi Hideyoshi]. 1658. http://epic.lib.ibaraki.ac.jp/namazu-d/cat/W0702260.HTML. Hinotani Teruhiko, ed. 1996. Taikōki [Toyotomi Hideyoshi Chronicle]. Shin Nihon koten bungaku taikei 60 [New Anthology of Classical Japanese Literature 60]. Tōkyō: Iwanami Shoten. Kornicki, Peter. 1998. The Book in Japan: A Cultural History from the Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Kurozumi, Makoto. 2001. “Kangaku: Writing and Institutional Authority.” In Inventing the Classics: Modernity, National Identity, and Japanese Literature, edited by Haruo Shirane, 201–219. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kuwata Tadachika. 1965. Taikōki no kenkyū [A Study of the Taikōki]. Tōkyō: Tokuma Shoten. Kuwata Tadachika. 1975. Toyotomi Hideyoshi kenkyū [Research on Toyotomi Hideyoshi]. Tōkyō: Kadokawa Shoten. Kuwata Tadachika. 1984. Toyotomi Hideyoshi. Tōkyō: Kadokawa Shoten. Lurie, David B. 2011. Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Mass, Jeffrey P. 1976. The Kamakura Bakufu: A Study in Documents. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mizuno, Norihito. 2003. “China in Tokugawa Foreign Relations: the Tokugawa Bakufu’s Perception of and Attitudes toward Ming-Qing China.” Sino-Japanese Studies 15: 108–144. Pollock, Sheldon. 1998. “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular.” Journal of Asian Studies 57(1): 6–37. Pollock, Sheldon. 2000. “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History.” Public Culture 12(3): 591–625. Pollock, Sheldon. 2006. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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Pollock, Sheldon. 2009. “Future Philology? The Fate of a Soft Science in a Hard World.” Critical Inquiry 35(4): 931–61. Verschuer, Charlotte von. 2007. “Ashikaga Yoshimitsu’s Foreign Policy 1398 to 1408 A.D.: a translation from Zenrin Kokuhōki, the Cambridge Manuscript.” Monumenta Nipponica 62: 261–298. Walthall, Anne. 2007. “Histories Official, Unofficial, and Popular: Shogunal Favorites in the Genroku Era.” In Writing Histories in Japan: Texts and Their Transformations from Ancient Times through the Meiji Era, edited by Baxter Fogel, 175–199. Kyoto: International Research Center for Japanese Studies. Zheng Jiexi. 2008. “Hideyoshi no chūgokujin setsu ni tsuite” [Concerning the Legend that Hideyoshi was of Chinese Origin]. Wakumon 14. http://www2.ipcku.kansai -u.ac.jp/~shkky/wakumon/wakumon-data/no-14/No.10zheng.pdf.

Chapter 8

A Crisis in the Cosmopolitan: Colonization and the Promotion of the Vernacular in an Early-Twentieth-Century Vietnamese Script Experiment John D. Phan 1

Introduction and Background

There are two major episodes of what might broadly be termed “vernacularization” in the history of Vietnam: the first involves the morphosyllabic script known as Chữ Nôm (𡦂喃, 𡨸喃, or 字喃), and the second involves the romanized alphabet called Quốc Ngữ (lit. “national language”). In his illuminating study of South Asian social, cultural, and linguistic diglossia, Sheldon Pollock (2006) remarked that only Vietnam’s adoption of the alphabet “under the vastly changed circumstances of colonization” triggered a “full vernacularization,” as exemplified by type cases like Kannada (Pollock 2006: 486–487). There is room to challenge the teleology of this assessment, but the difference in tenor, scope, and effect between the Nôm and Quốc Ngữ vernacular episodes is an unassailable fact. To put it crudely, the adoption of Quốc Ngữ led to the replacement of the cosmopolitan language (i.e., Literary Sinitic) by an expanded form of the vernacular (i.e., Vietnamese), whereas the cultivation of Nôm left the primacy of Literary Sinitic unchallenged.1 Pollock explains this by claiming that Nôm vernacularity was only “hesitantly asserted,” and that in terms of “inaugurating a new cultural politics,” it “essentially died on the vine” (Pollock 2006: 259, 486–487). Pollock’s remarks are understandable when considering the South Asian perspective, where the rise of the vernacular generally led to the obsolescence of the cosmopolitan language. The failure of Vietnamese Nôm to replace Literary Sinitic, for example, suggested to Pollock that greater processes of sociopolitical and expressive vernacularization were somehow stalled before the advent of a colonial modernity.

1 Though, as argued in Phan (2013a), it left its mark on the structure and lexical content of the vernacular.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163

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This point of view has great explanatory power when applied to the adoption of the Roman alphabet in Vietnam over the first third of the twentieth century. However, to consider Nôm vernacularity as a half-step toward what was ultimately fulfilled by the alphabet privileges a South Asian and European model of vernacularization that is unequipped to explain classical East Asian “diglossia” before modernity.2 Pollock himself observed that the persistence of Literary Sinitic in Korea and Vietnam defies a detailed comparison with South Asia. As noted above, we must, rather, confront two separate “vernacular” episodes in Vietnamese history, with separate underlying social and cultural machinery. Treating them separately allows us to examine each form of vernacularity on its own terms, and also suggests that the root of the Quốc Ngữ revolution lies not with Nôm, but elsewhere. As I have discussed previously (2013b; 2014), Nôm vernacularity was fueled by an attempt to hybridize with the cosmopolitan, and to elevate the vernacular language to the point where it could be viewed as an extension of Literary Sinitic (what Pollock might call the cultivation of a cosmopolitan vernacular). The cultivation of Nôm led to a dramatic relexification and enrichment of Vietnamese, defining in large part the expressive scope and range of the modern language. From this perspective, Nôm does not represent a vernacularity “hesitantly asserted,” but an energetic exploration of the imaginative and expressive capacity of the Vietnamese language. And yet, Pollock is perfectly correct in suggesting that it was only with the advent of colonization that a desire to promote the vernacular in replacement of Literary Sinitic took shape. As many others have documented, the rise of Quốc Ngữ during the 1920s was overtly linked to processes of reform, modernization, and anticolonial foment.3 How then do we reconcile the kind of hybridizing diglossia (or “hyperglossia,” to use Pollock’s term) typified by Nôm with the distinctly “revolutionary” adoption of the alphabet only a few generations later? How can we understand the intervention of colonialism, as it affected, disrupted, or reformulated the cosmopolitan-vernacular relationship? In this article, I suggest that colonization triggered an exclusive promotion of the vernacular language among the educated elite, in part because of a fear that endemic forms would be extirpated as the result of integration into an imperial system. In other words, colonial cosmopolitanism was selectively interpreted as a threatening, invasive system that menaced vernacular identity, rather than as a prestigious intellectual tradition that elevated social or 2 For a discussion of some of the problems with the term “diglossia” in the “Sinographic Cosmopolis,” see King (2015). 3 See Marr (1981), DeFrancis (1977), Tai (1992), and McHale (2004).

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cultural discourse (as the “Sinographic Cosmopolis” was traditionally viewed).4 Vernacular language was felt to be particularly vulnerable to this ‘cosmopolitan violence’ because it lacked a systematic writing system (Nôm, in the new language ethics of the period, being deemed unequipped to preserve or champion the vernacular). The safest armor for a language was thought to be a logical and transparent writing system; and thus, the preservation of the vernacular language became entwined with the promotion of a script. These concerns are explicitly voiced in an unpublished text called New Characters for the Nation’s Sounds (Quốc âm tân tự 國音新字; hereafter, qatt). Most likely finished in 1921 (see the following section on dating), the qatt is one of a number of Vietnamese experiments in script design, and arguably represents the earliest purely phonographic alternative to Nôm and Quốc Ngữ devised. The qatt attempts to employ classical Sinitic philological and philosophical principles to create an accurate and comprehensive phonographic script for the Vietnamese language. At the same time, the preface expresses rather Western notions of statehood and national identity, cloaked in NeoConfucian and Neo-Daoist philosophical language. In sharp contrast with previous attitudes on vernacularity (as subservient, or at best, equivalent, to the cosmopolitan), the author of the qatt seems to describe the Vietnamese language as a vessel of cultural identity endangered by the colonizer. In this way, the stable diglossia that had defined Vietnamese intellectual life before colonization was disrupted and reformulated by Western notions of cultural identity. Colonialism thus introduces a break in one vernacular mode, and catalyzes another. The qatt script was never adopted. Instead, Quốc Ngữ experienced a rapid ascent in the decade or so following the qatt’s production, catapulting the vernacular into the center of Vietnamese social, political, and artistic life. The success of Quốc Ngữ over the 1920 and 1930s resulted from a number of factors, not least of which was the dismantling of the civil service exam in 1919, the Western education of a new generation of Vietnamese intellectuals, exposure 4 French and European cosmopolitanism—especially when it came to scientific knowledge— was indeed embraced enthusiastically by Vietnamese intellectuals, especially in the twentieth century. But this does not invalidate a vision of colonialism as a destructive force, and much of the debates of the colonial era agonized over those elements of “traditional” intellectual culture it might be necessary to let go of, and what might possibly be saved. On the topic of reactions to political invasion, an interesting question to pose would be how the Ming occupation of Đại Việt in the fifteenth century affected attitudes toward Sinitic cosmopolitanism among the elite. Certainly, a tradition of court poetry in Nôm begins at this time, but we also see the adoption of Neo-Confucianism and the first rigorous implementation of the civil service exam as well.

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of Vietnamese intellectuals to notions of nationalism and statehood (both within Vietnam and abroad), and even the circulation of Western fiction (notably French and Russian) as an expression of the pedestrian, the everyday, and the “vernacular” in a social and political sense. Quốc Ngữ had previously been endorsed by the short-lived Tonkin Free School (Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục 東京義 塾) during its brief operation in 1907–1908, and had also been used to translate many Western works into accessible Vietnamese. A number of literary journals adopted it, beginning with Nguyễn Văn Vĩnh’s Đông Dương Tạp Chí (published 1913–1919). It was then adopted by a group of young nationalist intellectuals, many of whom were educated at the Lycée Albert Sarraut (in Hanoi), and who were largely illiterate in both vernacular Nôm and Literary Sinitic. These young writers and poets styled themselves the Self-Strengthening Literary Group (Tự lực văn đoàn), and promoted a series of intellectual, educational, political, and cultural reforms, through essays and short fiction composed in Quốc Ngữ. Over the course of the 1920s, literary magazines publishing in Quốc Ngữ proliferated, and multiple opposing cliques adopted its use. By the 1930s, propelled by Quốc Ngữ, the Vietnamese vernacular language had emerged as the dominant form of political, intellectual, and imaginative expression in colonial Vietnam.5 By the 1920s, the importance of vernacular language was upheld by virtually all sides of the colonial debate. Phạm Quỳnh, reviled by the colonial opposition as a French collaborator, famously enshrined the Tale of Kieu as Vietnam’s national literary masterpiece by claiming: “As long as the Tale of Kieu endures, so does our language, as long as our language endures, so does our country” (Tai 1992: 111). Ngô Đức Kế, a staunch anti-colonial who nevertheless vigorously promoted the adoption of Quốc Ngữ from the opposite perspective, criticized Phạm Quỳnh and argued that “if a nation survives, so will its culture and language; if a nation is exterminated, so will be its culture and language” (Ibid.: 112). For Ngô, the adoption of Quốc Ngữ was essential so that Western knowledge could be disseminated, and he supported the written vernacular as a tool to elevate Vietnamese society. Finally, the Self-Strengthening Literary Group, which played such an instrumental role in the popularization of Quốc Ngữ, also made it a tenet of their practice to create original works in the vernacular language (thus generating a new corpus of Vietnamese literature for the modern world). Although the adoption and promotion of Quốc Ngữ was spearheaded by Western-educated intellectuals who embraced European cosmopolitanism, they critically inherited a devotion to the vernacular language—whether 5 For more on the rationalizing shift in ideology surrounding script throughout the 1930s, see Phan (2016).

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pragmatic or philosophical—voiced by efforts like the qatt. The promotion of Vietnamese vernacular language as written in Quốc Ngữ over the 1920s and 1930s contrasts sharply with an elite world dominated by Literary Sinitic just decades earlier. The qatt therefore provides color and detail to the process by which colonization engendered such a dramatic reversal in Vietnamese language ethics, and allows us to connect the hybridizing vernacularity of Chữ Nôm—flourishing by the mid-nineteenth century—with the vigorous adoption of the alphabet only a few generations later. Section 2 addresses the authorship and dating of the qatt. Section 3 provides an overview of the mechanics of the qatt system, and discusses the philological basis upon which the script was built. Section 4 provides an analysis and translation of the qatt preface, in which the author’s fears of a “cosmopolitan violence” are fully voiced. Section 5 closes with some remarks on the place of the qatt in the dynamic reversal of language ethics triggered by colonization, and which ultimately led to abandonment of Chữ Nôm, and the adoption of Quốc Ngữ. 2

Authorship and Dating

The qatt is preserved in the form of two hand-written manuscripts, which demonstrate only small discrepancies.6 Based on the presence of a taboo character for Hoa 華 in both texts, Nguyễn Quang Hồng argued that the qatt was produced during the Nguyễn dynasty (1802–1945), and probably during the second half of the nineteenth century (Nguyễn 1986, 67). The taboo referenced by Nguyễn was enacted in honor of Empress Hồ Thị Hoa 胡氏華 (1791–1807), first wife of the second Nguyễn emperor Minh Mạng 明命 (1791–1841), who died just thirteen days after giving birth to the crown prince (the future emperor Thiệu Tri 紹治 [1807–1847]).7 In order to comfort his grieving son, reigning emperor and founder of the dynasty, Gia Long 嘉隆 (1762–1820), enacted a taboo of the word hoa even in daily use, leading to the replacement of hoa in many toponyms across the kingdom, with slightly mutated forms like ba or huê. The taboo character for hoa found in the qatt combines 花 with a single stroke一 across the bottom, and was presumably used in deference to Gia Long’s command; thus, the text must have been produced no earlier than the nineteenth century. On this basis, Nguyễn Quang Hồng concludes that the text was 6 My analysis is based on manuscript AB636, held by the Institute for Sino-Nôm Research. 7 Note that Minh Mạng ascended the throne in 1820, some seventeen years after Hồ Thị Hoa died.

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produced between the middle and end of the nineteenth century (Ibid.: 67). While these arguments convincingly place the production of the qatt no earlier than the nineteenth century, they do not necessarily contradict a later dating (since taboos could be irregularly observed as long as the dynasty lasted). Besides the presence of a taboo character, the preface is also signed with an astronomical dating that reads: Written by Nguyễn Tử, the Hermit of the Southern Citadel, on the Conjunction of the Five Planets 五星聚斗南城居士阮子書

(Viet. Ngũ tinh tụ đẩu Nam Thành cư sĩ Nguyễn Tử thư) Huang Yi-long showed that, while some scholars have attempted to rely on “five planet conjunctions” in order to pinpoint dates for various works and events in Chinese history, neither the rarity of the astronomical event (which occurs roughly every century, according to Huang’s computations), nor the context of the references can be trusted to do so (Huang 1990). Of the fiveplanet conjunctions that have been recorded since the Han dynasty, Huang writes that “more than half of them could never have been actually observed, while the more than ten such cases during these two thousand years that could most easily be observed have not been recorded at all” (Ibid.: 111–112). Nevertheless, Huang’s calculations do in fact include at least one conjunction to have occurred within a plausible time frame for the qatt. According to Huang’s calculations, the last three instances of an observable five planet conjunction through the year 2000 occurred in 1564, 1584, and 1921 respectively. Clearly, the 16th century dates are not plausible, which leaves 1921—and specifically, November 12, 1921—as the only remaining alternative. While as noted above the usage of five planet conjunctions as a means of dating is somewhat unreliable, it is striking that the only observable instance of such an event in either the 19th or 20th centuries fits so exactly with our expectations of a late Colonial setting for the production of the text. 1921 accords fairly well with the taboo evidence, and still precedes the rapid ascent of Quốc Ngữ by a reasonable measure. In the absence of further evidence, I accept a 1921 dating for the text. As for authorship, the pseudonym “Nguyễn Tử, the Hermit of the Southern Citadel” 南城局士阮子 (Viet. Nam Thành cư sĩ, Nguyễn Tử) gives several clues, but nothing certain. The epithet “Nguyễn Tử” may be read as “Master Nguyễn,” or alternatively, “a son of the Nguyễn”—but whether this refers to the author’s

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family name or more prosaically to the imperial clan (or indeed, both at once) remains unclear.8 As to the identity of the “Southern Citadel,” this was a common epithet for Nam Định 南丁 in northern Vietnam.9 Finally, the author’s erudite command of Literary Sinitic suggest that he was classically trained, and may very well have been a civil-service degree-holder. Regarding the identity of the author, Nguyễn Quang Hồng (2008) noted that the question of whether or not he was aware of the Latin alphabet, and of Quốc Ngữ in particular, is of critical importance—because if he were, the entire qatt becomes an intentional choice to reject the alphabet as a viable option (Nguyễn 2008: 479). European missionaries had already begun using Quốc Ngữ in Vietnam by the mid seventeenth century, and by the nineteenth century, French Catholicism in Vietnam was robust enough to spark legal restrictions and even overt persecution under the Nguyễn. Given all of the evidence reviewed in this section, the qatt appears to have been penned by a Nguyễn literatus, possibly in the city of Nam Định, as early as the mid-late nineteenth century, but probably in 1921. This places the text before the rapid spread of Quốc Ngữ over the 1920s, but well after its introduction to Vietnam. Therefore, I believe it most likely that the author was indeed aware of both the Latin alphabet in general, and of Quốc Ngữ in particular.10 While our exact interpretation is unavoidably contingent on whether it was produced at the

8

One possibility is that “Nguyễn Tử” refers to a member of the “Nguyễn Tử” clan of Ninh Bình—for instance, Nguyễn Tử Mẫn 阮子忞/愍 (1810–1901), a provincial degree holder who retired after several positions to teach and write in his hometown. Nguyễn Tử Mẫn died in 1901, which is at odds with the astronomical dating discussed above. However, his general dates (late nineteenth century) are perfectly in line with the themes of the text. I am grateful to Wynn Wilcox for suggesting this possibility. 9 At this time, however, present-day Hanoi was sometimes called the “Northern City” (Viet. Bắc Thành 北城), and so it is not impossible that Nam Thành here refers to Saigon in a kind of poetic opposition. While this theory lacks direct evidence, there is some evidence from the phonology of the Chữ Nôm glosses that the author may have spoken a more southerly dialect. Nevertheless, the argument for Nam Định remains the simplest and most likely. Incidentally, Nam Định was also the site of publication for two other script experiments in the early 1930s. 10 Nguyễn Quang Hồng considered the phrase “five-planet conjunction” (ngũ tinh tụ đẩu 五 星聚斗) to be a sobriquet, or biệt hiệu 別號, of the author (Nguyễn 2008: 447). However, the fact that the phrase is formulaically followed by a location (the Southern Citadel 南 城) and ends with the verb written (書) strongly indicates that it is an astronomical date (not to mention its ubiquity as such in Sinitic literature). With this clarification, I believe that the case for a 1921 date is reasonably strong, and that we may answer Nguyễn Quang Hồng’s very pertinent question as to whether or not the author was aware of the Latin alphabet (in the affirmative).

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onset or apogee of French colonial rule, all plausible dates occur within an historical context of strong French presence in the region.11 3

A New Body for the Vernacular Language

As the title Quốc âm tân tự 國音新字 suggests, the text presents a new method for writing the vernacular language. It is, above all, an attempt at purely phonographic writing—that is, the transcription of the sounds of the language, with no attempt to encode semantic information. This is an important point because sinographs with all of their enormous prestige are morphosyllabic in construction, and their fullest form encodes both meaning and pronunciation in single graphemes. Despite its rejection of this essential aspect of Sinitic writing, the qatt system expresses a deep loyalty to Sinitic philosophical and philological principles, and it is in the intersection of these—sometimes opposing—ambitions, that the qatt both fails and shines as an experiment in script design. As Nguyễn Quang Hồng notes, all basic graphemes in the system consist of four strokes, each of which derive from a reduced inventory of Sinitic stroke types: a horizontal “one” line (一), vertical line (丨), dot (丶), or slash (丿) (Nguyễn 2008: 479). There are three basic components to the script: 1) a “root sound” generally providing onset information; 2) a “branch character” generally providing rime information minus tone (i.e., vowel and optional coda); and 3) a tonal diacritic. These are combined in a form of rime-based “spelling.” The structure of the writing system draws heavily from traditional Sinitic philology—notably its tonal analysis, as well as the essential division of all syllables into onsets and rimes, as performed in the transcription method known as fanqie 反切 (discussed at length below). This is an interesting point, because it suggests a deep familiarity with medieval rime texts such as the rime books (韻書) and the rime tables (韻圖)—neither of which appear to have played a major role in the development or governance of orthodox Sino-Vietnamese (Hán-Việt) pronunciation. The loyalty to these principles leads both to some ingenious solutions in representing the Vietnamese language, as well as some critical inefficiencies that would otherwise be handily settled by the use of a full alphabet. It is this internal struggle that is of most interest, and which provides the key to understanding the compressed and provocative language of the preface (discussed in section 4). I will thus discuss each basic component of the writing system here, with special attention to the philological and philosophical principles upon which they are built. 11

I will discuss these issues further in section 3.

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3.1 The Root Sounds The “root sounds” (Viet. cán âm 幹音) consist of twenty-two distinct graphemes, each glossed with a Chữ Nôm character. All twenty-two root graphemes are glossed with syllables bearing the same rime (i.e., vowel + optional final consonant) value of -ông, and they are thus distinguished only by different onsets. These are, in order of appearance: Table 8.1 The 22 “root” graphemes of the qatt

#.

qatt

ipa

Viet.

#.

1.

ʔ-/∅-

(vowel)

2.

ŋ-

3.

qatt

ipa

Viet.

12.

ɲ-

nh-

ng-

13.

*dz-a

d-

h-

h-

14.

*ʒ-

gi-

4.

g-

g-

15.

s-

x-

5.

k-

c-, k-

16.

kh-/x-

kh-

6.

l-

l-

17.

ʃ-

s-

7.

ɖʐ-

tr-

18.

r-

r-

8.

ɗ-

đ-

19.

m-

m-

9.

n-

n-

20.

ɓ-

b-

10.

t-

t-

21.

*ꞵ-

v-

11.

th-

th-

22.

f-

ph-

a I have starred (*) phonemes that are no longer distinctive in most forms of modern Vietnamese. For example, the affricate dz- has become voiced fricative z- in standard Northern Vietnamese and approximate j- in standard Southern Vietnamese, and the voiced bilabial fricative *ꞵ- has become v- in both standard Northern and standard Southern Vietnamese, and j- in some varieties of Southern.

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Although I have only marked onset values in the table above, the qatt glosses all “root sounds” with a Chữ Nôm character bearing the rime value of -ông. Thus, number 1, representing a glottal or zero onset ʔ-/∅-, is glossed with the character 翁 and pronounced ông in Vietnamese; number 8, representing implosive dental ɗ- onset, is glossed with 東 and read as đông, and so forth. The primary function of the “root sounds” is to convey onset information, but (as will be discussed below) they may also express the full syllable (as glossed in Nôm) bearing the rime value of -ông where needed. The fact that the twenty-two root graphemes are assigned an -ông rime is not an accident; the eponymous dōng 東 rime group is the first on the ordered rime list of the rime books (also used by the rime tables). It is therefore employed as a kind of default by the author, who was clearly familiar with traditional rime studies (Viet. âm vận học 音韻學). 3.2 The Branch Character The “branch character” (Viet. chí tự 支字) primarily encodes what in Sinitic philological terms would be “rime” information minus the tonal category—that is, both the vowel and coda/final consonant (if present). Recall that each of the 22 root sounds bears the default rime value of -ông. The first stroke of each root sound grapheme is actually moveable, and may be affixed to different positions to represent a variety of other possible rimes beyond the default -ông. For each of the twenty-two “root sounds” five additional variants are generally possible, resulting in 110 possible “branch characters.”12 One paradigmatic example is provided in Table 8.2 below, based on the root grapheme for onset /th-/ (marked #11 in Table 8.1 above). Note that the root grapheme bearing the default rime value of -ông is provided in the first row, for purposes of comparison. Just as the root sounds could stand alone to represent syllables bearing the default -ông rime, the branch characters could also stand alone as independent syllabograms bearing their respective range of rime values. But just as the root sounds primarily functioned as an inventory of 22 distinct onsets, the primary function of the branch characters was to furnish an inventory of rimes that could be recombined with those distinct onsets. Thus both the root sounds and the branch characters possessed a double function—either as standalone syllabograms, or as a means of expressing onsets and rimes independently, and for the purpose of recombinative spelling.

12

Not all of the 22 root sounds are actually furnished with five discrete variants in the text. But following the parlance of the author and for purposes of convenience, I will continue to refer to the inventory of branch character variants as containing 110 discrete forms.

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A Crisis in the Cosmopolitan Table 8.2 Branch diacritic variations for /th-/

qatt

ipa

Viet.

(th)oŋ

(th)ông

(th)əw

(th)au

(th)aw

(th)ao

(th)aj, (th)ʌj

(th)ai, (th)ơi

(th)ən

(th)ân

(th)em, (th)iəm

(th)em, (th)iêm

The choice of representing rimes (i.e., vowel + coda if present) as a basic unit introduces some interesting consequences for the script. Compare, for example, alphabets, which take what is called a phoneme as their basic unit of representation. A phoneme is the smallest discrete unit of sound in the abstract system of a language—what corresponds more or less to vowels and consonants. An alphabet’s inventory of letters theoretically (and indeed, usually only ideally) corresponds to the inventory of phonemes in a language, and alphabets work by recombining letters to produce larger units of sound. Syllabaries work the same way, except that their smallest unit of representation is the syllable (i.e., onset if present + vowel + coda if present), rather than the phoneme. The qatt also works this way, but unlike either a true alphabet or a true syllabary, the basic units of the qatt are not equal in size: the 22 root sounds are capable of expressing onset phonemes, whereas the branch character represents what we have been calling a rime; and since a rime includes both a vowel and coda (if present), it is both larger than a phoneme and smaller than a syllable. Now, despite this inequality in the size of basic units of representation, the qatt still works on a principle of phonographic recombination, and the most basic recombinatory method is to combine root sounds expressing an onset phoneme with one of the five branch character variants possible for each root sound, expressing rime information. The actual spelling methods of the qatt (and there are more than one) are much more complicated (as we shall see),

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but this basic recombinatory system already allows the qatt to “spell” syllables that are not actually attested in the Vietnamese language—something which morphosyllabic scripts like Chữ Nôm are ill-equipped to accomplish. For this reason, Nguyễn Quang Hồng makes the important point that the number of forms possible in the qatt should not be confused with the number of syllabic forms extant in language of the author (Nguyễn 2008: 481). If this is the case, then the author’s reliance on Chữ Nôm (a morphosyllabic script unable to render anything smaller than a full syllable) to gloss the system leads to some difficulties in interpreting what values the “branch characters” were actually meant to relate, and the glosses can at times seem reduplicative or misleading. Nguyễn Quang Hồng noted that many branch characters, for example, are glossed with Nôm characters bearing different onsets but the same rime—a fact the author attempts to encode by bracketing the gloss in question (Nguyễn 2008: 481). However, this apparent redundancy seems to result from the “double function” of the branch characters mentioned above. But the fact remains that it is pragmatically impossible to transcribe unattested syllables using Chữ Nôm (without creating a new character), and so in many cases the actual phonographic intentions of the author in glossing his branch character inventory remain somewhat opaque.13 This makes it somewhat challenging to answer perhaps the most basic question regarding the branch-character system: why five variants? That is to say, what linguistic reality are the five possible branch character variants meant to represent? In fact, we must account for six possible variations, since the root sounds carry with them the default rime value of -ông. Now this six-way categorization is obviously meant to capture something about the rimes of the Vietnamese language, but are they meant to express an exhaustive inventory? Or merely six basic rime shapes? Or six basic vowels? This is probably the most confounding feature of the qatt system. Of course, the default rime value of the 22 “root sounds” is straightforwardly and consistently -ông. But the five variants of the branch character do not demonstrate anywhere near this regularity. One possibility is that the author was attempting to encode six (including the default) different syllable types, defined by different finals: for example, open syllables ending in a vowel, two final nasals (of three: -m, -n, and -nh, while -ng is already present in the “root sound” grapheme), and syllables ending in a glide (either j or -w). However, while branch character sets all represent some combination of these syllable types (while notably not expressing syllables ending in final voiceless consonants—a fact explained in the next section, on tone), they do not always 13

For a discussion of this issue in the context of Chữ Nôm, see Nguyễn Qang Hồng (2008: 482).

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include all of them, nor the same ones across all sets. This means that they do not function regularly as a set of defined rimes that may be systematically recombined with the various onsets of the “root characters.” Another possibility is that the author was attempting to encode a set of basic vowel + coda combinations that perhaps do not constitute natural syllabic types, but from which one could use the recombinatory spelling system of the qatt to achieve a greater range of expression. I think this is the most likely explanation. In fact, what can be gleaned from the Nôm glosses suggests that the five branch-character variants possible for each root sound do not correspond to five specific rime shapes, but to generalized vowel + coda combinations that nevertheless obtain great diversity as applied across the inventory of 22 onsets. For example, the third branch-character variant demonstrates a tendency for rimes ending in a palatal glide ( or ) and the fifth branch-character variant demonstrates consistent /-m/, though the individual nuclear vowels vary.14 While these seem relatively consistent, even if they exhibit great diversity in the individual vowels and codas, they rank among the more wellbehaved of the branch characters. Others are more challenging. For example, the value for the first branch-character variant for the first five root onsets (∅-, ng-, h-, gh-, k-/c-; or nos. 1–5 in Table 8.1 above) all appear to be some kind of open syllable bearing mid-low front vowel /æ/ (). In order, and with Nôm glosses provided, these are: oe (喴), nghe (𦖑), hoa—or more probably hoe (花), gà (𪃿), and que (圭).15 Similarly, nos. 6–7 appear to approximate open syllables with the higher vowel /e/ (), while nos. 8–12 seem to reflect low-to-mid variations /-aw/ or /-əw/ ( or ). One might be tempted, therefore, to assign “open vowel” as the rime shape expressed by the first branch character. However, this rule does not hold, as root nos. 13–17 appear to express syllables marked by a diphthong + final -ŋ (). Even so, more like rimes are grouped together, according to the ordered list of 22 root sounds. These regularities suggest that the values for each of the five branch characters do aspire towards some kind of organization, but that the realities of the Vietnamese language (and of Nôm as a transcription system) require more or less diversity within each of the five variants as they are applied to each of the 22 root sounds. This is a major deficiency in the practicality of the script. If each of the five variations does not consistently mean the same thing, then the elegance of having five variants recombine with all onsets becomes 14

I use < > to denote two things: Quốc ngữ orthographic spelling or the orthographic system used by the QATT. 15 Incidentally, the apparent merger of -oe and -oa, which are distinct in standard Northern Vietnamese, supports the possibility that the author spoke a southerly dialect of Vietnamese (where low -a- is often raised to something approaching -æ-).

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meaningless, and what we really have is 110 (or 132, including the default root sounds) discrete “rime graphemes” that may be recombined with 22 different onsets. Although there is a kind of elegance in their design, the five-way “branch character” system becomes opaque in execution, and it becomes a matter of memorizing some 110 odd discrete values, rather than predictively recombining different root sounds with different branch characters. The branch characters thus seem unable to reconcile an ambition toward mathematical simplicity with the imperative to express all possible shapes in the Vietnamese language. Now the failure of a basic five-way (or again, more properly six-way) scheme of rimes to provide comprehensive expression of Vietnamese syllabic forms itself involves the author’s decision to rely on the rime as a basic unit of representation (as opposed to sticking purely with a phoneme-based alphabet, or a syllable-based syllabary). But to fully appreciate these limitations, we must first complete our description of the components of the system. I will thus discuss the tonal transcription and spelling principles of the qatt, before returning to elaborate on the branch character system and its peculiar deficiencies. 3.3 The Tone Mark As mentioned above, the branch character system encodes most basic rime shapes, but does not account for rimes ending in final voiceless consonants -p, -t, -c, -k. These types of consonants are called oral “stops” because they are articulated through a full closure in the oral cavity. As it turns out, the qatt does account for them—by incorporating them into the tonal transcription. In fact, it is in the qatt’s tonal transcription that the author’s preference for Sinitic philological models is most clearly evident, and perhaps most successful. Regarding the distinguishing of tone, the qatt states: [As for] the rule regarding base characters, foremost it relies on distinguishing the four [respective tonal] forms of yin and yang, [such that] every character becomes eight characters. 法於本字，上依陰陽四象識別，每一字成八字.

The qatt is of course referencing the classic typology of “four tones” (Viet. tứ thanh 四聲), consisting of a “level” (Viet. bình/bằng 平), “rising” (Viet. thượng 上), “departing” (Viet. khứ 去), and “entering” (Viet. nhập 入) tone.16 The system 16 The sense of the word thanh 聲 did not always correspond precisely to our current notion of pitch manipulation. The issue of how tones came to develop (i.e., tonogenesis)

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was observed and popularized by the first rime book, the Qieyun 切韻 (Viet. Thiết Vận) of 601 ce; but its creation is traditionally attributed to an earlier, lost work of Shen Yue 沈約 (441–513), entitled Sishengpu 四聲譜 (Four-Tone Register), and to another work of Zhou Yong’s 周顒 (?–491?) called the Sisheng qieyun 四聲切韻 (Splitting the Rimes of the Four Tones).17 Due to the loss of a voicing distinction in onsets at some point over the course of the Tang period (7th–10th centuries ce), each of these four tones of Early Middle Chinese was split into two variants: a yin 陰 (Viet. âm) variant and a yang 陽 (Viet. dương) variant.18 Thus, the original four tones were “doubled” into eight discrete types: 1) yin level, 2) yin rising, 3) yin departing, 4) yin entering; and 5) yang level, 6) yang rising, 7) yang departing, and 8) yang entering. In this analysis, the “entering tone” (入聲) did not really represent a separate tone, but the presence of a final stop on the syllable (-p, -t, or -k in Middle Chinese).19 This is important, because it means that the Chinese rime literature reckoned final stops like -p, -t, -k in terms of tonal categories, rather than analyzing them as codas defining a unique rime shape. The qatt replicates this classical Sinitic tonal analysis for Vietnamese, by applying an eight-way tonal distinction to its base graphemes. This explains why the branch characters described in the last section included only open syllables or syllables ending in a final glide or nasal—because stop-final syllables were analyzed as “entering tones,” and one of the eight tonal options. is complex and controversial, though it is now fairly well accepted that different pitchbased tones evolved from what are called “phonation types.” Phonation type describes different configurations of the glottis when producing a vocalization. Differences in these kinds of vocalizations were understood as different “tones” in the early medieval period, but eventually became pitch-based tones, probably by the end of the medieval period. 17 Both these texts are lost, and the attribution may be found in an anecdote of Shen Yue’s biography in the Liangshi 梁史 (History of Liang), among the Ershiwushi 二十五史 (Twenty-five Official Histories), v. 3, 13/1954.2. 18 I.e., devoicing of initial consonants, whereby voiced initial consonants like b-, d-, gbecame “voiceless” (e.g., > p-, > t-, > k-). This forced a shift in the contrastive cue from a difference in the initial consonants, to a difference in the way the vowel was pronounced. The yin series traditionally corresponds to onsets that were originally voiceless, while the yang series traditionally corresponds to onsets that were traditionally voiced. This is one of the best-known linguistic changes of Middle Chinese, and there are numerous accounts discussing it, including Pulleyblank (1984), Baxter (1992), and, succinctly, Jacques (2006). 19 In Mandarin, these final consonants were eventually lost and the syllables assigned various tones already existing in the system. In Cantonese, however, final consonants are preserved, and the tones that are realized in these syllables are generally considered “clipped” or “checked” versions of the same tones that occur in analogous syllables lacking the final consonant.

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The qatt encodes tone by using two different tone marks for the yin and yang series, respectively, situated according to four different positions around a base grapheme, to represent level, rising, departing, and entering tones for each. The yin series is represented by a small half circle, and the yang series is represented by a small full circle. Level tones placed the diacritic (either yin half circles or yang full circles) on the bottom left of a grapheme, rising tones were on the top left, departing tones on the top right, and entering tones—the syllables that bore a final consonant -p, -t, (in Viet., also -c), or -k—put the diacritic on the bottom right. This system, a kind of sishengdian 四聲點, or traditional tonal gloss, is summarized in Table 8.3 and Figure 8.1 below: Table 8.3 Key to qatt tone marks 聲

字

IPA

Viet.

Diacritic

Position

Yin 陰

平 上 去 入

東 董 凍 篤

˦˦ ˧˨˦ ˧˥ ˧˥ (p,t,c,k)

đông đổng đống đốc

C C C C

1 2 3 4

Yang 陽

平 上 去 入

同 洞 動 獨

˨˩ ˧ˀ˥ ˧˩ˀ ˧˩ˀ (p,t,c,k)

đồng đỗng động độc

○ ○ ○ ○

1 2 3 4

Figure 8.1 Tone mark positions

The examples given in Table 8.3 above (in the “Viet.” column) are the same as those given in the qatt, and, not surprisingly, are drawn from the traditional “default” rime of đông 東.20 As Figure 8.1 shows, one of the two tone marks 20

The two “entering tone” examples, strictly speaking, belong to different rimes, but to the same “rime group” (攝), the tōng group (通攝).

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was placed in one of four positions, allowing any base grapheme (again, a root sound grapheme furnished with branch character stroke) to acquire one of eight contrastive “tones.” A root sound or branch character configured for tone in this way is referred to as a “base character” (Viet. bản tự 本字). The qatt is thus doing precisely what traditional Sinitic rime description does—that is, it is representing final consonants as a tonal feature.21 Although Vietnamese bears one more final stop than Middle Chinese (-p, -t, -c, and -k; as opposed to just -p, -t, and -k), the overall tonal configuration (including socalled “entering tones”) is virtually identical to that of Middle Chinese.22 This means that the qatt’s method of transcribing tone—and of analyzing final stops as a tonal feature—actually works quite well for Vietnamese. Since syllables with a final -p, -t, -c, or -k in Vietnamese can only occur with one of two types of tone (rather than the three choices available in open or nasal-final syllables), this means that specifying a given syllable as “entering tone” by a mark on the bottom right corner allows us systematically to read that grapheme as having a final stop. One must still determine which of the two available tones the syllable carries, but that is solved by the yin (denoted by the half circle < C > diacritic) vs. yang (denoted by the full circle < ○ > diacritic) system. Finally, to distinguish between different types of final stop—that is, between bilabial -p, alveolar -t, palatal -c, and velar -k, one need only use the root grapheme + branch character expressing a final nasal with the same place of articulation (i.e., bilabial -m, alveolar -n, palatal -nh, velar -ng).23 From this point of view, then, the qatt’s tonal transcription is actually both elegant and effective. 3.4 Spelling in the qatt The qatt combines the three components outlined above (root sound, branch character, and tone mark) into a kind of recombinative spelling. There are three 21

From a modern phonological perspective, there is great controversy over this point. Cao (2001) presented a formal argument in favor of an eight-way (rather than six-way) tonal system for modern Vietnamese, claiming that such a model did away with a number of redundant codas that could be predicted based on the tone. This was repeated and summarized in Andrea Pham’s (2003) treatise on Vietnamese tone. There is some phonetic evidence that may be construed in favor of this argument as well. Michaud (2004) showed that final nasals -m and -n were devoicing and merging with “entering tone” finals -p and -t, respectively. Regardless of their synchronic reality (or lack thereof), what is important here is that the qatt author is creating a system of tonal representation based on classic Chinese philological models. 22 In fact, the current theory of how tones developed in Middle Chinese (i.e., “tonogenesis”) is based on André Haudricourt’s seminal analysis of tonal development in Vietnamese (1954). 23 Though, as noted earlier, the lack of a systematic way of expressing all possible final nonvelar nasals (-m, -n, and -nh) complicates this otherwise elegant system.

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Figure 8.2 Basic syllabic spelling

levels of complexity to qatt spelling. As alluded to above, the basic method is to compose syllables consisting of a root sound marked for tone on the left, plus a branch character on the right. The root sound is used to represent the onset, and is also marked for tone. The following “branch character” provides the remaining rime information. In the example above (Fig. 8.2), the left-hand element begins with the root form indicating a zero or glottal onset (corresponding to #1 in Table 8.1 above). Note that the stroke normally used to indicate the rime—generally on the upper left, in the root sound default—is absent (thus we see only three strokes, not four). This first grapheme is also marked for tone—as can be seen in the half-circle on the bottom left of the graph, denoting high-level tone (˦˦). Thus, from the first element, we read A) a zero onset, and B) high-level tone. The second element above represents the branch character corresponding to the syllable /ŋan/ (Viet. ngan); however, only the rime value of the syllable (, i.e., /-an/) is relevant here, and the initial (, i.e., /ng-/) is ignored. Thus, the first element provides both onset and tone information, while the second element provides only main vowel + optional coda (i.e., rime) information. The combination of these two elements, shown to the right of the (=) sign, reads an. As noted by Nguyễn Quang Hồng, this spelling system is essentially identical to a traditional system of oral spelling still used by the Vietnamese, in which the initial, rime (vowel + coda), and then tone are given in rapid succession (Nguyễn 2008: 484). In this tradition, the word má (“mother”) would be spelt out loud as “m-, -a,” rising tone, má (or in Vietnamese, “mờ-, -a-, ma, sách má,” where “mờ” = m-, and “sách” is the name of the rising tone). That spelling system, in turn, is deeply indebted to the aforementioned system of transcription called fanqie 反切 (Viet. phản thiết). Fanqie, which appeared in China around the fifth century and was made famous by the Qieyun, uses two characters to render a single Sinitic monosyllable. The first character is used for its onset value, while the second character is used for its

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“rime” value, which means its nuclear vowel, coda (if present), and tone.24 Thus, the monosyllabic word 東, pronounced /doŋA/ in Middle Chinese (where A = level tone), may be rendered by 德紅, representing /d-/ + /-oŋA/, respectively.25 The influence of fanqie on the mechanics of the qatt is unquestionable; and indeed the author calls his basic principle of spelling a kind of fanqie. However, rather than using fanqie as a transcription system based on equivalences (as it was originally used), the qatt attempts to elaborate it into a full-blown phonographic script. This is perhaps most clearly evidenced by the secondary and tertiary spelling apparatuses built into the qatt, which serve to enrich the inventory of forms renderable by the script. In the secondary form of recombination (beyond the basic form of spelling described above), a branch form on the left may also be marked for tone and then combined with a root sound on the right, to create compound graphemes or “fused writing” (Viet. hợp thư 合書) with different vocalic effects. For example, the branch character for ôn may be combined with its equivalent root sound (minus the first moveable stroke) to render the syllable ung. This compound grapheme occupies the same square space as a simplex root sound or branch character. Finally, a third method of recombination, called “joined writing” (Viet. tham thư 參書), may combine a branch character on the top with a compound grapheme on the bottom, thus allowing for an even richer set of syllabic shapes to be achieved. All three of these spelling techniques are elaborations of the basic fanqie principle, and they all appear necessary in order to achieve the full range of syllabic shapes otherwise inexpressible with only 22 onsets and 6 rime categories (as described above). The Mechanics of the qatt: Using “fanqie” to Create a Phonographic Script The received philosophy for Sinitic writing derives not from fanqie (used only for transcription), but from the “six graphs” (六書): a typology of sinographs codified by Han Dynasty lexicographer Xu Shen 許慎 (58–ca. 147) in his influential character dictionary, the Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 (Explaining wen and 3.5

24 25

Victor Mair (1992) rendered fanqie as “countertomy,” and suggested that the Chinese practice was adapted from India. Note that 東 and 紅 do not bear the same tone in modern Mandarin or Vietnamese, but this was due to a later split in the tonal system, which generated the yin and yang tonal variants described above.

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Unraveling zi; ca. 100 ce).26 The six graphs categorize individual characters according to their respective phonographic and semantographic qualities, with the three most representative types being pictographs, rebus-based phonographs, and semantosyllabic characters that combine a semantic radical with a phonographic base.27 The six graphs—and semantosyllabic characters in particular—represent the accepted apotheosis of writing technology from the classical point of view, and even such brilliant innovations as Korean han’gŭl were received with deep ambiguity in comparison. Indeed, for all of its inefficiencies, when Nôm was praised it was praised for adhering to a basic six graphs notion of semantosyllabic writing. However, the qatt writing system rejects semantosyllabic writing and favors a purely phonographic representation of language—while simultaneously affirming its connection to a Sinitic heritage by attempting to embrace fanqie as its guiding principle.28 3.6 The Numerology of the qatt This dual ambition—to “improve” Sinitic morphosyllabic writing by creating a logical phonographic script, while maintaining some philological and 26 The meaning of the title of the Shuowen jiezi is a matter of some debate. The received notion that wen 文 should be interpreted as simplex characters, while zi 字 should be interpreted as duplex or composite characters, was promulgated by Zheng Qiao 鄭樵 (1104–1162) in the Song period. However, Françoise Bottéro (2002) criticizes this interpretation as anachronistic, and proposes that the opposition between wen and zi actually refers to two broad philosophies of writing: one focused on the visual encoding and representation of reality (that is, wen 文; roughly associated with the recognition of visual patterns in reality) and one focused on encoding speech (zi 字; i.e., the association of graphemes with words or morphemes). I have thus left these two words untranslated. 27 Xu Shen did not create the six graphs, though he did contribute to their consolidation into a uniform conceptualization of writing. Xu Shen’s six graphs are: 1) zhishi 指事 (Viet. chỉ sự), “indicating matters,” schematic graphs, e.g., 上 and 下 (with a diacritic-like dash marking direction) for “up” and “down” respectively; 2) xiangxing 象形 (Viet. tượng hình), pictographs, e.g., 山 for “mountain”; 3) xingsheng 形聲 (Viet. hình thanh), semantosyllabic graphs, e.g., 江 (semantic radical 氵 + syllabographic 工) for “river”; 4) huiyi 會意 (Viet. hội ý), “combined meanings,” e.g., 信 (人 + 言) for “believe”; 5) zhuanzhu 轉注 (Viet. chuyển chú), annotated or notative graphs (i.e., existing graphs that have been diacritized in some way), e.g., kao 考 (“examine”) vs. lao 老 (“old”); and 6) jiajie 假借 (Viet. giả tá), rebus borrowings, e.g., 才 (originally, a pictograph showing a sprout) for “talent.” 28 This careful negotiation of loyalties is strongly reminiscent of the invention of han’gŭl, which King Sejong defended in the Hunmin chŏngŭm 訓民正音 (Correct Sounds to Instruct the People; 1446) on the basis of deep linguistic differences between Korean and Chinese. Despite achieving an advanced, elegant, and economical alphabet, han’gŭl goes out of its way to approximate syllable-block writing by combining individual “letters” into square syllabograms, ostensibly in mimicry of sinographs.

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philosophical essence of Sinitic cultural heritage—explains a great deal about the curious mechanics of the qatt. In fact, upon closer scrutiny, it becomes clear that these two aims are, for the author, a single purpose: to create a phonographic script that operates according to an elegant, logical principle. As described in the last section of the qatt, entitled The Number of Sounds (Viet. âm số 音數), that principle is mathematical in nature. In the last page of the text, the author explains his system of representation as a series of four multiplications: 1) 22 onsets multiplied by 8 tonal possibilities, equaling 176 forms; 2) 176 forms multiplied by 5 possible branch character variants, yielding 880 forms (and thus accounting for the 110 discrete branch characters multiplied against 8 tonal forms); 3) When creating compound graphemes with a branch form on the left and a root form on the right (i.e., the second method of recombination described above), this results in 110 possible discrete branch characters multiplied by 22 root sounds, also equaling 880 forms. Finally, 4) when combining a root form on the left with a branch form on the right (i.e., basic spelling), this should result in 22 onsets multiplied by 880 tonally-marked rimes (or alternatively, 176 tonally marked onsets multiplied by 110 rimes), equaling 19,360 possible forms. However, the author provides the figure 18,480 as the total number of possible forms, not the expected 19,360. The author does not explain this figure, and at first glance it appears quite puzzling. However, the fact that the first of the 22 root sounds (i.e., no. 1 in Table 8.1 above) represents a zero onset (i.e., no initial consonant) suggests that the author did not reckon it in his final multiplication, since a standalone branch grapheme marked for tone would essentially map the same syllable. This would give us 21 onsets multiplied by 8 possible tones multiplied by 110 possible discrete rimes, equaling 18,480. This solution is undermined somewhat by the fact that the author uses the zero-initial root sound in his illustrations of basic spelling (as shown in Figure 8.2 above). However, the ordering of each section in the qatt suggests increasingly complex methods of representation, from simplex “root sounds” consisting of a single grapheme bearing one of 22 possible onsets combined with the single rime of -ông, to “joined writing” consisting of a tonally configured branch form on top of a compound grapheme. Thus, it appears that the “branch character” inventory is presented not only as a component for recombination, but also as an inventory of standalone syllabograms. Indeed, in the following section on how to diacritize tone, the author explicitly states that every single grapheme in the system may be marked for tone, and thus achieve eight different potential forms (see section on the tone mark above). This also explains why onset information is also encoded in the branch character (as

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also discussed briefly above).29 This would furthermore explain why the 176 tonally-marked onsets are multiplied by five possible rime categories and not six, since the root sound graphemes may also stand alone, as full syllabograms with the default rime value of -ông. One might argue that 22 root sounds or onsets (and not 21) are reckoned in the earlier multiplications given above. However, in those cases inclusion of the zero onset actually makes sense. For example, the first multiplication of 22 root sounds by eight tones includes the zero onset because, of course, zeroonset monosyllables also occur in eight different tones. Similarly, in the second multiplication of 176 tonally-marked root sounds by five branch character variants, the number 176 (derived from multiplying 22 root sounds by eight tonal categories) must also include the zero-onset, since in this case, the total number of 880 describes the range of tonally-marked rimes (and not onsets)—and in the representation of rimes, the zero-onset is used to achieve certain effects in vowel quality. It is only in the final reckoning that one must subtract the zero-onset from the calculation, in order to avoid redundancy. From this point of view, the number 18,480 represents the total non-reduplicative forms derivable in the system. All these facts strongly suggest that the zero onset was subtracted from the onset inventory in the author’s final calculation, yielding 21 (and not 22) onsets multiplied by 8 tonal possibilities multiplied by 110 discrete rimes—thus equaling the requisite 18,480 total possible forms. The author ends his numerological analysis (and the entire qatt) by noting that the number of forms derivable through “joined spelling” (again, in which a tonally-marked branch form is stacked on top of a compound grapheme) “replicates” this number—and indeed, “joined spelling” results in 21 distinct onsets (not counting the zero onset) multiplied by 880 possible compound graphemes, also equaling 18,480. Not only is such a system completely different from the classic Sinitic morphosyllabary (in which an inventory of graphemes represent discrete morphosyllables in the language), but it is also quite distinct from either a pure syllabary or a pure alphabet. It is remarkably unique in its design, and quite ingenious in its mathematical adaptation of the fanqie transcription system to create a fully-fledged script.

29

This would also suggest that multiple avenues of achieving the same representation—such as “spelling” a zero-onset syllable using a root sound—are used to illustrate the system, but are not actually needed in practice.

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3.7 The qatt in Practice Yet despite the ingenuity of its approach, the qatt ultimately proves cumbersome in execution. The very feature that sets the qatt apart—its multiplication of an inventory of onsets against an inventory of rimes—also hamstrings its capacity to fully encode the Vietnamese language in a straightforward yet economical fashion. As alluded to above, the real problem lies in the notion of the rime, and its primary representative in the script: the branch character. The creation of a six-way contrastive organization of rimes (five-branch character variants plus the root sound default) assumes some reality to six categories of rimes. But as discussed above, that principle is contradicted by the variability attested in the first branch character series alone, and is further undermined by the variability attested within each series across the inventory of onsets. The realities of the Vietnamese language may help to explain why the author seems to have compromised the elegance of his own system. The first question to ask is: if not six, then how many types of rimes are attested in Vietnamese? Of course, the answer depends on what and how you count. There are perhaps seven possible codas alone in Vietnamese (not counting final voiceless stops, which again are reckoned as a tonal category): four distinct nasal codas (or possibly three, given a merger in southern dialects), two glides, and of course the option of an open syllable ending in a vowel. This number is perhaps not so far off from six, but against it we must still factor the number of possible individual vowels in a given Vietnamese syllable. As is typical in Austronesian languages, Vietnamese boasts a large vowel inventory—at least nine distinct vowels, plus three diphthongs (this number does not include short vowel allophones that occur only in closed syllables). Thus, even in the category of open syllables alone, there are far more than six possible individual forms, and that number is greatly increased when considering closed syllables that combine a vowel with a coda. For this reason, a six-way scheme cannot encompass even the number of possible codas, much less the number of possible rimes (i.e., the number of possible combinations of vowels and codas). This is why the author is compelled to introduce such variability into the values of each branch character series, across the 22 possible onsets—in order to achieve a greater base of rime shapes than is possible via his otherwise mathematically elegant branch character set. This is also why compound characters and joined spelling are necessary—in order to multiply by a factor of many the number of syllabic shapes ultimately possible in the script. In other words, the author is trying to get at the variability of the phoneme, while being unwilling to abandon the rime as a unit of expression.

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We have already discussed how this approach actually serves to sabotage the practicality of the branch-character system, at least in terms of transparent recombinative spelling. But it also makes it very difficult to recognize the actual number of discrete rimes available for recombination. While the default rime embedded in the “root sound” grapheme always corresponds to , each of the additional five-branch character variants possible for each “root sound” contains different ranges of diversity across the onset inventory, with some branch characters also expressing the same rimes across different onsets. In any recombinative system, a clear and memorable inventory of discrete units is essential to the practicality of that system. The English alphabet has 26 letters that children learn according to a nursery song. Similarly, Japanese hiragana contains 46 discrete syllabograms, and systems designed to teach the inventory date back at least to the Heian mnemonic poem Iroha.30 Now the qatt root sounds do express a simple, finite set of 22 discrete units. But despite the graphic system of five branch variants, the number of discrete rimes is only derivable through the series of multiplications discussed above. Thus, while elegant in design, the script is actually quite cumbersome in execution. Part of this inelegance may be explained by the fact that, as already discussed, each component serves a kind of “double duty”—i.e., root sounds may furnish onset information when combined with branch characters, but may also stand alone as a full syllabogram (and vice versa). While such a double duty may seem efficient from one perspective (and there are further reasons for this model, discussed in Section 4 below), it only increases the opacity of rime representation in the system. To be fair, the qatt still arguably results in fewer total discrete graphemes than, for example, Chữ Nôm—which theoretically builds a separate grapheme for every individual morphosyllable in the language (and indeed, the author makes this comparison explicitly in his preface). But even so, the failure to represent rimes in a straightforward fashion despite a clear preference for mathematical precision points toward factors other than the purely utilitarian in the construction of the script. The qatt thus presents a series of conundrums from the perspective of design. As a fully phonographic script, it definitively rejects traditional Sinitic (i.e., six graphs) concepts of writing. Yet, despite an almost certain awareness of the Roman alphabet (and quite possibly other alphabetical systems closer to home, such as Korean han’gŭl), it rejects the simplicity of a phoneme-based representational system in favor of a mathematical elaboration of the basic 30

Note that the Iroha contains 47 discrete syllables, and does not include -n (). This is due to the presence of Early Middle Japanese wi and we , no longer present in modern Japanese.

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principles of fanqie. Furthermore, it also appears to abandon a more intuitive expression of rimes (a basic component of fanqie representation) in favor of a practically complex but mathematically elegant system of overlapping, opposing, and recombinative components. Why would the author deliberately choose to favor such impracticality, not only over a simpler faithfulness to fanqie, but also over such elegant alternatives as pure alphabetical—or even syllabographic—representation? Why, for that matter, remain faithful to Sinitic riming concepts while rejecting the six graphs? And perhaps, most obviously, why not simply embrace the Roman alphabet (as Quốc Ngữ users eventually did over the 1920s)? 4

A Threatening Cosmopolitan?

Some answers to these questions are provided in the preface of the qatt. In many ways, the preface poses a set of problems, which the script is meant to resolve. The preface, apparently composed by the author of the script, makes two major claims: 1) There is a precedent for catastrophic consequences to political cosmopolitanism in history; and 2) an elegant, natural writing system that follows a single, simple principle is needed for the Vietnamese in order to protect itself from a (new) cosmopolitan threat. Alongside these two basic claims, the qatt author also forms judgments on the viability of Chữ Nôm, the Han script, and through silences and implications, the Latin alphabet as well. Perhaps unsurprisingly, each of these existing writing systems is rejected as unsuitable for representing Vietnamese. However, the directness with which the author rejects each option varies dramatically: Chữ Nôm is castigated openly; the Han script is described as more logical than Chữ Nôm but nevertheless innately flawed; the Roman alphabet is passed over in silence, but is strongly implied to be discordant with the logic of nature. Given the probable colonial dating of the text, it is tempting to read into this rhetorical hierarchy an inverse relationship between the transparency of the author’s criticism, and the political power (or threat) associated with each script. Chữ Nôm, associated with Vietnam directly, posed no political threat and was thus free to open castigation; Chinese writing represented an elite Sinitic heritage, the criticism of which required more delicacy; finally, the Latin alphabet and French colonial power possibly represented a direct threat, and thus required the most obviation. This political subtext helps to explain the peculiar mix of demands the author of the qatt was trying to fulfill in constructing his writing system.

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The author begins with a condensed history of writing in China, but one already laced with politicized rhetoric:31 In the past, the Chinese knotted ropes for reckoning. In later ages, the Sages adapted this into writing. The warp and weft of their tadpole script necessarily conformed to the Six Graphs. When the Qin regime burned books and reformed strokes, [regarding] the structure of [their script’s] fanqie and tonal system, while a semblance survived, the profundities of the Sages were swept utterly from the earth. 厥昔，中華結繩而治．後世聖人易之以書契．其蝌蚪縱橫，必歸於六 書之法．迨乎秦政焚書改畫，其反切平上之格，雖畧有存而聖之奧掃 地盡矣．

The author traces the origin of Chinese writing to arithmetic rope-knotting (結繩), which was then adapted by the Sages into the “tadpole script” (or scripts). The phrase khoa đẩu 蝌蚪 is worth some discussion here. The term dates to the Han dynasty, when clerical script (隸書) was emerging as a new standard form for writing. Clerical script has traditionally been viewed as a cursive derivative of the small seal script (小篆書) promulgated by the Qin.32 In Han times, clerical script was referred to as the “modern script” 今文 or “modern characters” 今字, and was opposed to the “old scripts” 古文 of the preQin era, which were colloquially referred to as “tadpole scripts” 蝌蚪文 due to their top-heavy visual style (Wilkinson 2013: 13). The author of the qatt refers to these tadpole scripts as a kind of tangible instantiation of the wisdom of the Sages, notably destroyed by the writing reforms of the Qin dynasty.33 31 All punctuation of the original text and translations are my own, based on the AB636 manuscript held by the Han-Nom Institute. 32 The linear descent of clerical script has recently come under question. 33 In Vietnam, the word “khoa đẩu” has also become associated with Indic scripts used to represent Tai languages. In 1903, the governor of Thanh Hoá province, Vương Duy Trinh, published an anthology of folk songs from the province entitled Thanh Hoá quan phong (Observed Airs of Thanh Hoa). In the section on songs from Quan Hoá (northwestern Thanh Hoá), Vương Duy Trinh includes several songs transcribed in an Indic script resembling Thai or Lao. In his discussion of this “regional script” (chữ châu), Vương uses the term “khoa đẩu” in reference to pre-Qin writings in much the same way the author of the qatt does. However, Vương uses the pre-Qin “tadpole” writing as an analogy for the Indic script under discussion, claiming that just as “tadpole” script died out as a result of the Qin reforms, an ancient Vietnamese script also died out among Vietnamese people, preserved only in the remote borderland of Quan Hoá. This is clearly a problematic analysis of the script, since it was used not to represent Vietnamese or Mường (or

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Generally lauded as a monumental achievement of Chinese civilization, the standardization of writing initiated by Li Si 李斯 (ca. 280–208 bce) sought to abolish variant orthographies in favor of one style to be used throughout the new Qin Empire (i.e., small seal script). These reforms were part of a broader set of policies designed to standardize a wide range of systems, including axle widths, weights and measures, and laws and penalties. In other words, Li Si’s reforms may be viewed as powerful cosmopolitan achievements, designed to eliminate interregional variation and enhance the unity and efficiency of the new empire. Rather than celebrate the standardization of writing as a triumph of cosmopolitan government, the qatt author condemns it as a kind of intellectual holocaust, deliberately coupling the Qin “reformation of strokes” (改畫) with its notorious “book-burning” (焚書) campaigns of 213–210 bce. Here, phần thư 焚書 refers to phần thư khanh nho 焚書坑儒; i.e., the Qin “burning of books and burying of scholars” described by Sima Qian 司馬遷 (ca. 145–ca. 86 bce) in his Shiji 史記 (Records of the Grand Historian). In one of the most notorious episodes in Qin history, the first emperor, prompted by Li Si, ordered the burning of all historical texts not written by Qin historians, and then later arrested over 460 scholars (Confucians prominently among them) and had them buried alive.34 Note that Li Si’s script reforms are not generally associated with the persecution conducted between 213–210 bce.35 However, the qatt author has combined them into a single thought with a clever wordplay: he has changed “the burning of books and burying of scholars” (phần thư khanh nho 焚書坑儒) into “the burning of books and the reformation of strokes” (phần thư cải hoạ 焚 書改畫). Thus, Li Si’s script reforms are equated with the slaughter of innocent scholars, and his otherwise laudable standardization of writing, associated with the (alleged) tyranny of the Qin Empire. The “tadpole” scripts of the Sages are therefore depicted as a kind of lost wisdom, obliterated by the Qin regime. In its attempt to create a cosmopolitan empire, the Qin is viewed as having destroyed the essence of the Sages, while preserving only the most superficial qualities of Sagely writing. This is Proto-Viet-Muong), but to represent a Tai language. Nevertheless, the thrust of Vương Duy Trinh’s argument here—that the Qin reformation led to the extinction of something valuable and worthy—is strikingly similar to what the author of the qatt is driving at. 34 See Shiji, fascicle 6 (Basic Annals of the First Emperor of Qin [秦始皇本紀]). 35 Boltz notes that Wang Guowei 王國維 (1877–1927) did in fact associate the two, suggesting that the primary target of the book-burning was books written in pre-Qin “old script” (古文) writing—i.e., tadpole writing (1994: 157). Boltz is drawing on a discussion by Bodde (1938), who did not fully accept this point of view since genre and category played a key role in which books were burned. Nevertheless, Wang Guowei’s later association suggests that perhaps the qatt author’s perspective was not so singular.

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deft rhetorical sleight of hand: by associating contemporary Chinese writing with the alleged cruelty of the Qin, the qatt author at once maintains the blamelessness of the pantheon of classical Sages (and therefore, the nucleus of Sinitic intellectual culture), while freeing himself to excoriate Chinese characters. In other words, the brutal reputation of the Qin provides rhetorical license for the author’s criticism—criticism that would be impermissible if applied to the Zhou or the Han (or, for that matter, the Tang). For the qatt author then, the Chinese writing system does not descend from the Han clerical script, nor from Zhou era writing (although an effortless case could be made for either), but from the standardized Qin script; and the Qin script is in turn, at best, flawed, since it only preserves the cosmetic features of Sagely writing while sacrificing its profound nature. In this way, the reader is led to understand contemporary Chinese writing as a direct descendent of Qin tyranny that only vaguely reflects the wisdom of the Sages. The author then sets his sights on Chữ Nôm, critically as a derivative of postQin writing: Our nation was governed as a part of China, and in days past there existed only our nation’s speech, but not yet a national script. Because we read China’s texts, we progressed to borrowing its characters. Sometimes we matched their tones; other times we unraveled their meanings.36 The accumulation of such writings eventually led to the formation of the “southern characters.” Their [Chữ Nôm] vulgar unintelligibility is even worse than is found in the writing altered by the Qin. 我國政附中華，日前只有國音，未有國字．因讀華書，遂借其字。或 諧聲，或繹義．增多其書，以為南字．其部陋不通，更甚於秦改之 書焉．

In a concise resumé of Chữ Nôm history, the qatt author argues that Nôm arose as an improvised and ad hoc consequence of Sinitic literacy. He then proceeds openly to excoriate both Nôm and Chinese writing together, by describing Nôm as even more “unintelligible” than Qin writing. Note here that Chinese writing is described as “秦改之書”—literally, “writing altered by the Qin.” That is, Qin writing (and by extension, contemporary Chinese writing) is already defective due to Li Si’s corruptive reforms, but Nôm is “even worse.”

36

Here the author is saying that some adaptations of Chinese characters were based on pronunciation, while others were based on meaning.

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Note that the author’s criticism is trained on the logic—or, more precisely, the illogic—of the Chinese and Nôm writing systems. They lack a central, intuitive, organizing principle—something that is presumed to have been present in the lost “tadpole” scripts of the Sages.37 When the ‘wisdom of the Sages’ was swept away by the Qin reforms, this simple and elegant principle was supposedly lost. But this is not just a matter of utility or efficiency. The view on postQin Sinitic writing here is that it is unnatural. The elegant principle allegedly intuited by the Sages and imbued in their script is nothing other than a cosmological principle—a fundamental pattern that is omnipresent and which is obfuscated in impure forms, but reflected and transmitted with clarity in the works of the Sages. This concept—that writing ought to reflect the innate logic of the universe—requires some unpacking. It bears classical roots, but was perhaps most clearly expressed by Liu Xie 劉勰 (ca. 465–ca. 522), in his seminal work of literary criticism, Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍 (The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons). Deeply informed by contemporary Neo-Daoist thought and the numerology of the Book of Changes (i.e., the Yijing 易經; Viet. Dịch Kinh, or more commonly Kinh Dịch), Liu argued that wen 文 (Viet. văn), bearing the sense of a cosmological pattern, “arose together with Heaven and Earth” (文…輿天地並生…), and that writing (also wen 文), subsequently evolved as a natural expression of that pattern. Liu explicitly described writing as a derivative of language, and language as a derivative of consciousness: “[W]ith the emergence of mind, language is created, and when language is created, writing appears” (心生而言立, 言立而文明).38 Thus, writing is ultimately derived from the supreme unity of the Way, and uncorrupted writing will therefore always reflect the cosmological principles immanent in nature.39

37

This is manifestly incorrect, since “tadpole” writing is merely a visual style, but uses the same orthographic principles as small seal script. However, Cang Jie 倉頡, the legendary creator of sinographs, was commonly held to have derived writing from his sagely intuition of essential patterns in nature, as noted by Xu Shen in the postface to the Shuowen jiezi (see Bottéro [2002: 23]). This is consonant with the qatt author’s vision of a Qin corruption of sagely writing, and the loss of a single, simple principle guiding the figure of writing. 38 See Chapter 1, “On Tao, the Source” (原道). I have followed the interpretation endorsed by Youzhong Shi in his 1970 translation of Liu Xie. Shi reads the compound 文明 as a subject + intransitive verb, with 明 carrying the basic meaning of “to appear.” However, the phrase 文明 (“writing appears”) also puns together with a secondary verb phrase, meaning “the pattern is revealed.” Thus, the phrase both refers to the derivative development of writing, as well as the role literature plays in the revelation of the cosmological pattern. 39 For more on this topic, see Phan (2013b: 15–16).

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This perception, popular among the Neo-Daoists of Liu Xie’s time, was inherited and adapted by the Neo-Confucians of the Song era centuries later. Notably, the Cheng brothers—Cheng Hao 程顥 (1032–1085) and Cheng Yi 程頤 (1033–1107)—emphasized the notion of a universal principle (理) immanent in all things.40 The Cheng brothers’ model was in turn embraced by the most influential Neo-Confucian, Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200), who elaborated a theory of principle as prerequisite to the physical universe, and therefore immanent and observable in all natural phenomena. Thus, the clarity with which a thing expressed this primitive and fundamental principle became a direct measure of its excellence. This held for all conceivable matters, from governance and personal relationships—to painting, poetry, language and writing. As in other parts of East Asia, Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian doctrine became the orthodox vision of Confucian thought in Vietnam, especially after the twentyyear Ming occupation of 1407–1427. The Neo-Confucian perspective explains a great deal of the qatt’s emphasis on a lost principle of writing, which we may now understand not only to be logical, but cosmological in significance. Indeed, this begins to explain the qatt’s fixation on mathematical derivations in its system of representation. What, after all, is more logical or more natural, more immanent as an underlying pattern in the universe—than mathematics? This is, furthermore, no mere speculation on the cultural universality of mathematics. One of the texts most revered by both the Neo-Confucians and the Neo-Daoists was the Book of Changes, whose system of divination was based on the assumption that the Universe worked according to an underlying principle, and whose concept of the universe was defined by a mathematical or numerological vision of creation. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the very next passage of the preface directly invokes the numerological mysteries of the Book of Changes:41 As was once verified by the trigrams of the Three Unities, one begins with the two [lines; i.e., the distinction between yin and yang, or the broken 40

The brothers wrote that “[t]here is only one principle in the world … You may extend it over the four seas and it is everywhere true”; and argued that “[t]o be humane is to be humane according to this principle” (Er Cheng yishu 二程遺書 2A:1a; translation from de Bary et al. [1999: 690]). The Er Cheng yishu (“Transmitted Writings of the Two Chengs”) was reassembled and edited by Zhu Xi, whose teachings were the main vehicle by which the Chengs’ ideas survived. 41 While Neo-Confucian thought is everywhere in evidence in the qatt, there appear to be no direct citations to Zhu Xi’s work. In such a compact text there is no reason to expect the author to fit in a citation to Zhu Xi, but it is also not implausible to imagine that the author was actively avoiding doing so, in order to maintain the integrity of his appeal to a classical, pre-Qin intellectual heritage.

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and solid lines of the trigram], and then applies the Four [operations].42 This yields the eight [trigrams]. When [eight and eight are] multiplied, [they] become the 64 [combinations], which may then be transformed into 4,096 [possible divinations]. The numbers [required] for the qian and kun [hexagrams] correspond to the days of the year [lit. “all the days in the epoch”]. The [numbers of wands required to produce the] two parts [of the Yi] correspond to the number of all things. 嘗考之三一卦，始於兩，次於四，成於八，重之為六十四，変之為四 千九十六．其第則乾坤，當[X] 朞之日．二篇當萬物之數．

The first thing to notice is how very similar the dense numerological derivations recited here are echoed in the mathematical analysis of the qatt discussed above. This is, of course, no mistake. Although never explicitly stated, the author is setting up the numerology of the Book of Changes as a model of cosmological wisdom—an embodiment of the fundamental principle of the universe—and one that is ultimately mirrored in his design of the qatt. To fully appreciate this parallel, it is important to unpack the reference to the Book of Changes contained in the passage above. The extremely compact language here actually paraphrases the logic of a line from a book on prognostication called the Li Xuzhong mingshu 李虛中命書 (“Li Xuzhong’s Book of Fate”), the main text of which is attributed to the pseudonymic “Master of Demon Valley” (鬼谷子), and to the Tang dynasty commentator Li Xuzhong 李虛中 (762–813).43 The relevant passage of the Li Xuzhong mingshu occurs in a long commentary note, discussing a line of the primary text dealing with the arising of a primal duality from the supreme unity of the way. The primary text reads: The way and law of two arising from one is modeled on the Natural. The Eight Trigrams and the Nine Palaces are multiplications of yin and yang, and on [this] basis, proliferate. 42 The “two” here refer to what are now usually called the “yin” 陰 (broken) and “yang” 陽 (solid) lines comprising a trigram (卦). These were earlier referred to as “soft” (柔, broken) and “firm” (剛), respectively. The “four” operations were four actions taken to count the yarrow stalks, used each time a line of a trigram was derived. According to Rutt (1996: 160), these were: 1) dividing the stalks into two piles; 2) setting one stalk aside; 3) counting them out in fours; and 5) reserving the discarded stalks. 43 It is also possible that the qatt is drawing directly on the source of the numerology found in the Li Xuzhong mingshu, the “Great Treatise” commentary on the Book of Changes (see below), although the language appears closer to Li Xuzhong’s work.

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Phan 一而兩之道法于自然．八卦九宮乘陰陽以數．44

Li Xuzhong then engages in a lengthy commentary on the natural logic of the yin–yang duality, culminating in a numerological analysis of the Book of Changes: Thus, the number [of wands required to produce] the qian and kun [hexagrams] is 11,520, which corresponds to the days of the year, and the number of all things. The Four Operations produce the Yi,45 the 18 [interim calculations] are transformed into the hexagram, the firm and the soft are issued, thus generating the yao [lines of a trigram], and the Four Dimensions obtain according to the eight [upper trigrams] and eight [lower trigrams].46 Thus, that which mediates between occurs exhaustively within the Nine [Palaces]. 故乾坤之策，萬有一千五百二十，當期之日，當萬物之數，四營成 易，十有八變成卦，發剛柔而生爻，以八八於四維，則居中者盡乎九 也[…]47

The number 11,520 is derived from the total number of yarrow wands (or stalks, or bamboo slips) used to produce all 64 possible hexagrams in the Book of Changes. It is thus the total pool from which all divinations are drawn, and the source for the qatt author’s “number of all things” (萬物之數). The “number of the days of the year” (期之時) is derived by adding the number of wands needed to form the qian 乾 hexagram (216), comprised of all solid (yang/“firm”) lines, to all the wands needed to form the kun 坤 hexagram (144), 44

Cited from Master of Demon Valley/Gui Guzi 鬼谷子 (4th century), Li Xuzhong Mingshu 李虛中命書, p. 9, middle fascicle, in the Beijing Airusheng Sea of Classics (北京愛如 生典海) (Electronic Collection), in the Chinese Basic Ancient Texts Corpus (Beijing: Zhongguo jiben guji ku 中國基本古籍庫, 2009). 45 Here, Yi 易 refers to one of three derivational steps used to draw a trigram. Each of these derivational steps is performed using the “four operations” (四營). 46 What I have translated as “hexagram” is the character 卦 (elsewhere, trigram), but here clearly referring to the combination of two trigrams (i.e., a full hexagram with an “upper” and “lower” half). Each trigram has three strokes, and so there are 18 possible combinations in forming the two-part hexagram. The “firm” and “soft” (剛柔) refer to yin and yang (solid and broken) lines of the trigrams respectively. The “Four Dimensions” (四維) refer to four seasonal changes, or four moral standards, four directions, and four limbs of the body. 47 Cited from Master of Demon Valley/Gui Guzi 鬼谷子 (4th century), Li Xuzhong Mingshu 李虛中命書, p. 9, middle fascicle, in the Beijing Airusheng Sea of Classics (北京愛如 生典海) (Electronic Collection), in the Chinese Basic Ancient Texts Corpus (Beijing: Zhongguo jiben guji ku 中國基本古籍庫, 2009).

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comprised of all broken (yin/“soft”) lines, which equals 360 (i.e., the days of the calendrical year). Li Xuzhong was himself relying on a text called the Yidachuan 易大傳 (Great Treatise; Viet. Dịch đại truyện), also known as the Yixi cichuan 易係辭傳 (Viet. Dịch hệ từ truyện), a collection of early commentaries on the Book of Changes probably written some time during the second century bce (Rutt 1996: 158, 404). The Great Treatise establishes the numerological principles used by both Li Xuzhong and the qatt author, in the following passage: The number [lit. “scheme”] required by qian is 216; the number [lit. “scheme”] required by kun is 144, thus equaling 360, which corresponds to the days of the year … The number [required to produce] the two parts [of all hexagrams] is 11,520, the number of all things … Thus verily, the Four Operations produce the Yi, and the 18 transformations produce the hexagram. 乾之策，二百一十有六；坤之策，百四十有四，凡三百有六十，當期 之日…二篇之策，萬有一千五百二十，當萬物之數也…是故，四營而 成易，十有八變而成卦．48

As shown above, the precise numerological symbolism reflected in both Li Xuzhong’s book and the qatt was originally set down in the Great Treatise.49 More importantly, the entire Book of Changes embodies the principle that the universe (both time and space) operates according to a numerologicallyderivable logic (indeed, this is what makes divination possible), and thus, all things pure and natural will reflect that logic. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the Book of Changes is viewed as a product of the Zhou, and thus, belonging to the pre-Qin world to which the “tadpole” script also belongs. The qatt reference to the Book of Changes thus accomplishes two rhetorical objectives. First, it punctuates the author’s argument that the supreme knowledge of the Sages was sabotaged by a Qin ‘cosmopolitan violence,’ but nevertheless survives in hints and glimpses (i.e., the outward shape of Sinitic writing; the numerological wisdom of the Book of Changes). Second, it establishes the notion of cosmological naturalness as something to aspire to, wherever possible.

48 Cited from Zhouyi chuan yidaquan 周易傳一大全, fascicle 22, lines 105, 107, and 108, using the online C-Text version at https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=en&chapter=141199. The C-Text version was scanned by CADAL, and based on the Imperially Commissioned Siku­ quanshu (Qinding sikuchuanshu 欽定四庫全書), housed at Zhejiang University Library. 49 At least textually speaking; the ultimate roots of this numerological tradition are unclear.

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But most importantly, the numerology of the Book of Changes establishes a mathematical definition of the fundamental principle (lý 理) underlying all things. It articulates the creative act of the universe as a derivative one: from a single unity emerge two opposing forces, and from two opposing forces emerge (eventually) all phenomena in the universe. That essentially derivative model of creation is mirrored in the derivative numerology of the Book of Changes, and finally, in the derivative multiplications of the qatt. This is why the author is so willing to sacrifice utility in favor of an elegant mathematical design, and why his script not only rejects the simplicity of a fully alphabetic mode, but also any other more straightforward method of encoding rimes: he is designing a script that will produce forms for all the sounds of the Vietnamese language through a series of interlinked derivations, just as all divinations in the Book of Changes are mathematically derived from the qian and kun hexagrams (and in turn, from the simple opposition of a broken and unbroken line)—and ultimately, just as all phenomena in the universe are creatively and mathematically derived from two essential principles (yin and yang). He is mimicking the complexity and the elegance of the Book of Changes, which he considers a repository for a cosmological truth intuited by the classical Sages, but sabotaged by the Qin. The qatt author returns to an explicit discussion of writing by forming an analogy to music, which also bears traces of an immanent universal logic.50 Though musical theory (樂) has already faded away and become lost, yet of the five tones, eight notes, and twelve stipulations—the regulation of their clearness or turbidity conforms to nothing other than the natural order of the universe.51 This being the case, I think that in creating a writing system there must [also] be a single, simple principle, lest—as [once happened in] the Qin—the unmarked tones and rimes of men and things be obliterated completely.

50 51

Note that Li Xuzhong also discusses music in his commentary (see above). I have taken some syntactic liberty with my translation since the Literary Sinitic is very condensed here. In fact, everything before the particle 者 should properly be analyzed as the set of conditions that leads the author to make his claim beginning in “I think” (窮想). This becomes extremely awkward in English, so I have broken up the sentence. I have also slimmed down the rendering for the compound 損益 to “balance,” again for purposes of flow. This, admittedly, required some semantic fluidity (“increase and decrease” > “balance”), but since the Way (道) is consistently imagined as one of innate balance, this is perhaps permissible.

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樂雖已散亡，而五聲，八音，十二律，其清濁損益之制，無非合造化 之自然者，窃想書契之造必有一個簡易之格，而人物聲音靡有遺者只 以秦而泯耳．

It is in this passage that the crux of the qatt author’s argument is laid down. First, the author reiterates his (essentially Neo-Confucian) conviction that the universe exhibits a fundamental logic by claiming that this logic is also observable in music (even if, as with everything post-Qin, a complete grasp of musical principles has now been lost).52 It is to that supreme logic that an ideal writing system must also aspire. At this point, the reader already understands that the “single, simple principle” that ought to guide writing is something like the numerological design of the Book of Changes. In addition to this, however, the author also makes it plain that what is at stake is the phonic dimension of a language (i.e., its “tones and rimes”).53 Therefore, we can presume that for the qatt author, the right kind of writing system is one that is phonographically accurate.54 Thus, the author has established that an ideal writing system will not only reflect the mathematical design of the universe, but will also exclusively encode the sounds of the language—i.e., it will be phonographic. This explains why, despite their prestige, the six graphs and especially semantosyllabism, are rejected as a basis for writing—because they do not accurately capture the sounds of the language. 52

Note that the author’s description of the loss of musical theory is also a reference to the Yuejing 樂經 (Classic of Music), a Zhou text lost by the time of the Han. 53 Again, while the specifics of this “principle” as it relates to language are not discussed, the philosophical context is undoubtedly Neo-Confucian. Here, “principle” must be understood as reflecting Principle (理)—the collective logic of all things operating according to a universal Way (道). 54 This presumption is consonant with what we have already seen of the actual qatt script (as described previously)—i.e., that it is essentially a fanqie-based phonographic system. There is a sly equivocation in the author’s rhetoric here. Drawn out to its logical extent, these passages imply that the writing of the Sages was phonographic, or at least in some way appealed to phonography (since phonography is a basic principle of the qatt system). In fact, Boltz (1994) showed that Warring States scripts did indeed veer toward the phonographic. However, this was aborted by the Qin unification and subsequent reforms. No fully phonographic Sinitic script has yet been discovered, and all deciphered pre-Qin scripts (including the “tadpole” script) represent the same basic writing system as the Qin standardization, differing only in visual style. It is not impossible that a nineteenthor early twentieth-century intellectual could have imagined a greater diversity—even including “Sagely alphabets”—than is currently accepted to have been obtained during the Zhou. Indeed, perhaps exposure to Western science may even have stimulated such a fantasy. But there is no way to be certain. At any rate, the qatt author covers his bases by not making this connection explicit anywhere in the text.

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But it is in this second half of the passage that the author finally reveals his actual motivation for creating the qatt script: the “new characters for the nation’s sounds” are meant as kind of shield against cultural eradication. The threat of this cultural eradication is, in turn, evoked by referencing the intellectual holocaust that the author has already attributed to the Qin (as discussed above). In a nutshell, the logic reads as follows: if Vietnamese is not given a natural, elegant, phonographically accurate writing system soon, it will fall victim to the same fate as pre-Qin language, writing, knowledge, and diversity. That is to say, the Vietnamese language (and by extension, Vietnamese thought, culture, tradition—and indeed, it is not implausible to include sovereignty here) will be wiped out. This politicized invocation of the Qin metaphor raises an important question: just who were the “Qin” in the qatt author’s contemporary world? The author has drawn a deeply critical analogy here, but left its target in conspicuous silence. Given the relative dating of the text, the simplest conclusion to draw is that colonial France is the “Qin” of the author’s age. French rule, the encroachment of French ideas, language, and perhaps most pointedly, French writing (in the form of Quốc Ngữ), all represent a cosmopolitan threat: cosmopolitan, because they represent the integration of Vietnam into a broader social, cultural, political, and intellectual world; and a threat, because these are perceived as bartered in exchange for Vietnam’s individual, region-specific, vernacular identity. Facing this danger, Chữ Nôm is viewed as entirely inadequate for preserving the Vietnamese language. It is presented as a messy derivative of post-Qin writing, and as discussed above, even less logical and less attuned to a universal order than Chinese writing. What then, of Quốc Ngữ? Certainly, in terms of phonographic accuracy, Quốc Ngữ represents an incalculable improvement over Chữ Nôm. The qatt author may of course have felt that its association with the French was reason enough to reject it, but I would argue that a deeper justification is embedded in his preface. As shown in this section, a guiding principle of the qatt’s language ethics is the conviction that the universe operates according to a cosmological order, and that that order was, in turn, best understood by the pantheon of classical Sages whose writings formed the nucleus of Sinitic intellectual heritage. Thus, the qatt author invokes the Book of Changes (rather than any document of Western provenance—e.g., the Bible) in his discussion of the nature of the universe. Indeed, the author’s early claim that contemporary (i.e., post-Qin) Chinese writing retains only superficial qualities of the (pre-Qin) Sagely scripts may be reinterpreted to suggest that, by comparison, Western (i.e., Romanized, alphabetical) writing lacks any connection whatsoever to the fundamental principle (lý 理) of the universe. Indeed, it is not hard to recognize that—despite its simplicity and

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utility—the alphabet does not mimic the series of linked, creative derivations that characterize both the divinations of the Book of Changes, and by extension, its vision of the universe. (From one perspective, the alphabet is actually too simple!) The numerological mysteries of the Book of Changes are nowhere evident in the basic logic of an alphabet, and it is plausibly on this basis that the author rejects (the unnamed) Quốc Ngữ as a viable script for the needs of the Vietnamese. As we have seen, the qatt not only replicates basic insights of fanqie, but it also imitates the numerological organization of the Book of Changes, in its core mathematical principles of recombination. Finally, by using basic Sinitic strokes, the qatt even retains the outer “semblance” of Sinitic writing—the only part of Sagely writing said to have survived the Qin reformation. Except for utility, then, in terms of the threats and needs described in the preface, the qatt succeeds in every way that the Latin alphabet fails. In summary, the preface of the qatt demonstrates the author’s belief in an underlying, essentially mathematical principle to the universe, his conviction that a writing system ought to reflect it with clarity, and his fear that the distinctiveness of Vietnamese culture would be “swept utterly from the earth,” if the “tones and rimes” of the language were not preserved in script. This very specific mix of philosophical, ethical, philological and political ambitions neatly explains the otherwise puzzling contradictions immanent in the script itself. It reveals to us that the author was not motivated purely by efficiency, nor by taste, but by a desire to preserve Vietnamese cultural distinctiveness, according to deeply-held beliefs about the nature and order of the universe. That instinct to preserve, furthermore, arose in response to a perceived threat of extinction. Despite the breadth and depth of his ambition, the qatt author closes his preface on a standard note of humility: This model and index of sounds and strokes, made into a form of writing, reflects only my personal [understanding]. How could I dare to speak about the tones and rimes of men?! Written by Nguyễn Tử, the Hermit of the Southern Citadel, on the Conjunction of the Five Planets. 茲模索音畫創為一樣書，以便私已也．豈敢云通倮蠱55之聲音乎哉． 五星聚斗，南城居士阮子書．

55 Literally, a body without hair or feathers or scuta; often used in ancient times to refer to people. See Ci yuan (253).

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Thus, the entire project is a private enterprise, apparently unpublished, and signed with a pseudonym. It represents not an official proposal to the throne, but one intellectual’s personal solution to what he perceived as a threat to the nation. The use of a pseudonym and the absence of overt reference to the French are tantalizing hints of a possibly subversive, anti-colonial element to the text, but there is no real way to verify this without first positively identifying the author.56 What we can say for certain is that the text exhibits a hostility toward cosmopolitan ambitions, views cosmopolitanism as a vehicle for cultural and intellectual extirpation, and argues for the importance of a phonographic writing system as a defense against this cosmopolitan threat. 5

Conclusions: A Crisis in the Cosmopolis

The intellectual precedent in early modern Vietnam was arguably to celebrate Vietnam’s membership within a broader, “Sinographic Cosmopolis.”57 The contents of the qatt demonstrate a sharp reversal of this attitude. Cosmopolitanism (specifically French colonialism) is selectively viewed as a form of political and intellectual violence, rather than as a condition of enlightenment. Value is placed on the local and the distinctive, rather than on the universal and the transregional. The spread of a cosmopolitan system is perceived as an invasion that threatens endemic forms with extinction, rather than proffering advancement. These contemporary threats are expressed through analogy with the allegedly brutal Qin regime, whose (otherwise remarkable) writing reforms are blamed for the corruption of classical Sagely wisdom, and the obfuscation of humanity’s grasp of a fundamental cosmological principle. Thus, the author rhetorically frees himself to imagine a third intellectual lineage—neither the alien French, nor the vitiated postQin Chinese—but one rooted in the classical wisdom of the Sages and which may be imagined as directly linked to contemporary Vietnamese civilization. That classical wisdom survives in glimmers only—vaguely in the architecture of Chinese writing (but not in Romanized writing), in the intuitions of music, and perhaps most significantly, in the numerological mysteries of the Book 56

It is tempting to use the literary substance of the preface to make a claim for authorship or dating of the text, but this would be an exercise in circularity. 57 As I have discussed in previous work (Phan 2013b; 2014), this attitude came into particular resolution in the bilingual prefaces of the Sino-Vietnamese dictionary entitled Chỉ nam ngọc âm giải nghĩa 指南玉音解義 (Explication of the Guide to Jeweled Sounds), a text that sought to elevate the use of Chữ Nôm by equating it (and by extension, the vernacular language) with Han characters (and thus, Literary Sinitic).

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of Changes. To safeguard that intellectual heritage, and most importantly, to avoid another episode of cultural obliteration, the qatt author argues that the Vietnamese language needed a new form—or in the author’s own words, new characters for the nation’s sounds. The Quốc âm tân tự is thus presented as a solution: a natural and elegant phonographic script that resonates mathematically with the fundamental principle of the cosmos, and which could therefore ward Vietnamese language and culture against the threat of cosmopolitan extirpation. The qatt’s concerns are in fact typical of the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, during which time language took center stage in debates over how to deal with the French (and by extension, modernization). In 1867, three years after the French formally declared their colony of Cochinchina in the Mekong region of Vietnam, the southern Catholic intellectual and reformist, Nguyễn Trường Tộ 阮長祚 (ca. 1830–1871), submitted a petition to Emperor Tự Đức 嗣德 (1829–1883) entitled “Eight Points to Aid in a Crisis” (Viet. Tế cấp bát điều 濟急八條). Among his eight concerns, Nguyễn included an article promoting the systematic renovation of vernacular writing. Nguyễn Trường Tộ not only railed against what he considered a slavish and backward devotion to Literary Sinitic, he also urged the court to establish a conventionalized (and imperially mandated) set of Han characters that would accurately and systematically represent vernacular speech.58 Although some have described this recommendation as a “systematization” of Nôm, Nguyễn was actually arguing for a much more drastic measure; what he describes amounts to the creation of a new writing system using Sinitic graphemes to phonographically represent the Vietnamese language. This, Nguyễn believed, was needed to facilitate and expedite the broadening of the Vietnamese educational system. Note that in one stroke, Nguyễn was not only calling for a new vernacular script to replace Nôm, but for the Vietnamese language itself to replace Literary Sinitic as the modus of education in Vietnam. Nguyễn called his theoretical script “Han Characters for the Nation’s Sounds” (Viet. Quốc âm Hán tự 國音漢字), yoking (non-Western) Sinitic prestige to a representation of the vernacular language.59 Nguyễn never saw his theoretical writing system realized (his petition on language was rejected by the staunchly Confucian Tự Đức), but his

58

59

Note that Nguyễn Trường Tộ desired not only a standardization of Nôm, but its transformation into a purely phonographic system. In fact, as Nguyễn Quang Hồng notes, Nguyễn Trường Tộ submitted no less than 58 memorials to the throne on the topic of script reform (Nguyễn 2008: 474). It is interesting to note that Nguyễn, as a Catholic, did not endorse Quốc Ngữ.

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concern for the vernacular would only take root and grow stronger in the soil of colonization. Wynn Wilcox also notes that the policy question (sách vắn 策問) of the civil service exams during the reign of Tự Đức 嗣德 (r. 1847–1883) evolved into a forum for discussing contemporary issues; and that the 1862, 1868 and 1877 exams used the policy question “as a venue to explore military and diplomatic options against the French” (Wilcox 2002: 3). The 1910 policy question addressed the issue of Quốc Ngữ specifically, as well as invoking the Book of Changes in a manner strikingly consistent with the qatt preface. Wilcox discusses the 1910 exam’s use of the 64th hexagram of the Book of Changes (entitled vị tế 未濟, “yet to be forded”) as an articulation of Vietnam, emerging from the trauma of colonization into an era of great potential for change (Wilcox 2002: 11, 15). This state of potentiality was considered fraught with peril, and the exam meditates on which kinds of change ought to be considered beneficial and which kinds poisonous. The policy question first raises the issue of Quốc Ngữ as a new script that has abandoned Vietnam’s rich Sinitic tradition; but then, turns around to suggest that the classical Sages themselves were embracers of change (Ibid.: 12). This is reminiscent of the qatt author’s invocation of a pre-Qin heritage in order to justify his endorsement of a “third” intellectual path. Nevertheless, as Wilcox notes, the issue with Quốc Ngữ was that “it actually makes the exchange of ideas easier for French censors to understand,” while “the advantage of both the use of Chinese and of the Yijing (I Ching, Book of Changes) is that it allows for stealthy subtlety” (Ibid.: 15). Thus, Wilcox argues, “[w]hile it may have traditional elements … the 1910 examination partially embraces language reform, and when it does not, it rejects reform for what amounts to an anticolonial purpose” (Ibid.). As such, the qatt’s invocation of the Book of Changes, its claims that script reform was necessary while rejecting Quốc Ngữ, and its valuation of an imagined classical intellectuality over and against both French and contemporary Chinese cultural models, all bear deep roots in the political zeitgeist of the time. These values were in turn galvanized and transformed in the 1920s by the new generation of Western-educated intellectuals who would ultimately adopt Quốc Ngữ as their chosen medium. The qatt thus provides a unique expression of language ethics as they emerged in reaction to colonization, and on the eve of the Quốc Ngữ revolution.60 The history of the next couple of decades reveals, of course, that Quốc Ngữ indeed overtook any other competitor, and became firmly established as the 60

This analysis is, of course, contingent upon the accuracy of the 1921 date for the text. If new evidence overturns this dating, my arguments would need to be reassessed.

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written “body” of the Vietnamese language. It is perhaps fair then to admit that the fears expressed by the qatt did in some measure come to pass. While the “tones and rimes” of the vernacular language were not lost in the wake of colonial rule, an entire visual (and, for the author of the qatt, cosmological) dimension of the language was sacrificed in exchange. Indeed, the adoption of Quốc Ngữ certainly led to many transformations in Vietnamese thought, culture, and society. For the qatt author, this would have meant a final break with the profound wisdom of the Sages—a consummation of the damage first wrought by the Qin, and now completed by the French. It is therefore perhaps both ironic and noteworthy that, while the ideas of the preface are heavily indebted to Neo-Confucianist concepts of a logical universe, this valuing of vernacular identity seems informed by Western notions of the nation-state, which presume cultural, ethnic, and linguistic lines of definition. In some ways, the fears expressed in the qatt further illustrate the colonial invention of a Vietnamese “imagined community” (in Benedict Anderson’s terms), one whose cultural lineage is plotted all the way back to the classical Sages. The fears expressed by the author articulate a sense of nationalism that seems inconsistent with precolonial concepts of culture and civilization, but predicated on nineteenth-century European and colonial visions of the nation-state as a culturally, linguistically, and ethnically homogenous unity with a clearly defined origin story and historical trajectory. In this way, Sheldon Pollock’s remark linking colonialism and at least the zero-sum definition of social and cultural vernacularization is quite insightful, despite falling short of accounting for precolonial vernacularities of East Asia. The tenor expressed by the qatt in its promotion of the vernacular thus seems uniquely tied to Vietnam’s colonial experience. The rise of vernacular practices in spaces like South Asia or Western Europe—stimulated as they often were from within rather than without—therefore invites sharper comparison, and suggests a multiplicity of social or ethical routes to the vernacular replacement of cosmopolitan practices. This, in turn, also suggests that Pollock’s “cosmopolitan and vernacular” need not in fact be a zero-sum game, and that vernacular phenomena like Chữ Nôm may coexist within a greater cosmopolitan rubric fluidly, until other cultural, intellectual, or political forces intrude. In the end, the qatt describes a crisis in the cosmopolitan, triggered by the threat or reality of colonization. It is only with the fear of extinction, articulated both by Western concepts of cultural identity and Neo-Confucian models of a logical universe, that conscious focus shifted to the vernacular as a thing to be valued apart from its connection to cosmopolitan Sinitic forms. Although never adopted, the qatt paints an extraordinary picture of

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Vietnamese language ethics at a moment when the vernacular language was poised for enormous changes. It articulates a rather moving longing, for a cultural existence premised on intellectual values fast-tracked for obsolescence. As such, it provides us with a glimpse of one man’s fears and hopes for his nation, as it reexamined itself under colonial rule. But in the end, it also delivers a rather intimate sense of what the Quốc Ngữ revolution both saved from destruction—and left to the fires. References Anderson, B. R. O’G. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso. Baxter, William H. 1992. A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Bodde, Derk. 1938. China’s First Unifier. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Boltz, William G. 1994. The Origin and Early Development of the Chinese Writing System. New Haven, CT: The American Oriental Society. Bottéro, Françoise. 2002. “Revisiting the wén 文 and the zì 字: The Great Chinese Characters Hoax.” Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 74: 14–33. Cao X. H. [1997] 2001. “Hai cách miêu tả hệ thống thanh điệu tiếng Việt” [Two Ways of Describing the Tonal System of Vietnamese]. In Tiếng Việt: Mấy vấn đề ngữ âm, ngữ pháp, ngữ nghĩa [Vietnamese: Issues in Phonology, Syntax, and Semantics], edited by C. X. Hạo, 79–87. Ho Chi Minh City: NXB Giáo Dục. Ci yuan = Guangdong, Guangxi, Hunan, Henan Ci yuan xiu ding zu, and Shang wu yin shu guan. 1979–1983. Ci yuan [Source of Words]. Beijing: Shang wu yuin shu guan. De Bary, William Theodore, et al., eds. 1999. Sources of Chinese Tradition. Volume I: From Earliest Times to 1600. New York: Columbia University Press. DeFrancis, John. 1977. Colonialism and Language Policy in Vietnam. The Hague: Mouton Publishers. Haudricourt, André. 1954. “De l’origine des tons en vietnamien.” Journal Asiatique 242: 69–82. Huang, Yi-long. 1990. “A Study of Five-Planet Conjunctions in Chinese History.” Early China 15: 97–112. Huỳnh, S. T. 1996. An Anthology of Vietnamese Poems from the Eleventh through the Twentieth Centuries. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Jacques, Guillaume. 2006. Introduction to Chinese Historical Phonology. Leiden. n.p. King, Ross. 2015. “Ditching ‘Diglossia’: Describing Ecologies of the Spoken and Inscribed in Pre-modern Korea.” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 15(1): 1–19.

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Liu, Xie. 1970. The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons. Translated by Youzhong Shi. Taipei: Chung-Hwa Books. Mair, Victor. 1992. “A Hypothesis Concerning the Origin of the Term fanqie (‘Countertomy’).” Sino-Platonic Papers 34: 1–13. Marr, David G. 1981. Vietnamese Tradition on Trial: 1920–1945. Berkeley: University of California Press. McHale, Shawn F. 2004. Print and Power: Confucianism, Communism, and Buddhism in the Making of Modern Vietnam. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Michaud, Alexis. 2004. “Final Consonants and Glottalization: New Perspectives from Hanoi Vietnamese.” Phonetica 61(2–3): 119–146. Nguyễn K.-C. 1932. Chữ Nôm Mới [New Chữ Nôm]. Nam Định: Imprimerie My-Thang. Nguyễn K.-T. 1933. Chữ Việt, Quốc-Ngữ lối chữ nho [Viet Characters: Sinitic-Style Quốc Ngữ]. Nam Định: Mỹ-Thắng ấn quán. Nguyễn Quang Hồng. 1986. “Quốc Âm Tân Tự: Một phương án chữ Việt ghi âm thế kỷ 19” [The Quốc Âm Tân Tự: A Nineteenth-Century Method of Transcribing Vietnamese]. Tạp Chí Hán Nôm 1: 66–71. Nguyễn Quang Hồng. 2008. Khái luận văn tự học Chữ Nôm [Discussions on the Grammatology of Chữ Nôm]. Ho Chi Minh City: Giáo dục. Pham, Andrea Hoa. 2003. Vietnamese Tone: A New Analysis. New York and London: Routledge. Phan, John D. 2013a. “Lacquered Words: The Evolution of Vietnamese under Sinitic Influences from the 1st Century BCE through the 17th Century CE.” PhD diss., Cornell University. Phan, John D. 2013b. “Chữ Nôm and the Taming of the South: A Bilingual Defense for Vernacular Writing in the Chỉ Nam Ngọc Âm Giải Nghĩa.” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 8(1): 1–33. Phan, John D. 2014. “Rebooting the Vernacular in Seventeenth-Century Vietnam.” In Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919, edited by Benjamin A. Elman, 96–128. Leiden: Brill. Phan, John D. 2016. “The 20th Century Secularization of the Sinograph in Vietnam, and its Demotion from the Cosmological to the Aesthetic.” Journal of World Literature 1(2): 275–293. Pollock, Sheldon. 2006. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Pulleyblank, Edwin G. 1984. Middle Chinese: A Study in Historical Phonology. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Rutt, Richard. 1996. The Book of Changes (Zhouyi): A Bronze Age Document. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon.

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Tai, Hue-Tam Ho. 1992. Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Taylor, Keith W. 2011. “Literacy in Early Seventeenth-Century Northern Vietnam.” In New Perspectives on the History and Historiography of Southeast Asia: Continuing Explorations, edited by Michael Aung-Thwin and Kenneth R. Hall, 183–198. New York: Routledge. Vi H. Đ. 1929. Việt Tự: Một lối việt tiếng An-Nam [Viet Characters: A Method of Writing Annamese]. Haiphong. Wilcox, Wynn. 2002. “The Examination System under the French Protectorate: A Tool for French Control or Vietnamese Protest?” Conference paper presented at the international workshop, “Literature of High Stakes and Long Odds: Locating Civil Service Examination Writings in the Late Imperial Cultural Landscape.” Boston, Massachusetts, University of Massachusetts Confucius Institute, November 17. Wilkinson, Endymion. 2013. Chinese History: A New Manual. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center for the Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University Press.

Chapter 9

Traveling Civilization: The Sinographic Translational Network and Colonial Vietnam’s Modern Lexicon Building, 1890s–1910s Yufen Chang 1

From “Civilization” to Văn Minh: A New Framework of Analysis

Words are one of the most elementary tools for making and remaking the world, past and present. They travel and are constantly in motion. As words move across time and space, they simultaneously transform and are transformed by the world with which they interact (Gluck 2009; Tsing 2009). But how exactly do words travel? What are the various routes they travel? Why were some routes better able to facilitate word circulation than others, and under what circumstances? What are the political, social, and cultural effects when a word takes one particular course and not another, privileging a particular set of meanings, while foreclosing others? Thus far, some scholars have focused on the material infrastructures that facilitate the journeys of words and ideas and have demonstrated how the state sponsored the construction of roads, railways, bridges, canals, telecommunication systems, and schools, etc., enabling intelligence gathering, administrative penetration, and knowledge transmission for both colonialist and nationalist projects (Deutsch 1953; Gellner 1983; Mrázek 2002; Weber 1976), though in some cases misinterpretation of the information collected has contributed to the failures of such projects (Bayly 1996). Others have directed attention to the instability and volatility of words’ meanings, especially when they travel across cultural borders, pointing to the illusion of linguistic equivalence between the source and target languages upon which the practice of translation is based (Hu 2000; Liu 1995; Sakai 1997). In this chapter, I tackle the above question by examining the lexical infrastructure that makes the travel of words possible on the one hand and transforms the connotations of words on the other, using the example of Vietnam under French colonial rule between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I situate colonial Vietnam in the context of the millennium-long, but by then collapsing, Sinographic Cosmopolis that was comprised of learned men versed in Literary Sinitic across China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and the

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Ryukyu Kingdom (modern-day Okinawa, Japan). I show how the word “civilization”—the underpinning of the European Enlightenment movement—was consistently translated into the sinographic compound 文明 in these four societies in the context of pan-East Asian reform movements as well as in the context of the dual processes of literary vernacularization and modernization, thanks to the route that I call the Sinographic Translational Network that emerged from the crumbling Sinographic Cosmopolis.1 It might seem rather banal to discuss the lexical journey of Enlightenment “civilization” in East Asia, insofar as scholars have long since acknowledged that the majority of modern sinographic words were coined in and introduced from Japan (Liu 1995; Masini 1993) and that these words became part of the Vietnamese lexical repertoire during French colonial times (DeFrancis 1977; Dutton 2015a and 2015b; Vinh Sinh 1993; Woodside 1976). Nevertheless, if we broaden our research scope and compare the Sinographic Cosmopolis with the Sanskrit Cosmopolis as discussed by Sheldon Pollock in his various works (Pollock 2000; 2006), the Sinographic Cosmopolis was distinguished by its centralizing tendencies and by the strong diplomatic, commercial, and logographic ties that bound together Chinese intellectuals and other learned men across East Asia. Pollock wonders why vernacularization took place much later in the Sinographic Cosmopolis—Japan excepted—than in the Sanskrit Cosmopolis; so much so that it appeared to be “the derivative project of modernization” (Pollock 2000: 595). As my discussion below will demonstrate, the belated nature of vernacularization, as well as its intertwinement with modernization, in the Sinographic Cosmopolis resulted from two key characteristics of the latter: its centralizing tendencies and the presence of strong supporting mechanisms. These two characteristics lent the Sinographic Cosmopolis its long-surviving power and enabled it to metamorphose into the Sinographic Translational Network even when China was under severe predation from the West. Though no longer seen as a sacred script, sinographs continued to function as the medium of both vernacularization and modernization in East Asia between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By contrast, there does not seem to have been a comparable Sanskrit Translational Network after the vernacularization processes began in the second millennium, and the word

1 Hwang Hoduk in this volume introduces a similar term—“Sinographic Mediapolis”—to emphasize how sinographs in the late 19th century were “becoming the medium that ensured East—West interactivity or quasi-interactivity” (p. 534). In this essay, I wish to highlight the connectedness of East Asian intellectuals and the differences between the Sinographic Cosmopolis and its Sanskrit counterpart.

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“civilization” was translated differently by former members of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis. 2

The Centralizing Sinographic Cosmopolis and Late Vernacularization

The Sinographic Cosmopolis, the predecessor of the Sinographic Translational Network, can be seen as the cultural and intellectual manifestation of the concept of tianxia 天下, which literally means “All-Under-Heaven” and was a comprehensive world order sustained by three mechanisms. The first mechanism was diplomatic ties, which were institutionalized into the tribute system that by the seventh century had become the principle means by which China managed its relations with its non-Sinitic neighbors (more on the tribute system below). The next was commercial ties, facilitated by adventurous Chinese traders/pirates plying routes between southern China (especially Fujian and Guangdong), Maritime Southeast Asia, and Japan since the fifteenth century. Although Imperial China was lukewarm at best toward commercial activities and more concerned with the ever-present security threats from northern and western nomadic tribes, commercial ties proved to be quite resilient, even when Qing China was being turned upside down, thanks to China’s huge market and Chinese traders’ business acumen (Hamashita 2008). Finally, there were logographic ties, which facilitated the appearance of both what Saitō Mareshi calls ritual “cultivated speech” and of various cosmopolitan vernaculars in Japan and Korea, as discussed by David Lurie and Alexey Lushchenko in this volume. These ties ensured the cultivation of knowledge of Literary Sinitic and formed the basis of the Sinographic Cosmopolis in East Asia. Together, these three ties helped form the tianxia world order, and the most prestigious form of cultural capital in tianxia was jiaohua 教化. This denoted a process by which the Son of Heaven, with the assistance of scholar-officials, transformed/civilized through education (that is, jiaohua-ed) his subjects and subordinates in the realm of tianxia from a primitive, child-like state toward the ideal of the gentlemen ( junzi 君子). For this process to work, a deep commitment was required from both parties: the leaders had to act “parent-like” and follow and teach the Way and li 禮, the proper rituals, as recorded in the sagely texts;2 in response, the subjects had to diligently and carefully study the 2 I use the term “parent-like” to describe an East Asian ideal that requires that leaders in governments, schools, and families act like responsible and loving parents, whose job it is to take good care of and give wise advice to their child-like subordinates. Both Chinese and

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texts and follow the examples provided by their mentor-superiors. Jiaohua is a complex concept; in this chapter, I highlight the aspect of knowledge of Literary Sinitic and classic texts written by ancient sages and focus on one of its properties, that is, as a form of cultural capital. By the seventeenth century, this idealized jiaohua concept was applied to China’s management of interactions with ethnically, culturally, linguistically, and religiously diverse neighbors, including border minorities and vassal kingdoms. The idealized tianxia world of jiaohua was arranged in a concentrically hierarchical way (see Fig. 9.1 below). In the center sat the Son of Heaven, who represented the zenith and arbiter of jiaohua. The farther from the center, the less civilizational blessings one could receive, hence the more “barbarian” one would become (Fairbank 1968; Hamashita 2008). Four concentric circles surrounded the center: the local; the minorities; the tribute-paying kingdoms, including Korea and Vietnam; China’s trading partners with which China had no intention to engage in affairs other than business transactions; and finally, the societies located in “the sphere outside of jiaohua” (C. huawai zhi di 化外之 地) (Hamashita 2008). In this world order, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and Ryukyu were located in the Sinitic zone and were viewed as the most “civilized barbarians” due to their geographical proximity to the center. In the ideal world order envisioned by China’s ruling elites, the Son of Heaven had no equal in tianxia, and no later than the fourteenth century, the tianxia system stipulated that foreign princes and ambassadors had to perform the full ritual of kowtow in front of the Son of Heaven in grateful recognition of China’s superior civilizational influence when they had an audience with the Son of Heaven. Of the three linkages that sustained the prestige of jiaohua, the diplomatic ties were the most controversial, possibly because of the kowtow ritual required on the part of foreign countries to show their submission to superior Chinese civilization. But revisionist scholars have attempted to highlight Imperial China’s vulnerability to its northern neighbors (Rossabi 1983), emphasizing the vassal kingdoms’ cunning resistance (Truong Buu Lam 1968), and questioning the effectiveness of jiaohua in assimilating non-Sinitic peoples, in particular the Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty (Millward et al. 2004). As the impact of China’s recent reemergence as the world’s potential next superpower rivaling the United States has been increasingly felt by the West, international scholars in China and the West have been trying to determine whether the tianxia Vietnamese have the expressions “parent-like officials” ( fumu guan; quan phụ mẫu 父母官). The closest concepts in English are patronizing and condescending. Nevertheless, while the English terms tend to convey a feeling of superiority, in the East Asian context the parent-like behavior is socially approved of as virtuous.

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Figure 9.1 China’s tianxia world order Source: Hamashita (2008: 17)

system might present an alternative to the Westphalia system of international order (Callahan 2008, 2015; Dreyer 2015; Kang 2012; Perdue 2015; Zhao 2015), and by implication, to what we understand by “China.” Due to the complexity of this concept, some scholars believe that it was purely China’s wishful thinking and rhetorical strategy (Zhuang 2005), and some others even suggest that it be dismissed from scholarly debates altogether (Zhang 2009). All the controversies surrounding the tianxia order notwithstanding, the power of idealized jiaohua was such that it became a form of prestigious cultural capital and was able to provoke sentiments of what I call “civilizational envy” on the part of learned men in the Sinographic Cosmopolis outside of China, who constantly measured their own level of civility against the center of the (Sinitic) universe. Moreover, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam all came to envision themselves as the centers of their own tianxia realms during different time periods. To distinguish themselves from the “barbarian” others, Nguyễn Vietnam and Chosŏn Korea’s ruling elites in their official historical records described their kingly realms and subjects as Han 漢, the name of a powerful dynasty in Chinese history and one of the most common self-designations for

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the Chinese. Japan during the Edo era also came to regard itself as the Central Efflorescence (中華), a term synonymous with China, i.e., the Middle Kingdom. When Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598) demanded Chosŏn Korea’s cooperation in his ambitious plan to invade China, he reportedly stated that he would like to spread kyōka (the Japanese rendition of jiaohua) to China via the route of the neighboring Korean Peninsula.3 Although learned men in Vietnam, Korea, and Japan all embraced jiaohua as a form of cultural capital, in Japan, as Pollock has noted, vernacularization took place much earlier than in Korea and Vietnam. The different timings reflected the different strengths between the Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean, as well as Sino-Vietnamese logographic ties, which could at least partially be attributed to the factor of the imperial civil service examination that China adopted beginning in the seventh century to recruit talented officials on the basis of merit. The Sino-Vietnamese logographic ties were probably stronger than the Sino-Korean ones due to the linguistic proximity of the Sinitic and Mon-Khmer language families. The proto-Việt language, though not genetically related to Sinitic, is not radically different from Chinese in terms of its grammar and syntax. The Red River Delta, the traditional heartland of Vietnam, was part of China’s southernmost commandery (the rest was located in what are now Guangdong and Guangxi provinces in China) from the second century BCE until the tenth century, and during this long time period its Sino-Việt inhabitants were speakers of a dialect of Middle Chinese that linguists call Annamese Middle Chinese (Phan 2010). The Korean language, on the other hand, is quite different from either Chinese or Vietnamese in its structure. Korean and Japanese share almost identical structure and verb-final word order, whereas in Chinese and Vietnamese the object comes after the verb. The linguistic similarity between Chinese and Vietnamese might be one reason why Vietnamese ruling elites never felt it necessary to standardize their vernacular Nôm script that began to appear sporadically in the tenth century. The Sinographic Cosmopolis as part of the centralized tianxia world order, buttressed by organized administrative power through diplomatic, commercial, and logographic ties, formed a sharp contrast to the Sanskrit Cosmopolis that encompassed most of South and Southeast Asia. As Pollock describes in his groundbreaking book, the wide spread of Sanskrit as a means of political 3 One of Edo Japan’s influential thinkers, Rai San’yō 賴山陽 (1781–1832), reported in his Unofficial History of Japan (Nihon gaishi 日本外史) that Toyotomi Hideyoshi claimed that “I request that our armies pass through your great kingdoms, as I intend to circumvent the mountains and seas, penetrate the Ming, and spread our kyōka to its four-hundred provinces” (吾欲假道貴國，超越山海，直入於明，使其四百州盡化我俗) (Rai San’yō [1829] 2015: 347).

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and aesthetical expression by ruling elites from northwest India all the way to Champa in modern Vietnam was a process of voluntary adoption (Pollock 2006). Unlike the Sinographic Cosmopolis, there was no single center of power production, and no polities or religious organizations were involved in the wide production of Sanskrit. Moreover, whereas the sentiment of “grammar envy” was widespread among the elites that comprised the Sanskrit Cosmopolis (Pollock 2006: 15, 177–184), they do not seem to have been concerned about the question of whether or not their grammatical prowess measured up with that of their peers, let alone the center, as there was no center. 3

The Lexical Journey of “Civilization” during the Collision between French Civilization and Sinitic Jiaohua (Latter Half of the 19th Century)

When the Sinographic Cosmopolis was collapsing along with the tianxia system, in its place emerged a Sinographic Translational Network that built on the old logographic ties that continued to connect learned men in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, though to be sure this lexical network now gravitated toward Japan rather than China. It was established during the pan-East Asia reform (J. ishin 維新) movements that pushed for vernacularization and modernization under the slogan of “civilization and enlightenment” (J. bunmei kaika 文明開化). Before the concept of “civilization” reached East Asia, it had already wrought havoc in Christian Europe. It is no exaggeration to suggest that the word itself has been one of the most impactful concepts in human history, with its own long itinerary and complex connotations, that has often stirred up contention wherever it has gone, in both the West and non-West alike. In Europe, the concept was closely tied with the European Enlightenment movement in the eighteenth century. In France, the movement advocated reason and republicanism in opposition to divine revelation and absolute monarchy. During this age of reason, empiricism and the new political theory of nationalism were encouraged, while the mad were completely separated from society’s progress toward tolerance and equity through a process of “Great Confinement” (Foucault 2006). The French Revolution in 1789 bore powerful witness to the spirit of the Enlightenment movement: it replaced the Christian trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with a new humanistic trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity embodied in the newly created French nation built not on papally-authorized monarchy but on plebeian sovereignty (Bell 2003). In response to the anticlerical onslaught, Catholic revitalization swept across Europe, particularly France,

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from whose rural areas—Brittany, Alsace, as well as the Midi—Catholic men and women constituted two-thirds of European Catholic missionaries working in the diaspora in the nineteenth century, including Vietnam (Keith 2012). The culture wars between republicans and the Church were so intense that France was said to be polarized into “two Frances” (McMillan 2003). Culturally, the concept of “civilization” grew to be the indicator of urbanites’ proper manners and sophisticated etiquette (Elias 2000) at the expense of personal pleasure (Freud 1966). Since the majority of French liberal republican intellectuals were urbanite Parisians who frequented salons, they saw the rural areas of Brittany, Alsace, and the Midi as “savage” areas still pitifully plagued by Catholic “superstition” and waiting to be civilized: this process of civilizing peasants into Frenchmen in the nineteenth century gave rise to modern France as we know it today (Weber 1976), and was completed with la laïcité—the separation of Church and State—in 1905, thanks to Jules Ferry, the mastermind behind the French takeover of central and northern Vietnam in 1884. When some French republicans felt they had to defend the pride of the French nation that was threatened by France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and the rapidly rising British Empire, they decided to undertake their own mission civilisatrice in diaspora. French Indochina, which included Cambodia, Laos, as well as modern Vietnam (divided into the three pays of southernmost Cochinchina, central Annam, and Tonkin neighboring China), was formed during the interval between 1858 and 1885 in order for France to compete with the British Empire in developing a “back door” to the huge market of China (Brocheux and Hémery 2009). By that time, the concept of “civilization” had become the universal standard with which non-Western societies had to comply if their sovereignty was to be recognized by international law (Gong 1984). It was against this backdrop that the tianxia order encountered “enlightened” civilization armed with its advanced weaponry and international law. The realigning of the world order led to the emergence of pan-East Asian reform movements aiming to “civilize and enlighten,” with Japan leading the way. With the “European wind and American rain,” as it was understood by Japanese thinkers, the ideology of Social Darwinism was introduced to the old tianxia order along with other new concepts such as society, nation, sovereignty, liberty, and so on. Enlightenment civilization came to be closely intertwined with the Social Darwinist concept of “survival of the fittest,” and it became the new source of both hope and anxiety for East Asian learned men trying to expedite their societies’ progress toward the Western version of civilization. Sinitic jiaohua, on the other hand, was being discredited as useless,

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outdated, and even harmful for progress and the development of national consciousness. Only some time after these reform movements did the legacy of Sinitic jiaohua begin to be reluctantly recast as part of the “national essence” in East Asia. Qing China’s defeat in the two Opium Wars (1839–1842; 1856–1860) with the British Empire launched China onto a stumbling and reluctant journey toward modernization. The news of China’s defeat greatly alarmed Japan’s Tokugawa feudal government and samurai intellectuals, as well as Korea’s progressive thinkers and those yangban scholar-officials who had had opportunities to visit China on tribute missions, but it did not seem to worry the Nguyễn court in Vietnam. All three of these polities were implementing seclusion policies to keep Catholic influences and Western demands for trade at bay after China lost the wars with the British Empire, but Japan had been keeping abreast with the revolutionary developments in Western science, technology, and medicine through its contacts with Dutch traders, who, along with Chinese businessmen, were the only foreigners tolerated by the Tokugawa shogunate during its closed-door era that started in 1633 and ended with the arrival of American warships demanding trading opportunities in 1853. With the foundation of rangaku 蘭學 (“Dutch learning,” which later came to refer more generally to Western learning) and the restoration of imperial power to the Meiji emperor, Japan was able to launch a thorough Westernization project in 1868 known as the Meiji Ishin 明治維新 under the slogan of “civilization and enlightenment,” translated as bunmei kaika 文明開化 by renowned reformer and thinker Fukuzawa Yukichi 福澤諭吉 (1835–1901), who authored the extremely influential text Bunmeiron no gairyaku 文明論之概略 (An Outline of a Theory of Civilization) in 1875. No documents have been discovered that relate why Fukuzawa Yukichi decided to translate “civilization” with the sinographic compound bunmei 文明, but it proved to be a very apt choice. Its earliest textual appearance dates back to the Book of Changes 易經 (C. Yijing), a famous divination book in East Asia and one of China’s oldest texts—the earliest available manuscript of which dates from between the fourth and second centuries bce. During the period when the various manuscripts of the Book of Changes were compiled, 文 came to mean “patterns,” while 明 denoted “illuminated and manifested brilliantly,” and thus the compound word 文明 referred to the patterns emerging from people’s divinations about and observations of heaven, earth, and man. The sinograph 文 gradually acquired the meanings of “words, characters, writings, texts, learning, literature, belles lettres,” etc., and took on the aura of sacredness and magic. The sense of “writing system” for 文 was first

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standardized in the second century bce, and was subsequently tied to state administration, authority, prestige and Confucian doctrine by the introduction of the imperial examination system around the seventh century. Japan’s bunmei kaika movement was so successful that in 1894 Japan was able to crush China’s newly modernized troops in its competition for control of the Korean Peninsula. As a result, diplomatic ties between China and Korea in the traditional sense were severed in 1895, and the slogan of “civilization and enlightenment” invented by Fukuzawa Yukichi was quickly popularized among distressed Chinese and Korean intellectuals. In the same year, under the leadership of Kang Youwei 康有為 (1858–1927) and his student Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929), both contemporaries of Fukuzawa Yukichi, Chinese intellectuals pressed the Qing government to adopt the weixin (Mandarin pronunciation of 維新) measures so as to transform China into a wenming kaihua (Mandarin rendition of 文明開化) monarchist state. Strong resistance on the part of the Qing royal court prevented any large-scale reforms from happening in China, and when they finally did transpire in 1898, they lasted only 103 days; after this failed “Hundred-Day Reform” both Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao were forced into exile. The Korean attempts at reform in the name of munmyŏng kaehwa (Korean pronunciation of 文明開化) fared no better than their Chinese counterparts. They were initiated by Japan once the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) tilted in Japan’s favor. With the collaboration of some reform-minded Koreans, including Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Korean pupil Yu Kilchun 俞吉濬 (1856–1914), Japanese troops seized the royal palace, purged the anti-Japan clans, and enforced measures that would strengthen Japan’s control over Korea. Known as the Kabo Reforms, the movement took place in the midst of multi-layered power struggles between China and Japan, yangban elites and middle-class Korean professionals and peasants, as well as different royal clans that tried to enlist the support of competing foreign powers. The movement came to an end in 1896, as the masses were alienated by the reformists’ complicit role in Japan’s encroachment on Korea. Despite its complicated relationship with Japanese imperialist power, munmyŏng kaehwa remained a household name in Korea by the turn of the century (Schmid 2002). France’s colonization of Vietnam took two decades to complete, and Sino-Vietnamese diplomatic ties were officially dissolved ten years earlier than Sino-Korean ties as a result of the Sino-French War (1884–1885). In the 1900s, Chinese reformist writings found their way into Vietnam, especially those penned by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. They were known as “new books” (tân thư), meaning “books that teach new learning.” It is possible that these books entered Vietnam via the commercial ties that connected Vietnam to the global economy through the large Chinese diaspora population in Chợ Lớn

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(lit. “big market”) in Saigon (modern Ho Chi Minh City), which was a critical nodal point in the dynamic Southeast Asian Chinese trading networks encompassing the Straits Settlements in British Malaya (i.e., Singapore, Melacca, and Penang), Bangkok, Saigon, and Hong Kong. Rice was the most important export item, and it was highly likely that books were also circulated along these same trading routes. During the pre-colonial era, books entered Vietnam primarily via the tribute routes (Chen 2011); during colonial times, Chinese books, including the tân thư, were sold by Chinese dealers in major cities such as Huế in Annam, Saigon in Cochinchina, and Hanoi and Hải Phòng in Tonkin (Chew 2012; Đào Duy Anh 1989; Đinh Xuân Lâm 1997; Vinh Sinh 1993).4 These tân thư were eagerly consumed by Vietnamese scholars well-versed in Literary Sinitic, and inspired the Duy Tân (Vietnamese rendition of 維新) Reform Movement in the 1900s. Under the leadership of Phan Chu Trinh 潘周楨 (1872–1926) and Phan Bội Châu 潘佩珠 (1867–1940), some scholars, especially those from the Annam area where the Nguyễn court was located and where the imperial examination was not abolished until 1915, the Duy Tân Movement encouraged modernization and nation-building, and more than two hundred students stowed away to Japan for Đông Du 東遊 (literally “journey to the East”) so as to study the secrets of văn minh khai hoá, the Vietnamese pronunciation of 文明開化. The movement reached its climax when the Tonkin Free School was established in Hanoi in 1907 after the model of Keio Free School (the predecessor of Keio University) founded by Fukuzawa Yukichi. Tellingly, one of the textbooks for the Tonkin Free School was entitled Strategy for Civilization and New Learning (Văn minh tân học sách 文明新學 策, 1904). Another textbook was Reader for the People (Quốc dân đọc bản 國 民讀本, 1907), which aimed to form a civilized and enlightened Vietnamese nation. Unfortunately, in 1908, an anti-tax peasant revolt broke out in Annam, and a panicked French government blamed scholars from the area for inciting peasants to rebel. Quite a few scholars involved in the Duy Tân Movement were imprisoned, executed, or exiled; Vietnamese students studying in Japan with their Chinese and Korean peers were expelled when Japan reached an agreement with France according to which they would send off Vietnamese students in exchange for trading privileges in Indochina. 4 It might not be mere coincidence that traditional Chinese fiction, especially martial arts novels, historical fantasies, and the “Ducks and Butterflies” (C. yuanyang hudie 鴛鴦蝴 蝶) romantic stories that emerged in the late nineteenth century, were popular not only in Chinese communities in the Southeast Asian societies named above but also in colonial Vietnam. For a discussion of the reception of traditional Chinese fiction in Asia, see Claudine Salmon (2013).

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The Duy Tân Movement failed to accomplish its goal of turning Vietnam into an independent nation in accordance with the Western standard of civilization that they saw embodied in the picture of Meiji Japan as painted by Chinese reformist thinkers. It remained an elite movement throughout the 1900s, with all the materials written in Literary Sinitic. Very few were translated into the sinographic Chữ Nôm 𡨸喃, a script apt for facilitating oral transmission (Liu 2007); virtually none were written in Quốc Ngữ script, even though the Duy Tân activists, such as Phan Chu Trinh, insisted that replacing sinographs with Quốc Ngữ was indispensable to Vietnam’s survival (Vinh Sinh 1993: 12). Still, this moment rounded out the Sinographic Translational Network and started the process of construction of Vietnam’s modern lexicon. Nearly a decade later when the monthly Nam Phong 南風 (literally “southern wind” or “southern ethos”), the most influential intellectual journal in colonial Vietnam founded by France, published its first issue, its chief editor opined that it was time for Vietnam to standardize the orthography of the many modern neologisms that scholars had been adapting and translating freely from Sino-Japanese neologisms (Nam Phong vol. 1, 1917). A supplement entitled “Vocabulary” (Tự vựng) featuring trilingual Sino–Vietnamese–French lists of new words, ran from Nam Phong’s first through fourteenth issues (July 1917–August 1918). 4

The Sinographic Translational Network

The tianxia world of jiaohua suffered the most miserable fiasco of its long history in its encounter with Enlightenment civilization. Whereas the diplomatic ties based on the unequal tribute system were replaced by a theoretically equal international world, commercial ties continued to function amidst the resentments against the economic strength of diasporic Chinese that began to surface in the era of nationalism, while the European colonial regimes attempted to control the Chinese population and assigned them the role of middleman minority (Hooker 2002; Lessard 2007). The logographic ties persisted, too, in spite of the fact that the Sinographic Cosmopolis had been robbed of its glory along with the demise of the tianxia, but they persisted in a new manner: they transformed into a Sinographic Translational Network, ensuring that the translations for “civilization” and other modern concepts were consistent across East Asia. On the other hand, translations for one and the same concept appear to vary across the former members of the decentralized, mandala-like Sanskrit Cosmopolis, as a comparable Sanskrit Translational Network does not seem to have existed (for the concept of mandala system, see Wolter [1968; 1982]).

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The Sanskrit words for “civilization” and “barbarian” are arya (the root of the word “aryan”) and mleccha, broadly referring to “bearers of Vedic culture” and “non-Sanskrit speakers” or “outcast,” “foreigners,” respectively.5 In Southeast Asia, the Sanskrit influence is clearest in aryathor អរិយធម៌, the Khmer rendition of “civilization.” The Khmer word for “barbarian” is monus prei មនុស្សព្រៃ, a combination of Sanskrit and native words.6 In Thai, the word “civilization” was first introduced as siwila, a transliteration from English. It nevertheless carries some Indic flavor, as “si,” or the alternative spelling “sri,” means “blessing, prosperity, brightness, beauty” in Sanskrit (Winichakul 2000: 530). It was possibly coined in the mid-nineteenth century under the influence of British and American Protestant missionaries, and was made popular during the reign of the modernizing King Mongkut (1804–1868; r. 1851–1868) (Harrison 2010). Aarayatham อารยธรรม, an alternative Thai term for “civilization” that was coined in accordance with Sanskrit etymological rules, appeared later in the Thai lexicon, perhaps during the mid-twentieth century when King Chulalongkorn (1853–1910; r. 1868–1910), King Mongkut’s first son and heir, reigned.7 The Thai word for “barbarian” is anaraychon อนารยชน, a word that means “people without araya” and that combines both Sanskrit “araya” and Balinese “chon,” literally “people.” Whereas Thai siwilai still retained some Sanskritic flavor, the translations for “civilization” in Bahasa Malay and Bahasa Indonesia are of Arabic origin as a result of the conversion to Islam in many polities in the Malay Archipelago from the fourteenth century onward. In both languages, the words for “civilization” are peradaban and tamadun, the latter of which refers to “epoch” and can also be found in modern Persian. The “adab” in peradaban is an Arabic word that refers to the refined, polished, and dignified behaviors expected from people of nobility. The words for “barbarian” in Bahasa Indonesia include the Arabic-derived kasar (literally “rough”), orang biadab 5 I thank Andrea Arci for sharing with me his expert knowledge on Sanskrit. An English-Sanskrit online dictionary can be found at http://dictionary.tamilcube.com/sanskrit-dictionary.aspx (last accessed June 28, 2016). 6 I am grateful to Ea Darith for his kind and patient assistance in supplying the Khmer terms for “civilization” and “barbarian.” 7 It is almost impossible to find etymological information on aarayatham. Early SiameseEnglish and English-Siamese dictionaries of the early twentieth century digitized by archive .org, such as English-Siamese Dictionary (1916) by George Bradley McFarland (https:// archive.org/stream/asiameseenglish00cartgoog#page/n4/mode/2up), and Siamese-English Dictionary (1907) by B. O. Cartwright, which was published by The American Presbyterian Mission Press (https://archive.org/stream/abn4718.0001.001.umich.edu#page/n5/mode/2up), do not carry entries for “civilization.” What is certain is that aarayatham appeared later than siwilai. I thank Sheldon Pollock for providing references and Kornphanat Tungkeunkunt for patiently guiding me through the Thai vocabulary.

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Table 9.1 Translations of “civilization” in some languages of former members of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis

Language

Word for “civilization”

Sanskrit Thai

arya 1. siliwai

Khmer

2. aarayatham arayathor

Bahasa Malay and Bahasa Indonesia

1. peradaban 2. tamadun

Etymological origin

English with Sanskrit twist Sanskrit Sanskrit Arabic

Word for “barbarian” mleccha anarayachon

monus prei 1. kasar 2. orang biadab 3. barbar

Etymological origin

Sanskrit and Balinese Sanskrit and Khmer Arabic

(literally “people barbarous”), as well as barbar, possibly referring to the Berbers in North Africa who entered the Arabic vocabulary when they were conquered by Islam in the seventh century.8 A review of how some early lexicographers of East Asian languages explicated and translated the word “civilization” further demonstrates that the Sinographic Translational Network was consolidated during the era of panEast Asian reform movements for both vernacularization and modernization.9 The entry for Japanese bunmei that appeared in American Protestant missionary James C. Hepburn’s (1815–1911) A Japanese-English and English-Japanese Dictionary published in 1886 is likely East Asia’s first dictionary entry for the translation of “civilization” coined by Fukuzawa Yukichi. The entry is short and simple: “Bunmei, ブンメイ, 文明, n. Enlightenment; civilization;

8 I thank Jack Chia and Siew Min Sai for providing me with the translation and Deasy Simandjuntak for kindly educating me about the etymology of peradaban and tamadun. 9 The earliest compilers of East Asian dictionaries were Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century, including Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) from Italy and Alexander de Rhodes (1591–1660) from France. Both were fluent in Chinese, and Rhodes was also well versed in Vietnamese; he is credited with giving birth to the modern Quốc Ngữ script in the mid-seventeenth century. After the Society of Jesus was suppressed by European polities in the eighteenth century, the torch was passed to Catholic and Protestant missionaries. Nonetheless, since these dictionaries were compiled before the clash between Enlightenment civilization and Sinitic jiaohua, I do not include discussion of them here.

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refinement. -shi, history of –.”10 The entry for “civilization” appeared again in 1891 in The Sea of Words (Genkai 言海), Japan’s first native-compiled modern Japanese—Japanese dictionary by famous lexicographer, linguist, and historian Ōtsuki Fumihiko 大槻文彦 (1847–1928), known for his contributions to modern Japanese grammar and lexicography. In Ōtsuki Fumihiko’s dictionary, bunmei is explicated as follows: “ぶんめい. The state in which literature/ humanities,11 knowledge, and education are progressing and becoming more open, politics is evolving toward the right way, and customs are the most perfect. (example). ‘Civilization and Enlightenment.’”12 The translation of Mandarin Chinese wenming 文明 appeared in ChineseEnglish and English-Chinese dictionaries in the 1900s, after the Qing government’s suppression of the short-lived Weixin Reform Movement. The nineteenth century saw a veritable explosion of such dictionaries. The Institute of Modern History at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan has created an online searchable digital database of fourteen bilingual dictionaries compiled by Protestant missionaries from English-speaking countries and Germany, Japanese thinkers, Western customs officials working in China, as well as Chinese Christians, between the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.13 A search of the database using “civil,” “civility,” and “civilization” shows that while the terms “civil” and “civility” appeared as early as the 1820s as the English equivalent of li 禮, and are explained as “courtesy,” “rituals,” and “politeness,”14 the earliest entries for “civilization” appeared in the 1860s.15 Before the term began to be entered as wenming in the 1900s, it was established as a synonym for Sinitic jiaohua.16 10 The digital version of James C. Hepburn’s dictionary is available at https://archive.org /details/japaneseenglishe00hep (last accessed June 28, 2016). The entry for bunmei is on page 46. 11 In classical Japanese and Vietnamese, the term “文學” (bungaku in Japanese and văn học in Vietnamese) denotes both literature and the humanities. 12 An electronic version of The Sea of Words is available at http://www.babelbible.net/gen kai/genkai.cgi (last accessed January 20, 2016). I thank Zheng-heng Zhang and Yijiang Zhong for their kind assistance in translation. 13 http://mhdb.mh.sinica.edu.tw/dictionary/index.php (last accessed June 28, 2016). 14 http://mhdb.mh.sinica.edu.tw/dictionary/search.php?searchStr=civil&titleOnlyBtn.x=0 &titleOnlyBtn.y=0&titleOnlyBtn=true&titleOnlyBtn=true (last accessed June 28, 2016). 15 http://mhdb.mh.sinica.edu.tw/dictionary/search.php?searchStr=civilization&titleOnly Btn.x=0&titleOnlyBtn.y=0&titleOnlyBtn=true&titleOnlyBtn=true (last accessed June 28, 2016). 16 http://mhdb.mh.sinica.edu.tw/dictionary/search.php?searchStr=civilization&titleOnly Btn.x=0&titleOnlyBtn.y=0&titleOnlyBtn=true&titleOnlyBtn=true (last accessed June 28, 2016).

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Similarly, in early English-Korean bilingual dictionaries compiled by Englishspeaking Protestant missionaries published prior to the 1910s, the term “civilization” was translated as kyohwa, the Sino-Korean pronunciation of jiaohua.17 For colonial Vietnam, I managed to locate ten dictionaries (Table 9.2).18 Of these dictionaries, the French-Vietnamese one by Catholic scholar, interpreter, and teacher Trương Vĩnh Ký (Pétrus Ky/Jean-Baptist Pétrus, 1837–1898) was the first that contained an entry for “civilisation,” the French version of “civilization.” Like other lexicographers in China and Korea in the nineteenth century, Trương Vĩnh Ký, too, understood “civilisation” as giáo hoá, the Vietnamese rendition of jiaohua.19 After Trương Vĩnh Ký, the next dictionaries that carried entries for “civilization” were published in 1931 and 1932 by a pro-French elite club and nationalist thinker, respectively, and both adopted văn minh for their translations. Table 9.2 Some early modern Vietnamese dictionaries

Year

Dictionary

Author

1839

Dictionarium Anamitico-Latinum [Vietnamese—Latin Dictionary] Grammaire Annamite suivie d’un vocabulaire Français-Annamite et Annamite-Français [Annamese grammar followed by a French—Annamese and Annamese-French vocabulary] Petit dictionnaire Français-Annamite [Small French—Vietnamese Dictionary] Dictionnaire Annamite/大南國音字彙/ Đại Nam Quốc Âm Tự Vì [Vietnamese Dictionary] Dictionnaire Annamite-Français [Vietnamese—French Dictionary]

Jean Louis Tabred, French Catholic bishop G. Aubaret, frigate captain, Consulate of France in Bangkok

1863

1884 1895

1898

Trương Vĩnh Ký, Vietnamese Catholic scholar Huình Tịnh Của, Vietnamese Catholic scholar J. F. M. Génibrel

17 See the appendix to Hwang Hoduk’s chapter in this volume. 18 I am grateful to Nguyễn Phúc Anh for sharing with me his valuable collection of early Vietnamese dictionaries and to Nguyen Nam for helping me obtain Barbier’s dictionary at Harvard-Yenching Library. 19 A digital version of Trương Vĩnh Ký’s dictionary can be found at https://archive.org /details/bub_gb_2kg0AQAAMAA (last accessed January 28, 2016).

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Traveling Civilization Table 9.2 Some early modern Vietnamese dictionaries (cont.)

Year

Dictionary

Author

1900

大南國音字彙合解大法國音/

Jean Bonet, French linguist

1908 1922 1931

1932

Dictionnaire Annamite-Français (Langue officielle et langue vulgaire) [Annamese–French Dictionary (Official Language and Vulgar Language)] Petit Lexique Annamite-Français [Small Annamese–French Lexicon] Dictionnaire Annamite-Français [Annamese–French Dictionary] Việt Nam từ điển [Vietnamese Dictionary]

Hán Việt từ điển [Sino–Vietnamese Dictionary]

A. L. Pilon, French missionary Victor Barbier Pro-French elite “Association for Intellectual and Moral Formation of Vietnamese,” AFIMA [l’Association pour la Formation Intellectuelle et Morale des Annamites/Hội Khai trí tiến đức] Đào Duy Anh, a Frencheducated Vietnamese Marxist

The 1694, 1762, 1787–1788, 1835, 1872–1877 editions of Dictionnaire de L’Académie française (Dictionary of the French Academy) defined “civiliser” in largely the same way; that is, as “to render a criminal matter civil, to reduce a criminal cause by an ordinary and civil way; to render civil, honest, and sociable; to polish mores.”20 The early East Asian dictionaries that were compiled by native scholars and that carried entries for “civilization,” on the other hand, provided definitions in accordance with Social Darwinism’s evolutionist sense, and often contrasted 文明 with the Chinese yeman 野蠻 (“savagism”) (Table 9.3).

20

See the ARTFL Project (Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language) at http://dvlf.uchicago.edu/mot/civilise (last accessed July 1, 2016).

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Table 9.3 Entries for “civilization” in early East Asian dictionaries compiled by native lexicographers

Year Title of dictionary

Compiler Original entry

English translation

Ōtsuki ぶんめい。文明。文 ぶんめい. The state 1891 Genkai 言海 Fumihiko 學，智識，教化，善ク in which literature/ [The Sea of Words] (p. 905) 開ヶテ，政治甚ダ正シ humanities, knowledge, ク。風俗最モ善キフ。 and education are progressing and becoming 「−−開化」 more open, politics evolving toward the right way, and customs are the most perfect. (example) “Civilization and Enlightenment.” 1915 Ciyuan 辭源 Lu Erkui 文明．（一）易乾 1. Book of Changes, “Qian” [The Origins hexagram: “When one 陸爾魁 文言:「見龍在田， of Words] sees the dragon appearing 天下文明」．疏: (Chinese) 「陽氣在田，始生萬 in the field, this is the (p. 192) 物．故天下有文章而 time when wenming prevails over tianxia.”a 光明也．」（二） （Civilization）人類 Commentary: “Only 社會開化之狀態，用 when the yang energy 為形容詞，與野蠻相 exists in the field can 對待．（三）唐睿宗 creation begin. Therefore, when there is literature, 年號（六八四） tianxia is illuminated.” 2. (Civilization) the state in which human societies have become enlightened. It is an adjective and is the opposite of savagism. 3. The regnal title of Emperor Ruizong (684 ce) during the Tang dynasty. a Here I have consulted missionary James Legge’s translation from 1889, which can be found online at http://www.biroco.com/yijing/Legge1899.pdf (last accessed September 27, 2014).

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Traveling Civilization Table 9.3 Entries for “civilization” in early East Asian dictionaries (cont.)

Year Title of dictionary

Compiler Original entry

English translation

1931 Vietnamese Dictionary (p. 626)

AFTMAb

1932 SinoVietnamese Dictionary (p. 537)

Đào Duy Anh

Văn minh. Being refined and luminous, it refers to a society or an epoch that has achieved a high level of enlightenment. The radiance of morality. When it manifests in the areas of politics, laws, learning, institutions, etc., it is called civilization. It is the opposite of savagism.

Văn minh. Văn vè sáng sủa, nói về xã hội hay thời đại đã khai hóa tới một trịnh đồ cao. Cái tia của đạo đức, phát hiện ra ở nơi chính trị, pháp luật, học thuật, điển chương v. v., gọi là văn minh. Phản đối với dã man.

b AFTMA stands for Association pour la Formation Intellectuellel et Morale des Annamites, an elite club founded in 1919 and sponsored by the Indochinese Sûreté.

5

Sino-Vietnamese Logographic Ties

As mentioned earlier, compared to the Sino-Japanese and Sino-Korean logographic ties, the Sino-Vietnamese ones were probably the strongest because of the linguistic similarities between Chinese and Vietnamese. The close linguistic ties between China and Vietnam can be seen in the lexical itinerary of “civilization” in East Asia between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries: while learned men in Korea and China were made aware of the concept through their consumption of Japanese print materials, their peers in Vietnam came to know of the discussions and debates on “civilization” in East Asia through tân thư, the “new books” containing Chinese reformist writings, especially those of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao. In other words, the Sinographic Translational Network extended Vietnam’s connections to Japan and the East Asian intellectual world, and through this connection the concept of “civilization” morphed into văn minh and become a weapon for anticolonial struggle, ready for mobilizing elites. Japan and France provided alternative routes to the Sinographic Translational Network for the lexical journeys of modern concepts into colonial

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Vietnam. The students who went to Japan for Đông Du amidst the Duy Tân Movement might have committed themselves to translating and transmitting the Western knowledge absorbed and emulated by Japanese thinkers in the late nineteenth century. France, Vietnam’s colonial master, was a child of the European Enlightenment movement and a proud civilizer who proclaimed that its civilisation was a gift for all humanity. Catholic missionaries from France had been working in Vietnam at least two centuries before the Third Republic decided to bring Vietnam under its civilizing influence on the pretext of protecting its missionaries from martyrdom. Therefore, it might not be entirely implausible that Vietnam followed Thailand and came up with an entirely different term for civilization, something that resembled French civilisation rather than Sinitic văn minh. Nevertheless, the roles of both Japan and France in facilitating colonial Vietnam’s absorption of the idea of “civilization” as văn minh seem to have been limited. As Nguyễn Văn Xuân argued, “Western civilization certainly could not be transmitted directly [to Vietnam] by steamships from Saigon or from Marseilles. It had to go around to Shanghai to be read, appreciated, rewritten in Chinese characters by the Chinese literati, before being imported to Vietnam by sailing boats along with other Chinese merchandise, in order to be trusted by the Vietnamese literati” (quoted from Vinh Sinh 1993: 13). To begin with, the language barrier seems to have restrained the capacity of the French to penetrate colonial conceptually. French lexicographers hoped that the Latin-based Quốc Ngữ script would isolate the Vietnamese from their traditional culture and their elites (Marr 1981), but it was not until the 1930s that Quốc Ngữ began to prevail over sinographs, leaving the task of translating and interpreting the new concept of “civilization” in the hands of learned men versed in Literary Sinitic. Between the 1900s and the 1910s, when the idea of “civilization” had made its way from Scotland to Japan and emerged as văn minh in colonial Vietnam by way of the Sinographic Translational Network, it was primarily an idea of a collective nature. As scholars note, when Meiji Japanese scholars were coining and interpreting neologisms, they tried to dilute the liberal nature of those terms by injecting into them an emphasis on one’s responsibilities toward society, nation, and the state (Howland 2002). This worry was shared by Chinese reformist thinkers, whose writings subsequently directed colonial Vietnamese intellectuals in the 1900s and the 1910s to focus more on the collective than the individualistic aspects of the idea of “civilization” and its affiliated words. Beginning in the 1920s, the younger generation of colonial Vietnamese intellectuals grew more familiar with French civilisation, and văn minh began to acquire individualistic connotations.

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Rather than “state,” “society,” “nationalism,” “sovereignty,” and “people,” from the 1920s văn minh was increasingly connected with words such as “individual,” “individualism,” “ego,” “happiness,” and so on, indicating the advance of “transformative rearticulations of individual agency and the proper relations between self and society” (Bradley 2004: 66). Still, these neologisms were coined in Sino-Vietnamese fashion as cá nhân 個人, chủ nghĩa cá nhân 個人 主義, bản ngã 本我, and khoái lạc 快樂, indicating that the conceptual framework for understanding and coming to terms with the West had been firmly established on the basis of loanwords that had traveled from Japan and China via the Sinographic Translational Network. One might argue that French lexical influence entered colonial Vietnam via the route of international law, one of the primary means by which the West forced the “uncivilized” non-West to comply with Europe’s rules of the game (Gong 1984). Nevertheless, France did not use the pretext of civilisation to force upon Vietnam the unequal treaties that eventually turned Vietnam into a French colony. Besides, Vietnam was not given the same opportunity to negotiate the terms of its treaties with France, as China and Japan were in their interactions with various Western powers (see Lydia Liu’s [2006] discussion of this). American lawyer and jurist Henry Wheaton’s (1785–1848) renowned work, Elements of International Law (1836), was translated into Chinese in the 1860s as Wanguo gongfa 萬國公法 by American Presbyterian missionary Alexander Parsons Martin (1827–1916) in China and was soon introduced to Japan.21 Yet no evidence indicating the existence of any Vietnamese translations of treaties on international law by either Wheaton or other scholars during colonial times can be found in Vietnam’s National Library (Thư viện quốc gia Việt Nam), which houses the world’s largest collection of Quốc Ngữ publications from both the pre-colonial and post-colonial eras.22 Vietnamese discussions 21

22

A digitized version of Henry Wheaton’s original Elements of International Law and its Chinese and Japanese translations can be found in the Hathi Trust Digital Library, but no Korean translation is available online (the work itself was translated into Korean already in the early 1880s under the title Iŏn 易言. The 1866 edition of the original version is at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044103157699;view=1up;seq=43; the 1864 edition of the Chinese version is at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.35112102 550631;q1=%E8%90%AC%E5%9C%8B%E5%85%AC%E6%B3%95; the 1865 edition of the Japanese version is at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=keio.10811568105;view =1up;seq=7 (last accessed June 29, 2016). Based on a search on the website of the National Library of Vietnam at http://103.23.144.229 /opac/ using the keywords công pháp quốc tế/quốc tế công pháp, công pháp vạn quốc/vạn quốc công pháp, hiến pháp vạn quốc/vạn quốc hiến pháp, as well as hiến pháp quốc tế/quốc

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about international law had to wait until the late 1920s and early 1930s (see Đồ Nam [1930–1931]), the period when the first generation of Vietnamese law students graduated from the Université Indochinoise in Hanoi, the most prestigious higher education institute in French Indochina. The university was founded in 1902 and shut down in 1908, thanks to the French repression of the anti-tax rebellion and the Duy Tân movement, and was reopened only in 1922 (Kelley 1975). In the case of Japan, historical evidence seems to suggest that colonial Vietnamese intellectuals’ direct contacts with Japan were limited in both frequency and theme. During the seventeenth century, there were commercial transactions between Edo Japan and the polities based in what is now known as central and southern Vietnam, while Hội An in the Quảng Nam Province in central Vietnam—known as Faifoo in European sources—became a dynamic trading port between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries thanks to traders from China, Portugal, and Japan. But both parties conducted their business in Literary Sinitic, and these contacts do not seem to have presented any conceptual challenges for the polities based in modern Vietnam. The Đông Du movement lasted only three years, and during this period less than three hundred Vietnamese students were able to reach Japan. By contrast, the trend for studying in Japan lasted at least two decades in China, and the Chinese students in Japan numbered in the tens of thousands; many of them went on to become prominent thinkers, nationalists, and Marxists in China in the twentieth century, and they translated countless volumes of Japanese materials into Chinese. Lone figures such as Prince Cường Để 彊㭽 (1882–1951) went into exile in Japan and dreamed of resurrecting the Nguyễn dynasty and establishing an independent Vietnam after the model of Meiji Japan (Tran My-Van 2005). But Cường Đề was never a major player in either the political or the intellectual arena, and he did not act as a cultural mediator between his countrymen and Japan. Two pieces of evidence lend further support to my argument that Japan’s intellectual impact was felt in colonial Vietnam only indirectly, via the mediation of the Sinographic Translational Network. First, there were two ways of translating “society” in colonial Vietnam, namely: xã hội and quần. While xã hội was rendered from shehui, the Chinese pronunciation of the Sino-Japanese shakai 社會, quần was coined not by Japanese Meiji scholars but by Yan Fu 嚴 復 (1854–1921) when in 1897 he translated Herbert Spencer’s (1820–1903) seminal The Principles of Sociology (1874–1896), the work that popularized the Social tế hiến pháp. The earliest work under a similar title is Trịnh Quốc Quang’s Elementary Knowledge of International Law (Quốc tế công pháp thường thức) from 1946.

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Darwinist ideology of the survival of the fittest “in search of wealth and power” for China (Schwartz 1964). An ardent Chinese nationalist, Yan Fu took great pains to coin Chinese neologisms for Western concepts, hoping to provide a more appealing alternative to Sino-Japanese neologisms (Liu 1995; Schwartz 1964). Unfortunately, his translational efforts failed: except for the terms qun 群 for “society” and qunxue 群學 for “sociology,” which are rendered as quần and quần học, respectively, in Vietnamese, his translations have been forgotten. In both China and post-colonial Vietnam, qun and quần have become obsolete translations for “society,” yet the entry of quần học as an alternative translation for “sociology” still appears in Đào Duy Anh’s Sino-Vietnamese Dictionary of 1932 (Đào Duy Anh 1932: 161). Second, a survey of the existing online catalogue of colonial Quốc Ngữ publications available in the National Library of Vietnam reveals that of the eightyseven Quốc Ngữ publishers active during the colonial period, none published books translated from Japanese.23 This does not mean that no Japanese works were ever introduced to colonial Vietnam, but that if they were they likely entered Vietnam in Chinese translation via the Sinographic Translational Network. The Japanese writers who were introduced into colonial Vietnam arrived via French sources in the early 1940s, the decade after the first generation of intellectuals who had received a Franco-Vietnamese education in the 1920s was mature enough to rebel against their Sino-Vietnamese predecessors’ reliance on Chinese sources and translations that had entered Vietnam via the Sinographic Translational Network in the 1930s. The spearhead of this youthful rebellion was the Self-Strengthening Literary Group (Tự lực văn đoàn) founded in 1932, which encouraged publication of original Quốc Ngữ literary works and the translation of important works of Western literature (Hà Minh Đức 2007). This group also founded the Association for Enlightenment (Hội Á nh sáng) in 1937. Among their translations were the works of Yamata Kiku24 山田菊 (1897–1975) and Nagai Kafū 永井荷風 (1879–1959); the former was based in Paris and wrote in French in the 1920s, and the latter’s works were also translated into French in the 1920s. Nagai Kafū’s works appeared in Vietnam in 1943, together with those of French novelist Alphonse Daudet (1840–1897) and French socialist writer Eugène Dabit (1898–1936) in the anthology Hương xa (Remote Hometown) translated by Khái Hưng (1896–1947), one of the 23 24

See appendix for a list of the publishers. Yamata Kiku is known as Yamata Kikou in Francophone literature. The sinograph 菊 is normally rendered as “Kiku” in Japanese; “Kikou” is a French-style romanization of 菊 that she chose to use as her international persona.

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founding members of the Self-Strengthening group.25 Yamata Kiku’s works appeared a year later in another edited book titled Hoa lạ: đoản biên và ký ức (Strange Flowers: Short Stories and Memoirs) by anonymous translators with works by American Nobel Prize winner in literature Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973), French writer André Corthis (1882–1952), and Chinese female socialist writer Bai Wei 白薇 (1894–1987; appearing in Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation as Bạch Vi). Both books were published by Đời Nay, the Self-Strengthening group’s publishing house active between 1934 and 1945. 6

Conclusion

This paper treats the Sinographic Cosmopolis as the logographic manifestation of the Sinitic tianxia world order. This idealized world order was a highly centralized one arranged concentrically and hierarchically according to the different levels of a society’s jiaohua. It was maintained by the diplomatic ties of the tribute system; the commercial ties sustained by diaspora Chinese traders/ pirates; and the logographic ties that connected learned men across East Asia via their shared knowledge of Literary Sinitic and the sagely texts that formed the basis for the translocal Sinographic Cosmopolis. Because of its foundation in the tianxia world order, the Sinographic Cosmopolis outlasted its Sanskrit counterpart, and the vernacularization processes in the former occurred much later than in the latter, except for Japan, where the logographic ties were the weakest. The lack of an imperial civil service examination, which tested one’s knowledge in the sagely texts written in Literary Sinitic and recruited the best talents into the centralized bureaucracy, is surely one reason for Japan’s comparatively weak Sino-Japanese logographic ties. By contrast, the civil service examination was adopted by both Korea and Vietnam, where the logographic ties were stronger than in Japan and where vernacularization only took place between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the context of demands for modernization during the pan-East Asian reform movements. Between Korea and Vietnam, the latter’s logographic ties with China were probably stronger, as Sinitic and Vietnamese share similar linguistic features 25

Alphonse Daudet’s “La Dernière Classe” (The Last Class), a short story about the German incorporation of the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine told by an Alsatian boy, is well known in China.

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even though they are not genetically related. The strong Sino-Vietnamese logographic ties help explain the relative underdevelopment of Vietnam’s vernacular Nôm script and the need for adopting the Latin-based Quốc Ngữ script to replace sinographs in the twentieth century. The lasting power of the Sinographic Cosmopolis is manifested in the Sinographic Translational Network. It emerged when the tianxia world order was falling apart during the clash between Enlightenment civilization and Sinitic jiaohua, and it was consolidated when learned men across East Asia began to push for modernization and vernacularization under the slogan of “civilization and enlightenment.” Prior to these pan-East Asian reform movements, the earliest modern Chinese dictionaries, compilation of which took place before other bilingual East Asian dictionaries and was concentrated in the nineteenth century, contained only entries for “civil” and “civility” as equivalents of “courtesy” and “politeness.” The Chinese dictionaries that appeared after the Meiji reform movement carried the word “civilization” and translated it into jiaohua 教化. Starting in the 1880s, the Chinese dictionaries were joined by Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese ones. Japanese dictionaries already included bunmei for “civilization” in the 1880s, whereas wenming appeared in Chinese dictionaries in the 1900s, munmyŏng in Korean dictionaries in the 1910s, and văn minh in Vietnamese ones from the 1930s. In contrast to East Asia, where the translations for “civilization” and other modern concepts are rendered consistently, the former members of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis appear to have more diverse and unrelated translations for the same word “civilization,” as a comparable Sanskrit Translational Network does not appear to have existed. The Sinographic Translational Network linked learned men in East Asia through their knowledge of Literary Sinitic, but its nodal point rested in Japan rather than in China. Whereas learned men in both Korea and China familiarized themselves with modern concepts directly by reading Japanese materials, their Vietnamese peers did so indirectly via the Sino-Vietnamese logographic ties, transliterating the Sino-Japanese neologisms into Quốc Ngữ. The French role in transmitting the idea of civilisation appears to have been limited during the period under study, partly because of the language barrier presented by French. Japan’s influence was mediated by Sino-Vietnamese ties, and a survey of the colonial book collections available in Vietnam’s National Library online database indicates that there were no Quốc Ngữ translations of Japanese books during the colonial era.

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Appendix 9.1: List of Quốc Ngữ Publishers

Alphabetically, the 87 Quốc Ngữ publishers are as follows: Á Châu26 Auteur Âu tây tư tưởng27 Bảo tồn Center Cổ kim thư xã Công lực Cường học thư xã D’Extreme-Orient Dịch thuật tùng thư Đại đồng thư xã Đắc Lập Đỗ Phương Quế Đông Kinh ấn quản30 Đông Pháp Đông Tây Đồng Xuân thư quán Đời nay Đuốc Tuệ Đức Lưu Phương Giác quần Hàn Thuyên

Huyền Nga Huỳnh Văn Tài Hương Giang thư quán Hương hát thư điếm Hương Sơn J. Viết Kim Đức Giang Kim Khuê Khuê Văn Lê Cường Lệ Chi Lê Mai ấn quán Lê Văn Phúc Lê Văn Tân Long Quang Mạc Đình Tư Mai Linh Mai Lĩnh Min Sang Minh Đức Mỹ Khoan Mỹ Thắng

Nam Cường Nam Đồng thư xã Nam Kỳ thư quán28 Nam Mỹ Nam Phong tùng thư Nữ lưu thư quán Nghiêm hàm Ngo Tu Ha Nguyễn Văn Của29 Nguyễn Văn Viết Nhật Nam Phạm Văn Thình Phú Văn Đường Phương Châu Phương Đông Quan Hải tùng thư Quốc dân thư xã Quốc gia tùng thư Schneider Tam Kỳ Tản Đà thư điếm Taupin

Tân Á Tân dân Tân Đông Á Tân Việt Tập sách Dân chúng Tiếng Dân Tư tưởng mới Thạch Thị Mai Thực nghiệp Trần Trọng Cảnh Trúc Khê thư cục Trung Bắc tân văn Vạn quyền thư lâu Văn nghệ tùng thư Văn tường Vị Giang văn khó Viễn Đông Việt dân Vĩnh & Thành Vĩnh Hưng Long Xưa nay

The above list is by no means comprehensive, not only because French rule stretched from 1868 to 1945 and many publishers emerged during this long time period, but also because the list is, to my knowledge, the first that anyone has attempted to compile regarding colonial Vietnamese literature. Furthermore, there are complications, such as the fact that owners of publishing companies might have changed the names of the companies over time, possibly out of fear of colonial censorship or in the hopes of a good start for their business 26 27 28 29 30

Possibly also known as “Asiatic” or “Impr. Asiatic.” Possibly also known as “Âu tây.” Possibly also known as “Impr. Saigonnaise.” Possibly also known as “Impr. de l’Union Nguyễn Văn Của” or “Impr. de l’Union.” Possibly also known as “Tonkinoise.”

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PART 3 The Special Case of Korea: From Late Chosŏn to Colonial Chōsen

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Chapter 10

Literary Sinitic and Korea’s Hierarchy of Inscriptional Practice W. Scott Wells 1

Introduction1

Literary Sinitic (hereafter ls) served for almost two thousand years as the primary written medium in virtually all domains of Korean society, whether documentary or expressive. As Korea’s default form of writing, ls was generally known in premodern Korean sources simply as mun(cha) 文(字) (“writing”). More rarely it was known as chinsŏ 眞書 (“true writing”), as when context required that it be distinguished from other scripts and writing systems.2 And even though the Korean alphabet, invented early in the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910), allowed for a nascent vernacular literary tradition to develop, ls literacy remained essential to achieving and maintaining success in elite society, with the sons of the country’s elites beginning their instruction in ls from a very early age. The central role that ls played in premodern Korea’s inscriptional practices was due to the fact that it connected the peninsula to a transregional ecumene centered on China. It did so by granting access to and enabling the maintenance of the authoritative textual tradition and the state bureaucratic and diplomatic structures which undergirded the sinocentric world. Thus, the eager participation of Korean elites in this world through their adoption of the ritual, cultural, and political modes of belonging that positioned their country firmly within it was facilitated by and predicated upon their simultaneous adoption of ls. The Chosŏn dynasty’s final decades—from the beginnings of modern diplomatic relations with Japan following the 1876 Treaty of Kanghwa, to Japan’s annexation of the Korean peninsula in 1910—were marked by tumultuous, rapid, and thoroughgoing transformations. This included internal changes in the institutions of government and the kingdom’s social order driven largely by 1 This work was supported and completed as part of a Korea Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship at Arizona State University during the 2020–2021 academic year. 2 On the late fifteenth-century origins of the term chinsŏ, see Wells (2011: 19–32).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163

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external changes in the country’s relationships with its neighbors, China and Japan, and with Western powers. These upheavals led many in Korea to reappraise the country’s sinocentric past and the once-shared knowledge, symbols, and practices of the traditional order. The literary and inscriptional practices sustained by ls literacy were thus a prime target of this reappraisal.3 Responding to Japan’s forced opening of the peninsula in 1876 and its succession of encroachments on Korean sovereignty leading up to annexation in 1910, the period saw the birth of Korean nationalist discourses that, in the linguistic sphere, raised the Korean alphabet to the status of “national writing” (K. kungmun 國文) while ethnically othering and foreignizing ls as mere “Han/ Chinese writing” (K. hanmun 漢文). No longer the “real” writing, this discursive shift was accompanied by policies that demoted ls from its long-held status as the official written medium of state and eventually removed it from the center of the curriculum of state-sponsored education to the periphery of a new multi-subject curriculum. This ls instruction within the new schools came to be known as Hanmunkwa 漢文科 (“hanmun course of study”) and was greatly limited in its scope relative to traditional instruction. That is, rather than training students to both read and produce texts in ls, students were trained in nothing more than a passive reading comprehension of excerpts from classical texts. Thus, in both North and South Korea today, it is the Korean alphabet, now widely known as han’gŭl, that dominates all domains of literate life, while ls survives as little more than a legacy literacy useful in limited domains and providing only backward compatibility with old or outmoded knowledge. A consequence of this rapid transformation of Korea’s inscriptional ecology and the role that vernacularization has come to play in forming modern Korea’s national imaginary is that the story Koreans now tell themselves about how they came to speak and listen, write and read the way they do today makes little room for the previous role ls played in binding Korea to a larger regional order or for its continuing influence on Korean linguistic and inscriptional practice. Instead, the received narrative, what Ross King calls the “Korean vernacular belief system,” centers on the fifteenth-century creation of the Korean alphabet, its supposed under-utilization by Sinophilic elites, its emergence in the late nineteenth century as a symbol of national identity championed by nationalist authors and linguists, and its eventual widespread adoption after liberation from Japan in 1945 (King 1998: 33–34). 3 Andre Schmid calls this intellectual and cultural reappraisal and the resulting reorientation away from China the “decentering of the Middle Kingdom.” See Schmid (2002: 55–100; for a general overview of the role that new language and inscriptional practices played in this “decentering,” see especially pp. 64–72).

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A key aspect of this narrative is its teleological nature—the belief that vernacularization was the natural culmination of an inevitable historical destiny. As Sheldon Pollock explains, the belief in teleological vernacularization is undergirded by “the common but mistaken notion that literary writing in the vernacular is somehow natural in a way that writing in a cosmopolitan language is not” (Pollock 2006: 318). Yet as Pollock reminds us, unlike the ability to speak, the “authorization to write,” no matter the language and no matter the script, is not “a natural entitlement” (Ibid.: 4).4 “Vernacularity” therefore, “is not a natural state of being but a willed act of becoming …,” one that cultural and political actors choose to inaugurate (Ibid.: 24). My purpose in this chapter is twofold. First, I will describe the inscriptional ecology of pre-twentieth-century Korea, detailing in particular the centrality of ls literacy and the authority of the Chinese textual tradition to Korea’s selfconception, in order to demonstrate that even after the invention of the alphabet, Korea’s inscriptional practices were not on some natural trajectory toward vernacularization. That is, the changes in Korea’s inscriptional practices during the final decades of the Chosŏn dynasty were not only unprecedented but wholly unlooked for. Second, I will describe the changes to ls instruction that were introduced in the final decades of the Chosŏn dynasty in order to show that the nature of ls instruction and its place within Korean society today was not foreordained. Rather, the status of ls as a legacy literacy useful in only limited domains is a result of the deliberate, often disparate, and sometimes contradictory education activities and policy decisions of interested parties, including the Korean court, Western missionaries, Korean traditionalist and nationalist scholars, and Japanese imperial officials. 2

The Sinographic Cosmopolis and the Korean Embrace of “This Culture of Ours”

ls is an integrated medium of language and script and was the lingua franca of premodern East Asia. ls and the body of textual knowledge for which it was the vehicle, allowed for the forging and maintenance of bilateral relations between the region’s peoples and states and enabled the shared knowledge and practices that gave the region a historical and cultural, if not entirely 4 Consider, for example, the on-going situation in which every school day in China children in the millions are taught to read and write in a cosmopolitan language (i.e., putonghua 普通話 or Modern Standard Mandarin) other than their often unwritten “non-literate” vernaculars (i.e., the so-called fangyan 方言 or topolects).

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political, coherence. Though used on the Korean Peninsula from as early as the second century bce, ls has much earlier origins. Based on the available archeological record, Chinese characters, or sinographs, have their material origins in the inscriptional practices of the late Shang dynasty (ca. 1600–1046 bce).5 The language which sinographs were first used to inscribe may well have been an approximation of the everyday speech of their users, but as Victor Mair explains, extensive anaphora and elision were a hallmark of the concise, elegant style of early Chinese texts, so that the language thereof was quite unlike the rustic vernacular language. Over time, the gap between the two grew until “there developed a deep chasm between the vernacular and the literary, such that eventually they became two different types of language altogether, with distinct grammars and distinct lexicons” (Mair 2001b: 27). In the millennium after the Shang dynasty, the culture surrounding ls literacy and textual mastery grew to have an immense standing in Chinese society. During the Spring and Autumn period (722–481/463 bce) and the Warring States period (481/403–221 bce), a large corpus of philosophical and didactic literature, both poetic and prose, developed under the influence of various schools of thought, including Daoist, Confucian, Mohist, Legalist and others. The texts that contained this literature, often termed “classics” (C. jing, K. kyŏng 經), became models for ls composition thereafter.6 Though the exact corpus of classics hardly remained stable, the first efforts to define a standard canon were made by Confucianists during the reign of Emperor Wu 武帝 (r. 141–87 bce) of the Han dynasty (206 bce–220 ce) when their teachings were adopted as the empire’s governing ideology (Puett 2001: 83). According to Mark Lewis (1999), the Confucianists, who had long emphasized writing and textual mastery, had, over the previous centuries, developed a concept of textual authority in which the records of the great sages of antiquity, most of all Confucius, were imbued with an authority above and beyond political authority such that from the time that the Han dynasty adopted Confucianism as it imperial ideology, “the ultimate importance of writing to the Chinese empire and imperial civilization did not derive from its administrative role. Rather the Chinese empire … was based on an imaginary realm created within texts.” It was this textual authority, Lewis argues, rather than the administrative or political use of writing, that allowed for the “implanting of the imperial vision” 5 Though the earliest surviving examples of sinographic writing date to the late Shang dynasty, Robert Bagley shows convincingly that its origins predate what is available to us in the archeological record. See Bagley (2004). 6 Beginning in the early centuries CE, this foundational corpus was added to and augmented by translations of Buddhist sutras from India, also termed “jing.” On the effects this addition had on subsequent ls literature, see Schmidt-Glintzer and Mair (2001: 160–172).

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that was the “mechanism by which the institution of the empire survived the collapse of each of its incarnations” (Lewis 1999: 4). Thus, as Victor Mair (2001a: 1) similarly describes, throughout the history of the Chinese ecumene from the early Han dynasty on, the power of writing, or wen 文 (K. mun; meaning, of course, writing in ls), grew as “officials possessing vast learning and outstanding writerly skills … were greatly respected” and “a tremendous premium was placed on advanced literary ability.” This led over time to the development of “an ethos of wen” or “a literati culture centered on refined compositional competence.” When viewed in this light, ls was more than the sum of its language-plusscript parts. Its learning and use became the very embodiment of a culture of textual authority that both asserted and legitimated normative claims about the proper constitution of society and the function of the imperial state. Writing (i.e., wen) became a synecdoche for Chinese culture itself. For example, Confucianists would come to refer to “the precious politicocultural heritage bequeathed by Confucius and his predecessors” as “This Culture [of Ours]” (C. siwen, K. samun 斯文) (Ibid.: 3).7 Another example is a phrase appropriated from the Zhongyong 中庸 and used in the Shiji 史記 to describe the Qin unification, “carriages with a common axle width and books in a common writing” (C. che tonggui shu tongwen 車同軌書同文), which was evoked throughout Chinese history to denote the universality of Chinese culture and institutions so that tongwen 同文 could be used to denote both shared writing and/or shared culture. By the late nineteenth century when the drastic shift in Korean inscriptional practice began, Korea had long since adopted and adapted the practices of LS literacy and textual mastery to its own circumstances. ls first made its way to the Korean peninsula in a period of Han imperial expansion. The administrative functions of ls at the very least would have been present on the peninsula from the reign of Emperor Wu when the Han established four commanderies in the peninsula’s northern region. And as Peter Kornicki (2018) describes, archeological excavations at the location of one of these commanderies, the Lelang Commandery near present-day Pyongyang, have uncovered wooden slats dating to the third century ce with fragments of the Analects written on them, showing “not only that written administration was the norm in Lelang, as would be expected in an outpost of the Chinese empire, but also that

7 With samun/siwen “This Culture,” I use here and hereafter the added “of Ours” based on the formulation by Peter Bol in his history of Tang and Song intellectual movements. See Bol (1992).

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Chinese textual culture had reached the Korean Peninsula” (Kornicki 2018: 50). After the fall of the Lelang Commandery in 313 ce, subsequent Korean states would make use of ls both for internal administration and for external diplomacy; they would continue to import literary, philosophical, and historiographical texts in ls from China as well as create their own such texts; they would establish national academies where the Confucian canon formed the basis of officials’ education; and they would eventually institute a civil service examination system testing potential officials on their mastery of that canon and their ability to compose in various genres of ls poetry and prose. In short, leading up to and especially following the Koryŏ dynasty’s (918–1392) institution of a civil service examination system in 958, successive Korean states had and would continue to make use of ls for administrative purposes but also embrace their own “ethos of wen” manifested in the institutions that rewarded and thus reproduced ls literacy and textual mastery. Besides the Koreans, other non-Chinese peoples on the Chinese periphery also adopted LS inscriptional practices. The settled societies of Vietnam and Japan did so, as would at various times the peoples to China’s nomadic north, including the Khitans, Tanguts, Jurchens, Mongols, and Manchus. As Kornicki describes, ls inscriptional practices “had, by the eighth century at the latest, created in East Asia a semblance of linguistic uniformity, or at least communicability, for domestic, diplomatic, and intellectual purposes; and by the eleventh century the reach of Sinitic extended from Japan in the east to the Tangut empire in the west, from Vietnam in the south to the Khitan empire in the north” (Kornicki 2018: 26). And even though each of these societies, including Korea, would develop scripts to record their own languages, these scripts were not used to the exclusion of sinography, but coexisted with it, as ls texts remained the bedrock of education and the literate communications it enabled. Thus, the physical manifestations of ls in the form of a rich textual heritage and vibrant manuscript and book culture were not only a defining symbol of premodern East Asia, but as the universal medium for the spread and maintenance of the shared knowledge and culture that bound the region together, ls, in its very learning and use, was itself arguably the defining symbol of the region. Though this Sinographic Cosmopolis included non-Chinese peoples other than the Koreans, Sixiang Wang (2015) shows that from the Mongol invasions of the mid-thirteenth century to the early decades of the Chosŏn period, Korean elites constructed a narrative about their country’s relationship to the Chinese empire and the Chinese past that carved out a peculiar place for their country and culture within the Sinocentric ecumene that was distinct from that occupied by other non-Chinese peoples. This narrative posited that Korea’s

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early acceptance of the authority of the canonical Confucian texts of Chinese antiquity via a distinct and independent line of transmission from the semimythical figure of Kija 箕子 (C. Jizi, 1122–1082 bce)8 made the peninsula’s successive states special participants in China’s civilization. Though early Chosŏn elites accepted a subordinate role for their country in its tributary relationship with the Ming (1368–1644), they did so with the self-understanding that they were a junior partner in a common civilizational endeavor that transcended the temporal confines of both the Ming and Chosŏn states as well as the geographical confines of either China or Korea alone. Wang describes how this narrative was the product of diplomatic discourse between various Korean and Chinese states as Korea navigated its tributary relationship first with the Mongol-Yuan (1279–1368) at the founding of that dynasty and then with the Ming after the fall of the Yuan. Wang shows that a particularly important site for the development of this discourse was the diplomatic poetry exchanged between Chosŏn and Ming officials during early-Chosŏn embassies to China as well as Ming envoys’ visits to Korea. To maintain Korean sovereignty over the peninsula as well as to assert a special status within the sinocentric ecumene, Korean officials used this poetry exchange, as well as other diplomatic correspondence and ritual, to articulate the view that Korea, though subordinate to China, was a coinheritor (via Kija) of the civilizational knowledge found in the texts of Chinese antiquity. Just as Lewis details how the imaginary realm created within the texts of Chinese antiquity developed an authority by and against which political authority could be legitimated and judged, Wang shows how that same textual authority could be drawn on by Koreans to legitimate their assertions of both sovereignty from and (subordinate) partnership with China. Thus, the disembodiment of political authority and its relocation in the canonical texts of Chinese antiquity that culminated in the Han dynasty’s instantiation of a Confucian episteme9 through its adoption of a Confucianist ruling ideology was not only a mechanism for legitimating later incarnations of the Chinese empire but was also adopted to legitimize the Chosŏn state and its participation as unique inheritor and protector of “This Culture of Ours.” Though originating in the practices of diplomacy and initially articulated for an external audience, this discourse was eventually turned inward and became a central pillar in the self-conception of Chosŏn’s elites. For example, 8 On the matter of the Kija story’s historicity, see Shim (2002). 9 I use “episteme” here in the Foucauldian sense of a power-knowledge system “that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice” (Foucault 1970: 183).

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Sŏ Kŏjŏng’s 徐居正 (1420–1488) statement in a court-commissioned history of the peninsula published exclusively for a domestic audience in 1484, nearly a century after Chosŏn’s founding, evinces this inwardly turned self-conception: Everything, from our attire to our codes of law, is identical with that in China, so that ours is called a land of poetry, calligraphy, ritual, and music and a country of benevolence and righteousness. How honored indeed to have had Kija as our earliest ancestor!10 Another signifier of this self-conception was the title “little central efflorescence” (so chunghwa 小中華) by which Chosŏn elites began to refer to their country. The term “central efflorescence” (C. zhonghua, K. chunghwa 中華) was part of a so-called “Sino-barbarian discourse” (C. hua-yi lun, K. hwa-i ron 華夷 論) developed in Chinese antiquity and used throughout China’s history to differentiate China—including sometimes culturally, sometimes politically, and sometimes ethnically defined conceptions of China or “Chineseness”—from non-Chinese or barbarian (C. yi 夷) others.11 In a 1472 discussion between King Sŏngjong 成宗 (r. 1469–1494) and his officials, we see the Koreans appropriating this discourse and assimilating their own self-conception to it: Civilization has prevailed in Our Eastern Quarter from the time of Kija, such that the men are in possession of the manners of noble principle and the women are possessed of the customs of virtuous rectitude, and thus we have been called the “little central efflorescence.”12 By adopting this identity, the Koreans were asserting that their country, its civilization and culture, though not the central efflorescence, was nonetheless an autonomous “little” or “lesser” central efflorescence, and thereby decidedly non-barbarian. With the fall of the Ming to the “barbarian” Manchu founders of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), Korea’s self-conception as a little central efflorescence 10 衣冠制度悉同乎中國，故曰詩書禮樂之邦，仁義之國也．而箕子始之豈不信 哉 (Sŏ Kŏjŏng, Sejong Taewang Kinyŏm Saŏphoe, and Tongbang Midiŏ Chusik Hoesa, Kugyŏk Tongguk t’onggam [Vernacular Translation of The Comprehensive Mirror of the Eastern Land] (Seoul: Tongbang midiŏ chusik hoesa, 2003 , 七 (7)). 11 For a further examination of the origins and historical deployment and reception in East Asia of this Sino-barbarian discourse, see Kornicki (2018: 5–7). 12 吾東方，自箕子以來，敎化大行，男有烈士之風，女有貞正之俗，史稱小中華 (Sŏngjong sillok 成宗實錄, kwŏn 20, Sŏngjong 3rd year [1472], 7th month, 10th day, entry 4).

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was strengthened as Korean elites came to see their country as the last legitimate (i.e., non-barbarian) redoubt where “This Culture of Ours” was properly preserved and transmitted. While the Koreans came to terms with the material fact of the Manchu conquest of China and thus accepted a tributary relationship with the Qing, they did not accept the Manchus as legitimate inheritors of the mantle of the central efflorescence or proper guardians of “This Culture of Ours.” As JaHyun Kim Haboush (1999) writes, “This sense of a Korean mission [to preserve “This Culture of Ours”] seems to have lasted almost to the close of the dynasty. Thus, in the eighteenth century, King Yŏngjo 英祖 (r. 1724–1776) announced that ‘the Central Plains [China] exude the stenches of barbarians and our Green Hills [Korea] are alone.’ Indeed, Koreans never really discarded their anti-Manchu stance. Throughout the latter half of the Chosŏn dynasty, they took pride in the fact that, unlike the Chinese, who had been made to adopt the Manchu hairstyle, headdress, and official dress, they had remained truthful to ‘civilized’ habits by perpetuating the Ming hairstyle and Ming dress” (Haboush 1999: 70). This sense of purpose and mission to preserve and correctly transmit “This Culture of Ours” was a crucial concern of Chosŏn elites as they confronted Korea’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century social and institutional changes, of which the shift in inscriptional practice was a key constituent. And abandoning this mission and purpose was something Korea only began to slowly acquiesce to during the Japanese protectorate period when its sovereignty was severely weakened, and the threat of full colonization loomed. 3

The Written Vernacular in Pre-Twentieth-Century Korea

As Korea’s first and, for nearly two millennia, only fully elaborated system of writing, ls brooked no real challenge to its prestige or dominance until the end of the Chosŏn dynasty.13 This is not to say, however, that the Koreans were not acutely aware of the vast differences between their spoken and written languages.14 To mitigate these differences they first developed borrowed-graph 13

This was the case even though ls was never connected to the native speech of any permanent linguistic community within Korea and, by the time of its arrival on the peninsula, had already sustained a long history of significant dissimilarity with the various vernaculars of China as well. 14 Throughout the Chosŏn period, the spoken language situation consisted of a variety of diachronically related, though non-standardized dialects of Korean, with the Seoul dialect as the most prestigious. See King (1998, 35), and also Ahn Daehoe’s chapter in this

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transcriptional techniques (ch’aja p’yogibŏp 借字表記法) first attested during Korea’s Three Kingdoms period (57 bce–668 ce).15 Though used in a limited way in later Silla (668–935) and early Koryŏ (935–1392) to transcribe short, yet fully vernacular, lyrical poems, these techniques were devised and used primarily for the limited transcription of vernacular elements within otherwise wholly ls texts.16 That is, they were used as ls reading aids or as a first step in ls composition. In the mid-fifteenth century, the Korean alphabet was invented and immediately proved capable of the full and efficient transcription of spoken Korean. Its invention, however, did not dislodge sinographic writing (including the borrowed-graph transcriptional techniques), nor did it threaten ls composition. For Korea’s ruling elites, the transcription of spoken language or the production of vernacular literary works continued to be only ever a concern secondary to literacy training in ls literary forms and the mastery of the textual knowledge that tied them and their country to the Chinese world order. Thus, until the end of the Chosŏn dynasty it was for these ends, not vernacular literary production, that the Korean alphabet was most widely employed. 3.1 Borrowed-Graph Transcription Borrowed-graph transcriptional techniques were first used to record Korean names and morphosyntactic elements known as t’o 吐, which included verbal endings and noun particles. To transcribe these elements, sinographs were used either solely for the sound value of their Sino-Korean reading (i.e., as de-semanticized phonograms) or for their semantic value, disregarding the Sino-Korean reading and instead being read with a synonymous vernacular word or morpheme (i.e., as semantograms). As David Lurie (2011) has shown, the precursors of these transcriptional techniques were already evident in the Chinese lexicographical tradition, and, since sinography spread to neighboring societies in its already mature canonical form, the reading and writing practices that developed in Sino-xenic cultures were outgrowths of the writing volume, for a discussion of late-Chosŏn intellectual discourse around the discrepancies between speech and writing in Korea. 15 Though tradition has it that borrowed-character transcription was invented during the early Unified Silla period (668–935) by the revered Confucian scholar Sŏl Ch’ong 薛聰 (650?–730?), such transcriptions predate him. See Lee and Ramsey (2011: 56). 16 Often termed “hyangch’al” 鄕札 (“local letters”), the transcriptional techniques used to record these full-vernacular poems were not actually different in kind from the semivernacular idu transcriptions described below. And as Gari Ledyard notes of such fullvernacular transcriptions, they “followed the fortunes of native poetry and declined during the Koryŏ period” (Ledyard 1998: 67).

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system’s preexisting tendencies and functions, rather than creations ex nihilo (Lurie 2011: 334–342).17 By the early Unified Silla period (668–935), these borrowed-graph transcriptional techniques had undergone a degree of regularization and were employed in an inscriptional system known as idu 吏讀 (“clerk readings”). Used for mundane record keeping or other clerical tasks well into the twentieth century, idu developed first to render ls texts into semi-vernacular translations that mixed ls vocabulary and phrases written in partial Korean word order together with t’o, the above-noted morphosyntactic vernacular elements. This method then came to be used in reverse as a tool for scribes and other clerical personnel to transcribe a “first pass” at extemporaneous official dictations, discussions at the court between the king and his officials, or judicial proceedings. These scribal transcriptions would then often be rendered on a “second pass” into full ls. As reflected in its name (i.e., “clerk readings”), idu thus became a tool primarily of scribal compositions by government clerks which were in turn often treated as only a first semi-vernacular step toward a fully ls composition. Borrowed-graph inscription was also used in an annotational system known as kugyŏl 口訣 (“recitation glosses”18), first evidenced in Silla. What Ross King (2007: 203) succinctly describes as a “reading-aid-cum-translation device,” kugyŏl annotations used abbreviated sinographs to inscribe t’o glosses brushed lightly in ink between the lines of an otherwise wholly ls text, allowing the reader trained in their decipherment to read out extemporaneously in a hybridized register of ls understood by Korea’s ls literates.19 These kugyŏl 17

Sim Kyŏngho, too, shows that the inscriptional techniques used in idu have their origins in China, well prior to their extension in Korea and later Japan. See Sim Kyŏngho (2012: 1:73–74). 18 Though often rendered in English as “oral embellishments,” An Pyŏnghŭi (1976) argues that the graphs “口訣” were originally a borrowed-graph transcription of a Middle Korean vernacular word, ipkyech (입겿) or ipkyec (입겾). An has analyzed ipkyec(h) as 잎- iph-, the Middle Korean form of modern Korean 읊- ulph- ‘recite’, + 겾/겿 kyec(h), a native synonym for t’o, which also appears to be a native word. Following An’s analysis, “recitation glosses” (or even more literally “grammatical elements for vocalized reading”) would thus be a more accurate translation of the term transcribed as 口訣 and today pronounced using the graph’s Sino-Korean readings (i.e., kugyŏl). See An (1976: 149). 19 Ilya Gershevitch (1979) coined the term “alloglottography” to describe a phenomenon in the ancient Near East whereby utterances in Old Persian made by the Persian king were recorded by bilingual scribes in Elamite. When reread aloud, the Elamite records were then rendered orally back into Old Persian. Citing Gershevitch’s work, Gonzalo Rubio (2006: 45) describes alloglottography as the practice of “writing a text in a language different from the language in which it is intended to be read,” and in addition to ancient Near Eastern examples of the phenomenon discusses the Japanese practice of rendering Japanese readings for ls texts as an example. The Korean practice of inscribing t’o should

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transcriptions were an inscriptional reflection of an oral reading practice foundational to ls literacy instruction that persisted even in the practices of the mature reader. Both idu and kugyŏl developed and would always remain supplementary to ls literacy, the former serving as a first step in the production of new ls texts and the latter as an aid to the proper vocalization and decipherment of existing ones. Written using sinographs or their abbreviations, borrowed-graph inscription had the look of ls and was learned as part of the same literacy instruction. Thus, though borrowed-graph inscriptions of the idu and kugyŏl sort were not part of China’s repertoire of inscriptional practices, being part and parcel of Koreans’ ls literacy training and practice, they were nevertheless perceived by Korea’s ls literates as compatible with the uniform culture/ writing (C. tongwen 同文) that Korea and China held in common and therefore occupied the same inscriptional space as ls. 3.2 The Korean Alphabet Invented in the mid-fifteenth century, the Korean alphabet originated through the private initiative and patronage of King Sejong (r. 1418–1450),20 and it was through subsequent court sponsorship, especially the efforts of Prince Suyang (the later King Sejo, r. 1455–1468) that early works using the script were first published. The Korean alphabet for the first time provided an efficient, accurate, and easily learned means for recording vernacular Korean, and three full-vernacular literary works completed in Sejong’s lifetime demonstrated from the start the alphabet’s capacity to record the Korean language in precise detail.21 Thus, for those today, both Korean and non-Korean alike, who hold to likewise be considered an alloglottographic device, meant as it was to facilitate a nativized reading of ls texts, or a vocalized reading of ls texts in a vernacularized register of ls understandable to Korea’s ls literates. For further discussion of alloglottography and its applicability to the East Asian, and specifically Korean, context, see Ross King’s editor’s preface in Kin (2021). 20 Though I do not wholly agree with his assessment of Sejong’s motives, Yi Kimun (Ki-moon Lee) makes a compelling case that the alphabet was in fact Sejong’s personal project. See Ki-Moon Lee (1997). 21 The first vernacular works to be published using the script were a compilation of panegyric hymns to Sejong’s ancestors (Yongbi ŏch’ŏn ka 龍飛御天歌) and two Buddhist works compiled in memory of Sejong’s recently deceased queen; the first a translation of the biography of the life of the Buddha (Sŏkpo sangjŏl 釋譜詳節) and the second a collection of hymns of praise to the Buddha said to have been composed by Sejong himself (Wŏrin ch’ŏn’gang chi kok 月印千江之曲). It is worth noting that all three works were originally composed in ls and then translated into vernacular Korean, thus demonstrating the primacy of ls literary norms. For a comprehensive examination of early works that employed the new script, see An (1979).

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a teleological view of vernacularization (that is, that it was natural and inevitable), it is a regrettable failure that the invention of the Korean alphabet did not lead to the replacement of sinographic writing and the learning of ls. For these, the continued use of sinography and the ls literacy practices it entailed represent a triumph of tradition, hierarchy, and ascriptive power over progress, democracy, and merit. As Koh Jongsok, a South Korean essayist and public intellectual has written, “The history of the struggle between han’gŭl and Chinese characters is precisely the history of the struggle between democracy and feudalism” (Koh 2014: 241).22 No less distraught proclamations of “missed opportunities” can be found within academic scholarship as well: The invention of han’gŭl should have marked a turning point in the history of written language in Korea. For han’gŭl was a writing system so simple, convenient, and accurate that almost any Korean could master it in a matter of weeks—instead of years, as in the case of hanmun. Han’gŭl made it possible, for the first time, to banish the alien writing system used in Korea for more than a thousand years. As it happened, however, the history of han’gŭl from the time of its creation until the very eve of the twentieth century was one of missed opportunities. Kichung Kim 2015: 4

Contrary to the teleological view, Sixiang Wang cogently argues: “To view the development of the Korean script as a precursor to an allegedly inevitable process of vernacularization contorts fifteenth- to eighteenth-century cultural phenomena to fit a late nineteenth and twentieth-century narrative of nation building….” Wang continues: “Emphasis on the alphabet’s invention as an assertion of linguistic difference conceals the significant roles that the new script took on as an instrument for mediating difference” (Wang 2014: 60, 61). It was exactly this issue of whether the new alphabet mediated or exacerbated difference that was the grounds for the conflict between Sejong and a coterie of officials led by Ch’oe Malli 崔萬理 (d. 1445), a high-ranking scholar in the Hall of Worthies (Chiphyŏnjŏn 集賢殿).23 The group remonstrated before King Sejong in an anti-alphabet memorial of early 1444 following an announcement of the script’s development. As their memorial and the exchange with

22

Never mind that it is North Korea that uses the alphabet to the almost full exclusion of sinographs in public life, while in South Korea they are still tolerated. 23 Though I had read and reread the account many times previously, this crucial aspect of the conflict first became evident to me only when reading Sixiang Wang (2019: 42).

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Sejong that followed its reading at court show,24 the anti-alphabet memorialists had fully assimilated the discourses of Korea’s special partnership in the Chinese ecumene. They considered the introduction of peculiar inscriptional practices based in local speech sounds to be an improper deviation from the cultivation of the uniform culture and institutions of Chinese civilization—a barbarian-like betrayal of the literary and material customs bequeathed to them by Kija. The new alphabet would, they feared, work to exacerbate rather than mitigate the differences between Korea and China. Wrote Ch’oe: Our court, since the times of our founders and ancestors, has with utmost sincerity served the Great. We have uniformly honored Chinese institutions. But now, at this time of a uniform culture and uniform institutions [K. tongmun tonggwe 同文同軌], we create the Vernacular Script. We observe and attend this with alarm…. If these graphs should flow into China, and if people there should adversely criticize them, how could we be without shame, considering our Service to the Great and our emulation of Chinese civilization! Although from ancient times customs and local usages have differed within the Nine Lands, there has never been a case of separately making a script based on local speech. Only the likes of the Mongols, Tanguts, Jurchens, Japanese, and Tibetans have their own graphs. But these are the matters of barbarians, and not worth talking about. It has been traditionally said, “Change the barbarians using Chinese ways; we have never heard of changing toward barbarism.” From one age to the next, China has always regarded our country as having the bequeathed customs of Kija, but in matters of culture, literary and material, and in ritual and music, we have rather imitated Chinese civilization. To now separately make the Vernacular Script is to abandon China and identify ourselves with barbarians. This would be what they call forsaking the perfume of storax for the dungball pushed by the beetle. How can this fail to have great implications for our civilization!25 24

On the origins of the Korean script and the debates that followed its promulgation, see Ledyard (1998). 25 一，我朝自祖宗以來，至誠事大，一遵華制，今當同文同軌之時，創作諺文，有駭 觀聽 …．若流中國，或有非議之者，豈不有愧於事大慕華？ 一，自古九州之內，風土雖異，未有因方言而別爲文字者，唯蒙古・西夏・女 眞・日本・西蕃之類，各有其字，是皆夷狄事耳，無足道者．傳曰：“用夏變夷，未 聞變於夷者也” 歷代中國皆以我國有箕子遺風，文物禮樂，比擬中華．今別作諺 文，捨中國而自同於夷狄，是所謂棄蘇合之香，而取螗螂之丸也，豈非文明之大 累哉？ This and subsequent passages from the exchange between Ch’oe Malli’s group

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The “great implications” for the civilization Korea shared with China were, Ch’oe predicted, that the use of the new alphabet would undermine sinography in general and lead to the eradication of Confucian learning. Ch’oe argued that this would happen as both clerks and officials, seeing that government offices could be successfully attained without having “to strain their minds and labor their thoughts going through the study of ‘Nature and Pattern’” (which the long process of ls literacy training entailed), would come to abjure that training altogether. As Ch’oe wrote: After a few decades of this, surely there will not be too many who know the written word. They might be able to use the Vernacular Script in application to clerkly matters, but if they do not know the writings of the sages and wise men, “they will not study, their faces will be to the wall.” They will be blind with respect to right and wrong in the Pattern of things. They will merely be expert in the Vernacular Script, and what use can be made of that! We fear that the Culture of the Right, which our nation has amassed and accumulated, will gradually come to be swept from the earth.26 Sejong did not deny that he hoped his new alphabet could be used in place of idu, which he argued, had been primarily intended “to ease things for the people” by making ls texts more accessible to local officials.27 “And if [idu] eased things for the people,” Sejong responded, “will not the Vernacular Script now ease things for the people?”28 Sejong thus upbraided his remonstrators for denouncing his efforts while they revered the works of idu’s purported inventor, Sŏl Ch’ong: “How can you people consider Sŏl Ch’ong to have been right but consider the work of your own sovereign ruler to be wrong?”29 and King Sejong are from the Sejong sillok 世宗實錄, kwŏn 103, Sejong year 26 (1444), 2nd month, 20th day, entry 1. The English translation above and those that follow are, with slight modifications, from Ledyard (1998: 141–149). 26 如此則數十年之後，知文字者必少．雖能以諺文而施於吏事，不知聖賢之文 字，則不學墻面，昧於事理之是非，徒工於諺文，將何用哉？我國家積累右文之 化，恐漸至掃地矣． 27 Ledyard argues that statements about idu easing things for the people were “probably a face-saving way of saying the local officials needed translations, since using idu or t’o to render a Chinese text would have made it no more accessible to the peasants than it was before” (Ledyard 1998: 88). 28 且吏讀制作之本意，無乃爲其便民乎？如其便民也，則今之諺文，亦不爲便  民乎？ 29 汝等以薜聰爲是，而非其君上之事，何哉？

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As to the claim that the new alphabet would replace sinography in general leading to the “Culture of the Right” (K. umun 右文, i.e., Confucian learning) being “swept from the earth,” this Sejong did flatly deny. “Do you people know anything about rhyme books?” he rebutted. “How many initial consonants are there among the Four Tones and the Seven Innunciants? If I do not correct these rhyme books, who will correct them?”30 Sejong here referred to a project he had just commissioned only days earlier—the translation of a Yuan dynasty rhyme dictionary using the new alphabet. The eradication of sinography, to say nothing of Confucian learning, was, as Gari Ledyard (1998: 150) writes: “hardly contemplated by the man who had just ordered the translation of a Chinese [rhyme] dictionary for the promotion of Chinese learning.” Long predating Sejong, the publication of rhyme books for preserving or recovering sinographs’ proper pronunciations (i.e., their “correct sounds”) reflected an underlying assumption that sinographs not only contained intrinsic meaning but that their meanings were most accurately understood and conveyed through a “correct” enunciation of a sinograph’s sound; and by extension, that a full and proper understanding of an ls text could best be gained through the “correct” vocalization of that text.31 As Ledyard notes, phonological research projects undertaken in the early decades of the Chosŏn dynasty show that Koreans were thoroughly aware of the differences between their contemporary pronunciations of sinographs and those of both contemporary China and of earlier Chinese periods (Ledyard 1998: 93–97). And as Wang describes, anxiety over the linguistic differences that had led to early-Chosŏn misreadings of the Ming legal code and to grave diplomatic missteps at the Ming court was a prominent element of early Chosŏn’s internal discussions and policies regarding its relationship with the Ming (Wang 2014: 64–71). Both Ledyard and Wang thus conclude that the motives underlying the alphabet project were as much entangled with Sejong’s concerns to mediate the linguistic difference between Korea and China as they were with assertions of that difference. And his concerns were reflected not only in the lexicographical projects he commissioned for recovering sinographs’ “correct sounds,” but also 30 四聲七音，字母有幾乎？若非予正其韻書，則伊誰正之乎？ 31 This assumption long predated Sejong. As Timothy O’Neill notes about the cumbersome and self-referential fanqie 反切 “spelling system” originally used within dictionaries to indicate the pronunciation of sinographs, over time “it became standard commentarial practice to give fanqie glosses in all kinds of texts, up to and including the classics—in fact, many of the most important commentaries on the Chinese classics consist in large part of such sound glosses, e.g., the Jingdian shiwen 經典釋文 of Lu Deming 陸德明 (550–630 ce)” (O’Neill 2016: 7).

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in the very name he chose for his alphabet: the correct sounds to teach the people (K. hunmin chŏngŭm 訓民正音). Sejong’s 1446 preface to the Hunmin chŏngŭm (the text published to debut the alphabet of the same name) makes it clear that he hoped the new alphabet would allow for popular literacy. The preface, however, in no way indicates that this desired outcome was to entail an end to the primacy of ls in Korea, nor in fact does it state that popular literacy necessarily meant only popular vernacular literacy. Throughout the remainder of the Chosŏn dynasty the script was employed only modestly for vernacular literary production, and yet, contrary to modern characterizations, it was hardly rejected outright by Korea’s ruling scholar-officials. Rather, from its invention through to the Chosŏn dynasty’s final decades, the alphabet was most widely used by the literati as a tool to bolster ls literacy’s dominance. Of the early works that employed the new alphabet—including those works produced by those most closely connected to the alphabet project—most were hybrid editions of classical texts known as ŏnhae 諺解 (“vernacular explications”) that paired the ls text of an existing Buddhist sutra or Confucian classic with a passage-by-passage vernacular rendition explicating its meaning. In order to ensure a correct vocalization of the original ls text, ŏnhae editions also used the alphabet to inscribe t’o glosses (replacing the abbreviated sinographs typical of kugyŏl-style t’o glossing) within the ls original as well as to inscribe pronunciation glosses (ŭm 音) for each sinograph indicating their “correct sound.” An ŏnhae edition of either Buddhist or Confucian ls texts thus did not create separate stand-alone translations that replaced the ls original, but rather acted as scaffolding to facilitate access to and a correct reading of an ls original—that is, both a correct vocalization through its ŭm and t’o glosses and a correct interpretation through its vernacular explication. Though the practice developed several generations later, the use of the alphabet to facilitate ls learning can also be seen in its utilization within sinograph primers to indicate each sinograph’s vernacular gloss (sŏk 釋32) and Sino-Korean reading (ŭm). The first such primer was Ch’oe Sejin’s 崔世珍 (1468–1542) Hunmong chahoe 訓蒙字會 (A Collection of Graphs for Instructing Children), published in 1527.33 From 1575 through to the end of the Chosŏn dynasty, copies of the Thousand Character Classic (C. Qianziwen 千字文, Ch’ŏnjamun) too were published using the alphabet to inscribe sinographs’ sŏk and ŭm. Though the Korean script was used in various other ways, the ubiquity 32 33

Also sometimes called hun 訓 or saegim. The preface to Hunmong chahoe also included an introductory primer on the use of the alphabet.

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Figure 10.1

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Opening page of the 1691 printing of the Sŏkpong ch’ŏnjamun Source: National Library of Korea

of the Thousand Character Classic and its prominent place at the ground floor of ls learning imparted to every young boy that undertook even the rudiments of ls literacy training not only a basic knowledge of the alphabet but a conception of its primary function as being a useful inscriptional technique in service of gaining and strengthening ls literacy. Likely a reflection of this conception and usage, the alphabet was frequently referred to as ŏnmun panjŏl 諺文反切 (“vernacular-script fanqie”). And this understanding of the alphabet as primarily a pedagogical device useful for ls literacy training would have been fortified, as we have already discussed, as the boys progressed to encounter

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and make use of ŏnhae editions of classical texts. Thus, the invention of the Korean alphabet not only did not upend the dominance of either sinography or ls literacy, but in the very works in which it saw its most widespread use the alphabet served to improve ls literacy and thus strengthen ls’s dominance. 4

Reconfiguring ls Instruction for the Modern Classroom

Chosŏn-era education focused primarily on the needs of men and boys from the scholar-official class (yangban 兩班).34 Learning to read and write in LS and to fully assimilate the knowledge contained in the Confucian texts written therein constituted the fullness of education. Beginning when a boy was age seven or eight, ls literacy was learned through sunup-to-sundown instruction at either privately established and locally funded village primary schools known as sŏdang 書堂 (“book hall”)35 or within individual households through one-on-one instruction from a family member or hired tutor. The boys memorized a series of primers through rote recitations beginning with the Thousand Character Classic and ending with the Elementary Learning (C. Xiaoxue, K. Sohak 小學), and though attrition was high, for those boys who advanced to secondary education, the curriculum of canonical Confucian texts was intended to prepare them for the civil service examinations. Composition instruction began in the final years of primary education—crucial to which was instruction in reading and writing verse—and eventuated in compositional competency in multiple genres of ls poetry and prose. Education was organized around the sometimes contradictory and sometimes complementary aims of public service and private self-cultivation, with the hybrid system of public and private educational institutions reflecting these aims. Such was the nature of Korean education until the final decades of the Chosŏn dynasty. The opening of Korea through Western-style treaty relationships—first with Japan in 1876 and then with Western countries beginning with the U.S. in 1882—was a fundamental departure from Korea’s previous relationships with its neighbors and the world beyond. Though these new treaty relationships did not immediately overturn Korea’s sense of itself as an integral part of the Chinese world order and an inheritor and protector of “This Culture of Ours,” they did however entail new encounters with foreign peoples and 34

With only a handful of known exceptions, women and girls in Chosŏn received no formal, institutionalized education or training in LS literacy. 35 Village schools were also known variously as kŭlpang 글방 (writing room), sŏjae 書齋 (study hall), or sasuk 私塾 (private school).

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ideas that would greatly challenge this world view and the Confucian episteme on which it was based. Struggling against both intractable traditionalists and radical reformers, the Korean court initiated modest and sometimes halting efforts at reform in the wake of the U.S. treaty. This included the establishment of a government newspaper intended to introduce new ideas and technical knowhow coming from the West via China and Japan and the founding of new educational institutions, operated primarily by Western educators, for training interpreters and officials for diplomatic service. At the same time, the court allowed Western Protestant missionaries to establish schools in Seoul, and it was in these schools that the first lasting changes to Koreans’ ls learning and use were introduced. In order to more widely evangelize the Korean public, the missionaries promoted popular vernacular literacy and literary production through their publication efforts and in their educational activities. The missionaries’ belief in the necessity of vernacular literacy and popular education were vastly different from and often in opposition to traditional Korean views on literacy and education. Thus, though they included ls instruction within their schools’ multi-subject curricula, they did so in grudging acquiescence to the demands of students’ parents, considering it initially only a temporary measure. They first allowed ls instruction for primary-aged children using traditional primers and classical texts memorized by rote recitation in the traditional mode. Some of the missionaries were discomfited by the use of Confucian texts in their Christian schools, however, and so began teaching ls using missionary tracts published by Protestants in China, thus separating ls instruction from its traditional Confucian content. As missionary schools multiplied throughout the country in the 1890s this de-Confucianization of ls literacy instruction became more widespread, and by 1904, a four-volume series of readers titled Yumong ch’ŏnja 牖蒙千字 (English title: The Thousand Character Series: Korean Reader) was published by Canadian missionary James Scarth Gale (1863–1937) and his Christian convert assistant Yi Ch’angjik 李昌稙 (1866–1938), which desacralized ls learning even further by focusing solely on secular topics.36 Korean efforts to promote vernacular literacy and diminish the learning and use of ls first began in earnest during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. A contest for control over the Korean peninsula, the war ushered a cadre of Korean reformers into a newly formed governing cabinet backed by the Japanese military. Members of the reform cabinet, many of whom had spent time in Japan or the U.S. over the previous decade, rejected the “old 36

For a more extensive examination of the missionaries’ education activities and their impact on ls learning and use, see Wells (2020: 158–177, 230–251).

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knowledge” (kusik 舊識) of Korea’s Confucian episteme and instead embraced the Western-derived, Japanese-mediated replacement of “Civilization and Enlightenment” (J. bunmei kaika, K. munmyong kaehwa 文明開化) with its attendant “new knowledge” (sinsik 新式). Heavily influenced by Japan’s ongoing language and writing reforms, they declared Korean alphabetic writing to be the “national writing” (kungmun 國文, a borrowing of the Japanese kokubun) and considered it a more fit vehicle than ls for the new knowledge they sought to propagate. Additionally, along with a wide range of governmental and societal institutions, they targeted the Korean state’s bureaucratic and educational institutions for reform leading to the abolition of the traditional civil service examinations and the establishment of a modern education system that prioritized vernacular literacy. Though these reforms met with mixed success following the collapse of Japanese influence over the Korean government at the end of the war, the official elevation of the Korean alphabet and the discursive foreignization of ls as mere Chinese writing (hanmun) initiated a real and lasting demotion of ls’s status. Combined with the abolition of the traditional examination system, which severed the link between government office holding and ls literacy and thus eliminated a principle rational for its learning and use, these policies and declarations went a long way to upending Korea’s traditional hierarchy of inscriptional practice. A further transformation of this hierarchy came following Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. At the conclusion of this war Japan was able finally to assert sole control over Korean affairs and immediately took over Korea’s fledgling modern education system, expanding it rapidly. This takeover of government education spurred a rapid increase in private educational activities. Japan’s now obvious imperialist intentions led Koreans in great numbers to send their children to mission schools, establish private schools, form education societies, and publish textbooks in an effort to “redeem the nation through education.”37 What had been at most a few hundred private modern schools in 1904 run mostly by missionaries or Christian churches, grew by 1910 to around 3,000, mostly secular, private modern schools run by Koreans.38 Though the objectives of Japanese education officials and private Korean educators differed greatly, the promotion of vernacular literacy was core to the 37 38

For a fuller examination of this shift in Koreans’ educational priorities, see Yuh (2008: 211–225). According to a 1911 survey by the colonial government, 1,272 private Korean-run and 755 private missionary or church-run schools were registered by the government. See Chŏng (2005: 16). As Watanabe Manabu notes, however, many other modern private schools that had not yet received government approval were not included in this official total, bringing the actual total closer to 3,000. See Watanabe (2010: 280).

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efforts of both. Nevertheless, Korean parents—who still equated facility in ls with education itself—demanded that their children continue to receive training in ls literacy. Thus, as the missionaries had done twenty years previously, both state and private schools acquiesced to parents’ demands by including ls instruction within their curricula. However, condensing ls instruction, which had traditionally been a decade-long sunup-to-sundown affair, into a single course within a multi-subject curriculum required substantial departures from the traditional content, methods, and aims of instruction. Therefore, despite centuries of ls instruction in Korea and the existence of a robust pedagogical apparatus of primers, chrestomathies, and canonical texts glossed and annotated to facilitate it, this new classroom subject, Hanmunkwa 漢文科, required educators within the modern schools to develop new methods and materials to teach ls, publishing new Hanmunkwa textbooks whose contents and pedagogical methods departed in significant ways from those of traditional ls primers and texts. Government textbook preparation and publication began shortly after the promulgation of a series of government-school regulations in 1906, and the proliferation in private schools led to a boom in private textbook publication as well. Second only to math/arithmetic textbooks in the numbers published, Hanmunkwa textbooks were a core constituent of the publication boom. A consequence of the proliferation of private textbooks was the development of a wide variety of approaches to teaching Hanmunkwa in private schools. Considering just their content, for example, some authors compiled textbooks using only excerpts from classical Confucian texts, others chose past works in ls by exclusively Korean authors, while still others compiled new ls compositions covering both historical and contemporary topics from a nationalist perspective. And regardless of the variety in their content and aims, ls learning was treated by most as a living, dynamic tradition and a core component of Korean inscriptional practice that would allow not only for continued access to the knowledge and customs of Korea’s past but would be capable of expressing new ideas and patriotic sentiments. This boom in private Hanmunkwa instruction and the proliferation of new textbooks to facilitate it was to last only briefly. Seeking to gain control over the curriculum of private schools and to censor the nationalist content in many of their textbooks, Japanese officials promulgated a September 1909 education ordinance regulating private education. The ordinance stipulated that the curricula and textbooks of private schools, like those of their staterun counterparts, would require approval by the Japanese-controlled Ministry of Education, enforced by means of a strict textbook screening survey. Once the survey was fully instituted in January 1910, the content and format of

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new private-school ls textbooks came to mirror their much more limited government-issued counterparts prepared by Japanese officials, which trained students in no more than a passive reading comprehension of excerpts from classical texts. Japanese-controlled Hanmunkwa, therefore, greatly limited the scope and application of ls literacy and was the beginning of the end of a living ls tradition in Korea, transforming it into a legacy literacy useful only in limited domains and providing nothing more than a level of backward compatibility with old knowledge. 5

Conclusion

This chapter has shown that the status of ls as a limited legacy literacy within contemporary Korean society was not foreordained. The invention of the Korean alphabet did not spell the inevitable doom of ls, nor was the alphabet rejected or under-utilized by Sinophilic elites. Instead, for more than four centuries following its creation the alphabet was most widely employed as a tool for improving ls literacy and thus strengthened the dominance of ls in Korea’s inscriptional hierarchy. Moreover, when in the final decades of the Chosŏn dynasty first Protestant missionaries, then Korean reformers, and finally Japanese education officials sought to promote Korean alphabetic writing and to limit the scope of ls’s learning and use, Korean parents nonetheless persisted in their desire for their children to learn ls. Therefore, the transformation of Korea’s inscriptional hierarchy at the turn of the twentieth century might more correctly be characterized as a forced conversion from without rather than as a natural evolution or inevitable revolution from within. By undermining belief in a teleological vernacularization narrative this chapter has also demonstrated the veracity of Sheldon Pollock’s observation cited in the introduction, that “vernacularity is not a natural state of being but a willed act of becoming,” one that cultural and political actors choose to inaugurate (Pollock 2006: 24). And in the case of Korean vernacularization, these political and cultural actors—these inaugurators of vernacularization—were as often Protestant missionaries and Japanese colonial officials, as they were nationalist Korean authors and linguists. Thus, the gravest sins of the Whig history of Korean vernacularization are its willful sins of omission. Finally, although the multi-subject curriculum of the modern-school classroom placed limits on instructional time and content that prevented the simple porting over of traditional ls literacy instructional modes into the new school environment, when left to their own devices, the Western missionaries and Korean private educators who developed Hanmunkwa textbooks were able

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to produce a wide range of approaches to its instruction. While it may have been the case that in the end not all of these approaches would have worked in many or most schools, because the textbook screening survey bent the development of Hanmunkwa textbook materials to political rather than pedagogical ends, we cannot know which approaches would have proved pedagogically sound. Furthermore, what the variety of approaches to teaching ls shows is that were it not for Japan’s control over Korean education policies we might well imagine an inscriptional ecology in Korea much more accommodating of the influences of ls style and phraseology than the one we have today. References An Pyŏnghŭi. 1976. “Kugyŏl kwa hanmun hundok e taehayŏ” [On Kugyŏl and Hanmun Gloss Readings]. Chindan hakpo 41: 139–158. An Pyŏnghŭi. 1979. “Chungse-ŏ ŭi han’gŭl charyo e taehan chonghapchŏgin koch’al” [A Comprehensive Examination of Middle Korean Han’gŭl Materials]. Kyujanggak: 109–147. Bagley, Robert W. 2004. “Anyang Writing and the Origin of Chinese Writing.” In The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process, edited by Stephen D. Houston, 190–249. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Bol, Peter K. 1992. “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Chŏng Hŭisuk. 2005. “Chŏnt’ong sŏdang kyoyuk esŏ kŭndae ch’odŭng kyoyuk ŭro ŭi chŏnhwan” [The Transition from Traditional Sŏdang Education to Modern Elementary Education]. In Han’guk kŭndae ch’odŭng kyoyuk ŭi sŏngnip [The Formation of Modern Korean Elementary Education], edited by Kim Chŏnghyo and Yi Sŏngŭn, 9–46. Seoul, Korea: Kyoyuk kwahaksa. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1st American ed. World of Man. New York: Pantheon Books. Gershevitch, Ilya. 1979. “The Alloglottography of Old Persian.” Transactions of the Philological Society 77(1): 114–190. Haboush, JaHyun Kim. 1999. “Constructing the Center: The Ritual Controversy and the Search for a New Identity in 17th-Century Korea.” In Culture and the State in Late Choson Korea, edited by JaHyun Kim Haboush and Martina Deuchler, 46–90. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Kim, Kichung. 2015. An Introduction to Classical Korean Literature: From Hyangga to P‘ansori. New York: Routledge. Kin Bunkyō. 2021. Literary Sinitic and East Asia: A Cultural Sphere of Vernacular Reading. Boston and Leiden: Brill.

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King, Ross. 1998. “Nationalism and Language Reform in Korea: The Questione Della Lingua in Precolonial Korea.” In Nationalism and the Construction of Korean Identity, edited by Hyung Il Pai and Timothy R. Tangherlini, 33–72. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California. King, Ross. 2007. “North and South Korea.” In Language and National Identity in Asia, edited by Andrew Simpson, 200–235. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. King, Ross. 2021. “Editor’s Preface: Vernacular Reading in the Sinographic Cosmopolis and Beyond.” In Literary Sinitic and East Asia: A Cultural Sphere of Vernacular Reading, by Bunkyō Kin, edited by Ross King, ix–xl. Boston and Leiden: Brill. Koh, Jongsok. 2014. Infected Korean Language, Purity Versus Hybridity: From the Sinographic Cosmopolis to Japanese Colonialism to Global English. Translated by Ross King. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press. Kornicki, Peter. 2018. Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ledyard, Gari. 1998. The Korean Language Reform of 1446. Seoul: Sin’gu munhwasa. Lee, Ki-Moon. 1997. “The Inventor of the Korean Alphabet.” In The Korean Alphabet: Its History and Structure, edited by Young-Key Kim-Renaud, 11–30. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Lee, Ki-Moon, and S. Robert Ramsey. 2011. A History of the Korean Language. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Lewis, Mark Edward. 1999. Writing and Authority in Early China. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Lurie, David B. 2011. Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Mair, Victor H. 2001a. “Introduction: The Origins and Impact of Literati Culture.” In The Columbia History of Chinese Literature, edited by Victor H. Mair, 1–15. New York: Columbia University Press. Mair, Victor H. 2001b. “Language and Script.” In The Columbia History of Chinese Literature, edited by Victor H. Mair, 19–57. New York: Columbia University Press. O’Neill, Timothy Michael. 2016. Ideography and Chinese Language Theory: A History. Welten Ostasiens = Worlds of East Asia = Mondes de l’Extrême-Orient, Band 26. Berlin: De Gruyter. Pollock, Sheldon. 2006. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press. Puett, Michael. 2001. “Philosophy and Literature in Early China.” In The Columbia History of Chinese Literature, edited by Victor H. Mair, 70–85. New York: Columbia University Press. Schmid, Andre. 2002. Korea between Empires, 1895–1919. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Schmidt-Glintzer, Helwig, and Victor H. Mair. 2001. “Buddhist Literature.” In The Columbia History of Chinese Literature, edited by Victor H. Mair, 160–172. New York: Columbia University Press. Shim, Jae-Hoon. 2002. “A New Understanding of Kija Chosŏn as a Historical Anachronism.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 62(2): 271–305. Sim Kyŏngho. 2012. Han’guk hanmun kich’ohaksa [A History of Philology in Traditional Korea]. 3 vols. P’aju: T’aehaksa. Wang, Sixiang. 2014. “The Sounds of Our Country: Interpreters, Linguistic Knowledge, and the Politics of Language in Early Chosŏn Korea.” In Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919, edited by Benjamin A. Elman, 58–95. Sinica Leidensia, volume 115. Leiden; Boston: Brill. Wang, Sixiang. 2015. “Co-Constructing Empire in Early Chosŏn Korea: Knowledge Production and the Culture of Diplomacy, 1392–1592.” PhD diss., Columbia University. Wang, Sixiang. 2019. “Story of the Eastern Chamber: Dilemmas of Vernacular Language and Political Authority in Eighteenth-Century Chosŏn.” Journal of Korean Studies 24(1): 29–62. Watanabe Manabu. 2010. Wat’anabe ŭi han’guk kyoyuksa [Watanabe’s History of Korean Education]. Seoul: Munŭmsa. Wells, William Scott. 2011. “From Center to Periphery : The Demotion of Literary Sinitic and the Beginnings of Hanmunkwa—Korea, 1876–1910.” MA thesis, University of British Columbia. Wells, William Scott. 2020. “A Limited, Legacy Literacy: Reconfiguring Literary Sinitic as Hanmunkwa in Korea, 1876–1910.” PhD diss., University of British Columbia. Yuh, Leighanne Kimberly. 2008. “Education, the Struggle for Power, and Identity Formation in Korea, 1876–1910.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles.

Chapter 11

Script Apartheid and Literary Production in Pre-modern Korea: Framing Pollock’s Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in East Asia Gregory N. Evon 1

Introductory Remarks: Assessing Script Apartheid in Pre-modern Korea1

Several decades before Japan provoked a skirmish with Korea in 1875 that led to the end of the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910) and then Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945), the Confucian scholar Chŏng Yagyong 丁若鏞 (1762–1836) wrote his Ilbonnon 日本論 (Treatise on Japan) (Chŏng 2001: 91–92). Given the terrible destruction suffered by Chosŏn during the Japanese invasions of the late sixteenth century, assessing Japan was no idle matter. Chŏng concluded that Chosŏn had no reason to fear Japan. What is of interest here is how he arrived at this conclusion. His evidence was drawn from the writings of Tokugawa (1603–1868) Japanese scholars such as Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 (1666–1728). In Chŏng’s view, these writings demonstrated that Japan had become civilized sometime around the turn of the eighteenth century. However, this was not an idea of culture or civilization that could conceptually encompass Heian 平安 (794–1185) fiction, Nō plays, the haiku poetry of Matsuo Bashō 松尾芭蕉 (1644–1694), or even the richness of Japanese Buddhism. Chŏng’s central point was that Tokugawa Japanese scholars had demonstrated excellent abilities in Confucian-based literary skill and scholarship, and if his analysis was narrowly focused, it also had deep historical antecedents. At root, this praise reflected the classical Confucian view that literature and Confucian learning ought not to be seen as two separate things. In practical terms, this assumed mastery of classical or literary Chinese (hereafter, Literary Sinitic, per Mair [1994]). Chŏng’s judgment was at once practically possible and conceptually sensible only through Literary Sinitic and the Confucian tradition. In Chŏng’s view, the Japanese were doing things correctly, and if his 1 This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOE) (AKS-2011-AAA-2103). The author would also like to thank Lee Dong-Eun and the staff at the Dongguk University Central Library, who provided invaluable assistance during a research trip in November 2012. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163

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hauteur seems rather laughable in retrospect, it is necessary to bear in mind that Chosŏn Koreans had been vigorously engaged for hundreds of years in the sorts of Confucian scholarship taken up in earnest only later by the Japanese. Ogyū Sorai and other Japanese scholars of his ilk no doubt would have been thrilled to know of Chŏng’s praise (Nakai 1980: esp. 172). On the other hand, the Japanese had a much longer head start on the Koreans with respect to the development of indigenous scripts, literary production in the vernacular, and hybrid forms of writing that made use of both Chinese characters (hereafter, sinographs) and Japanese native kana scripts. Chŏng’s praise for the Japanese was tantamount to praising an erasure of Japanese-ness at the written linguistic level: the Literary Sinitic written by the Japanese could be read by a Chosŏn Korean with no difficulty. Or cast in terms drawn from Sheldon Pollock (2006), to whom I will turn below, the Japanese had entered the cosmopolitan order and hence civilization. What was at stake, however, was not simply a matter of written language. In this conception, the “how” of Literary Sinitic and the “what” of Confucianism were inextricable. Chŏng was thus assessing the Japanese in Confucian-based terms that were fundamental to elite conceptions of literature during Chosŏn and which were typically expressed in prefaces and postscripts to literary collections. This does not mean, however, that there were no tensions within such elite conceptions of literature; that there were no changes over the course of the dynasty; or even that there was a complete match between theory and practice. Chŏng’s voluminous writings, in fact, encompass those and other related literary questions. There was nonetheless a high degree of continuity in the role of Literary Sinitic as well as an emphasis on the sinographic script in the larger Korean literary tradition. This became all the more marked after the middle of the fifteenth century, when the Korean alphabetic script was devised. Over the following four and a half centuries, there remained an overwhelming reliance on Literary Sinitic, and hence sinographs, and although language and script are, of course, not the same thing, there was a close correspondence between the two in the Korean literary tradition. This correspondence in the Korean context was much closer than what historically had existed in Japan, and Chŏng’s praise for the Japanese writers and scholars must be read partly in that light. Korea’s alphabetic script was used for vernacular literature—both poetry and prose—but there was an obvious reluctance to exploit its full possibilities in literary production. This reluctance was evident in what can be called “script apartheid,” by which I mean a strict separation of scripts, so that sinographs and the Korean alphabetic script typically did not occupy the same visual space. The difference with Japan in this regard is striking, albeit far from absolute. As Lurie explains in this volume, there was in Japan a sense of a marked

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contrast generated by the mixing of scripts that was strong enough to elicit explicit mention in the titles of works that contained such graphic admixtures. Even so, the Korean case appears extreme, and the notable exception to this general rule as found in ŏnhae 諺解 or glossed texts provides a clue. Such texts incorporated the Korean script as a matter of course, but the sole purpose of such incorporation was to enable access to Literary Sinitic texts. In these instances, the Korean alphabetic script was not a tool of an autonomous textual creation, but instead a tool to master preexisting Literary Sinitic texts. The result was paradoxical since, as Wells argues in this volume, the use of the Korean alphabetic script in ŏnhae 諺解 texts helped to bolster the dominance of Literary Sinitic. The Korean experience is also illuminated by an attempt, discussed by Phan in this volume, to fashion a new script in Vietnam in the early twentieth century. The most striking feature of Phan’s analysis when viewed from the Korean perspective is how the attempt he describes was marked by a fundamental contradiction. On the one hand, the attempt to fashion a new script aimed to safeguard an autonomous Vietnamese identity untouched by foreign influence, both French and Chinese. On the other hand, the conceptual basis for this new script was indebted to such foreign influence. The classical Chinese inheritance, broadly construed, was crucial, and the similarities and differences with the creation of the Korean alphabetic script are particularly striking (on this issue, see also Wells in this volume). The essential point is that Korea’s “script apartheid,” as I have called this phenomenon, reflected the dominance of Literary Sinitic, and yet it also laid the groundwork for vernacular textual production that, in some instances at least, might challenge that dominance. Below I will address this issue in greater detail, focusing on broad critical questions that are implicit in Chŏng’s praise of the Japanese but which, for historical and bibliographical reasons, can be discussed more fully through the writings of Kim Manjung 金萬重 (1637–1692). Since it was through Pollock’s The Language of the Gods in the World of Men that I came to see the significance of this question of “script apartheid,” it is necessary to begin with a sketch of some of the major differences between the world of Sanskrit as discussed by Pollock and the East Asian context of Literary Sinitic. 2

The Worlds of Sanskrit and Literary Sinitic: Key Points of Divergence

Pollock takes note of some of the principal contours of East Asia, but three points require elaboration in this context. The first concerns the existence of multiple scripts in the Sanskrit world. On the basis of Pollock (2006), it

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is reasonable to conclude that multiple languages, Sanskrit included, could be—and were—written in multiple scripts with no apparent anxiety attached to the matter (229, 273–274). Or put another way, there was no such thing as a “Sanskrit script.” This suggests a far greater degree of independence in practice between language and script than existed in China, Vietnam, Korea or Japan. Koreans, Vietnamese, and Japanese did not write in Literary Sinitic using their own scripts; rather, they used their own scripts to write in Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese. To be sure, native scripts could be used to transcribe the sounds of texts in Literary Sinitic or translate/gloss them; likewise, in China, sinographs themselves were used for their sound values in order to transcribe pronunciations of unknown sinographs (C. fanqie 反切). In the Korean case, it is also necessary to bear in mind that the development of the native alphabetic script in the middle of the fifteenth century seems to have been motivated partly by a desire to standardize and correct the pronunciation of sinographs. The Japanese case is perhaps the most complex, due to both the existence of multiple scripts (sinographs, hiragana, and katakana) and the oral and written technologies surrounding textual production and reading practices (Lurie 2011). Yet even in the Japanese context, native scripts were not used to produce Literary Sinitic texts, whereas sinographs were used to produce Japanese texts. The situation was, of course, different in China where sinographs were the native script. Notwithstanding the predominance of Literary Sinitic in China through the early twentieth century, sinographs had been used—and are now used regularly—to write vernacular Chinese, but to speak of Chinese using sinographs to write Literary Sinitic is redundant. In the cases of China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan, Literary Sinitic thus could not function without sinographs, but sinographs were used—albeit to varying degrees and in varying ways—for writing things that were not Literary Sinitic. The second point concerns the relationship between the visual and the oral/aural realms. Notwithstanding the difficulties acknowledged by Pollock with respect to understanding the origins of Sanskrit as well as its restricted uses and how these changed over time, it is obvious that Sanskrit was “sayable” while Literary Sinitic was “unsayable” (Mair 1994: 708). To know and use Sanskrit put an emphasis on “language-as-sound” (the use of different scripts to write Sanskrit makes this clear), whereas the mastery of Literary Sinitic required above all else mastery of a complex script (the sole use of sinographs to write Literary Sinitic makes this clear). There was thus a far closer correspondence between script and written language in Literary Sinitic than existed in the case of Sanskrit: to learn Literary Sinitic meant learning the sinographic script in which it was written. But despite the importance of the visual dimension with respect to Literary Sinitic, it is also necessary to emphasize that

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mastery of Literary Sinitic required much extra-textual information and vernacular explanation. To master Literary Sinitic otherwise is inconceivable: one had to memorize the pronunciations of thousands of discrete sinographs, their meanings, and graphic representations. To understand what one was learning to read therefore required a gloss, and as Whitman notes, “[v]ernacular glossing of Chinese texts was a linguistic habitus practiced throughout the nonChinese speaking Sinosphere” (2011: 116). The same was surely true in China itself, albeit in a different form and one that has left little evidence, or at least, evidence different than what is found in Japan and Korea (for an overview of the situation in China, see Brokaw [2005: 11–17]). The very notion of “vernacular glossing” thus steers attention towards the high probability that the overwhelming majority of such glossing occurred in face-to-face settings, as teachers explained texts to students in the vernacular, and was never recorded in the first place. One consequence of learning to use sinographs to read and write in Literary Sinitic was that there was a tendency to privilege the visual in seemingly incongruent contexts, and at times such incongruence was all the more marked because of the political-theoretical and practical importance that was attached to sound (correct sounds, i.e., 正音) in the conception and composition of Literary Sinitic poetry: political-theoretical, in that the Confucian tradition saw a link between the quality of morals and governance of a given place and the poetry produced there; practical, in that the organization of Literary Sinitic poetry—no matter whether written by Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans, or Japanese—relied on a set of shared phonological distinctions, established in China, to determine rhyme and after the advent of “recent style poetry” (C. jintishi 近體詩; or “regulated verse,” lüshi 律詩)—itself a direct consequence of Chinese contact with Sanskrit poetics—to also determine tonal patterns within poems (Mair and Mei 1991). After the style had become codified and rose to prominence in Tang China (618–907), any piece of “recent style poetry” was visually recognizable as such anywhere Literary Sinitic was used for poetic composition. The core characteristics of Literary Sinitic as a cosmopolitan language were sharply exemplified by “recent style poetry.” Notwithstanding differences in the pronunciation of sinographs among Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans, or Japanese—and despite the fact that verse was often chanted—“recent style poetry” was a product of literary composition rather than a transcription of something said, sung, or chanted. It was a consequence of high literacy in an “unsayable” language. As Pollock emphasizes, the very notion of the oral/vernacular is brought into being through writing (2006: 3–4, 78, 305). The Japanese case furnishes an excellent early example of this and the complex interconnection of the visual

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and oral/aural realms. It is found in the preface to a tenth-century anthology, where two poems are described as “being like the father and mother of poetry, practiced at the beginning by those studying calligraphy” (quoted in Lurie [2011: 261]). This emphasis on writing in even a vernacular poetic context calls to mind the work of Walter J. Ong in his Orality and Literacy (2010) and makes plain the degree to which writing irrevocably shapes an understanding of the oral/vernacular. The Japanese poems in question could be recited aloud and understood, and were therefore “sayable.” On the other hand, there was historical disagreement over a phrase in one of the poems, and in deciding what it meant, sinographs were used logographically for disambiguation of the homophones (Lurie 2011: 261n10). The third and most vexing point concerns the range and uses of Sanskrit in comparison with Literary Sinitic, particularly as employed in Chosŏn Korea after the invention of the Korean alphabet in the middle of the fifteenth century. Fitted into Pollock’s categories, it is obvious that the deployment of culture-power through Literary Sinitic overlapped with that of Sanskrit in many respects, but not all. Some of these differences can be attributed to diverging ideas on what constituted literature as opposed to mere writing. This is a tremendously complex comparative issue that cannot be treated here at length, but it is necessary to question the applicability of Pollock’s distinction between a text’s “workly” and “documentary”/“contentual”/“informatio­ nal” dimensions, that is, “between expression and content, performance and constatation, imagination and information” (2006: 3). It would seem to be nearly impossible to graft those distinctions sensibly onto the realm of Literary Sinitic. More specifically, it is difficult to see that such distinctions adhered in the Korean case during the Chosŏn dynasty. The reason for this is that Literary Sinitic fulfilled functions ranging from the expressive to the informational. Furthermore, in the context of Literary Sinitic, the expressiveness of poetry, for instance, was made meaningful by the very fact that such expressiveness was supposed to be informational. A defining element of Literary Sinitic poetics, rooted in the Shijing 詩經 (Book of Odes), was predicated on that idea. In sharp contrast, negative attitudes generally surrounded fiction in the Literary Sinitic realm (and with a particular forcefulness in Chosŏn Korea), precisely because fiction was imaginative. Fiction was nonetheless produced, but as seen below, it was not defended on the grounds of imagination. However, the clearest example of the difficulty in employing Pollock’s contrastive schema is the massive body of court documents contained in the Chosŏn wangjo sillok 朝鮮王朝實錄 (Veritable Records of the Chosŏn Dynasty). These contain day-by-day accounts of governmental business at the courts of successive kings and very often include conversations

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and royal orders issued orally in Korean. These records are, in short, informational, but they were composed in Literary Sinitic even after the development of the Korean script. The parallels with Sanskrit diverge here, and the crucial factor seems to have been that Sanskrit was adopted in places where literacy already existed. Literary Sinitic and sinographs were, by contrast, the vehicles of literacy in East Asia. 3

The Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in Kim Manjung (1637–1692)

Questions surrounding Literary Sinitic, the Korean vernacular, and literary genre in Korean literary history can be usefully approached through the works of Kim Manjung. In addition to his writings in Literary Sinitic that were collated under his pen name, Sŏp’o 西浦, in accordance with tradition in his Sŏp’o chip 西浦集 (Collected Works of Sŏp’o), he also left behind a collection of essays, Sŏp’o manp’il 西浦漫筆 (Random Jottings of Sŏp’o) in Literary Sinitic as well as two novels, Kuunmong 九雲夢 (A Nine Cloud Dream) and Sassi namjŏng ki 謝氏南征記 (Lady Sa’s Journey to the South), each of which exists in Literary Sinitic and Korean vernacular versions. (In order to prevent potential confusion over provenance versus language, I will hereafter use “Korean vernacular” or “vernacular Korean” unless otherwise warranted by context. “Modern Korean” translations are, of course, in the Korean vernacular, but specificity is also at times required since there are “modern Korean” translations of premodern Korean vernacular and Literary Sinitic works.) Kim’s writings reveal a curious paradox at the heart of the Korean literary tradition’s evolution through the later stages of the Chosŏn dynasty and into the modern era. In terms of the idea of the literary canon that adhered in Chosŏn Korea, Kim’s Collected Works of Sŏp’o was not so much his most important work as his only important work. In addition to poems in various genres, it also contained formal pieces, such as his necrology (haengjang 行狀) of his mother. These provide vital clues to the trajectory of his life and other works, but in spite of that, his Collected Works of Sŏp’o has not been seriously studied. One clear indication of this lack of interest is found in the fact that it has not been translated into modern Korean. The reason seems to be that his other works are far more obviously interesting to modern readers. Indeed, his Random Jottings of Sŏp’o has been translated twice with full scholarly apparatus and annotations, most recently in two large volumes by the outstanding scholar of pre-modern Korean literature Sim Kyŏngho (2010) who has included extremely detailed notes and analyses of the individual chapters (see also, Hong [1990]).

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Kim Manjung’s two novels likewise have been the subject of much study and translation, but in these instances, the process of translation began not long after he died. Moreover, we know more clearly—albeit imperfectly—something about this process of translation. His Lady Sa’s Journey to the South was originally written in the Korean vernacular and then subsequently translated into Literary Sinitic by his grandnephew, Kim Ch’unt’aek 金春澤 (1670–1717), whose involvement raises a range of questions that typify the problem of authorship in a cultural setting in which manuscripts were just as important—and at times, far more important—than printed texts; I will return to this point below. The textual history of A Nine Cloud Dream is itself extremely complex, although it is fair to say that one element in this complexity arises from the fact that this novel’s textual history has been better studied and that we therefore better understand the issues involved. Serious critical work began on the textual history of Kim’s A Nine Cloud Dream roughly six decades ago. One of the core questions since then has been the language in which Kim originally composed the novel: was it written by him in Literary Sinitic and then translated into Korean, or was it the reverse? This question has generated a complex body of scholarship, elements of which will be addressed below. Here it is sufficient to emphasize that one crucial factor in these debates has been twentieth-century Korean nationalism, specifically linguistic nationalism, which saw a downgrading of the cosmopolitan language of Literary Sinitic in favor of the Korean vernacular. There is, in sum, an obvious desire to think that Kim wrote A Nine Cloud Dream in Korean, even though, as Chŏng Kyubok—one of the foremost experts on its textual history—consistently argued, the textual evidence indicates that the novel was written in Literary Sinitic and then translated into Korean. Through careful comparison of the various extant texts—both printed and in manuscript—Chŏng traced textual lineages to show how one text derived from or served as the basis for another. Over the past several decades and with the discovery and analysis of new texts, Chŏng’s arguments merely grew more detailed. Key elements of Chŏng’s textual work are dealt with below, but here it is necessary to emphasize that his arguments have not been widely accepted. One recent overview concludes that barring the discovery of a copy of A Nine Cloud Dream that definitively can be proven to have been written by Kim Manjung himself, it is pointless to worry about the language question (Kim Tonguk 2011). Setting the evidentiary standard so high thus blunts the argument that A Nine Cloud Dream was originally written in Literary Sinitic. The crucial point is that A Nine Cloud Dream was not a stable text. Two factors were at work here. First, fiction was generally deemed unacceptable by Confucians, and those who wrote fiction typically did not sign off as authors,

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so to speak, or otherwise advertise the fact. There is no question that Kim wrote A Nine Cloud Dream, but we know this through scattered references in the premodern sources, and all this is largely a matter of luck. The second and related factor was the continued importance of manuscripts. A Nine Cloud Dream was printed in both Literary Sinitic and vernacular Korean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but through the twentieth century, many of the most important texts were in manuscript form and held privately. Moreover, the highly regarded Korean vernacular version held at Seoul National University’s Kyujanggak library seems never to have been printed until the late twentieth century. The literary scholar Kim Pyŏngguk used this manuscript as the basis for his modern Korean translation in 1984, providing the Seoul National University text in typeset on pages facing his modern Korean translation (Kim 1984).2 The Seoul National University text has more recently served as the basis for another modern Korean translation with scholarly apparatus by the literary scholar Chang Hyohyŏn (2008) as well as Kim Pyŏngguk’s (2007) more detailed two-volume critical edition. The latter includes a typeset reproduction of the original manuscript in its pre-modern orthography; another reproduction of the original manuscript but with sinographs inserted as necessary to aid comprehension; a modern Korean translation; and copious annotations and cross references throughout. The prevalence of manuscripts has thus rendered studies of A Nine Cloud Dream complex indeed. But on balance and in view of the actual evidence— rather than evidence that might come to light—there can be little room for doubt that A Nine Cloud Dream was written in Literary Sinitic and then translated into Korean. I have addressed some of these issues in a book chapter (Evon 2014), focusing largely on questions surrounding Buddhist interpretations of A Nine Cloud Dream. During the course of that study it became apparent that the general trajectory of textual comparisons and the associated literary interpretations have been marked by a species of the “can’t see the forest for the trees”-type problem; this has become all the clearer through Kim Pyŏngguk’s (2007) detailed two-volume critical edition. Of central importance is a textual anomaly surrounding a piece of Buddhist verse drawn from the Diamond Sutra (K. Kŭmgang panya paramil kyŏng, C. Jingang bore boluomi jing 金剛般若波羅 蜜經). This anomaly, in turn, sheds light on the question of “script apartheid” due to the broad continuities across the multiple pre-modern manuscripts and 2 In order to prevent confusion due to the nature of this discussion, references to Kim Manjung’s A Nine Cloud Dream and other premodern works in the in-text citations and bibliography use the names of the editors and translators as well as abbreviations for online sources; hence “Kim [Pyŏngguk] 1984,” rather than “Kim [Manjung] 1984,” etc.

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printed texts of A Nine Cloud Dream and Lady Sa’s Journey to the South, as well as within individual texts. Here it is necessary to summarize three main points drawn from that study insofar as these are relevant to the textual questions that are of specific concern here and to which I will turn below. First, Buddhism plays an important role in both A Nine Cloud Dream and Lady Sa’s Journey to the South, albeit in different ways. A Nine Cloud Dream is set in Tang (618–906) China and tells the story of a young Buddhist monk who encounters eight Daoist maidens and is then overcome by desire for riches, fame, and women. He is promptly reborn and gets his wish, ultimately marrying eight women (i.e., the reborn Daoist maidens). In the end, however, he and they are forced to face the question of mortality, and the novel concludes with an affirmation of Buddhism’s analysis of the human condition. Lady Sa’s Journey to the South likewise is set in China, during the Ming (1368–1644) dynasty, and the role of Buddhism is no less important. Here, however, the focus is not on Buddhist philosophy, but rather popular Buddhist practices surrounding childbirth which centered on Guanyin 觀音 (Avalokitesvara; K. Kwanŭm), the Buddhist Goddess of Compassion. Although the details are too complex to be treated here, it is necessary to stress that both A Nine Cloud Dream and Lady Sa’s Journey to the South attest to a high degree of knowledge about Chinese Buddhist history. Second, the apparent link between A Nine Cloud Dream and Lady Sa’s Journey to the South through Buddhism is far more important than has typically been recognized. Careful examination of the pre-modern sources indicates that the origin of both works can be traced to 1680 when Kim’s niece, Queen In’gyŏng (In’gyŏng wanghu 仁敬王后; 1661–1680; r. 1674–1680), died of smallpox without leaving an heir to the throne (Kim Yonggwan 2011: 248–250, 270–271). His family’s fortunes thereafter declined, illustrating the Buddhist notion of “emptiness” that plays such a large role in A Nine Cloud Dream. Likewise, the narrative thrust of Lady Sa’s Journey to the South comes into sharper focus, as does the fact that Kim wrote the story in the vernacular. This story addressed women’s concerns. Finally, there is the question of the textual anomaly in A Nine Cloud Dream. The overall importance of the Diamond Sutra in A Nine Cloud Dream is not in doubt. It plays a crucial role at the end of the novel when its teachings are invoked by the Buddhist master, leading to the protagonists’ attainment of enlightenment. The question is one of emphasis. In the most important Literary Sinitic version of A Nine Cloud Dream, as in many of the others, the Diamond Sutra is invoked by name and reference is made to the “hymn [i.e., gātha] in four lines” (K. sagu ji ke 四句之偈), but we are not told the content of the hymn. A knowledgeable reader might fill in the gaps, however, on the

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assumption that the hymn is from the very final portion of the Diamond Sutra as translated from Sanskrit into Chinese by Kumārajīva (344–413): 一切有爲法 il ch’e yu wi pŏp

All phenomenal things [are] 如夢幻泡影 yŏ mong hwan p’o yŏng

Like a dream, an hallucination, a bubble, a shadow 如露亦如電 yŏ ro yŏk yŏ chŏn

Like a dewdrop, and also like lightning 應作如是觀 ŭng chak yŏ si kwan

Responsive manifestations [i.e., phenomena] are seen thus Someone at some point did make that assumption. In a setting in which manuscripts played such an important role, the author did not have the final word. 4

From “French Money” to “Stench Monkey”: Script Apartheid and Garbling the Hymn from the Diamond Sutra

Whoever first inserted this hymn into A Nine Cloud Dream sought to underscore the novel’s Buddhist point of view, and on the balance of textual evidence, we must conclude that this occurred during either the translation of A Nine Cloud Dream from Literary Sinitic into the Korean vernacular or when someone copied a Korean vernacular version of A Nine Cloud Dream. This person might well have been a Buddhist cleric. Notwithstanding the paucity of references to the Diamond Sutra in non-Buddhist literary collections (searchable through dbkc), it was provided with a Korean ŏnhae 諺解 exegesis by royal order and printed during a minor Buddhist resurgence at court not long after the invention of the Korean alphabet (cws, Sejo 10[1464]/2/8b; for details on the history of this translation, see Kim, Pak, and Pak [2006: 24–47]). Its importance in the Buddhist context can also be gauged by how King Yejong 睿 宗 (r. 1468–1469) sought to use it and another sutra to reduce the clergy. Yejong proposed that those who could not explain the sutras were to be laicized. This

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worried the priest and translator, Sinmi 信眉 (fl. mid-fifteenth century), who asked that Buddhist exams test for the ability to recite and chant the sutras in their Sino-Korean pronunciation from memory. Sinmi feared that very few could pass if oral explication were required (cws, Yejong 1[1469]/6/27e). An ability to chant/recite—as opposed to explicate or translate—is evident in the reproduction of the hymn in A Nine Cloud Dream. The hymn was phonetically transcribed using the Korean script, and as with the rest of the text, no sinographs were included. But unlike the other instances in the novel where Literary Sinitic poems are found—and they occur frequently throughout the novel—there was no additional vernacular translation accompanying the transcription. Whoever first inserted the hymn into A Nine Cloud Dream was, it seems, confounded as to how to translate the passage into the vernacular, but even so, was unwilling to insert the sinographs despite appearing to know them. We can infer this through the transcription itself, which makes it impossible to think that the Seoul National University text is a perfect reproduction of the vernacular version of Dream where the hymn was first incorporated. This is because the hymn itself as contained in the Seoul National University text has several mistakes, marked below in bold (from Kim [2007: 1:295n141, 405]). These mistakes are useful since they fall into three distinct categories. Taken together, they provide clues to suggest that the Seoul National University text is a copy of a copy (Table 11.1). Table 11.1 Transcription mistakes: evidence of successive copies

The Hymn in Kumārajīva’s Translation of the Diamond Sutra

一切有爲法

如夢幻泡影

如露亦如電

應作如是觀

일졀유의법

염모환됴영

여디역여젼

응쟉여시관

일톄위법

여몽환포영

여로역여젼

응쟉여시관

일체유위법

여몽환포영

여로역여전

응작여시관

il ch’e yu wi pŏp yŏ mong hwan p’o yŏng yŏ ro yŏk yŏ chŏn ŭng chak yŏ si kwan Pre-modern Orthography/Pronunciation (Seoul National University text) il chŏl yu ŭi pŏp yŏm mo hwan cho yŏng yŏ ti yŏk yŏ chŏn ŭng chak yŏ si kwan Corrected Pre-modern Orthography/Pronunciation il ch’e yu wi pŏp

il ch’e yu wi pŏp

yŏ mong hwan p’o yŏng yŏ ro yŏk yŏ chŏn Modern Orthography/Pronunciation yŏ mong hwan p’o yŏng

yŏ ro yŏk yŏ chŏn

ŭng chak yŏ si kwan

ŭng chak yŏ si kwan

The first type of mistake is the most interesting. It is not fully a mistake and instead attests to knowledge of sinographs on the part of the person who made

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the mistake. It is also unique among the mistakes in the passage. It is a clear consequence of using an alternate pronunciation for the sinograph 切. In the bound expression ilch’e 一切 (all), the correct reading is t’ye/ch’e 톄/체, but chyŏl (졀 in the pre-modern orthography) is another reading of the same sinograph. This use of chŏl rather than ch’e strongly suggests that this mistake was made by the person who first integrated the hymn into A Nine Cloud Dream and that this person was transcribing from the original passage in the Diamond Sutra. Subsequent copyists introduced additional mistakes, but otherwise left the passage alone. The second type of mistake is oral/aural in nature, with yŏmong 여몽/如夢 (“like a dream”) incorrectly transcribed as the meaningless two syllables yŏmmo 염모. This is a sound-based mistake, and it is easy enough to understand how it was made. It is equally clear that the person who made this mistake did not know the meaning of what was being transcribed or the source text. The third type of mistake, by contrast, is visual in nature. Those who have had something handwritten then typed by another will recognize this mistake as the sort in which a messily written “French money” becomes the typed “stench monkey.” The result here was that 포 (p’o) was incorrectly written as 됴 (tyo/cho), while 로 (ro) was transformed into 디 (ti). As with the second type of mistake, it is clear that the person or persons who made these two mistakes did not know the meaning of what was being transcribed or the source text. The mistake of 위 (wi) for 의 (ŭi) can be understood as belonging to either the second or third type. Kumārajīva was not the only one to translate the Diamond Sutra, but it is impossible to explain these mistakes through the renderings of the hymn as given in other versions contained in the authoritative Taishō Canon (Taishō shinshū daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經). Moreover, Kumārajīva’s translation was the one that was reproduced in the Korean vernacular exegesis (ŏnhae) of the Diamond Sutra in the fifteenth century (Kim, Pak, and Pak 2006: 343). Yet if this attests to the relative importance of Kumārajīva’s translation, it tells us little about the reach or use of the ŏnhae version. On the contrary, the hymn is conspicuous precisely because it was merely transcribed, with no accompanying translation. This deviates from the pattern that is established at the outset in the Seoul National University version of A Nine Cloud Dream and then followed consistently throughout. The following example illustrates the principle guiding the treatment of poetry throughout the novel. It is taken from the first line of the first poem in the novel, when the young hero gazes upon a lovely scene and chants a poem beginning with “the greenness of the willows is like patterned silk” (yangnyu ch’ŏng yŏ chik 楊柳靑 如織). In the Seoul National University text, this is given in Korean transcription

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and followed by the fully vernacular Korean translation/gloss “pŏdŭri p’urŭrŏ pe tchanŭn tŭt hani” (“the willows are green, as if weaving cloth”). The transcription below reproduces that of the original manuscript. Due to technical constraints (i.e., pre-modern Korean letter combinations I cannot make), the Korean translation/gloss below follows the modern orthography. (For the original manuscript portion of the text, see Kim [2007: 1:25]; for the reconstructed Literary Sinitic source text, see Kim [2007: 1:27]; and for the vernacular passage in modern orthography, see Kim [2007: 2:21].) Due to space constraints, it is impossible to discuss the complex questions surrounding the Korean vernacular translation/ŏnhae in this instance and others. Instead, my purpose here is to show how the Seoul National University version of A Nine Cloud Dream presents Literary Sinitic poems without using sinographs. Table 11.2 Literary Sinitic poems without sinographs

Literary Sinitic

楊柳靑如織

The Principle Surrounding Poems in the Seoul National University Text: Transcription + Translation/Gloss Transcription

Translation/Gloss

양뉴쳥여딕

버들이 푸르러 베 짜는 듯하니

yang nyu ch’ŏng yŏ chik

pŏdŭri p’urŭrŏ pe tchanŭn tŭt hani

The treatment of the poems in the Seoul National University text leaves little room for doubt that the text was a translation made from a Literary Sinitic source text or a copy of the same. To be sure, the fact that there is a transcription of the poem in Sino-Korean pronunciation underscores the depiction of the protagonist chanting the poem. After all, the novel is set in Tang China, and to give only the translation/ŏnhae would break with verisimilitude, though this break did ultimately occur as seen below. Moreover, Koreans did recite Literary Sinitic poems and texts in Sino-Korean pronunciation, something evident in relation to Sinmi as discussed above. But the Literary Sinitic poem from which this line is taken carries more information than it seems to at first glance, the reason being that the poem contains specific information with respect to rhyme and tonal structures that is built into the sinographs, but is otherwise invisible in transcription or translation. Moreover, the poem in question is found in the major Literary Sinitic versions of A Nine Cloud Dream, including the Ŭlsa text (Ŭlsa pon 乙巳本), named after the year of the sexagenary cycle in which it was printed by woodblocks. Due

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to a note carved onto the final block of the Ŭlsa text, we know that it was prepared in 1725. In the Chosŏn-Korean fashion after the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644, it employs the Ming loyalist dating convention in conjunction with the sexagenary cycle, giving the date as the “second time of ŭlsa [in the sexagenary cycle] after [the Ming Chinese Emperor] Chongzhen” (Sungjŏng hu chaedo ŭlsa 崇禎後再度乙巳) (Chŏng 1988: 452). The poem in the Ŭlsa text is stable, with one minor exception: there is a misprinted sinograph in the poem, something explicable as a mistake made when carving the woodblocks (Chŏng 1993b: 369; Chŏng 1988: 175; Chŏng 1993a: 578; Chŏng and Chin 1996: 37). In addition, we find the poem translated in the Wanp’an text (Wanp’an pon 完板本), which is named after woodblock printings made in Wansan (today’s Chŏnju) over the final decades of the Chosŏn dynasty. This vernacular version of A Nine Cloud Dream was carved into woodblocks for printing in 1862 (Chŏng and Chin 1996: 352; on the date, see Ibid.: 331 and 437, but cf. 540, which gives a different date for the printing of the second volume, most likely 1907). The chief interest of the Wanp’an text is that it is marked by two contradictory characteristics not seen in the Seoul National University text. First, it adheres to the principle of “script apartheid,” with one exception: at the very beginning, it introduces the nine characters of the novel, with brief descriptions in Literary Sinitic followed by Korean vernacular translations. Second, all the poems are simply given in Korean vernacular translation, with no phonetic transcriptions whatsoever. And as with the Literary Sinitic versions of the text, it does not contain the hymn from Kumārajīva’s translation of the Diamond Sutra. The treatment of the poems in the various vernacular texts of A Nine Cloud Dream points to the primacy of Literary Sinitic in the creation of the novel as a whole. With respect to the poems, it is easy to see the process moving from a Literary Sinitic source text through to a transcription with an accompanying translation/ŏnhae. By contrast, it is exceedingly difficult to see the process going in reverse. The logic of this one-way process also shows up in an extreme form in another vernacular version, the Kyŏngp’an (“capital woodblock”) text (Kyŏngp’an pon 京板本), which was printed by woodblock in Seoul and appears to have been initially prepared in the early nineteenth century (for a reprint, see Chŏng, Kim, and Sin [1990: section V, 4–33]). This version is much shorter, in part because it avoids the many problems posed by reproducing the poems in transcription and translation. These comprise a significant portion of the Literary Sinitic versions, whereas the Kyŏngp’an text just sticks to the main action of the story. The treatment of the poems in the vernacular versions thus draws attention to another issue, that of space. Literary Sinitic, whether prose or poetry, is characteristically concise. Working from the vernacular translation of the

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line quoted above, one sees that the Literary Sinitic (楊柳靑如織) takes up less space than what is required when it is reproduced in transcription with a translation/ŏnhae (양뉴쳥여딕 버들이 푸르러 베 짜는 듯하니). The ratio of five syllables to seventeen in this single example indicates the problems of space posed by translation of a Literary Sinitic source text. Even if the transcription is omitted (as in the Wanp’an text), the translation/gloss is still nearly two and a half times longer than the Literary Sinitic. The Seoul National University text is a handwritten manuscript, and we can assume that the person who copied it had leisure and financial resources. In that context, the length required for the transcription and translation/ŏnhae seems not to have been a problem. But we sense space becoming a problem in identifiably commercial contexts, that is, in relation to the Wanp’an text and the Kyŏngp’an text, in particular. In those commercial contexts, vernacular versions of A Nine Cloud Dream were being printed by woodblock, and those woodblocks had to be carved. Although the history of the commercialization of A Nine Cloud Dream requires much more research, one can readily see here the principle of commercial efficiency at work, in terms of time, financial resources, and the return on time and resources. Here too one sees additional evidence that the Korean vernacular texts derived from Literary Sinitic texts, rather than the other way around. That is, the relative fullness of the Literary Sinitic versions of A Nine Cloud Dream in terms of content was uneconomical in a vernacular context, particularly in a commercial vernacular context. As a rough guide, one can compare what is considered to be the oldest extant Literary Sinitic text (a manuscript dating to sometime before 1725) and the Wanp’an vernacular text as contained in the single-volume presentation of those two versions with accompanying modern Korean translations for each (Chŏng and Chin 1996). In this consistent format (i.e., print-type, paper size, margins, etc.), the Literary Sinitic version takes up less space than its parallel modern vernacular translation. However, the modern vernacular translation of the Literary Sinitic text takes up much more space than the original Wanp’an vernacular text, and the original Wanp’an vernacular text and its modern translation are nearly identical in length; indeed, the original Wanp’an vernacular text and its modern translation are presented in parallel, printed on facing pages, with the modern translation taking up only slightly more space. The point is that if one were to translate a vernacular version of A Nine Cloud Dream into Literary Sinitic, the result would be a physically much smaller text, even if it were equivalent in terms of content. However, the comparative diminution in terms of size and content is found in the vernacular versions. Or to put it another way, Literary Sinitic made it possible to deliver more story in less

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space. The notable exception is the inclusion of the hymn from the Diamond Sutra as found in the Seoul National University text. In this context, the fact that this hymn is not found in the extant Literary Sinitic versions takes on another implication, because the logical place for that hymn was in a Literary Sinitic version of A Nine Cloud Dream. In light of the mistakes found in the transcription of the hymn as discussed above, it is reasonable to conclude that the Seoul National University text was a copy of a copy. The copyist who rendered ilch’e as ilchŏl made a mistake that paradoxically attested to knowledge of sinographs, and it is difficult to see how that person would have made the other mistakes. In sum, if the person who wrote out the Seoul National University text perfectly copied his or her source text, then at least two texts would seem to have preceded it. But whatever the actual number of vernacular texts that sat behind the Seoul National University manuscript, the extant Literary Sinitic texts—both printed and in manuscript—omit Kumārajīva’s hymn. This indicates that the process of translation fundamentally moved in one direction, from Literary Sinitic to the Korean vernacular, culminating in shorter vernacular texts as reproduced in the Wanp’an and Kyŏngp’an woodblock editions. If the process had been reversed, this would have led to Literary Sinitic versions that were shorter than they in fact are. Furthermore, one would expect to see Kumārajīva’s hymn somewhere in these Literary Sinitic versions, but we do not. The Seoul National University text is unique in including the hymn, but just as important, the hymn is given only in transcription and includes mistakes. These mistakes taken together suggest the transcription was first inserted into the text by someone who knew Kumārajīva’s Chinese translation of the hymn. But that person gave the hymn only in transcription. The absence of an accompanying translation thus broke with the pattern found throughout the rest of the Seoul National University text. However, the absence of sinographs was consistent with the rest of the text as well as other versions of it. It is also consistent with what we find in relation to Kim’s other novel, which brings into focus other dimensions of the principle of “script apartheid.” 5

From Vernacular to Cosmopolitan: Lady Sa’s Journey to the South

Although difficulties surround Kim’s Lady Sa’s Journey to the South, the question of the language in which he wrote it is not among them. The reason is found in a section of comments on literature in the collected writings of his grandnephew, Kim Ch’unt’aek (1670–1717):

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Sŏp’o [Kim Manjung] very much used rustic speech [sogŏn 俗諺; i.e., the vernacular] to make stories. Among those, one called the Journey to the South has standards that are not to be ignored. I have therefore translated it using written language [munja 文字; i.e., sinographs/Literary Sinitic] (Sŏp’o p’ada i sogŏn wi sosŏl, kijung sowi namjŏnggi cha, yu pi tŭnghan chi pi, yŏ pŏn i munja 西浦頗多以俗諺爲小說，其中所謂南征記者，有非等閒之 比，余故翻以文字). Kim Ch’unt’aek, Non si mun 論詩文 (On Poetry and Prose); see also Bouchez 1979

This problematic passage has served as the chief piece of evidence to support the argument that A Nine Cloud Dream was written in the vernacular. But what those other vernacular stories might be is anyone’s guess. All that is certain is that Lady Sa’s Journey to the South was translated into Literary Sinitic by Kim Ch’unt’aek. Kim Ch’unt’aek’s “On Poetry and Prose” then moves seamlessly into a long quotation from the preface he wrote to his Literary Sinitic translation, wherein he also appended several introductory notes about how he had approached the work (Yi 1999: 9–12, 221–224). In both the preface to the translation and in what follows the passage quoted above, Kim Ch’unt’aek develops an interlocking justification for his granduncle’s writing of a story in the vernacular as well as his own translation of that story into Literary Sinitic. That justification is moral and educational: Lady Sa’s Journey to the South ought to be seen in a Confucian moral and literary framework, for it teaches proper conduct and therefore can be used “to instruct people” (kyo in 敎人). Notwithstanding the importance of Buddhism in the novel, Kim Ch’un’taek’s emphasis on its Confucian moral and political elements is certainly justified. His preface is nonetheless built on a paradox. On the one the hand, he justifies the story on Confucian moral and literary grounds—which is to say, conceptions of literature rooted in Literary Sinitic—by invoking both the Chu ci 楚 辭 (Lyrics of Chu) and the Shijing 詩經 (Book of Odes), among other things. On the other hand, he feels compelled to translate the story because it was written in the Korean vernacular. He is explicit on this point, noting that his granduncle wrote the story in the vernacular so that it could be easily read by women and morally influence them. But the more obvious of the moral and political problems in the story actually focus on men’s defects of judgment in explicitly political contexts. As a consequence, Kim Ch’unt’aek argues that the vernacular is capable of expressing moral and political principles in such a way that even women can be made to understand them, but unless the novel is translated into Literary Sinitic, educated men would not read it. His central

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contention here is that educated men, too, could benefit from the moral guidance it offered, and that such guidance was fundamentally an illustration of Confucian conduct. In explaining that Lady Sa’s Journey to the South has “standards that are not to be ignored,” Kim Ch’unt’aek was drawing deeply on the Confucian literary tradition (Bouchez 1979). The question of language vis-à-vis Lady Sa’s Journey to the South presents another paradox. Kim Ch’un’taek’s Literary Sinitic translation has assumed such a great degree of relative importance that it has effectively displaced the vernacular original. Indeed, none of the texts available online through the Changsŏgak (Jangseogak) Royal Archives are in the Korean vernacular. The partial exception—a Literary Sinitic text with vernacular connectives and particles to ease reading—merely proves the general rule, and it appears to have been printed in the early twentieth century (see cra). This cannot be explained solely in light of the existence of Kim Ch’un’taek’s preface or his notes to his translation, as if these either solved all problems or muddied the waters so much that any undertaking would be doomed to fail from the outset. Indeed, Kim Ch’unt’aek’s preface in conjunction with his notes to his Literary Sinitic translation would seem to enable an accurate reconstitution of the original as well as a means to judge the quality of the various extant versions. But in the case of Lady Sa’s Journey to the South, comparatively little textual work has been done, and in comparison to A Nine Cloud Dream, much less work has been done in general. One reason for this situation is that notwithstanding the thrust of linguistic nationalism in the twentieth century, A Nine Cloud Dream seems to be accorded greater esteem as an object of literary analysis, something that ironically helps to explain the desire to think that it was written in the vernacular or at least to forestall arguments to the contrary. I am not alone in querying this relative ranking as made evident through the disproportionate interest in A Nine Cloud Dream. Daniel Bouchez must be credited for having first drawn attention to this and other important textual and interpretive matters in a series of outstanding studies.3 This disparity is, I suspect, due to the fact that Lady Sa’s Journey to the South presents no grand philosophical statement of human life. On the contrary, the fact that it seems partly to be a reaction to complex political events at court has, through a kind of alchemical anachronism, transmuted it into something less worthy of study. Yet in the context of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chosŏn Korea, to be modeled on and a reaction to something historically real would have represented 3 Space constraints prevent me from doing justice to Bouchez’s work; for an overview see Eggert (1999), especially page 67.

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a proper employment of Confucian literary values. It is those values that Kim Ch’unt’aek’s preface emphasized. Kim Manjung was, it seems, taking his cue from the larger East Asian tradition in Lady Sa’s Journey to the South no less than in A Nine Cloud Dream. The question of language thus becomes all the more pressing in relation to Kim Ch’unt’aek’s explanation that his granduncle wrote the story to influence and guide women. The fundamental problem is virtually identical to what was described above in relation to A Nine Cloud Dream: the insertion of transcribed items into the story without clarification through translation or the inclusion of sinographs. Like A Nine Cloud Dream, the pre-modern vernacular and Literary Sinitic versions of Lady Sa’s Journey to the South are marked by “script apartheid.” We do not know for certain how pre-modern readers would have dealt with such items. But there is no reason to think that they would have easily understood all of these, if they could have even understood them at all. The problem begins with the very first line of the novel in some of the available handwritten manuscripts of Lady Sa’s Journey to the South in the Korean vernacular (all undated) as well as one of the early movable type printed editions put out by a commercial publisher in 1925 (Cho 1999: 8:3, 165, 397; and Cho 1999: 21:267). It occurs in relation to the historical and geographical setting. Kim Ch’untaek’s Literary Sinitic translation begins by setting the story “during the reign of the Jiajing Emperor [K. Kajŏng 嘉靖; r. 1522–1566] in the Great Ming” (tae myŏng kajŏng yŏn’gan 大明嘉靖年間) (Yi 1999: 225). However, one of the undated handwritten manuscripts and the 1925 printed version both give this in vernacular transcription (tae myŏng kajŏng yŏn’gan e 대명가졍년간에) (Cho 1999: 8:3; Cho 1999: 21:267). It is impossible to judge directly the potential intelligibility of a phrase such as “대명가졍년간에,” which is a transcription of Literary Sinitic (大明嘉靖年 間) with the addition of the Korean particle designating “during” or “at” in relation to time (i.e., e 에). But it is possible to examine it indirectly. At issue here is the fact that the use of sinographic writing in the Korean context generally seems to have presupposed a high degree of literacy in Literary Sinitic. The “Sinographic Cosmopolis” was not precisely the same as the “Literary Sinitic Cosmopolis,” but in the Korean case, sinographic writing and Literary Sinitic appear to have been close to coextensive. We can thus conclude that a transcription of underlying Literary Sinitic such as “대명가졍년간에” would have been next to meaningless for those only able to read Lady Sa’s Journey to the South in the vernacular. Firm evidence for this conclusion can be found in the sixteenth century, when Chosŏn Koreans confronted difficulties with understanding words,

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written in sinographs, which were embedded into otherwise Literary Sinitic contexts. This led Prince Yŏnsan (r. 1494–1506) to order the importation of books from China and the preparation of explanatory glosses (cws, Yŏnsan 12 [1506]/8/7c). Why this issue grew into relative prominence in the sixteenth century is unclear. But it also drew the attention of Yun Ch’unnyŏn 尹春年 (1514–1567), a high-level Chosŏn official, who was concerned over misunderstandings and difficulties associated with the Jiandeng xinhua 剪燈新話 (New Tales [Written while] Trimming the Wick), an early Ming collection of short stories in Literary Sinitic by Qu You 瞿佑 (1347–1433) (see also Ch’oe [2002: esp. 313–314, 324–325, 327–328]). Yun collaborated with a Korean translatorinterpreter of Chinese to publish an annotated edition of Qu You’s collection. As Yun explained it, the principal problems were historical references and lexical items (Chŏng 2003: 361–362). This analysis was fully borne out through the approximately six hundred notes of varying length that were inserted into their finished Chŏndŭng sinhwa kuhae 剪燈新話句解 (Glosses on the Jiandeng xinhua). The first seven sinographs in the glossed version of the first story make the essential point: “Chijŏng [the reign name of Emperor Shundi of the Yuan (dynasty)]” (Chijŏng [wŏn sunje yŏnho] 至正 [元順帝年號]) (Chŏng 2003: 24/720; the note given here in brackets is given in smaller print in the original). The explanatory notes on the Jiandeng xinhua thus remind us that cracks could and did appear within the Sinographic Cosmopolis. And yet at the same time, they also demonstrate the durability, functionality, and pervasive reality of Literary Sinitic in even a domestic Korean context. This is evident in the use of Literary Sinitic in the notes. By that point, the Korean script had been available for over a century, but one could never guess that fact by reading the work. 6

Final Remarks: The Need to Distinguish Literization and Literarization

With the exception of purpose-specific texts (e.g., the exegesis of the Diamond Sutra prepared during Chosŏn), there was something that amounted to a general rule in pre-modern literary contexts that one would not use sinographs and the Korean alphabet in the same textual setting. An early example of this principle of “script apartheid” can be found in the aforementioned Glosses on the Jiandeng xinhua. But this principle is even more conspicuous in the writings of Kim Manjung, precisely because these seem to have circulated widely, in both Literary Sinitic and Korean vernacular versions. In the available pre-modern versions of A Nine Cloud Dream and Lady Sa’s Journey to the South—whether in manuscript or printed—there is nothing to indicate that there was ever any

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mixing of scripts apart from limited examples (generally in the late nineteenth century). In those limited instances, it seems that sinographs were used for decorative purposes in texts that were otherwise in the Korean vernacular. This is especially marked in the Wanp’an text, that is, the woodblock printing from 1862 that was discussed above in another context. It gives the title A Nine Cloud Dream (Kuunmong) in both sinographs and Korean transcription (i.e., “九雲夢 구운몽”) and then lists the main characters, with brief passages in Literary Sinitic followed by Korean vernacular glosses. But thereafter, it makes sole use of the Korean script (Chŏng and Chin 1996: 332; see also cra for a digital reproduction of another woodblock printing from the same year, which follows the same pattern). This use of sinographs and Literary Sinitic is decorative and advertises the fact that one is reading a Korean vernacular translation of a Literary Sinitic work. However, we do not find the reverse: that is, Korean transcriptions or translations in texts otherwise written exclusively in Literary Sinitic. This began to change, however, from the start of the Japanese colonial period. One vernacular version of A Nine Cloud Dream published by the Japanese Government-General of Korea (Chōsen sōtoku fu 朝鮮總督府) in 1914 (Taishō 3) sparingly included sinographs in parentheses to clarify proper nouns of Chinese provenance, for instance, although the text itself was otherwise in Korean (see jgk). The result was something that, despite the oldfashioned orthography, looks similar to modern Korean vernacular editions of the novel. The same occurred with Lady Sa’s Journey to the South, as evident in a version printed using lead movable type (yŏn hwalcha) and published commercially in 1916 by Yŏngp’ung Sŏgwan (photo-reprint available through dhm). By that point, however, A Nine Cloud Dream and Lady Sa’s Journey to the South were also being made available to Japanese readers through the work of Aoyagi Tsunatarō 青柳綱太郎 (1877–1932), who in 1914 published the two together in a single volume under the auspices of the Korea Research Society (Chōsen kenkyūkai 朝鮮研究會).4 In 1914, a Korean publisher (Tagasŏp’o 多佳書鋪) also brought out what was presumably a two-volume vernacular version of A Nine Cloud Dream printed from woodblocks. Although only the second volume is available through the Digital Han’gŭl Museum (Tijit’ŏl han’gŭl pangmulgwan; see dhm), there are two conspicuous characteristics of this printing. First, its quality was poor when compared to the others’ use of modern printing techniques. Second, this 4 As far as I can tell from the limited online reproductions, these Japanese translations were done in parallel with source texts which seem to have been in Literary Sinitic, with Kim Ch’unt’aek credited as the author of Lady Sa’s Journey to the South; see Aoyagi (1914).

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1914 printing maintained the principle of “script apartheid.” Those two characteristics were directly connected, for a note at the end of the extant second volume shows that this printing used woodblocks that seem to belong to the Wanp’an textual lineage and that appear to have been prepared in 1907. Due to the final note engraved on the block by the publisher, it is obvious that that text is the one reproduced as the second volume in Chŏng and Chin’s presentation of the Wanp’an text as discussed above (Chŏng and Chin 1996: 438–541; for the publisher’s note, see 541). But what is most striking is that among the various versions of A Nine Cloud Dream available through the Changsŏgak (Jangseogak) Royal Archives, the one that makes the most use of mixed-script writing is a 1927 (Shōwa 2) republication of a version first published in 1916 (Taishō 5) (see cra). However, it made use of the Korean script so as to aid in reading the Literary Sinitic (i.e., hanmun ŏnt’o 漢文諺吐). To this end, it used the Korean script to mark off grammatical elements and separate clauses, though it did so in a minimal fashion compared to Japanese practices. In short, it was not, in any sense, a full vernacular translation of a Literary Sinitic version of A Nine Cloud Dream. Nor was it meant to teach Literary Sinitic; it instead assumed knowledge of Literary Sinitic. This is implicit in something absent from the text: the use of the Korean script to indicate pronunciations of sinographs. This leads to the distinction between translation and transcription. It is necessary to make this distinction in relation to pre-modern literary texts that used the Korean script. There was a considerable overlap between script and language in those contexts, which is to say that pre-modern texts in the Korean script were principally vernacular texts. But inasmuch as phonetic transcription was at times used in those vernacular texts, one cannot speak of the same degree of linguistic uniformity as in Literary Sinitic texts. To put it another way, the pre-modern Literary Sinitic texts adhered to the principle of “script apartheid,” as did the pre-modern Korean vernacular texts (albeit with some very minor exceptions, as noted above). However, the pre-modern Korean vernacular texts were less uniform in terms of language. Transcription is not translation. Here too, A Nine Cloud Dream and Lady Sa’s Journey to the South provide an interesting contrast. Whereas vernacular versions of A Nine Cloud Dream maintained what we might call Literary Sinitic holdovers (e.g., the use of wal 曰 [“say”] given in Korean transcription [i.e., 왈] when quoting speech) to a greater or lesser degree, these seem to have grown weaker over time as the text was made more and more “vernacular Korean.” The Capital/Seoul Printed Text (Kyŏngp’an pon), discussed above, represents this shift in an extreme form. Yet even here, the text often—but not uniformly—gave the Literary Sinitic wal in

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Korean transcription when quoting speech. It is not surprising that conversation and quoted speech appear to have been a point of tension. Kim Ch’unt’aek endeavored to make his Literary Sinitic translation of Lady Sa’s Journey to the South in the “literary style of an historian” (saga munch’e 史家文體), and by his own admission, he therefore omitted from his Literary Sinitic translation those portions that were “the ways of speech in fiction” (sosŏl kugi 小說口氣) (Yi 1999: 11/223). One point of interest here is that, for a Korean, the Korean alphabetic script made it possible to capture “the ways of speech” far more accurately than could Literary Sinitic. Kim Ch’unt’aek wanted to emphasize the Confucian moral and political dimensions of Lady Sa’s Journey to the South, but it is striking that in his formulation, “the ways of speech” were an impediment to that goal. This in turn focuses attention on another aspect of how “script apartheid” in Korea functioned to preserve linguistic uniformity in Literary Sinitic contexts. In China, writers could—and did—employ linguistic admixtures, embedding vernacular elements into Literary Sinitic contexts. As discussed above, this possibility was recognized in Chosŏn Korea during the sixteenth century. But as far as I am aware, there is no instance in which a Korean writer employed Literary Sinitic for prose while integrating conversation written in the Korean script. Of course, the difference between post-fifteenth century Korea and China was stark in this respect. For the Koreans, unlike the Chinese, a linguistic choice in the context of literary production effectively entailed a script choice. The only alternative was to use sinographs to record vernacular Korean.5 But this was awkward in literary contexts and therefore little used. It also underscored the importance of Literary Sinitic (Yi Ok 李鈺 illustrates this anxiety surrounding script-cum-language choice as discussed below). We do encounter exceptions in Korean written vernacular poetry and song, where such mixing was by no means uncommon, albeit to varying degrees (e.g., in verse forms such as sijo 時調 and kasa 歌辭 [also 歌詞]). But in light of the Confucian literary tradition’s emphasis on the oral origins of poetry, this is not surprising. These exceptions further illuminate the principle of “script apartheid,” because use of sinographs in those contexts indicated the author’s knowledge of Literary Sinitic and Chinese poetry, broadly speaking. The distinction is subtle but crucial: sinographs—use of which at times bordered on full-fledged Literary Sinitic—were here used in Korean vernacular verse forms; but neither the sinographs nor the vernacular portions were there for explanatory purposes; they were together essential to the verse itself (see McCann 5 For a detailed analysis of this question, see the chapter by Si Nae Park in this volume.

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[1993] for a nuanced overview of this issue). Such vernacular poems or songs reflected education, and in an echo of the example of the “father and mother of poetry” discussed above, these seem to have been largely products of writing. The result was an emphasis on the overarching conceptual importance of Literary Sinitic in even vernacular poetic contexts. The reason was simply that those concepts were rooted in ideas about poetry drawn from Confucian literary theory surrounding the Book of Odes. This is illustrated in the Literary Sinitic prefaces and postscripts to anthologies of vernacular verse which often explicitly invoked the Book of Odes, thus situating Korean vernacular poetry in the larger Confucian tradition. Kim Ch’unt’aek’s explanation-cum-justification of his translation of Lady Sa’s Journey to the South into Literary Sinitic covered the same ground and for the same reason. Over the following century, the principle of “script apartheid” found its sharpest and most paradoxical—but not only—expression in the writings of Yi Ok 李鈺 (1760–1812), who was inspired by Chinese writers to record “our country’s [i.e., Korean] vernacularisms” (aguk sogŏ 我國俗語) (sk 2009: 4:283). Yi’s writings embody both the overarching influence of the Confucian literary tradition as well as the principle of “script apartheid,” but more than that, they help to further illuminate the relationship between the two. This is due to Yi’s explicit interest in Korean vernacularisms and language issues more broadly. In Yi’s case, however, questions of language and script were firmly decided in favor of Literary Sinitic and sinographs; his “vernacularisms” were recorded in sinographs and used sparingly in Literary Sinitic contexts. For one as concerned with vernacularisms as was Yi to avoid use of the Korean script and vernacular in any full sense presents the principle of “script apartheid” in the starkest terms possible. In assessing this issue, Kang Myŏnggwan (2007), one of the foremost experts on pre-modern Korean literary and intellectual history, emphasizes how Yi lamented the absence of a Korean script, before situating this conundrum in relation to broader Chinese literary influences, principally those traceable to Yuan Hongdao 袁宏道 (1568–1610), an important literary figure from the late Ming dynasty (see esp. Kang [2007: 419–422]). Kang’s analysis is characteristically incisive, and it and the original passage by Yi are worthy of sustained treatment. My interest here is narrower, however, and centers on how Yi’s views reflect on all that has been discussed above, ranging from the praise for Japan by Yi’s contemporary, Chŏng Yagyong; to the principle of “script apartheid” as found in A Nine Cloud Dream and Lady Sa’s Journey to the South; to how the partial exceptions to that principle as found in Korean vernacular verse were situated in—and explicable through—the broader Confucian literarytheoretical tradition. Here too Pollock’s work is illuminating.

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To begin with, Yi Ok was not unaware of the existence of the Korean script. That is scarcely imaginable, and we know from references in his collected writings—including a portion close in proximity to the passage analyzed by Kang—that he was fully aware of the Korean script (for the passage in full, see sk [2009: 2:422]). Kang does not make that point clearly enough, even as he takes aim at the excesses of modern Korean linguistic nationalism that are so prominent in studies on Yi. Seen through Pollock’s work, however, the conundrum that surrounds Yi (or “contradiction” [mosun], as Kang puts it [2007: 419]) becomes less confusing and can be explained through the distinction between having the tools of literacy (i.e., “literization”) and the process by which those tools are used to produce writings that are conceived as literary (i.e., “literarization”) (Pollock 2006: esp. 4–5, 23–26). The invention of the Korean script provided an excellent tool for vernacular “literization,” and this tool had existed for well over three centuries by the time Yi was living. But “literization” only enables “literarization.” The two are not the same, just as a cabinetmaker’s tools are not a cabinet. This is evident through Kim Ch’unt’aek’s translation of Lady Sa’s Journey to the South into Literary Sinitic. Such anxiety over “literarization” was understandably an elite concern inasmuch as the superstructure for thinking about literature—even vernacular literature—was derived from the Literary Sinitic tradition. Differences in education were crucial, and we see the underlying assumption—again clearly evident through Lady Sa’s Journey to the South—that those who knew Literary Sinitic would eschew the Korean script, whereas it was expected that those who would read something in the Korean script would not know sinographs. What Yi Ok makes so clear is how difficult it was to move from vernacular “literization” to vernacular “literarization.” His writings in general—and comments on script, in particular—suggest that “script apartheid” was rooted in the anxiety that use of the Korean script would rupture the connection to antiquity (see also sk [2009: 2:422n14–15]). Insofar as that connection was mediated by Literary Sinitic and sinographs, the apparent contradiction at the heart of Chosŏn’s literary tradition and embodied in Kim Manjung’s writings becomes easier to understand. References Aoyagi Tsunatarō, trans. 1914. Genbun Wayaku taishō Shashi’nanseiki Kyūunmu [Original Texts and Japanese Translations in Comparison: Lady Sa’s Journey to the South and A Nine Cloud Dream]. Keijō: Chōsen kenkyukai. [For sale, with Preview pages

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available at: http://www.hanauction.com/htm/off_auction_read.htm?id=16123&off _id=61&page=23&ac_num=25&PHPSESSID=912f1b0c7da8c3d59cb701d724c2c441; viewed 29 August 2014]. Bouchez, Daniel. 1979. “A Neo-Confucian View of Literature: Kim Ch’unt’aek’s Comments on the ‘Namjŏng-ki.’” Korea Journal 19(5): 27–32. Brokaw, Cynthia J. 2005. “On the History of the Book in China.” In Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China, edited by Cynthia J. Brokaw and Kai-Wing Chow, 3–54. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chang Hyohyŏn, trans. 2008. Kuunmong [A Nine Cloud Dream]. Seoul: Sin’gu munhwasa. Cho Tongil. 1999. Cho Tongil sojang kungmunhak yŏn’gu charyo [Research Materials for National [i.e., Korean] Literature in Cho Tongil’s Possession]. 30 vols. Seoul: Pagijŏng. Ch’oe Yongch’ŏl. 2002. “Myŏngdae munŏnsosŏl-ŭi Chosŏn kanbon-gwa chŏnp’a” [Printing and Diffusion of Ming Dynasty Literary Sinitic Fiction in Chosŏn Korea]. In Tong-Asia munhak sogesŏ-ŭi Han’guk Hanmun-sosŏl yŏn’gu [Research on Korean Literary Sinitic Fiction in East Asian Literature], edited by Koryŏdae minjok munhwa yŏn’guwŏn, 299–331. Seoul: Wŏrin. Chŏng Kyubok. [1977] 1988. Kuunmong wŏnjŏn ŭi yŏn’gu [Research on the Original Text of A Nine Cloud Dream]. Seoul: Ilchisa. Chŏng Kyubok. 1993a. Kim Manjung munhak yŏn’gu [Research on the Literature of Kim Manjung]. Seoul: Kukhak charyowŏn. Chŏng Kyubok. [1974] 1993b. Kuunmong yŏn’gu [Research on A Nine Cloud Dream]. Seoul: Koryŏ taehakkyo ch’ulp’anbu. Chŏng Kyubok and Chin Kyŏnghwan, trans. 1996. Kuunmong [A Nine Cloud Dream]. Seoul: Koryŏ taehakkyo minjok munhwa yŏn’guso. Chŏng Kyubok, Kim Yŏlgyu, and Sin Tong’uk. 1990. Kim Manjung yŏn’gu [Research on Kim Manjung]. Seoul: Saemunsa. Chŏng Yagyong. 2001. Tasan nonsŏl sŏnjip [An Anthology of Essays by Tasan Chŏng Yagyong]. Edited and Translated by Pak Sŏngmu and Chŏng Haeryŏm. Seoul: Hyŏndae sirhaksa. Chŏng Yongsu, trans. 2003. Chŏndŭng sinhwa kuhae [Glosses on the Jiandeng xinhua]. Seoul: P’urŭn sasang-sa. CRA = Wangsil tosŏgwan changsŏgak tijit’ŏl ak’aibŭ [Changsŏgak Royal Library Digital Archives]. See: http://yoksa.aks.ac.kr/main.jsp. CWS = Chosŏn wangjo sillok [Veritable Records of the Chosŏn Dynasty]. http://sillok .history.go.kr/main/main.jsp. DBKC = Han’guk kojŏn chonghap DB [DB (Database) of Korean Classics]. http:// db.itkc.or.kr/itkcdb/mainIndexIframe.jsp.

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DHM = Tijit’ŏl han’gŭl pangmulgwan [Digital Han’gŭl Museum]. http://www.hangeul museum.org. Diamond Sutra, trans. by Kumārajīva. Jingang bore boluomi jing. Taishō shinshū daizōkyō [Taishō Canon] 235.8.748c–752c. Eggert, Marion. 1999. “The Balance of Words: The Sŏp’o manp’il on Language and Literature.” In Language and Literature: Japanese and the Other Altaic Language: Studies in Honour of Roy Andrew Miller on his 75th birthday, edited by Karl H. Menges and Nelly Naumann, 67–90. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Evon, Gregory N. 2014. “Buddhism and Death in Kim Man-jung’s A Nine Cloud Dream: From Fact to Fiction, and Nowhere Back Again.” In Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in Korea: From Ancient to Contemporary Times, edited by Charlotte Horlyck and Michael J. Pettid, 190–212. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Hong Inp’yo, trans. 1990. Sŏp’o manp’il [Random Jottings of Sŏp’o Kim Manjung]. Seoul: Ilchisa. JGK = Chōsen sōtoku fu (Japanese Government-General of Korea). 1914. Kuunmong [A Nine Cloud Dream]. Available for sale with preview pages at: http://www.kobay.co.kr /servlet/wsauction/item/itemView?item.itemseq=1005Z97XFZO; viewed 29 August 2014. Kang Myŏnggwan. 2007. Konganp’a wa Chosŏn hugi hanmunhak [Gongan School and Late Chosŏn Literature in Literary Sinitic]. Seoul: Somyŏng ch’ulp’an. Kim Ch’unt’aek. “Non si mun” [“On Poetry and Prose”]. In Pukhŏn kŏsa chip [Collected Works of Householder Pukhŏn (Kim Ch’unt’aek)], vol. 16. Available at: http:// db.itkc.or.kr/itkcdb/mainIndexIframe.jsp. Kim Pyŏngguk, trans. 1984. Kuunmong [A Nine Cloud Dream]. Seoul: Siinsa. Kim Pyŏngguk, trans. 2007. Kuunmong [A Nine Cloud Dream]. 2 vols. Seoul: Sŏul taehakkyo ch’ulp’anbu. Kim Sŏngju, Pak Sangjun, and Pak Chunsŏk. 2006. Kŭmganggyŏng ŏnhae [The Diamond Sutra with (Korean) Vernacular Glosses]. Seoul: Sin’gu munhwasa. Kim Tonguk. 2011. “Kuunmong wŏnbon t’amsaek ŭi kanŭngsŏng koch’al” [Examining the Possibility of Investigating the Original Text of A Nine Cloud Dream]. Kungmunhak yŏn’gu 24: 101–124. Kim Yonggwan. 2011. Chosŏn wangjo kwisin sillok [The Ghostly Veritable Records of the Chosŏn Dynasty]. Seoul: Todŭl saegim. Lurie, David B. 2011. Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Mair, Victor H. 1994. “Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia: The Making of National Languages.” Journal of Asian Studies 53(3): 707–751. Mair, Victor H. and Tsu-Lin Mei. 1991. “The Sanskrit Origins of Recent Style Prosody.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 51(2): 375–470.

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McCann, David R. 1993. “Chinese Diction in Korean Shijo Verse.” Korean Studies 17: 92–104. Nakai, Kate Wildman. 1980. “The Naturalization of Confucianism in Tokugawa Japan: The Problem of Sinocentrism.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 40(1): 157–199. Ong, Walter J. [1982] 2010. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London and New York: Routledge. Pollock, Sheldon. 2006. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Sim Kyŏngho, trans. 2010. Sŏp’o manp’il [Random Jottings of Sŏp’o Kim Manjung]. 2 vols. P’aju: Munhak tongne. SK = Silsihaksa kojŏn munhak yŏn’guhoe, trans. 2009. Wanyŏk Yi Ok chŏnjip [Yi Ok’s Collected Works in Complete Translation]. 5 vols. with original texts. Seoul: Hyumŏnisŭt’ŭ. Whitman, John. 2011. “The Ubiquity of the Gloss.” Scripta 3: 95–121. Yi Raejong, trans. 1999. Sassi namjŏng ki [Lady Sa’s Journey to the South]. Seoul: T’aehaksa.

Chapter 12

Prolegomena to a Study of “Chosŏn-Style Hanmun” 朝鮮式漢文

Ross King 1

Introduction1

Building on the Korea-related section of chapter three in this volume, and with a view to further elaborate on the complex relationship between cosmopolitan and vernacular in Korea as seen through the prism of vernacularized or hybridized forms of the cosmopolitan, this chapter sketches out the history of research to date on pre-twentieth century “Koreanized” forms of Literary Sinitic (a.k.a. Literary Chinese, Classical Chinese, wenyanwen 文言文, etc.—what Koreans today, following modern Japanese usage, refer to as hanmun 漢文).2 A full accounting of the available sources and research would require too much space, so this chapter is best read in conjunction with chapter three on “Vernacularizing the Cosmopolitan?” Here I survey the history of research on “Chosŏn-style hanmun” (Chosŏnsik hanmun 朝鮮式漢文) with a primary focus on the seminal research by Japanese scholars and then recent work by scholars in South Korea, along with a preliminary overview of some of the genres that offer the most promise for future research on Korean Variant Sinitic.3 My historical overview of research on vernacular-infused forms (and there was a diversity of forms rather than a single form) of Literary Sinitic in Korea will present occasional samples of some of the relevant linguistic data, but a systematic cataloguing ranging across graphology (innovative or unusual deployment of sinographs; made-in-Korea sinographs), lexicon, morphology, and syntax would be premature, given that the study of this facet of 1 This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOE) (AKS-2011-AAA-2103). 2 Needless to say, the terms “Literary Sinitic” and hanmun are vague, and are used to refer to a wide range of styles and genres across an equally broad swath of time. For our purposes here, the point is not whether the texts in question are “literary” or not, but that they are written exclusively in sinographs. 3 Scholars from North Korea have in some respects applied themselves more diligently to this problem than scholars in the South, but I reserve an analysis of their efforts for another occasion; see King (forthcoming).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163

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interaction between cosmopolitan and vernacular in Korea is still very much in its infancy. For discussion of the ideological work that attends “Koreanized Literary Sinitic,” by which I mean both the attitudes and political ideologies motivating modern research on the topic, as well as traditional Korean attitudes to such linguistic hybridization by the producers and consumers of such usages, please refer to chapter three. 2

History of Research on Chosŏnsik Hanmun

The question of vernacularized or “Koreanized” forms of Literary Sinitic has attracted surprisingly little attention from researchers. This is true even if one includes research on idu—usually rendered in sinographs as 吏讀, but also sometimes also rendered as 吏頭, ido 吏道, it’o 吏吐, etc., where 吏 = sŏri 胥 吏, the lowly social class of clerks and scribes whose job it was to produce workaday documentary and administrative texts, and with whom this form of sinographic vernacular document creation and management was traditionally associated: thus, “Clerk Readings” is the usual English translation, but my own preference would be Korean Chancery Sinitic (by analogy with the medieval European chanceries and the legal and administrative documents they produced in varieties of vernacular-inflected Latin). On the topic of idu, I should begin by clarifying my own definition of Chosŏnsik hanmun, or “Chosŏn-style Literary Sinitic”: I prefer to think in terms of a continuum of inscriptional registers where the single defining characteristic is sinography—exclusive use of sinographs to render the written text, but where the text rendered can range in its degree of incorporation of vernacular features, depending on the extent to which made-in-Korea sinographs, vernacular words (including proper nouns), or sinographic terms unique to Korean contexts are used, and the degree to which Korean morphosyntactic features are incorporated into the text. These can include the use of sinographs to indicate Korean morphology (verb endings and nominal particles) as well as Korean word order. Normally, the use of sinographically rendered Korean nominal and verbal morphology (i.e., verb endings and nominal particles written with sinographs functioning phonographically) would mark a text as typical idu (what I am inclined to call Korean Chancery Sinitic), but a range of possibilities exists, hence the appeal to the notion of inscriptional continuum. In this regard, it is worth noting that scholars in both North and South Korea frequently refer to Chosŏnsik hanmun as “Idu-style Literary Sinitic” (Idusik hanmun 吏讀式漢文). As an additional caveat in light of Schreiber’s (2019) cautionary remarks about the notion of “hybridity” and the need to distinguish carefully between language

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and writing, we should ask whether texts labeled by modern Korean scholars as evincing “Korean-style hanmun” were written as Korean texts or as Sinitic texts—i.e., whether the scribes were intending to write in Korean or in Sinitic. Alternatively, we could ask who the intended target of the text was—was it destined for local reception and consumption, or was there a hope or assumption of broader translocal reception? As we shall see, and unlike the case in Japan where so many more texts remain extant from early times, and where it is clear that many so-called hentai kanbun 変体漢文 texts were written as Japanese texts to be read in Japanese, there is rarely ever a straightforward answer to these questions in Korea. If anything, and unless the inscriptional or contextual evidence is explicitly to the contrary (e.g., idu texts, including hyangga 鄕歌 verses, which were self-consciously designed for local reception and consumption), it is probably safe to assume that the authors/scribes of most sinographic texts extant from Korea either thought they were writing in Sinitic, or thought of themselves as drafting something sinographically (which was the only way they could draft something until the invention of the Korean alphabet in the mid-fifteenth century) that could later be “upgraded” to some form of more orthodox Sinitic, if necessary (e.g., for print). 3

Japanese Research

Not surprisingly, given Korea’s bitter experience as a colony of imperial Japan from 1910–1945, some of the earliest modern-day commentary on “Korean-style Sinitic” comes from Japanese observers. For example, in his collection of observations about Korea published in 1894 in Seoul under the pseudonym Adachi Keijirō 足立銈二郎, Honma Kyūsuke 本間九介 (1869–1919)4 includes a short section on “Language and literary production” in which he writes: “There are several types of literary writing (bunshō 文章). They are almost the same as in our nation: 1) pure hanmun; 2) Chōsen-style hanmun (Chōsenshiki kanbun); 3) idu writing; 4) hanmun with idu mixed in; 5) genbun/ŏnmun 諺文; 6) genbun/ŏnmun with sinographs mixed in” (Honma 2008 [1894]: 18). But he gives no examples, leaving us to wonder how he differentiated “Chōsen-style 4 According to Ch’oe Hyeju (2008: 265–266), Honma (a.k.a. Adachi Keijirō) was a native of Nihonmatsu in Fukushima prefecture who first visited Korea in 1893 as a correspondent for the Niroku Shinpō 二六新報 newspaper, in which the original accounts of his travels were first serialized. He was active as a member of the militarist groups Ten’yūkyō 天佑 俠 (Order of Divine Chivalry) and Kokuryūkai 黑龍會 (Black Dragon Society/Amur River Society) before becoming an official in the Korean Protectorate-General and then the colonial Government-General.

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hanmun” from “hanmun with idu mixed in.” A generation later, when amateur ethnologist and Korean Government-General employee Imamura Tomo 今 村鞆 (1870–1943) produced a volume of translations from traditional Chosŏn accounts of Korean seasonal customs under the title Chōsen saijiki 朝鮮歲時 記, he remarked in his introduction that “Through this work, not only have we come to learn of cases where Korea has the same sinographs with different meanings (dōji igi 同字異義), but we have been able to clarify such cases between Chōsen and China, too, thus securing an excellent resource for expediting a cultural life that brings together Japan, Korea, and China under one East Asian roof.” He characterizes Korean Literary Sinitic as a “special kind of written style (buntai 文體)” where it is easy to misunderstand the meaning because the punctuation is not indicated. Moreover, there are so many special Korean idiomatic expressions like, for example, p’yori 表裏 in the meaning of p’obaek 布帛 for “cloth for inner- and outerwear presented as a gift” or kyŏngoe 京外 (combined from Kyŏngsong “Seoul” and oedo 外道 “outer provinces”) in the meaning of “the capital and the countryside,” that if one is not careful one is liable to mistranslate.5 In many ways the most pioneering Japanese scholar of Chosŏnsik hanmun was Ayugai Fusanoshin 鮎貝房之進 (1864–1946; sometimes Romanized as Ayukai).6 A native of Miyagi prefecture and younger brother of famous poet and literary figure, Ochiai Naobumi 落合直文 (born Ayugai Morimitsu 鮎貝盛 光, 1861–1903), Ayugai studied at the Sendai Teacher’s College and worked as an elementary school principal before receiving a Monbushō scholarship to study Korean for five years at Tokyo Foreign Languages College (Tōkyō Gaikokugo Gakkō). After graduation, he went over to Korea in 1894, where he was instrumental in founding the Ŭlmi Ŭisuk Japanese Language School in 1895. Ayugai began publishing scholarly articles on Korean topics already at the turn of the twentieth century, and dedicated the last decades of his life to intense scholarship and writing; he was especially interested in questions of language, script,

5 Cited from Pak Yŏngmi (2013: 98), based on her reading of Imamura (1921: 3). 6 There is an enigmatic but fascinating and substantial study from 1933, published in Korea by a Japanese scholar, on the origins of “Japanese-style readings” (wadoku 和讀) that deserves closer attention for the connections it draws to traditional Korean technologies for reading Literary Sinitic: Nakazawa Mareo 中澤希男, “Wadoku sogen 和讀溯源” (Seikyū gakusō 靑丘學叢 14 [1933]: 99–144). Nakazawa later published Kanji, kango gaisetsu 漢字, 漢語 概説 (Kyōiku shuppan, 1978), Dōkun iji jiten 同訓異字辞典 (Tōkyōdō shuppan, 1980), and Kanbun kundoku no kiso 漢文訓読の基礎 (Kyōiku shuppan, 1985), among other works.

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epigraphy, and ancient history. A nine-volume series of “miscellaneous essays” (zakkō 雜攷) appeared in the 1930s, and was reprinted in the 1970s.7 What interests us here is Ayugai’s Zakkō 6 ([1938] 1972, in two volumes), titled Zokubon kō 俗文攷 (lit. “A Study of Vernacular[ized] Literary Sinitic [in Korea]”). In the preface, Ayugai divides zokubun 俗文 into two types—(1) zokukanbun 俗漢文 and (2) imun 吏文—and defines zokukanbun as “an inscriptional style (buntai) which writes out (kakikudashitaru) [Korean] ‘as is’ without attaching inversion marks as in kanbun.” He continues: “Like Japan, the Koreans borrowed sinographs, studied how to adapt them to write the local language (hōgen 方言), and came up with a borrowed-graph technique (shakujihō 借字 法), to wit, Japan’s man’yōgana” (Ayugai [1938] 1972: 347). But Ayugai goes on to note that this technique was only ever used to record individual words, and that “not a single lucid prose composition” has survived in it. Rather, what was developed was zokukanbun, which Ayugai equates with the Japanese norito 祝 辞宜 style of Shintō liturgies (Ayugai [1938] 1972: 347–348). Ayugai traces zokukanbun back to the Korean Three Kingdoms period (57 bce–668 ce), and supposes it lasted until early Koryŏ (918–1392 ce), but claims that after Koryŏ, by which time Literary Sinitic was generally read and written by the “middle classes” (chūryū 中流) and higher, imun was used by those lower than the middle class, and zokukanbun died out. For Ayugai, imun is “the written language (bun 文) of the sŏri 胥吏 clerks” and thus corresponds to what post-war scholars call idu. He thinks the term imun itself is post-Koryŏ, and cites the passage from Yi Kyubo’s 李奎報 (1168–1241) “Collected Records of the Miraculous Efficacy of the Great Gold Buddha at Wangnyun Monastery” (Wangnyunsa Changnyuk kŭmsang yŏnghŏm susŭp ki 王輪寺丈六金像靈驗收 拾記; 1168) describing such usage: 但以其所記皆方言俚語而，不可久其傳．

But because all that it records is local speech and rustic expressions, it is not fit for long-term transmission.

7 See Ri Chinho (2011: 127–128) for basic biographical information. Considering Ayugai’s importance as a scholar and his considerable influence with the Japanese Government-General during the colonial period, it is surprising that there is so little research on him. He was clearly a bitter Koreaphobe; a Korean writing under the pseudonym of T’anhăesăeng in Cheguk sinmun left behind a series of three editorials (June 16, 17, and 18, 1908) lambasting Ayugai for his prejudiced, insulting and anti-Korean views expressed in an article in the June 1 issue of the magazine Chōsen of the same year. See Kang Hyŏnjo et al. (2014: 534–538).

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Ayugai relates the traditional claim that Sŏl Ch’ong 薛聰 (fl. 7th c.) was the inventor of zokukanbun (i.e., idu), but notes that there is a time gap between his dates and the earliest known inscriptions (Ayugai [1938] 1972: 349). In his view, zokukanbun predated imun (meaning idu), going back to the Three Kingdoms period shortly after sinographs began to be used. Ayugai makes the important point that imun was not used to record spoken language, but comprised a sort of special terminology inserted into Literary Sinitic: “Regardless of whether Sŏl Ch’ong was the originator or not, its purpose was as stated in the Yŏji sŭngnam 輿地勝覽: ‘to produce administrative documents for circulation among government offices’ (製吏札行于官府)” (Ibid.: 351). This terminology was the specialized province of government offices (kanpu 官府) and the lowlevel bureaucrats and clerks who used it. Ayugai compares Korean sinographic t’o 吐 grammatical markers to Japanese okurigana, and compares imun (= idu) compositions to the inscriptional style (J. buntai) used in Japanese texts like the Azuma kagami 吾妻鏡, or to the shokan buntai 書簡文體 used at the end of the Fujiwara period and in the Kamakura period, and sees this Korean “borrowed graph writing” (shakujibun 借字文) as equivalent or comparable to the writing style of the Japanese Man’yōshū (Ibid.: 349–350). The remainder of Ayugai’s introduction dwells on idu (which he calls imun): he attributes the lack of idu inscriptions after Koryŏ to the spread of knowledge of Literary Sinitic, but notes its persistence in documentary and administrative life in genres like chiryŏngmun 指令文 (directives), p’odalmun 布達文 (public notices), wŏnsŏ 願書 (requests/applications), sotchang 訴狀 (depositions), kugongmun 口供文 (confessions), and miscellaneous chŭngmun 證文 (certificates and attestations), and notes that it is used “even now” (he was writing in the late 1920s and early 1930s) for certifications and for real estate transactions (Ibid.: 352). For Ayugai, the persistence of idu even after the invention of the hunmin chŏng’ŭm 訓民正音 in the fifteenth century is comparable to the persistence of Kamakura-era (1185–1333) shokan buntai to his time in the early twentieth century, and he attributes its continued use on the one hand to a similar desire to “add gravitas to the diction” (詞を鄭重に云ふ) (Ibid.: 353); but in Chosŏn an additional factor was its close connection to the specific social class of sŏri clerks for whom idu served as a unique hereditary occupation. Ayugai laments the relative dearth of sources on how to read and write idu, citing, for example, the Idu p’yŏllam 吏吐便覽 (Idu Manual) held in the Tōyō Bunko (he says no copy survives in Korea) and the ubiquitous late-Chosŏn collection of templates for bureaucratic and administrative documents that use idu, Yusŏ p’ilchi 儒胥必知 (Must-know for Scholars and Clerks). Ayugai recounts that he personally has collected some twenty-three other manuscripts with lists of

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idu t’o 吐, but finds them all more or less the same as the Yusŏ p’ilchi. Such works, he writes, are useless not only to foreigners, but to Koreans themselves, as they do not give meanings. He finishes with an anecdote about “the late Shinjō Juntei 新庄順貞” (dates unknown) who first studied in Korea in early Meiji as a language student posted by the Japanese Army and later became an interpreter for the colonial Government-General; Shinjō apparently once gathered together a group of sŏri clerks and collected the readings and meanings for some 777 idu forms, which is approximately three times more than the 243 forms listed in the Yusŏ p’ilchi. The forms that Ayugai cites in his own work were provided to him while Shinjō Juntei was still alive. The rest of Zakkō volume 6 consists of more than 400 pages of detailed and erudite analyses of virtually all known idu and Chosŏn-style Sinitic inscriptions at the time.8 Ayugai’s work is still a valuable resource to this day. South Korean scholars refer to it frequently even if they do not always cite it. Nevertheless, his work raises a number of questions. The first concerns terminology, given his conflation of idu and imun.9 Imun is usually reserved in modern South Korean scholarship for the chancery style of writing and documentation that late Koryŏ and early Chosŏn adopted from the Yuan (1279–1368) and then Ming (1368–1644) bureaucracies for written communications, both between Korea and China, and between government offices within Korea. His work also has little to say about forms of Literary Sinitic in Korea that evince vernacularized characteristics, but do not carry full-blown idu morphological elements, given his focus on idu inscriptions, which more or less dry up after Koryŏ. In essence, while Ayugai’s oeuvre gives a comprehensive and detailed overview 8 Shinjō Juntei is another Japanese figure deserving of more research. According to Yi Kangmin (2015: 242–243), Shinjō worked as a vice-consul in the Japanese consulate in P’yŏngyang, and by 1912 was working as an interpreter in the Government-General in Seoul, where he was part of the team that created the “Pot’ong hakkyo ŏnmun ch’ŏlchapŏp” (Ŏnmun Orthography for Common Schools). Umeda (2013: 14) reports that Shinjō compiled and circulated a text with the name “Ritō chūshaku” 吏読註釋/吏吐註釋 (Idu Forms, Annotated and Explained), arranged in sequence from monosyllabic idu up to sequences of eleven sinographs—the same work cited by Ayugai above, and that this work was also cited to good effect in Chōsen Sōtokufu Chūsūin (1936), an annotated version of the early Chosŏn idu “translation” of the Ming law code. Shinjō also participated in the compilation of two different language textbooks for Japanese learners—one for Koreans learning Japanese (Yi Pongun 1895) and the other for Japanese learning Korean (Shinjō 1918). 9 Sim Kyŏngho (2014b: 23) defines imun as “an inscriptional style used in legislative collections from the Yuan dynasty, using four characters per clause and no final particles, focused exclusively on transmitting meaning.” For representative South Korean scholarship on imun, see also An Pyŏnghŭi (1987), Ku Pŏmjin (2012) and Yang Ojin (2014).

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of the earliest vernacularized forms of sinographic epigraphy from the Three Kingdoms period through Koryŏ, it has left to one side the rich developments in and explosion of printed materials starting with Chosŏn in the late fourteenth century. After World War II, the next scholar to make significant progress in the study of Chosŏnsik hanmun—and specifically with respect to materials from the Chosŏn dynasty—was Fujimoto Yukio 藤本幸夫 (1941–). His seminal 1978 article, “Chōsen kanbun: idu-bun kara no jōka” (Chōsen Literary Sinitic—Sublimation from Idu), remains in its broad outlines the definitive treatment of the topic. For Fujimoto (1978: 32), “Chosŏn hanmun” is an “extremely anomalous/irregular hanmun” that “seems bizarre”: “To wit: there are few xuzi 虚子 (functional particles) and the contents to be narrated are simply strung along one after the other, lending it a rather tense and terse feeling…. Sentential rhythm and elegant flow are absent; sometimes, polishing via appropriate word selection and deployment is omitted, which gives the reader a kind of unnatural/uncanny sense of unease … It is a Korean-smelling (Chōsenshū 朝鮮臭) hanmun akin to Japanese-smelling (washū 和臭) kanbun” (Ibid.).10 For Fujimoto, Chosŏn-style hanmun is essentially doctored~edited~cleaned up idu (idu purged of its phonographic elements and rearranged according to orthodox Sinitic word order with Chinese functional particles), and he presents examples of different versions of letters by T’oegye Yi Hwang 退溪 李滉 (1501–1570) and Yi Sunsin 李舜臣 (1545–1598) found in different recensions, all of which point to a process whereby texts originally drafted in idu or with heavy admixtures of idu were subsequently edited and cleaned up in varying degrees before inclusion in different kinds of print editions. In the case of T’oegye’s letters, the idu originals are no longer extant, but Fujimoto reconstructs the following series of editorial transitions:

10 The original Japanese reads: “極めて変格的な漢文…奇妙に映る…即ち、虚子は少 く、述べたい事柄を次々と重ね上げるだけで、成程緊迫感はあり…文のズムや流 麗さを欠き、或は語詞の適切な撰択と布置による彫琢は加えられず、読手に不自 然さとある種の不安感を与える.” The four-syllable cadences of Korean-style Literary Sinitic that give Fujimoto such a “sense of unease” were actually well in tune with Korean metrical sensibilities, and are unlikely to have elicited any sense of unnaturalness on the part of Chosŏn readers. Sim Kyŏngho (2008: 207) has also written about the predilection for 4–4 patterning in Korean imun.

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*Idu original 淸書 [clean copy] /

|



| touch-up

/

呈出用 [submission]



|

   touch-up |

|



承政院日記 etc.



Sŭngjŏngwŏn ilgi

| b 退溪先生文集 T’oegye sŏnsaeng munjip

   touch-up | b’ 中宗實錄

   Chungjong sillok

The original idu compositions underwent the following kinds of editing (Ibid.: 36): 1) 2) 3) 4)

deletion of idu elements paraphrase/rewording of idu terms and phrases re-ordering of words and clauses change of grammatical case

If we were to compare this with Japanese hentai kanbun (anomalous or variant kanbun/Literary Sinitic—see chapter three), hentai kanbun was originally written as Japanese and meant to be read as Japanese. By contrast, what remains as “Chosŏn-style hanmun” are compositions originally written in idu and then subsequently submitted to editorial cleansing for “sublimation” (the jōka 昇 華 in Fujimoto’s subtitle) as orthodox hanmun. However, the editorial process was frequently imperfect, and the resulting texts often fell short of their orthodox hanmun target (Ibid.: 38). Since Fujimoto’s important paper of 1978, other research by Japanese scholars has continued to appear, although the primary focus tends to be the earliest

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Korean sources from the Three Kingdoms period and explorations of connections to early Japanese writing. Among these, studies by Mori Hiromichi 森博達 (1949–) deserve our attention. Mori wrote a series of books and papers, starting with his 1991 book, Kodai no on’in to Nishon shoki no seiritsu (Ancient Phonology and the Origins of the Nihon Shoki), followed by his 1999 book, Nihon shoki no nazo o toku: Jutsusakusha wa dare ka (Solving the Puzzle of the Nihon shoki: Who was the Author?; reprinted in 2004 and translated into Korean by Sim Kyŏngho in 2006 as Ilbon sŏgi ŭi pimil), and then his 2011 book, Nihon shoki seiritsu no shinjitsu: Kakikae no shudosha wa dare ka (The Truth about the Origins of the Nihon shoki: Who was in Charge of Rewriting It?). Mori makes a number of interesting yet controversial claims about the authorship of certain portions of the Nihon shoki. Namely, that Silla Koreans and/or Japanese with prolonged exposure to Silla literacy practices through study on the peninsula had a hand in compiling, writing, and editing portions of the book, and that a number of oddities (e.g., use of sentence-final 之, dismissed as washū 和習 or “Japanisms” by other Japanese scholars but branded as rashū 羅習 or “Silla-isms” by Mori) in the Literary Sinitic of the text owe to Koreanisms. For example, whereas in orthodox Sinitic the adverb 亦 is normally placed between the subject and the verb, there are 39 examples in the Nihon shoki where it appears preceding the subject of the sentence (as per Korean word order, and precisely in those sections identified by Mori as having “Silla-isms”): 亦吾姉磬長姫在 (scroll 2)

“[Then she said:] ‘I have also an elder sister named Iha-naga-hime.’”

亦我兄二天皇 (scroll 13) “Moreover, the two Emperors, my elder brothers,”11

More recently, Mori (2009, 2010, and 2011) has advanced similar arguments (some new, some recycled from earlier work) based on what he sees as traces of old Sino-Korean pronunciations preserved in some of the readings in the Nihon shoki, and striking similarities between certain usages in Silla idu

11 Here I am relying on Sim’s Korean translation of Mori (2006: 308–309; English translations from Aston [1896: 84, 312]). Note that similar arguments were advanced already with respect to the late seventh-century Suikochō ibun 推古朝遺文 inscriptions in Fujii Shigetoshi (1981), who cites Ayugai’s work on sentence-final 之 in ancient Korean inscriptions. Fujii (1981: 11) concedes that sentence-final 之 can be found in Chinese sources, but that its more frequent use in Korean peninsular sources must have had at least an indirect influence on Japanese usage during the same and later periods. On the other hand, his attempt to connect this with modern Korean -chi -지 is simply wrong.

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inscriptions and the Nihon shoki. Mori (2009) cites the eighth-century travelogue Wang o Ch’ŏnch’ukkuk chŏn 往五天竺國傳 (Memoir of a Pilgrimage to the Five Kingdoms of India) by Silla monk Hyech’o 慧超 (704–787) which likewise evinces Silla-isms like the following: 男人並剪鬢髪、女人在頭。(突厥條) “The men cut their facial beard and hair, but the women keep their hair [in a chignon].”

Here, 在 is used incorrectly for 有, both of which are glossed as isi- 이시- “be; have” in Korean, while 頭 “head” is misused for 髮 “hair” since both are glossed in Korean as mŏri 머리 “head; hair,” so the orthodox Sinitic rendition would have been 女人有髮. Finally, another important Japanese scholar working in this area is Okimori Takuya 冲森卓也 (1952–). For example, Okimori (2007: 126) shows that a kind of “variant” or “anomalous” Literary Sinitic (pyŏnkyŏk hanmun 變格漢文) must have been in use in Silla, at least outside the capital, by the latter part of the sixth century. He supposes (Ibid.) that the localization (he uses the term pyŏnyong 變容) of Literary Sinitic in Three Kingdoms-period Korea must have proceeded according to the following sequence: 1) fixed conventional expressions using auxiliary elements (付屬辭 要素) (e.g., use of locative -中 and sentence-final 之 in the early fifth-century Chungwŏn Koguryŏbi monument 中原高句麗碑) 2) constructions and expressions atypical for orthodox Literary Sinitic (e.g., “所白了事” in the early sixth-century Yŏngil Naengsu-ri Silla pimyŏng 迎日冷水里新羅碑銘) 3) sinographic expressions reflective of vernacular grammar (e.g., “敎…敎” meaning something like “issued a directive to the effect ‘…’—so-endeththe-directive”) in the Yŏngil Naengsu-ri Silla pimyŏng 迎日冷水里新羅 碑銘) 4) expressions using vernacular Korean word order (e.g., the Musul ojak pimyŏng 戊戌塢作碑銘 of approximately 578 ce) With respect to this latter inscription—according to Kim Kijong (2012: 408) one of only two inscriptions remaining from the Three Kingdoms period that is written consistently in Korean word order throughout, whereas other inscriptions typically mixed Korean word order and Sinitic order—Okimori calls attention to the very last line:

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文作人壹利兮一尺. “Scribe Illihye 壹利兮, rank ilch’ŏk 一尺.”

Here, 文作人 for “scribe” follows Korean word order: lit., “text-create-person,” i.e., “글을 지은 사람 the person who created the text.” Okimori points out that within the Silla-era hierarchy of seventeen governmental ranks, “一尺” was a fifteenth-level, low-ranking provincial post. “This means that the scribe Illihye was a low-level functionary in the provinces, and the fact that Variant Sinitic was being used by such a person of that rank merits our attention. In other words, it is an indisputable fact that in late sixth-century Silla, practical compositions were usually written in Variant Sinitic, at least in the provinces” (Okimori 2007: 126).12 As we shall see below, these sorts of lower-level functionaries, scribes, clerks, and document handlers in the government bureaucracy continued to be the main (though by no means exclusive) producers and consumers of texts in Variant Sinitic throughout the Chosŏn dynasty. To sum up this overview of Japanese research on Korean Variant Sinitic, it was Japanese observers and researchers connected to imperial Japan’s encroachment on Korea at the turn of the twentieth century and into the colonial period who first called attention to Koreanized forms of Sinitic while noting similarities with various Japanese inscriptional styles, and modern academic scholarship on idu and idu-style Sinitic was pioneered by Ayugai Fusanoshin. Fujimoto Yukio authored a seminal article on Koreanized Sinitic from the Chosŏn period in 1978, but it seems fair to say that the bulk of subsequent

12

Okimori goes on to claim that the Silla practice of writing Variant Sinitic must have been learned from the “first adopter” in this regard, Koguryŏ, in and of itself not an unreasonable assumption. But as corroborating evidence he cites Mabuchi Kazuo’s (1970) interpretation of the famous story of Ō Shinni/Wang Chinni 王辰爾 from the Nihon shoki: a diplomatic letter is received from Ko[gu]ryŏ in the year 572, inscribed on black crow’s feathers, but all of the Yamato court’s officials puzzle over it for three days, unable to read it, until Ō Shinni, a scribe and descendant of peninsular immigrants from Paekche, successfully deciphers the missive. Okimori, following Mabuchi, supposes that the reason the court officials were unable to read the letter was because it was written in the “Koreanized Sinitic” (韓化漢文) of Koguryŏ, which would have been used in Paekche as well, and was thus familiar to Ō Shinni. This seems stretched, in light of the broad linguistic similarities between Korean and Japonic and the ways in which Sinitic writing was adopted in Japan; rather (and following Suroven’ [2013]), it makes more sense to interpret this episode as evidence of Ō Shinni’s accomplishments not simply in Sinitic reading and writing, but also in cryptography—the Nihon shoki explains that “Chinni accordingly steamed the feathers in the vapour from boiled rice, and took an impression of them on a piece of silk, whereupon all the characters were transferred to it, to the wonder of the Court” (cited from Aston [1896: 2:91]).

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Japanese scholarship has focused mainly on teasing out the links between peninsular adaptations of Sinitic writing to Korean and the importation of Sinitic reading and writing technologies to Japan in the earliest recorded materials. 4

Korean Research

4.1 Colonial Period There appears to have been extremely little in the way of Korean research or commentary published on Chosŏnsik hanmun during the colonial period. The only vaguely relevant publication I have found is a series of articles by one Kim Wanjin 金完鎭 (1877–1948)13 titled “Kanbun no yomikata” (How to Read Hanmun [in Korean]) in some 35 installments in the pedagogical journal Gekkan zasshi Chōsengo (Korean Language Monthly) targeted at Japanese colonial officials preparing to take the Korean Language Encouragement Exam between the years 1926–1929. However, this particular series is concerned more with contrasting Japanese and Korean techniques of deciphering Literary Sinitic for Japanese learners of Korean than it is with research into vernacularized varieties of hanmun, and cannot be considered academic research. The fact that the notion of a “Korean-style” Literary Sinitic was nonetheless current in the colonial period can be seen in the following snippet from a review of 1937 by Yi Chaeuk 李在郁 (1905–?) of Yŏ Kyuhyŏng’s 呂圭亨 (1848–1921) hanmun version of The Tale of Ch’unhyang that was used to produce a script for production as a musical play at the famous Wŏn’gaksa Theater: Yŏ Kyuhyŏng’s hanmun Ch’unhyang chŏn edits the Ch’unhyang song performed by Korean p’ansori artists so as to mimic the style of Chinese vernacular fiction or the Xixiangji. Because it was originally written in Korean-style Literary Sinitic (Sŏnsik hanmun 鮮式漢文) it is comparatively

13 According to the online Han’guk yŏktae inmul chonghap chŏngbo sisŭt’em, Kim Wanjin (courtesy name Ubong 雨峰) graduated from the Kwallip Hansŏng Yŏngŏ Hakkyo 官立漢城英語學校 in 1907, served in the Ministry of Education in different roles until 1910, then worked as an official in the Government-General throughout the colonial period, with the bulk of his service (1918–1939) spent as instructor in the Confucian Classics (sasŏng 司成) at the Kyŏnghagwŏn 經學院, the institution created by the Japanese colonial regime in the place of the old Sŏnggyun’gwan and designed to co-opt old style Korean Confucian intellectuals. See http://people.aks.ac.kr/front/dirSer/ppl /pplView.aks?pplId=PPL_7HIL_A1877_1_0027024&curSetPos=0&curSPos=0&category=di rSer&isEQ=true&kristalSearchArea=P (accessed January 26, 2020).

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clear and easy, and thus anybody with a bit of training in hanmun can read it with ease.14 But the term “[Cho]sŏnsik hanmun” had an additional related but different usage at this time, as can be seen from the handful of articles that appeared in the Chosŏn ilbo and Tonga ilbo in autumn of 1937 decrying the colonial Education Bureau’s decision to discontinue the teaching of “Chosŏn-style hanmun” within the combined “Chosŏnŏ hanmunkwa” (Korean language and Literary Sinitic”) subject in schools. Shiobara Tokisaburō 鹽原時三郞 (1896–1963), director of the Education Bureau and one of the architects of the notorious kōminka 皇民化 (imperialization) policies enacted under Governor-General Minami Jirō 南次郎 (1874–1955; governor-general of Korea from 1936–1942),15 was quoted in the Tonga ilbo on August 31 as saying that what had until then been taught as “Korean Language-cum-hanmun” (Chōsengo oyobi kanbun 朝 鮮語及漢文) would henceforth be changed to just “Korean language” by doing away with the “Chosŏn-style method of reading [Literary Sinitic]” (朝鮮式의讀 方). This was justified on the grounds that students were learning kanbun in their “national language” (kokugo 國語, i.e., Japanese) classes anyway, and that therefore learning how to read hanmun through and in Korean according to traditional Korean reading practices represented a double burden for students and an inefficient use of precious class time. Shiobara went on to reassure his interviewer that this change would have no effect on the teaching of Korean (or on the jobs of the instructors teaching the combined Korean-cum-hanmun classes) and that there was no intention of doing away with Korean language classes. And of course students were welcome to study Literary Sinitic in the Korean fashion on their own.16 Whereas the Tonga ilbo simply reported the newly announced policy in the context of a “chat” with Education Bureau Director Shiobara, the article from the same day in the Chosŏn ilbo was vociferous in its opposition. The anonymous author of this front-page editorial starts by refuting the notion that “in 14 “呂圭亨씨의 漢文 春香傳은 朝鮮의 倡優가 演하는 春香歌를 支那小說 西廂記 體를 모방하여 編한 것이다．이것은 원래 鮮式 漢文으로 써서 문장은 비교적 명이 함으로 조곰 한문의 소양이 있는 자는 쉬웁게 읽을 수 있다” (Yi Chaeuk 1937: 44; cited in Song Migyŏng [2009: 278]). 15 A general in the Imperial Japanese Army, Minami was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to life in prison. For more on his Education Bureau director, Shiobara, see Inaba (1998). 16 “Ijung pudam ŭi t’ongil: Shiohara Hangmugukchang tam” 二重負擔의　統一：鹽原學 務局長　談 [Unifying a Double Burden: A Conversation with Director Shiohara of the Education Bureau], Tonga ilbo, August 31, 1937.

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learning Literary Sinitic in Japanese (kokugo) and in Korean this is redundant education…. even if we concede that this is so in form, it is not at all the case in content. That is, kokugo kanbun is read via kundoku with okurigana (送點) and inversion glosses, and Korean hanmun is read via Korean with hundok and ŭmdok used in tandem. Thus, even when reading the same Sinitic text, a passage like 十有五而志于學 read through Japanese is a mouthful with the kun glosses, the inversion marks and the okurigana, but in Korean one reads it straight down the line as ‘sip yu o i chi u hak’ and can easily catch the meaning.” The author goes on to point out the need to distinguish between sinographs and hanmun, but emphasizes how deeply embedded both are in everyday Korean language. Besides, “By learning Korean hanmun through Korean in the combined Korean-cum-hanmun classes, we are at least more or less maintaining the number of hours devoted to Korean language and writing, but if even this is abolished, will not Korean language and writing be fated to gradually fade away (soyŏng 消影)?” He concludes: “Hanmun is not a foreign language like English or French. Just as Latin served as the matrix (mogye 母系) for speech and writing for European languages, hanmun has been the matrix for the East Asian peoples. To suddenly abolish it would bring about the momentous result of abolishing half of the language; the authorities must not proceed with this plan.”17 On the following day (September 1, 1937) the Tonga ilbo printed not one but two critiques of the “dual burden” redundancy argument. The longer editorial repeated many of the points made already the day before in the Chosŏn ilbo piece, stressing the notion of Literary Sinitic as the “common classical language of the countries of East Asia” and asking whether anybody would be so bold as to suggest removing kanbun from the Japanese language curriculum.18 A much shorter squib under the title “Gibberish” was also critical of the measure, albeit resigned in tone. The author muses whether, as a result of the new policy, there will be an “inundation of millions of laughably inaccurate character readings; for sinographs in their Chosŏn readings we shall have to go back to the traditional countryside sŏdang classrooms.” The writer concludes with the following tongue-in-cheek allusion to the Analects: “Would it not be a good thing (不亦可乎아!) to pay a bit more consideration to traditional Chosŏn-style hanmun in the future when making new [Korean language] chrestomathies and thus achieve both missions?”19 17 “Chosŏnŏ hanmunkwa p’yeji” [The Abolition of Courses in Korean Language and Hanmun], Chosŏn ilbo, August 31, 1937. 18 “Chosŏnsik hanmun ŭi p’yeji” [The Abolition of Hanmun], Tonga ilbo, September 1, 1937. 19 “Hoengsŏl susŏl” 橫說竪說 [Gibberish], Tonga ilbo, September 1, 1937.

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The last editorial protesting the abolition of Chosŏn-style hanmun in Korean language classes appeared in the Chosŏn ilbo on October 6, 1937. The (again anonymous) author blamed the measure on “an insufficient understanding arising from the abstract notion of wanting to separate off Korean, Japanese, and hanmun from each other,” whereas in fact “just like Latin for European languages, hanmun is the root and trunk (kŭn’gan 根幹) of East Asian languages; if you can’t understand hanmun, you can’t truly understand Japanese or Korean. Thus, hanmun is not hanmun, but a constituent part of Japanese and a constituent part of Korean, and they cannot be teased apart.”20 The author appeals for new and pedagogically improved hanmun textbooks to replace the faulty series just discontinued, but any complaints and appeals were rendered pointless less than six months later when Korean language classes were rendered “optional” (and thus effectively discontinued) with the promulgation of the Third Educational Ordinance on March 3, 1938. In sum, there was little research on Chosŏn-style hanmun by Korean scholars before 1945, and indeed hardly any opportunities for such research, given the political realities of the period. Nonetheless, we can find evidence of an awareness of “Chosŏn-style hanmun,” meaning both a particular way or style of writing in Literary Sinitic (as exemplified by Yŏ Kyuhyŏng’s rendition of the Tale of Ch’unhyang), and the traditional Korean way of reading (vocalizing) Literary Sinitic through and in Korean, using a combination of Sino-Korean pronunciations for sinographs and hyŏnt’o reading glosses. The colonial regime’s abolition in 1937 of the hanmun component of what had become a combined Korean-cum-hanmun subject in the schools turned out to be the prelude to doing away with Korean language instruction entirely in 1938 by making the subject “optional.” The brief but spirited defense of hanmun and instruction in hanmun in and through Korean—as something proudly Korean and different from Japanese or kanbun (alongside concurrent appeals to the cosmopolitan and classical pan-East Asian nature of Literary Sinitic)—on the pages of colonial Korea’s two major dailies in autumn of 1937 serves to underscore both the tenacious persistence of traditional hanmun literary practices and the flimsiness of post-liberation narratives of Korean alphabet triumphalism. 4.2 Post-Liberation After liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, scholarly interest in questions of hybridized forms of Literary Sinitic in South Korea does not seem to have matured until the late 1970s and early 1980s. Amidst this paucity of 20 “Hanmunkwa p’yeji wa kŭ sŏnhuch’aek” [The Abolition of Hanmun Courses and How to Remedy It], Chosŏn ilbo, October 6, 1937.

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scholarship, the linguist and pioneering scholar of Korean kugyŏl 口訣 glossing of Literary Sinitic texts, Nam P’unghyŏn ([1982] 1985) made one short yet important statement. Nam begins by defining “Korean hanmun” as Literary Sinitic with “additions/accretions from Korean linguistic and/or cultural elements.”21 Given his interest in hundok 訓讀-type “vernacular reading” techniques, Nam attaches importance to the way Koreans have read and vocalized Literary Sinitic texts in the vernacular, and includes in his working definition the notion that “Korean hanmun” is a kind of Literary Sinitic that is partially “assimilated” to Korean in terms of lexis, phonology, and syntax. Thus, he supposes that some form of systematized Sino-Korean (or at least Sino-Koguryŏan) pronunciation system must have been in place already by the year 372, when we are told that Koguryŏ was teaching the Chinese classics and literature in its T’aehak 太學 institution of higher learning. Nam’s spotlight on a systematized Sino-Xenic phonological system for both the vocalization of Literary Sinitic and for the development of localized traditions of reading and writing hanmun is significant. Nam’s line of thought has been developed more recently in a series of papers by Japanese scholar Itō Hideto 伊藤英人 (1961–), who uses the concept of “counter-Sinicization” (J. taikō Chūgokuka 對抗中國化). In Itō’s view, the key question to ask in the case of a language and culture like Korean, so heavily influenced by Chinese culture, is not “why is it so infused with Chinese?” but “how did Korea and the Koreans avoid total assimilation?” For Itō, one important answer lies in the development of a system of Sino-Xenic readings that then links to some sort of political or ethnic identity.22 To return to the work of Nam P’unghyŏn, he does not cite Ayugai, but nonetheless seems to follow him in his discussion of sokhanmun 俗漢文 from the Three Kingdoms period. But for Nam the significance of the idu elements in Three Kingdoms sokhanmun materials is the coexistence at the time of both ŭmdok 音讀 reading (whereby hanmun is read sequentially according to the Sino-Xenic pronunciation and without word-order inversions) and sŏktok 釋 讀 interpretive reading (whereby the hanmun is read with vernacular hundoktype glosses and word-order inversions). Crucially, he opines that a knowledge of orthodox Literary Sinitic alone would have rendered Korean sokhanmun materials opaque to non-Korean readers. Finally, Nam (1982: 176) imagines 21 “한국어 내지는 한국문화적인 요소가 가미 된 한문” (Nam P’unghyŏn [1982] 1985: 171). 22 See Yiteng Yingren [Itō Hideto] (2013). In this regard, Nam P’unghyŏn (1982: 173) makes the interesting observation that Ikchae Yi Chehyŏn 益齋 李齊賢 (1287–1367) based the rhyming scheme in his sa 詞 poetry on Sino-Korean pronunciations rather than on Chinese rhyme scheme.

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the following sequence of developments in literary languages and registers in Korea: Chinese Literary Sinitic → the Literary Sinitic of Korean literati → Korean sokhanmun → idumun → compositions in vernacular Korean (e.g., hyangch’al or texts in the Korean script) where Nam’s arrows represent the process of gradual accretion/addition of vernacular Korean elements. In Nam’s view, the Samguk sagi 三國史記 (History of the Three Kingdoms; 1145) belongs to the sphere of orthodox Literary Sinitic, whereas the Samguk yusa 三國遺事 (Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms; 1281) tilts more towards sokhanmun. Aside from Nam’s linguistic approach, the first post-liberation Korean scholar of hanmun literature (Korean literature in Literary Sinitic) to have called attention to the need for scholars of Korean hanmun to study idu, kugyŏl and other types of ch’aja p’yogi 借字表記 (borrowed-graph orthography) is Yi Kawŏn (1979; 1985; 1995–1997). Sim Kyŏngho (2012) credits Yi Kawŏn with not only being one of the first scholars to highlight the need for research into the historical developments of hanmun literary style(s) in Korea, but also for recognizing that Koreans had contrived genres with unique Korean-style Literary Sinitic that cannot be found in China. For example, Yi Kawŏn writes in the preface to his Han’guk hanmunhaksa (History of Hanmun Studies in Korea): It is an undeniable fact that the civil service exam poetry (kwasimun 科詩 文) of Koryŏ and of the Yi dynasty, or the songs of Koryŏ after the style of “Hallim pyŏlgok” 翰林別曲, as well as things like the official documentary templates (kongyong sŏsik 公用書式) of the Yi dynasty, possess a unique form and structure that cannot be found on Chinese soil (hant’o 漢土).23 Despite Sim Kyŏngho’s generous appreciation of his work, Yi Kawŏn does not seem to have dedicated any specialized studies to the problem of Korean-style variant hanmun. In a more recent call to arms, Hwang Wiju (2005) includes “old documents and Korean-style Literary Sinitic” as the third of his three tasks for future research in hanmun studies and makes the important point that research on Literary Sinitic in Korea has tended to neglect the vast number of extant archival manuscript documents at the expense of printed materials typically belonging to the very highest and most prestigious genres and writers. Hwang gives a sampling of representative idu forms, categorized into 23

Yi Kawŏn (1979: 5), cited in Sim Kyŏngho (2012: 239).

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nominals, verbs, adverbs, case particles, and syntax based on Ch’oe Sŭnghŭi (1981) and Yi Sugŏn et al. (2004), and also lists some of the common genres of administrative documentation that invariably featured Chosŏn-style hanmun and were part of most Chosŏn literati’s daily routine whenever they held any form of public office, because of their need to work closely with the local sŏri/hyangni clerks. As he notes, “a substantial portion of the texts that people read and wrote in everyday life were not in the typical Literary Sinitic included in posthumous literary collections (munjip 文集), but in precisely the Literary Sinitic characterized by a chaotic intermixture of vernacular lexicon and grammar known as Korean-style hanmun or idu style” (Hwang 2005: 1034–1035).24 Thus, rather belatedly, the first serious South Korean attempts to take up the challenge of grappling with the problem of Chosŏn-style hanmun are in fact owed to Sim Kyŏngho (2006; 2008)—articles that rely heavily on Fujimoto’s piece from more than three decades prior, but also draw on an impressive knowledge of a vast array of Korean hanmun sources. Sim (2006) complains that most South Korean research into Korean hanmun prose sources focuses almost exclusively on chŏnggyŏk 正格, or orthodox hanmun, while ignoring imun and idu materials. Citing an anecdote from the Ch’ŏngya tamsu 靑野談 藪 (a manuscript collection of yadam-type fictional narratives in hanmun copied at the beginning of the twentieth century), Sim (2006: 9–10) points out that Chosŏn literati were expected to be well versed not only in orthodox hanmun, but also in imun chancery style and kongnyŏngmun 功令文 (i.e., kwamun 科文, comprising the genres required for success in the civil service exam), and that they frequently wrote in and read a kind of “variant” or “anomalous” (pyŏnkyŏk 變格) hanmun that he calls hyŏnt’o-sik hanmun 懸吐式漢文: hanmun with vernacular Korean grammatical markers (t’o) appended (in effect, idu).25 When one removes the t’o and extracts the remaining hanmun, one is left with something stylistically closer to imun rather than to orthodox hanmun. Characterized by phrasing in groups of four sinographs and a lack of final particles, this imun “does not count as literary hanmun prose, but is extremely important in understanding the special nature of Korean hanmun” (Sim 2006: 10). By way of further examination of the most recent Japanese and South Korean research on Korean Variant Sinitic, I conclude with an overview of the 24 “그러니까　실재　생활하면서　읽고　쓴　글의　상당　부분이　문집에　수  록된　바와　같은　전형적　한문이　아니라　바로　우리　고유의　어휘  와　문법이　마구　혼재된한국식　한문　즉　이두문이었던　것이다．” 25 Note that the Ch’ŏngya tamsu itself is unusual as a manuscript collection of fictional narratives in hanmun in that it is glossed throughout with t’o in han’gŭl.

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genres and types of texts during Chosŏn likely to be of most interest for future research in this area. 5

Where to Look for Chosŏnsik Hanmun in Chosŏn Sources

Whereas pre-Chosŏn materials for Korean Variant Sinitic are thin on the ground compared to the rich materials available for the study of Japanese hentai kanbun from ancient and medieval Japan, for Chosŏn we are much better served in the way of texts, both printed and manuscript, across a wide range of genres. 5.1 Letters Letters are a largely untapped resource for the study of Koreanized Sinitic in Chosŏn. One of the first scholars to call attention to such materials is Kin Bunkyō (2011), who cites a letter from Hong Inu 洪仁祐 (1515–1554) to his teacher T’oegye Yi Hwang 退溪 李滉 (1501–1570) that is written in what Kin calls “Chosŏn-style epistolary Sinitic”—“which appears not be accurately recognized by researchers in South Korea today.” For example, the letters feature abundant use of 令 as an honorific prefix: 令候 (“your esteemed mood”), 令 律 (“your esteemed poem in regulated verse”), 前承令枉 (“previously I was honored by your visit”), etc. In orthodox Sinitic, this latter would be 前承枉 顧, and while 令 could appear in Chinese expressions like lingtang 令堂 (“your esteemed mother”) and lingdi 令弟 (“your esteemed younger brother”), it was never used on non-humans (Kin Bunkyō 2011: 47–48). More recently, South Korean scholar An Sŭngjun has introduced examples of what he calls “idu letters” from the 1480s or 1490s. A collection of fifteen letters written by Yi Pŏn 李蕃 (1463–1500) to his father, Yi Suhoe 李壽 會 (1431–1518), has survived in a bound volume with the title Yŏngmoch’ŏp 永慕帖. Although not quite as old as the “idu letters” written in 1468 by Kim Chongjik 金宗直 (1431–1492) to his mother and his wife, they are nonetheless notable for their Korean-style Sinitic and idu elements. An Sŭngjun characterizes their overall style as being written in short and simple Subject + Verb sentences (thereby avoiding the endless run-on sentences of idu administrative documents) in entirely Korean word order with virtually no Sinitic connective particles like 而, and featuring many Sino-Korean binoms representing either current Sino-Korean vocabulary or what are best read as compound verbs in vernacular Korean. For example, 進歸 (naaga toraga- “go out and come back”), 載送 (sirŏ ponae- “pack up and send”), 堅說 (tandanhage marha- “recount resolutely”), 傳諭 (chŏnhae irŭ- “convey and advise”), 書送 (ssŏ ponae- “write and

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send”), 計送 (hearyŏ ponae- “add up and send”), 促送 (chab-a ponae- “catch and send”), 耕食 (kar-a mŏk- “till/farm and eat”), 放賣 (nae-da p’al- “put up for sale”). Idu elements like ~敎事 (ha-sil il: “you should do~”), 右味 (wi wa katsŭmnida “as per above”), and 聞是白次 (i wa kach’i aroemnida “this is my humble report”) also appear correctly in the letters, but there are no phonographically rendered nominal particles or verb endings (An Sŭngjun 2016: 429). 5.2 Diaries and Historical Chronicles Diaries and historical chronicles have also been relatively underutilized as sources for Korean Variant Sinitic. In South Korean research, one sometimes encounters references to the odd vernacularism in a well-known diary like Yu Hŭich’un’s 柳希春 (1513–1577) Miam ilgi 眉巖日記 (see Sim Kyŏngho 2013: 42), and North Korean scholars have uncovered a late-sixteenth century diary called Hyŏn Ŭnsan ilgi and analyzed it in great detail for its idu elements and “Chosŏn-style Sinitic” (Ri Chinju 2017). But there is nothing in Korea like the hundreds of Japanese medieval courtier diaries written in relatively consistent and robust hentai kanbun. As for historical chronicles, North Korean scholars have also uncovered a work titled Sowip’o Ch’angŭi rok 少爲浦倡義錄 (A Record of the Sowip’o Righteous Army), an account from 1759 (but not printed until 1825) by one Kim Yanggi of the uprising at Sowip’o led by Kim U 金佑 in 1627. The many vernacular elements in this account are analyzed by North Korean scholar Kim Songi (2010). 5.3 Government Administrative Documents Chosŏn-era kwanmunsŏ 官文書/kongmun 公文 survive in overwhelming numbers from the latter half of the dynasty and are typically written in what some South Korean scholars have come to call isŏch’e 吏胥體: the style of government clerks (though I prefer Korean Chancery Style, given the parallels with vernacularized Latin documents in medieval European chanceries). Hwang Wiju (2008) was one of the first scholars to call attention to these documents and also to complain of the relative lack of scholarly interest in either their heavily vernacularized Sinitic style or their contents. As Hwang points out, the Kyŏngguk taejŏn 經國大典 (Grand Code for Governing the State) and Chŏnyul t’ongbo 典律通補 (Comprehensive Supplement to Codes and Statutes) between them stipulate as many as 83 different document types, each with its own template (Hwang 2008: 166). These included sangŏn 上言 (petitions), soji 所志 (civil petitions; written accusations), ŭisong 議送 (appeals), civil complaint documents, property inheritance and business documents; hogu tanja 戶口單子 (household registration documents), punjaegi 分財記 (inheritance

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documents), myŏngmun 明文 (exchange agreements), wanŭi 完議 (resolutions), t’ongmun 通文 (circular letters/manifestos), wŏnjŏng 原情 (declarations), and komok 告目 (the various types of official documents and queries submitted by clerks to their local magistrates or by their offices to government offices in Seoul), among many others. It is often claimed that one of the motivations for King Sejong’s invention of the vernacular script in the fifteenth century was a desire to replace idu in administrative and especially certain kinds of judicial documents with a more user-friendly and transparent writing system, but after the fifteenth century, certain genres that had typically been written in idu, like writs or certificates of appointment (known variously as chosach’ŏp 朝謝帖, kosin 告身, or ch’ach’ŏp 差帖), came to be written exclusively in Literary Sinitic, while the other genres persisted in idu until the twentieth century. Drafting administrative and legal documents in idu/Variant Sinitic would have been part of the daily routine of any Chosŏn literatus serving in the government bureaucracy, but such documents were never included in the literary collections of the elite. Two exceptional genres in this regard were changgye 狀啓 (field reports sent directly to the central court by state officials on assignment) and kyesa 啓辭 (legal opinions; also letters to the king declining a royal gift). In this former regard, the recent research of Pak Sŏni (2015; 2016) on the Chosŏn-style Sinitic in the field reports written by Ryu Sŏngnyong 柳成龍 (1542–1607), Yi Sunsin 李舜臣 (1545–1598), and Chŏng Munbu 鄭文孚 (1565–1624) during the Imjin Wars is particularly valuable. Pak Sŏni (2015) laments the complete lack of research into the genre of changgye, especially because it was often regarded as a form of chuŭiryu prose 奏議類 散文—memorials and written opinions submitted to the throne—and was therefore sometimes included in the collected works of scholars (or sometimes even in the Veritable Records). Pak examines the stylistic features of these three men’s late-sixteenth-century field reports and provides a detailed analysis of how such texts were converted from their original idu-infused Korean Variant Sinitic into orthodox Literary Sinitic: idu-type endings were purged and converted to Literary Sinitic connective particles like 而, 及, 故, and 且; Chosŏn-style Sino-Korean lexis was changed to orthodox Sinitic (topic marker 段 → 則, locative 良中 → 中, adverb tŏuk 加于 “moreover” → 尤, adverb kasăeya 更良 “again” → 更, kot 庫 “place” → 處, adverb aullo 並以 “together” → 並, ŭisin 矣身 “your humble servant (I)” → 小人); and sentence structure was converted from Korean OV to Sinitic VO word order. Insofar as Fujimoto Yukio (1978) was the first to identify the importance of this genre and point out how the idu-infused Variant Sinitic originals were purged of their idu elements

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before inclusion and printing in either munjip or the sillok, Pak’s work cannot be called original, but it far surpasses Fujimoto’s seminal article in terms of its detail and breadth. Other administrative document genres that frequently included vernacular elements and/or Korean-style Variant Sinitic were kongsin nokkwŏn 功臣錄券 (certificates of meritorious subjects), ch’ŏmmun 貼文 (certificates/placards), archival records from the royal family like ŭigwe 儀軌 (handbooks for royal rituals and ceremonies), and tŭngnok 謄錄 (tŭngnok-type archival collations of official government documents in draft form like the Sŭngjŏngwŏn ilgi 承政 院日記 [Journal of the Royal Secretariat] or the Pibyŏnsa tŭngnok 備邊司謄錄 [Records of the Border Defense Command]). Genres like these have also been scarcely touched by modern scholars in terms of their inscriptional style and vernacular elements, with the exception of the Pibyŏnsa tŭngnok, on which North Korean scholar Son Ŭnil (2010) has written in the context of the North Korean project to translate it. One final administrative arena in which documents in Variant Sinitic can be found is diplomacy—specifically, the numerous documents and letters exchanged between Korean interpreter officials and their counterparts on the island of Tsushima. Both Hŏ Chiŭn (2008) and Kim Chup’il have written about these documents, with special reference to the genre of chŏllyŏng 傳令: directives handed down by the central government to lower-level government offices, administrators and civilians. Both Hŏ and Kim note that these documents going in both directions were typically written in “Chosŏnsik hanmun.” Hŏ calls attention to the interesting fact that, at least in the context of the waegwan 倭館, or Pusan Japan House that oversaw the relationship with the interpreters and officials on Tsushima, the language of these idu-infused documents in Chosŏn-style Sinitic was referred to as ŏnmun 諺文, a word generally assumed today to have referred exclusively to what is now called han’gŭl or the Korean alphabet. But these documents did not include han’gŭl; instead, documents in han’gŭl were referred to as ŏnmunjang 諺文帳 (Hŏ Chiŭn 2008: 156).26 26 In other words, there were three types of documents exchanged between Korean and Japanese interpreters: documents in orthodox Literary Sinitic (chinsŏ 眞書); documents in Chosŏn-style Sinitic (ŏnmun); and documents in han’gŭl. Kim Chup’il (2015) seems unwilling to accept that the term ŏnmun could refer to a document without any han’gŭl, but a broader usage of ŏnmun in the sense of “anything vernacular and non-sinographic” is not without precedent, and other Chosŏn documents that lump together idu and han’gŭl as “諺 ŏn” are not difficult to find. Kim is more concerned to claim, on the basis of the fact that many of these Tsushima documents with han’gŭl in them have sinographs mixed in and therefore qualify as “mixed script” orthography (kukhan honyong 國漢混 用), that this earlier practice—and not Japanese Meiji usage—is in fact the precedent

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5.4 Literature By late Chosŏn, we also find increasing numbers of examples of literary texts in Sinitic (both prose and verse) evincing substantial vernacular elements in the form of incorporation of Variant Sinitic and/or idu elements. South Korean specialist in Korean Sinitic literature Sim Kyŏngho (2014a) connects this to a broader trend toward what he calls “t’ongsoksŏng” 通俗性 in Chosŏn literature—not “vulgarity” or crass commercialization and mass reproducibility, but a move away from traditional kyŏngguk munjang 經國文章 and hwaguk munjang 華國文章 (literary composition supporting successful governance and glorification of the state; see Sim and Kornicki [2018: 542]) toward a more popular(ized) aesthetic fascinated by the details of the quotidian lives of social classes other than the highest elites. Prose works tended to use what Sim calls pyŏnkyŏk hanmun (irregular Sinitic), while verse works tended to eschew the straitjacket of regulated verse, preferring instead unrhymed compositions in genres that otherwise normally demanded rhyme (e.g., chemun 祭文, funerary orations composed for funerary and memorial rites). Prose was in general more hospitable to Variant Sinitic than verse, and the most salient examples of Chosŏn-style Sinitic come from late-Chosŏn (mostly nineteenth-century) fictional narratives. For example, Cho Hyeran (2011) notes that Oksŏnmong 玉仙夢, a “nineteenth century Chosŏn Korean hypertext” of the seventeenth-century novel Kuunmong 九雲夢 (Wuerthner 2017: 137), mixes in instances of Vernacular Sinitic (baihua 白話), idu, and ‘Korean-style Sinitic’ expressions like maryŏn 摩練 (“preparations, arrangements”), sagwa 沙 果 (“apple”), and the proverb su samch’ŏk i sikhu yŏnggam 鬚三尺而食後令藍 (“even if your beard is three feet long, you can’t be a yangban on an empty stomach”). More recently, Dennis Wuerthner has also studied the vernacular elements in Oksŏnmong and called attention to the incorporation of both idu and baihua: “in the text we can find different forms of idu 吏讀, ‘clerk’s readings,’ both in pure Chinese and in Chinese/han’gŭl…. Clearly, the idu in the manuscript of Oksŏnmong was not inserted arbitrarily, as it fittingly appears in a long passage circling around a legal case when Chŏn Mongok 錢夢玉, the main figure of the work’s dream narrative, is first accused of murder and eventually of indecent conduct which lead to the suicide of one of the female characters.” For Wuerthner, the use of idu in the judge’s final verdict, the passages in baihua in battle-related passages and dialogue, as well as the use of occasional made-in-Korea sinographs, all help create “narrative intensity” and make the text “appear livelier and more realistic” (Wuerthner 2017: 59–62). for the Mixed-Script orthographic style that began to flourish after intensive contact with Japan in 1880s Korea and into the colonial period (a claim that I am unwilling to accept).

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Another set of fictional narratives, presumably from the late-nineteenth century, that has recently attracted attention is the manuscript with the title Yoram 要覽 (“For Reference Purposes”) published by Yi Taehyŏng (2012). The collection contains two fictional narratives (“Ch’oe Ch’iwŏn chŏn” 崔致遠傳 [The Tale of Ch’oe Ch’iwŏn] and “Yi Hwasil chŏn” 李花實傳 [“The Tale of Yi Hwasil”]), but is mostly comprised of short fictionalized versions of typical Chosŏn administrative and judicial documents, many of which could be classified as court-case fiction, and some of which are in the form of allegorical works featuring protagonists from the animal world. Genres include many of those highlighted by Hwang Wiju (2008): soji (civil petitions submitted to the local administrative office), wŏnjŏng (declarations of personal appeal), tŭngchang 等狀 (group petitions), kongsa 供辭 (transcripts of oral statements of confession) and sangŏn 上言 (personal petitions to the king). In a separate study of “The Tale of Yi Hwasil” from this collection, Yi Taehyŏng notes “Korean-style Sinitic” expressions like 請謁於大監前矣 (“requested an audience with the taegam”), 物之多寡, 惟在處分之中 (“the number of items is solely dependent on how they’re dealt with”), and 原來老翁, 智勇過人 (“originally, the old gentleman’s wisdom and bravery surpassed that of others”), and he also notes occasional baihua expressions like 小的 (read sojŏk or soji in Korean) used by servants to refer to themselves (Yi Taehyŏng 2008: 474). Overall, the texts gathered together in Yoram can hardly be considered belles lettres, and presumably functioned in the first instance pedagogically, as templates to be followed by low-level government clerks needing to compose similar documents in their day-to-day work, but they were also clearly meant to be read for pleasure. Another collection similar to Yoram is the manuscript in ninety leaves titled Kyŏnmun chapki 見聞雜記 (“Random Records of Things Seen and Heard”) owned by Professor Kim Yŏngjin of Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul and introduced in Sim Kyŏngho (2017), who characterizes the text as “apparently compiled by either a rusticated yangban (hyangban 鄕班) or local administrative office functionary (ajŏn 衙前) as a collection of model templates-cumbook for reading pleasure” (Sim 2017: 17). Of the forty-seven selections included in the collection, seven are in “idu-style Sinitic,” another eleven contain interspersed idu elements, and yet others contain hyŏnt’o 懸吐—“appended grammatical elements” (presumably in han’gŭl) inserted as reading aids, making for a heavily vernacularized ensemble. Moreover, the genres represented include those found in Yoram, but add t’ongmun 通文 (circular letters), a chŏnmun 箋文 (commemorative letter), a pyŏnbaengmun 辨白文 (legal decision), sŏ 書 (letters), and p’ummok 稟目 (written inquiries submitted to higher authorities), among others. The fact that many of the texts are grouped together in thematically related pairs is additional evidence that the collection was compiled to

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be read for pleasure, and Sim singles out the short text “Pyŏkcha kŏl ch’uhwan chŏnch’ŏ mun” 躄者乞推還前妻文 (“A cripple pleads for his wife to be brought back,” characterized by Sim as a kŏlmun 乞文, or written entreaty in “idu-style Sinitic”) as particularly moving.27 Finally, narratives in the yadam 野談 (vernacular story; lit. “unofficially circulating stories”) genre can also include substantial vernacularized elements, depending on the particular story collection, for literary effects. For details, please refer to Si Nae Park’s chapter in this volume as well as her Park (2020). Examples of Korean-style Sinitic are more difficult to find in the area of poetry, and much less studied in terms of their “Variant Sinitic,” but here too Sim Kyŏngho has begun to clear a path forward. Sim (2014a) calls attention to how some late-Chosŏn disenfranchised scholars (hansa 寒士) flouted traditional rhyming conventions in their chemun funerary and memorial texts and in yuktam p’ungwŏl 肉談風月 verses—unrhymed Sinitic poetry in a ludic vein that featured word play, incorporation of sinographically rendered vernacular words, etc. This latter genre is discussed by Chŏng Yagyong 丁若鏞 (1762–1836) in his Aŏn kakpi 雅言覺非 (preface 1819; “Realizing the errors in proper speech”), where he calls it “Chosŏnsik kop’ung” 古風 (“Chosŏn-style ancient airs”): what we might call “rhymoclastic poems” (p’aunsi 破韻詩) in sinographs that follow the 5- or 7-syllable structure of regulated verse, but without consideration for rhyme or traditional tone alternation rules. Sim (2017) extends this discussion to the poems of Kim Pyŏngyŏn 金炳淵 (1807–1863; a.k.a. Kim Ip 金笠 or “Kim Satkat”) and to the late-Chosŏn kwasi 科詩 (“examination poems;” also known as haengsi 行詩, kwach’esi 科體詩, tongsi 東詩, kongnyŏngsi 功令詩, and chŏngsi 程詩) and kwamun 科文 (“examination essays”). According to Sim (2014a, 16), these genres were looked down upon by elite literati but preferred by disenfranchised scholars, and he calls attention to what he calls paehae 俳諧 forms of kwasi and kwamun—examination-style poems and essays in a playful register that reflect non-elite daily life and aesthetics (Sim Kyŏngho 2017: 30–31).

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Two other notable examples of the literarization of idu documentary templates are the short “Petition Submitted by Han chinsa Residing in Myŏnch’ŏn” (Myŏnch’ŏn kŏ Han chinsa chang 沔川居韓進士狀) that appears at the end of one of the manuscripts of a work on falconry titled Ŭnggolbang 鷹鶻方, the idu forms of which date to late Koryŏ or early Chosŏn, and the court case story “Frog versus Snake” (Wasa ogan 蛙蛇獄案), bound together with the hanmun fictional narrative Chongok chŏn 鍾玉傳 held by the Tōyō Bunko and framed as a postmortem inquest-cum-autopsy kŏman 檢案 report concerning the murder of a young tadpole by a snake. For the former see Pak Sŏngjong (2008), and for the latter see Ōtani (1970) and Kim Chunyŏng (1995). Both are discussed in detail in King (2022).

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Conclusions

Whereas the preponderance of both professional research on and popular narratives about the history of vernacularization in Korea has focused in one way or another on the triumph of the vernacular Korean script over sinographs and Literary Sinitic, and has thus tended to view vernacularization exclusively through the lens of script with a focus on han’gŭl and its “struggle” and “adversities” in the face of an overwhelming sinographic oppressor, a more balanced and true-to-life account must incorporate an understanding of how Koreans experimented with “being vernacular” within a purely sinographic frame—especially for the nearly five centuries during which they had a brilliantly designed alphabetic script at their disposal, but nonetheless continued to produce the overwhelming majority of their texts in sinographs and Sinitic. In other words, if we are to understand the history of vernacularization on the Korean Peninsula from the time of first contact with Chinese language and writing up to the twentieth century, we must study not only texts in the vernacular script and sinographically rendered vernacular texts that were clearly designed to write and be read in the vernacular, but also the wide range of sinographic texts that occupy different places in the little-studied no-man’s land along the spectrum between the highest registers of orthodox Literary Sinitic on the one hand, and purely vernacular texts on the other. As I have tried to show in chapter three and here, the morphographic nature of Chinese writing presented both opportunities and challenges for Koreans in their inscriptional practice. Varieties of vernacularized Sinitic developed over time, and a body of research has begun to coalesce around the notion of Chosŏn-style Sinitic/Chosŏnsik hanmun. The obvious place to look for parallels is Japan and hentai kanbun, and indeed some of the research on Japanese Variant Sinitic is instructive, but Korea’s earlier adoption of Sinitic relative to Japan, and its closer—even claustrophobic—proximity to China along with its adoption, from mid-Koryŏ onward, of increasingly sinophilic ideologies of language and writing, inhibited a full embrace of vernacular script-based vernacularization while also facilitating varieties of hybridized Sinitic. An additional consideration complicating the comparison with Japan and Japanese is the considerably more complex syllabic structure of Korean, which seems to have inhibited the development and flourishing of a vernacular syllabary based on the phonographic deployment of a subset of sinographs, as happened with kana in Japan, where the predominantly simple CV-type syllable structure and overall limited number of possible syllables facilitated the early development and widespread use of a vernacular syllabary. While Korea developed phonographic idu symbols already in the Three Kingdoms period, idu was never used

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to record spoken language, and instead developed (and quickly ossified) as an auxiliary set of phonographs limited to recording mostly grammatical morphemes in otherwise sinographic (and Sinitic) contexts—the complex syllable structure of Korean made anything else difficult.28 Modern research on hybridized Korean Sinitic begins with Japanese scholarship in the colonial period, and has continued after 1945 in both Japan and Korea. The corpus of earliest surviving inscriptions and texts from Korea is tiny, but in some ways still monopolizes the attention of most researchers, while Chosŏn dynasty materials are far more substantial in their number and variety, and have only begun to attract study. In the future, closer study of these latter materials will be essential for a more nuanced understanding of how vernacularization unfolded in Korea in the early modern period—for this was a vernacularization that proceeded not only in the vernacular script, but also under the cloak of sinography. References An Pyŏnghŭi. 1987. Imun kwa Imun taesa [Imun and Imun taesa (Great Master of Imun)]. Kugŏhak yŏn’gu sŏnsŏ, vol. 11. Seoul: T’ap ch’ulp’ansa. An Sŭngjun. 2016. “15segi idu p’yŏnji sarye yŏn’gu: Yi Pŏn ŭi kanae sŏgan ul chungsim ŭro” [An Example of 15th-century Letters in Idu: The Letters of Yi Pŏn’s Household]. Komunsŏ yŏn’gu 48: 405–435. Aston, William George. 1896. Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697: translated from the Original Chinese and Japanese. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ayugai Fusanoshin 鮎貝房之進. [1938] 1972. Zakkō zokujikō, zokubunkō, shakujikō 雑 考俗字考・俗文考・借字考 [Miscellaneous Studies: Vulgar Graphs, Vulgar Sinitic, Borrowed Graphs]. Edited by Ayugai Fusanoshin. Second Edition. Tōkyō: Kokusho kankōkai. Cho Hyeran. 2011. 19 segi sŏŏl chisigin ŭi taeanjŏk kŭlssŭgi, Samhan sŭbyu [Samhan sŭbyu: The Alternative Écriture of a 19th-century Secondary Son Intellectual]. Seoul: Somyŏng ch’ulp’an. Ch’oe Hyeju. [1894] 2008. “Ilbon ŭn 19 segi chosŏn ŭl ŏttŏk’e insikhaessŭlkka? Haeje” [How did Japan perceive 19th-century Chosŏn? Bibliographic Note]. In Honma Kyūsuke (2008) [1894] Chosŏn chapki: Ilbonin ŭi chosŏn chŏngt’amnok [Random 28

See Handel (2019) for an excellent discussion of how linguistic structure (and especially syllable structure) affected the adaptation of sinography to different languages in the Sinographic Cosmopolis.

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Records from Chōsen: One Japanese Observer’s Intelligence Report on Korea], by Honma Kyūsuke, translated and annotated by Ch’oe Hyeju, 264–313. P’aju: Kimyŏngsa. Ch’oe Sŭnghŭi. 1981. Han’guk komunsŏ yŏn’gu [Research on Old Korean Documents]. Sŏngnam: Han’guk chŏngsin munhwa yŏn’guwŏn. Chōsen sōtokufu chūsūin 朝鮮総督府中枢院. 1936. Kōtei dai Minritsu chokkai 校訂 大明律直解 [Corrected and Revised Direct Explication of the Great Ming Code]. Keijō: Chōsen Sōtokufu Chūsūin. “Chosŏnŏ hanmunkwa p’yeji” [The Abolition of Courses in Korean Language and Hanmun]. Chosŏn ilbo, August 31, 1937. “Chosŏnsik hanmun ŭi p’yeji” [The Abolition of Hanmun]. Tonga ilbo, September 1, 1937. Fujii Shigetoshi 藤井茂利. 1981. “Suikochō ibun no bunmatsu hyōki ni mochiita ‘之’ ni tsuite: Chōsen kanbun to no kakawari ni oite” [Concerning the Sentence-final ‘之’ Written in the Suikochō ibun: On its Connection to Korean Literary Sinitic]. Kokugo kokubun satsumaji 26: 1–13. Fujimoto Yukio. 1978. “Chōsen kanbun: idu kara no jōka” [Chosŏn Hanmun— Sublimation from Idu]. Gobun 34: 32–38. Handel, Zev. 2019. Sinography: The borrowing and adaptation of the Chinese script. Language, Writing and Literary Culture in the Sinographic Cosmopolis, 1. Leiden; Boston: Brill. “Hanmunkwa p’yeji wa kŭ sŏnhuch’aek” [The Abolition of Hanmun Courses and How to Remedy It]. Chosŏn ilbo, October 6, 1937. Hŏ Chiŭn. 2008. “Tsushima chosŏnŏ t’ongsa ŭi sŏngnip kwajŏng kwa yŏkhal” [Formation Process and Roles of Korean Language Interpreters on Tsushima]. Han-Il kwan’gyesa yŏn’gu 29: 123–170. “Hoengsŏl susŏl” 橫說竪說 [Gibberish]. Tonga ilbo, September 1, 1937. Honma Kyūsuke 本間九介. [1894] 2008. Chosŏn chapki: ilbonin ŭi chosŏn chŏngt’amnok [Random Records from Chōsen: One Japanese Observer’s Intelligence Report on Korea]. Translated and annotated by Ch’oe Hyeju. P’aju: Kimyŏngsa. [Originally published in 1894 as Chōsen zakki 朝鮮雜記 under the name Adachi Keijirō 足立銈 二郎 in Seoul.] Honma Kyūsuke 本間九介. [1894] 2016. Chōsen zakki: Nihonjin ga mita 1894-nen no Ri-shi Chōsen [Random Records from Chōsen: Yi Dynasty Chosŏn as Seen by a Japanese in the Year 1894]. Edited and annotated by Christopher Szpilman. Tokyo: Shōdensha. Hwang Wiju. 2005. “Han’guk hanmunhak yŏn’gu ŭi myŏt kwaje” [Some Tasks for Korean Hanmun Studies]. In Han’guk hanmunhak yŏn’gu ŭi sae chip’yŏng [New Horizons in Korean Hanmun Studies Research], edited by Yi Hyesun et al., 1014–1037. Seoul: Somyŏng ch’ulp’an.

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Chapter 13

The Lexical Vernacularity of the Tongp’ae naksong and the Boundaries of Korean Vernacular Literature Si Nae Park 1

Introduction1

Before the twentieth century, Korea’s literary practices pivoted around the prestige of the transregional written medium called Literary Sinitic, a literary language that formed a complex and intimate relationship with sinography.2 Korea’s literary past had long been explained through the lens of a nationcentered linguistic ideology (Silverstein 1979), or a kind of linguistic “mythology” (Barthes 1972 [1957]), whereby the Korean language and script form a conflated and privileged category in the narratives of the history of the written culture and linguistic life in Korea. Typically, such views employ a plot where the Korean native script (han’gŭl) is an epic hero who is preordained to become great yet first has to overcome a long period of adversity inflicted by the foreign forces of Literary Sinitic and sinography. Termed the “Korean vernacular belief system” (King 1998), such a view fosters an idea of the ‘naturalness of the vernacular,’ an a priori assumption that literature written in the vernacular is natural and inevitable (Pollock 2006: 318).3 This mythology also manifests in the form of otherizing Literary Sinitic and sinographs as things “Chinese,” and is evident in this remark: with the “transition from Chinese to Korean as the principal written language of the Korean people … [t]he linguistic aspiration to use the natural language of the Korean people was realized” (Lee 2003: 337). This dyadic formulation is giving way to more multi-pronged approaches that provide more historically and linguistically nuanced understandings of Korea’s literary, inscriptional, and linguistic past. This newer scholarship unpacks the hierarchical yet dynamic ways in which Literary Sinitic interacted with and was 1 This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies Grant funded by the Korean Government (MOE) (AKS-2011-AAA-2103). 2 For the relationship between sinography and Literary Sinitic, see the chapters by Gregory N. Evon and David Lurie in this volume. 3 See also the chapter by Scott Wells in this volume for the problem of the naturalness of the vernacular.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163

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sustained through diverse means of using the Korean language, as expressed in both speech and writing, from literacy acquisition to literary composition over a long period (Whitman 2011; King 2014; King 2015; Kornicki 2018; Kin 2010/2021). Another important implication of this newer scholarship—as multiple chapters in this volume put forward in different ways—is the inaccurate characterization of Korea’s vernacularization process that Sheldon Pollock (2006) posits when he characterizes it as an event of “derivative modernity” at the turn of the twentieth century. Oriented towards this denationalizing, demythologizing framework, this chapter focuses on the lexical texture of a late eighteenthcentury collection of stories called the Tongp’ae naksong 東稗洛誦 (Repeatedly Recited Stories of the East) to illustrate how a Korean vernacular genre arose from within sinographic writing through lexical vernacularity—the deliberate and versatile deployment of vernacular words and expressions. 2

Why Focus on Words?

In Park (2020), I have demonstrated how the origins of the Tongp’ae naksong embody the compiler No Myŏnghŭm’s 盧命欽 (1713–1775) impulses to construct a “new mode of vernacular belonging” (3). There I show, for example, that the language of the Tongp’ae naksong embraces “varying kinds of lexical and stylistic elements that had ordinarily been off limits for literary composition so that the written text could evoke the sociolinguistic realities of contemporary Chosŏn” (115). By focusing on how the language of the Tongp’ae naksong is a vernacularized form of Literary Sinitic, I call the tales in the Tongp’ae naksong vernacular stories, meaning that they are “tales written by and for contemporary Chosŏn people in a medium reflective of the sociolinguistic realities of the time,” and thus refute the common han’gŭl-centered view of Korean vernacular literature. This chapter serves as a sequel to Park (2020) but at the same time is more than a postscript to it. It has two goals: (1) to present a fuller contextualization of how the Tongp’ae naksong came to be written the way it did, and (2) to expound upon the value of a lexically oriented approach to the history and process of vernacularization in premodern Korea. In so doing, this chapter argues that the late eighteenth century deserves greater attention as a momentous epoch in the history of vernacularization in Korea. The Tongp’ae naksong was one of the formative texts in the rise of the genre of yadam 野談. Literally meaning “unofficially circulating stories,” yadam refers to short tales that not only claim to be reports of orally circulating stories about the lived experiences of people of all walks of life, but also are written in a kind of Literary Sinitic that evoke their oral transmission. Contrasted with

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earlier scholarship on yadam that had postulated that yadam were records of orally circulating tales from late Chosŏn, Park (2020), focused on the origins the Tongp’ae naksong in the late eighteenth century and its impact on later story collections, and asserted that yadam are rather stories developed from creative impulses to construct a narrative form that “makes an overt claim about its own pertinence to contemporary society and culture” at the level of both contents and language (2). Previous scholarship had tended to anticipate the Korean native writing system as the primary script of choice for such a genre in a way that failed to historicize the genre’s development within its original inscriptional milieu. Park (2020) instead uncovers a written medium that seems to be Literary Sinitic but is in fact a vernacular medium under the veneer of Literary Sinitic: sinographically written, following the svo syntax of Literary Sinitic, and without Korean morphosyntactic particles and verbal endings. What makes this medium “vernacularized Literary Sinitic” is its lexical texture, embracing a range of words and expressions that contemporary Chosŏn writers would have hesitated to embrace if they were writing according to the conventions of orthodox Literary Sinitic composition. Indeed, as will be shown, the yadam tales would have been categorized as too colloquial, too reminiscent of idu documentary writing, and too evocative of expressions tied to Chinese colloquial diction to pass muster as orthodox hanmun. The upshot is a rather plain diction that manifests a disinterest in the stylistic purity typical of composition in orthodox Literary Sinitic as a classical medium, which by definition kept its distance from the language of the local. A corollary is a pattern of embracing diverse non-orthodox Literary Sinitic elements as rhetorical devices. Here it is useful to remind ourselves of the definition of Literary Sinitic as articulated in Mair (1994). That is, Literary Sinitic is a type of “demicryptography largely divorced from speech” and thus is to be distinguished from Vernacular Sinitic (baihua 白話), which “shar[es] a close correspondence with spoken forms of living Sinitic” (Ibid.: 708). In literary practice, stylists rarely aspired to create “an unalloyed form” of Literary Sinitic or of Vernacular Sinitic (Ibid.: 708). Thus, the distinction between Literary Sinitic and Vernacular Sinitic is not absolute because written Chinese “consisted of a large number of registers loosely located on a gradation” between a variety of “elevated” registers and a variety of “popular” (su 俗) registers, and a variety of “elevated” registers suggesting erudition (Owen 2001: 172). Factors such as generic conventions, the individual writer’s stylistic goals, and period style would determine whether a piece of writing fell closer to Literary Sinitic or Vernacular Sinitic. In particular, writers of Literary Sinitic are “more conscious of maintaining the integrity and purity of their highly mannered style” (Mair

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1994: 709). The language of the Tongp’ae naksong exhibits creative impulses to flout the highly mannered style typical of orthodox Literary Sinitic. By emphasizing the non-orthodox nature of the language of the Tongp’ae naksong, Park (2020) builds upon and expands the idea of Chosŏnsik hanmun or Korean-style Literary Sinitic. Put forward by Fujimoto (1978) and Sim (2008), Korean-style Sinitic, termed “Chosŏn hanmun” (Chōsen kanbun 朝鮮 漢文) or “idu-derived Chosŏn-style variant hanmun” (idu-sik pyŏnkyŏk hanmun), respectively, is a highly productive concept for understanding premodern Korea’s written culture, and its importance as a form of “regionalized Literary Sinitic” is examined in a chapter by Ross King in the present volume. Nevertheless, the framework of Korean variant Sinitic, I contend, is insufficient to appreciate what is happening in the language of yadam. How so? Fujimoto (1978) is the first to show that such a thing as Korean-style variant Literary Sinitic existed and that we can characterize it as a kind of sublimated version of idu documentary writing (idumun 吏讀文; lit. “writing in the style of ‘clerkly reading’”), which was a style of technical writing used for record-keeping at the local and central levels of the Chosŏn bureaucracy. That is, Korean-style variant Literary Sinitic is a by-product of unwitting slips of the editorial hand committed during less-than-thorough proofreading of texts originally composed in idu documentary writing. Under this formulation, there are neither stylistic concerns nor creative impulses in the way Korean-style variant Literary Sinitic came to exist. Sim Kyŏngho (2008) greatly expands on Fujimoto’s account to identify wide-ranging forms of premodern Korean prose composition as cases of Korean-style variant Literary Sinitic and rightly stresses that what constitutes premodern Korean literature written in Literary Sinitic should include both works written in orthodox Literary Sinitic and works composed in “idu-style variant Literary Sinitic.” The latter, Sim emphasizes, permeated Chosŏn written culture as the medium for legal contracts, inheritance documents, administrative records, epistles, and some prose narratives.4 Yadam is also among the genres enumerated in Sim’s suggested research areas for the study of Korean variant Literary Sinitic. Sim’s observation is welcome and certainly reimagines the typical script-based formulation of 4 In North Korea, interest in “Chosŏn-style hanmun” (Chosŏnsik hanmun 朝鮮式漢文) resulted from North Korean translations of Chosŏn historical records, such as the Veritable Records of the Chosŏn Dynasty (Chosŏn wangjo sillok 朝鮮王祖實錄), with a focus on syntactic elements not complying with the svo word order of Literary Sinitic and on made-inKorea Sino-Korean lexical elements; the most recent study is that of T’ae Hyŏngch’ŏl et al. (2009). See also Sahoe kwahagwŏn (1993), Ch’oe Tongwŏn (2009), Ross King’s chapters in this volume, and King (forthcoming-a).

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the constituents of premodern Korean literature: literature written in hanmun (synonymous with literature written in sinographic writing), literature written in Korean (synonymous with literature written in han’gŭl), and orally transmitted literature. It points to the rather porous boundary between literature written in hanmun and that written in Korean. Nevertheless, the Fujimoto-Sim formulation of Korean-style variant Literary Sinitic leaves little room for the stylistic and creative dimensions of an individual piece of writing or a literary genre. Based on this view, then, the drafting of a contract between two individuals, the documentation of a royal interrogation in a criminal case, and the creation of a work of narrative fiction are indiscriminately lumped together as specimens of Korean-style variant Literary Sinitic, despite the important distinction between the first two as cases of practical writing and the last as a case of literary composition. A corollary of this orthodox-vs.-variant distinction is that it is rather narrowly linguistic—i.e., Sinitic-versus-Korean—and does not address the fact that orthodox Literary Sinitic is at once transregional and transtemporal. From the mid-sixth or early-seventh century “Oath Stone of the Imsin Year” (Imsik sŏgisŏk 壬申誓記石) of Silla 新羅 (tr. 57 bce–935 ce) to idu documentary writing, the writing style of quotidian administrative documentation essential to all levels of the state bureaucracy throughout the Koryŏ and Chosŏn periods, a deliberately modified form of Literary Sinitic co-existed with orthodox Literary Sinitic in premodern Korea. Furthermore, as Plassen (forthcoming) notes, Buddhist monks of the Silla and Koryŏ habitually resorted to modified forms of Literary Sinitic in preparation of their oral lectures. Such modified forms of vernacularized Literary Sinitic fit the profile of Korean-style variant Literary Sinitic, with Korean sov word order, Sino-Korean expressions, and/or the use of Korean nominal and verbal morphology. Such elements of vernacularized Literary Sinitic were makeshift measures that were typically expunged or trimmed away in the process of publication (often, but not always, in the form of printing) so as to achieve the literary refinement that was synonymous with orthodox Literary Sinitic. The logic behind this editorial intervention resonates closely with how idu documentary writing retains elements of the Korean language; a perceptible distance was to be maintained between literary composition and the composition of practical writing or of preliminary drafts. By contrast, as will be shown, the lexical texture of the Tongp’ae naksong indicates a deliberate interweaving of elements of the Korean language, features of idu documentary writing, and non-native items such as words from Chinese vernacular writing (baihua). What we observe, then, is a literary medium meant to be neither documentary nor preliminary, and meant to transcend the Sinitic-vs.-Korean formulation.

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Thus, although connected to Korean-style variant Literary Sinitic, the modus operandi of the lexical configuration of the Tongp’ae naksong manifests a mode of writing that amounts to what I prefer to call “Korean Vernacular Sinitic.” What am I proposing with Korean Vernacular Sinitic, and how does it differ from Korean variant Sinitic? The designation of “variant” connotes secondary status and deviation from a higher order or standard, the higher order being (a striving for) orthodox Literary Sinitic. It was not documentation but stylization of Literary Sinitic composition that shaped the language of the Tongp’ae naksong. So how do words matter in the Tongp’ae naksong, and in what ways does its lexical vernacularity advance our understanding of the history of vernacularization in Korea? That this stylization is detectable at the level of words and expressions is important. I put forward the idea of “lexical texture” as my unit of analysis for examining the language of the Tongp’ae naksong and of the yadam genre. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “texture” as: “the quality created by the combination of the different elements in a work of music or literature.”5 My analysis of the lexical texture of the Tongp’ae naksong considers the ways in which various verbal elements are combined, configured, and interlaced to form a degree of stylistic unity, thus going beyond the presence or absence of particular lexical items and contemplating the effects of lexical usage and arrangement. Here, traits of Vernacular Sinitic for fiction writing in late imperial China are worth noting. According to Mair (1994: 709), while Vernacular Sinitic and Literary Sinitic frequently borrowed from and mixed with each other, polysyllabicity and the use of “是” for the copula form are features of Vernacular Sinitic as a style (Mair 1994: 709). Most specifically, as Porter (1993: 114–115) notes, the language of vernacular fiction forms a “hybrid medium that represents a self-conscious mixing of varying levels of speech, ranging from the stylized and lofty language of the descriptive tableaus to the didactic summary of the storyteller/narrator.” The relevance here is that the language of the Tongp’ae naksong exhibits a similar trait in that it, too, is a hybrid medium whereby varying levels of speech are deliberately intermixed and whereby the narrator behaves in a way that evokes the generalized storyteller-narrator delivering his tale before a generalized audience—a quintessential marker of vernacular prose narrative in the Chinese tradition of narrative composition (Hanan 1973: 21). Of import here is that such affinities between the language of Chinese vernacular fiction and the language of the Tongp’ae naksong do not imply that 5 Oxford English Dictionary Online, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/200031?rskey=HAbgda &result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed 7 June 2015).

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the end goal of No Myŏnghŭm’s creative decisions and innovations lay in the adoption or imitation of Chinese Vernacular Sinitic, a written medium that closely corresponds with forms of spoken Chinese. I suggest that we rather interpret these affinities in tandem with his adoption of Korean colloquialisms and stylistic features of idu documentary writing. That is to say, the lexical texture of the Tongp’ae naksong was meant to reflect a wide-ranging lexical repertoire culled from words and expressions that would have formed the very fabric of contemporary Chosŏn’s written culture. Thus, the narrative world of the Tongp’ae naksong is populated by characters who are disposed to utter words and expressions that are tied to the time-space of contemporary Chosŏn Korea, and is related by a narrator who purports to be a contemporary Chosŏn person. 3

Committing Vernacular Forms to Literary Sinitic in Late Chosŏn

The late Chosŏn period witnessed a remarkable growth in the way literati expressed desires to discover, preserve, and textualize the language of the local. While typical modern-day narratives about the literature of the late Chosŏn period often seek traces of the awakening of what might be called an ethnonational consciousness (minjok), such narratives, as suggested previously, tend to subscribe to the elusive imperative of an organic, steady development with a national literature of Korea as its telos. Thus, such narratives often fail to pinpoint what events and circumstances transpired in late Chosŏn to make it such a ripe period for literati to engage with diverse ways to inscribe vernacular written and spoken forms using the literary style par excellence that they knew—Literary Sinitic. While awaiting more nuanced, less nation-centered, and more historicized research about late Chosŏn written culture,6 it is possible to situate No Myŏnghŭm’s decision to shape the Tongp’ae naksong as a text of hybrid lexicality within the larger cultural forces whereby literati used Literary Sinitic as a vehicle for vernacular written forms and oral forms. The best known example of sinographic inscription of vernacular forms is the Silla and Koryŏ hyangch’al 鄕札 (lit. “vernacular writing”) inscription of vernacular songs called hyangga 鄕歌 (lit. “songs of the local”). The problem of an extreme paucity of examples—we have but 25 surviving examples 6 The chapter by Ahn Daehoe in this volume is full of insightful primary sources illustrating the complex ways in which late Chosŏn literati contemplated how best to understand the relationship between Literary Sinitic as the literary medium par excellence and Korean speech.

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of hyangga—makes it difficult to extrapolate precisely the extent of the hyangch’al transcription method and its cultural legacy. Nevertheless, we can surmise that the hyangga surviving in hyangch’al reflect efforts to transcribe Korean songs as accurately and effectively as possible by utilizing sinographs’ capacity to serve as semantograms, phonograms, and logograms for vernacular inscription.7 In late Chosŏn, this tradition of vernacular transcription or documentation of vernacular forms meets a new concern about how to accommodate and canonize vernacular forms or oral forms in Literary Sinitic composition. One example is the prominence of yŏngsa akpu 詠史樂府 (“collected ballads narrating history”), a genre of folk lyrics and stories that narrates historical episodes (Sim 1999: 112–129). Yŏngsa akpu is a subgenre within akpu 樂府 (lit. “musical bureau”; C. yuefu). In China, the yuefu genre first appeared during the Han dynasty and expanded through the Tang. While there was a resurgence in mid-Ming, the genre was not as prominent as it was Korea, in which it floursiehd especially during late Chosŏn. The late Chosŏn yŏngsa akpu genre had predecessors in late Koryŏ. The earliest examples are So akpu 小樂府 (Small Collection of Folk Songs) by Yi Chehyŏn 李齊賢 (1287–1367) and Min Sap’yŏng’s 閔思平 (1296–1359) work by the same title. There were other more high-flown works, such as “Tongmyŏngwang p’yŏn” 東明王篇 (Lay of King Tongmyŏng) by Yi Kyubo 李奎報 (1168–1241) and Chewang un’gi 帝王 韻紀 (Songs of Emperors and Kings) by Yi Sŭnghyu 李承休 (1224–1300) of late Koryŏ, along with Yongbiŏch’ŏn ka 龍飛御天歌 (Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven) in early Chosŏn, all of which are panegyrics waxing lyrical about the achievements and virtues of heavenly-ordained rulers and their ancestors. The prominence of historical akpu in Chosŏn indicates a growing interest in accommodating folk lyrics in connection with histories of the local (at two levels: at the level of the state vis-à-vis Sinitic tradition as the cultural center, and at the level of the region vis-à-vis the capital as the cultural center). In early Chosŏn, Kim Chongjik 金宗直 (1431–1492) compiled Tongdo akpu 東都 樂府 (Collection of Folk Songs from the Eastern Capital), in which he reports on local customs and legends centering on Kyŏngju 慶州 as the ancient capital of Silla, the first kingdom to unify most of the Korean peninsula. The Ming-dynasty work Nigu yuefu 擬古樂府 (Imitative yuefu) by Li Dongyang 李東陽 (1447–1516), in particular, gained favorable reception among Chosŏn literati such as Sim Kwangse 沈光世 (1577–1624), who authored the Haedong akpu 海東樂府 (Lyrics of the Eastern Seas; 1617), in which he lamented that his 7 For the workings of hyangch’al transcription, see Kim Young Wook (2010). For similarities between hyangch’al and Japanese manyōgana 万葉仮名 inscription, see page 74.

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contemporaries were better versed in Chinese histories and lacked familiarity with histories of their own country.8 Following Sim Kwangse, a host of works of yŏngsa akpu emerged in late Chosŏn. As noted by Breuker (2010), it was already in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries that the epithet “East of the Sea” (haedong 海東) came to serve as a moniker for not only the geographical location of the Korean peninsula but also for the geopolitical entities that assumed sovereignty on the Korean peninsula and in contiguous regions. There were other interchangeable terms such as Tongbang 東方 or Tongbang 東邦, and Tongguk 東國 (Eastern Kingdom) and Ch’ŏnggu 靑丘 (Green Hills). The titles of late Chosŏn works of yŏngsa akpu bear words such as Haedong 海東 (East of the Sea),9 Tongguk 東國 (Eastern Country), and Taedong 大東 Great East), clearly indicating their creators’ evocation of the shared past of the peninsula. Others, such as Yŏngnam 嶺南 (also called Kyonam 嶠南), the southeastern part of the peninsula, point to desires for regional cultural inscription. Stylistically speaking, the akpu genre tends to be more free-style and accommodating of local expressions and colloquialisms (Hwang 1998).10 Yet another literary activity that merits our attention is Literary Sinitic poetic (hansi 漢詩) renditions of Korean vernacular lyrical forms. The professed rhetoric behind these Literary Sinitic “translations” was preservation and durability. Writers viewed Literary Sinitic as a more permanent home for the life of a work, while deeming oral forms originating from speech or written forms intimately tied to speech as ephemeral and restricted. Let us turn to how Kim Sangsuk 金相肅 (1717–1792) explains in “Pŏn miin kok pal” 飜思美人曲跋 (Postscript to Translating Songs for the Beloved One) his motivation to give hansi renditions of two vernacular lyrical forms called kasa 歌詞/歌辭: “Sa miin kok” 思美人曲 (Song for the Beloved) and “Sok miin kok” 續美人曲 (Continued “Song for the Beloved”), both by Chŏng Ch’ŏl 鄭澈 (1536–1593).11

8

On the influence of Yigu yuefu on Korean haedong akpu, see Kim Yŏngsuk (2011). For a discussion of the historical development of akpu in premodern Korea, see Hwang Wiju (1998). 9 For the origins and development of these terms as appellations for Koryŏ, see Breuker (2010). At times haedong included Liaodong 遼東. In early Chosŏn, Sin Sukchu 申叔舟 uses the term Haedong 海東 to refer to Japan in his Haedong cheguk ki 海東諸國紀 (Records of Various Countries East of the Sea; 1471), presumably because in his conceptualization Chosŏn was a central point of reference regarding Japan. 10 For a brief history of the development of akpu poetry in premodern Korea, see Hwang Wiju (1998). 11 Kim Sangsuk, “Pŏn Sa miin kok pal” (Postscript to Translating Songs for the Beloved”), cited in Kim Myŏngsun, Chosŏn hugi hansi ŭi minp’ung suyong yŏn’gu (Seoul: Pogosa, 2005), 174n12.

The Lexical Vernacularity of the Tongp ’ ae naksong 此兩辭之文 合用方言 使東方之人聽之 雖婦孺無不知之 而若異方之人見之 則必不知其爲何語也 然忠愛之懷 托以寃女之詞 使千載之下讀其文者 如誦屈子之辭.

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In the written text of these two songs, both Literary Sinitic and the local language are used. If the people of the East hear them, even women and children know them. But if people from other places see them, they will surely not know what the songs are talking about. However, if one entrusts feelings of loyalty and love to the lyrics of a lamenting woman, he will enable those who read the written text for the next thousand years to feel as if they are reciting the songs of Qu Yuan.

Kim tells us that while Chŏng Ch’ŏl’s works were well known all over Chosŏn to the point that even “women and children,” metonymically referring to those who had not obtained Literary Sinitic literacy, knew them, they are, in their current state, unrecognizable for those who do not live in Korea. The distinction Kim draws is two-layered: hearing the words versus seeing the words, on the one hand, and within and beyond the speech community, on the other. Within the Korean-speaking community, the current written form whereby the vernacular is intertwined with Literary Sinitic can have a vibrant life because what is written, when read aloud, is immediately intelligible. This congruence between the spoken and the written is problematic once the text traverses the boundaries of the speech community. The decontextualized written text becomes meaningless and mute. Words moored to the speech community are both a merit and liability for the life of a text. Kim’s motivation, in other words, lies in his desire to ensure a life for Chŏng’s lyrics beyond Chosŏn Korea by rescripting the vernacular songs into a literary form that can be recognized by anyone anywhere equipped with Literary Sinitic literacy. His creative choice is the “Sao-style” 騷體, a form of prose poetry whose origin is traced to Qu Yuan’s 屈原 (340–278 bc) Li Sao 離騷 (Encountering Sorrow; also known as Chu Ci 離詞 [Song of the Chu]).12 As Gregory N. Evon’s chapter in the present volume discusses, rendering a prior vernacular written form into a Literary Sinitic form was not unique to verse. Kim Ch’unt’aek’s 金春澤 (1670–1717) Literary Sinitic rendition of his grand-uncle Kim Manjung’s 金萬重 (1637–1692) Sassi namjŏng ki 謝氏南征 記 (Lady Sa’s Journey to the South), for example, was done in the name of spreading it among educated male readers. The motivation was not because the educated male readers would not comprehend the contents of the novel in 12

On a related note, several decades later, Sŏng Haeung 成海應 (1760–1839), too, rewrote Chŏng Ch’ŏl’s vernacular verse, and his creative choice was a pentasyllabic Sinitic poem titled “Sa miin kok yŏk” 思美人曲譯 (Song for the Beloved, Translated).

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its original form but because of a cultural habit of associating writing housed exclusively in the vernacular script with women and children, a phrase synonymous with those not (yet) equipped with Literary Sinitic literacy. It was the logic of the cultural power and prestige of Literary Sinitic and forms connected to orthodox Literary Sinitic that Chosŏn literati saw a need to re-script worthy vernacular written forms and texts using Literary Sinitic. Prior to late Chosŏn, cases of vernacular-to-Literary Sinitic rendition are rare. Nevertheless, vernacular song-to-Literary Sinitic re-scripting indicates a shared uneasiness about locally bound written forms and a shared aspiration for the longevity of written words, with an eye toward transregional inscription using not only Literary Sinitic as medium but various conventional Literary Sinitic compositional forms. For example, as Ahn Daehoe’s chapter in the present volume discusses, Ch’oe Haenggwi 崔行歸 (n.d.) gave a Literary Sinitic rendition (hanyŏk 漢譯) of eleven Buddhist hyangga called “Pohyŏn sibwŏn ka” 普賢十願歌 (Songs of Ten Vows of Bodhisattva Samantabhadra), originally composed by Monk Kyunyŏ 均如 (923–973), into the Buddhist genre of chanting called “song” 頌 (or jiesong 偈頌; K. kesong; Sanskrit: gātha). Although Ch’oe Haenggwi and Kim Sangsuk each had their own motivation, both were concerned with re-scripting preexisting vernacular written forms that they deemed particularly worthy of wider circulation into a literary form that would be transregionally recognizable. The late-Chosŏn permutation of this phenomenon, however, reflects newer concerns: whether and how to embrace in Literary Sinitic composition idioms that are tied to the time-space matrix of the present time. Such expressions, loosely called “idioms that reflected contemporary times and customs” (sisok ch’ingwi 時俗稱謂), preoccupied late-Chosŏn writers. The question of which specific expressions should be admitted into Literary Sinitic writing varied from writer to writer, but scholars saw a need to close the gap between Literary Sinitic composition practice and how things were happening in reality. These remarks by Kim Ch’unt’aek, for example, on contemporary people’s Literary Sinitic composition are particularly germane (Sim 2008: 222–225). Kim adamantly opposed the use of idu grammatical elements in Literary Sinitic composition, saying that the use of idu invalidates a piece of writing from standing as Literary Sinitic composition (苟用吏頭, 文不能爲文矣) (Sim 2008: 223n30). Nevertheless, he allowed certain idu-derived expressions, such as the pronoun “I; myself; the person in question” (矣身) and people in relation to the person in question (e.g., the use of ŭi- as a prefix when referring to one’s brother [矣兄] or sister [矣妹], etc.). There were things that he found objectionable, yet he remained open to using them based on contemporary custom: e.g., place names like Wansan 完山 for Chŏnju 全州 in Chŏlla province. In the case of certain vernacular-inflected

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expressions, he was even more lenient. Examples include forms of address such as satto 使道 for “military generals or local magistrates” and taegam 大 監 or yŏnggam 令監 for “ministers”13 and honorific forms of address used in epistolary writing such as “my dear brother” (hyŏngju 兄主) or “my dear uncle” (sukchu 叔主), where “主” represents the Korean suffix “-nim.”14 In light of Fujimoto (1978) and the chapter by Ross King in the present volume, Kim Ch’unt’aek here might be referring to the practice of excising such expressions in the editorial process typical of munjip or anthologies, and thus suggests that some of those expressions deserve to remain in Literary Sinitic compositions. Yet another relevant literary phenomenon where Literary Sinitic, vernacular, and oral forms intersected is in the transcription of Korean aphorisms using Literary Sinitic. Some writers like Hong Manjong 洪萬宗 (1645–1725) and Yi Tŏngmu 李德懋 (1741–1793) translated Korean aphorisms into Literary Sinitic in the Sunoji 旬五志 (Records in Fifteen Days) and “Yŏlsang pangŏn” 洌上方 言 (Vernacular Language), respectively. In his Paek ŏn hae 白諺解 (A Hundred Vernacular Expressions, Explained), Yi Ik 李瀷 (1681–1763) not only documents one hundred Korean pithy sayings but he also rewrites them into concise foursyllable stanzas, evocative of the ancient style of the poems in the Shijing 詩 經 (Book of Poetry). For Chŏng Yagyong 丁若鏞 (1762–1836), transcription of Korean aphorisms was a project of literary rectification because he found some expressions, especially those originating from the classics and canonical texts, were inaccurately worded.15 Alluding to a late-Ming collection of Chinese aphorisms called Er Tan 耳談 (An Earful of Conversation) by Wang Tonggui 王同 軌 (fl. 1620), Chŏng created Aŏn kakpi 雅言覺非 (Refined Words to Rectify the Incorrect) and Idam sokch’an 耳談續纂 (Sequel to “Er Tan”). Such late Chosŏn compilations of aphorisms not only show contemporary literati’s keen interest in inscribing vernacular expressions but also reveal their approaches to utilizing sinographic writing. They typically transcoded aphorisms using sinographs as both logographs and phonographs and usually imposed the svo syntax typical of Literary Sinitic composition. No Myŏnghŭm wrote his Tongp’ae naksong at a time when Chosŏn literati were taking seriously the question of how best to use Literary Sinitic to preserve vernacular written forms and oral expressions. Chosŏn literati’s assessment of the relative merits of different original vernacular forms and oral expressions

13 “Yŏnggam,” more usually “yŏnggam-nim” with the honorific suffix “-nim,” is still used in present-day Korea to address prosecutors (kŏmsa). 14 See Pukhŏn kŏsa chip 北軒居士集 (Collected Works of Master Pukhŏn), vol. 16, quoted from Sim Kyŏngho (2008: 223). 15 Ryu Chunp’il (2008: 187).

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was far from homogeneous, but they shared an interest in the potential usage of Literary Sinitic for the inscription of events, ideas, and expressive modes tied to Chosŏn society or the history of Korea. As No compiled narrative texts that would give a vivid impression of contemporary Chosŏn society, such linguistic and literary interests shaped No Myŏnghŭm’s creative decisions. 4

No Myŏnghŭm in Seoul amid a Literary Culture in Flux

I have already given detailed information about No Myŏnghŭm’s life and his sociocultural milieu in Park (2020), so it is sufficient to mention here that he was a highly educated literatus, teacher, and writer whose life and stylistic tastes underwent a dramatic change in the mid through late eighteenth century. A central inflection point was his entry into Seoul during an epoch when all in Chosŏn perceived Seoul as the capital of contemporary culture and considered the bifurcation of Seoul-versus-provinces (the rest of Chosŏn) as part of the cultural order of the time. No Myŏnghŭm was a child prodigy born into a struggling yangban family in Ch’ungju, Ch’ungch’ŏng Province, where he grew up with high hopes of succeeding in the civil service examinations (kwagŏ 科 擧), a result that could at once bring greater economic stability to his family and increase chances of his family’s status retention. Due to poverty and thanks to his connection to a distant well-established yangban relative by the name of Song Chaehŭi 宋載禧 (1711–?) in Seoul, No moved there and eventually found permanent employment as a live-in tutor at another, even more illustrious yangban household, that of Hong Ponghan 洪鳳漢 (1713–1778).16 No spent most of the latter half of his life in Seoul sustained by the patronage of the Hong family, the members of which treated No as not just a family tutor but as their literary associate.17 No’s move to Seoul greatly impacted his literary taste; his relocation to Seoul thus marks his exposure to a dynamic new literary culture that compelled him to reassess his prior modes of composition centered, as they were, on honing the skills necessary to pass the state examinations. 16

When No Myŏnghŭm met Hong Ponghan in the mid-eighteenth century, Hong was a royal in-law by virtue of having married his daughter Lady Hong 惠慶宮洪氏 (1735–1816; also known as Lady Hyegyŏng) to the reigning King Yŏngjo’s 英祖 (r. 1724–1778) crown prince, best known as Prince Sado 思悼世子 (1735–1762). Hong and his brother were ministers, and Hong’s sons also served as high-ranking officials. The Hong family was connected to other illustrious families through marriage. For biographical information about Hong Ponghan and the interpersonal connections that No Myŏnghŭm formed with members of the Hong family, see Kim Yŏngjin (1998). 17 This sort of patronage was not uncommon in late Chosŏn, and besides No Myŏnghŭm (and his son No Kŭng), the Hong family also patronaged other talented people of nonyangban status. See Park (2020: 63–66).

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Previously, No would have concentrated on mastering writerly skills tailored to meet the demands of the state examination, especially the highly specialized style of writing known as “examination-style poetry” (kwach’esi 科體詩). Mastery of this style required the candidates’ rote memorization of allusions to canonical texts, both well-known and obscure, and their emulation of the styles of literary masters. The candidate wrote on a given topic by “speaking in someone’s stead” (taeŏn 代言), thereby lodging his own points while demonstrating his familiarity with established expressions and literary styles.18 For example, Hong Ponghan’s younger brother Hong Yonghan 洪龍漢 (1734–?) writes about No’s eventual disdain for the rigidity of the examination-style poetry as follows (Kim Yŏngjin 1998: 35n53): 翁平生精力在科體詩,   所作以千數 翁自嫌其局促少機變, 晩更改塗, 騁意匠尙標致, 可以毆喝場屋, 亦不自滿, 屢擧不利, 不咎考官, 益省其倒繃之失

All of Master No’s energies were spent on examination-style poetry. His poems numbered in the thousands. He loathed the style for its constrained boundaries and limited room for improvisation. In his later years, he renovated his path. Letting his artistry run wild and championing ornamentation, he struck out at and rebuked “the examination venue”19 and yet he did not pride himself on his ability. Several times he was unsuccessful in the examinations.20 He did not blame the examiners. He became all the more watchful in order not to make “mistakes of oversight.”21

Although it remains unknown what specific event caused No Myŏnghŭm to rethink the limits of his writing, we can surmise that there were abundant books and literary activities available at the Hong household. Four members of the Hong family, including Hong Yonghan who wrote the above biographical 18

For a study of Chosŏn kwach’esi, see Yi Sanguk, “Chosŏn kwach’esi ŭi kŭl ssŭgi pangsik yŏn’gu,” MA thesis, Yonsei University, 2005. 19 “Examination venue” is metonymically used for literary styles used in writing the civil service examination. 20 In 1759, No Myŏnghŭm, at age forty-seven, passed the preliminary examination and earned a literary licentiate (chinsa 進士) degree. This was approximately two years after No moved to live at the Hong household. The multiple failures Hong mentions here refer to the higher examination called the munkwa 文科. 21 “Mistakes of oversight” (tobung chi sil 倒繃之失) comes from the set-phrase “a midwife who mistakenly swaddles a newborn upside-down” (tobung haea 倒繃孩儿) and alludes to “a perilous mistake made by an expert.”

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note (chŏn 傳), dedicated prefatory materials to the Tongp’ae naksong, including two prefaces (sŏ 序) and a postscript (pal 跋). All of them mention No’s avid and extensive reading (pangnam kunjŏk 博覽群籍) and fondness for telling stories from the books he read (mae hyangin songsŏl 每向人誦說).22 Furthermore, there is the likelihood that No’s literary appetite benefited from the fact that Hong Ponghan and Hong Yonghan were key figures in the Chosŏn court’s compilation of the Tongguk munhŏn pigo 東國文獻備考 (Reference Materials of the Eastern Kingdom, 1770), a massive encyclopedic compendium (100 volumes, 40 books) of the institutions and customs of Korea from the earliest times to the present.23 For example, two stories from the Tongp’ae naksong about a certain Pak Chinhŏn of P’yŏnggu probably came from Kim Kan’s 金榦 (1646–1732) Hujae sŏnsaeng chip 厚齋先生集 (Collected Works of Master Hujae), which was block-printed in 1766 and mentioned in the Tongguk munhŏn pigo. In fact, Hong Yonghan’s biography of No Myŏnghŭm paints a vivid picture of No as an obsessive reader and taker of copious notes (ch’o 抄) of the books he read at his brother’s house. This description below, for instance, suggests that the books at the Hong household were at No’s disposal. When free from teaching to look after his own personal affairs, Master immersed himself in rummaging through and collecting profound and wondrous phrases old and new; he forgot sleep and food. Furiously he would write out what he had perused, in letters small as the tips of needles, and with the strength of a bull he turned them into books. He was able to amass everything without omission and store his learning in his mind. He internalized refined expressions and regularly uttered them from memory.24 These ch’o notes that No Myŏnghŭm created—a poor man’s private library— probably form the bulk of what No Kŭng 盧兢 (1738–1790), No Myŏnghŭm’s son, refers to in his letter to his own son No Myŏnjŏng 盧勉正 (n.d.) in which he asks his son how his father’s handwritten books would fare during the summer rains:

22 Park (2020: 68–69). 23 Hong Ponghan chaired the project’s supervisory committee, overseeing twenty-five people, while his brother clerked as a nangch’ŏng. For the compilation process of the Tongguk munhŏn pigo, see Pak Kwangyong (2007) and Ok Yŏngjŏng (2007). 24 退省其私，披輯古今奧語奇字，亡寢食，疾書若鍼芒細錄成卷，幾盡牛力，然能博 包該貫，以服爲笥, 尋常雅言, 皆由其中出; cited in Kim Yŏngjin (1998: 33–34n53).

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Have our books been able to survive undamaged in the summer rains? Although I am unable to return home and you are still young, how could one not treasure all those books that bear your ancestor’s [No Myŏnghŭm’s] handwriting? For forty-some years, he sat under the lamplight beneath the window, suffering through heat and cold, laboriously making copies and excerpts to the point that those books fill our house. Since my coming here, who has browsed through them? My heart grieves as I worry that those books might be attacked by bristletails and moths and that the graphs and strokes might be smudged.25 A clear indication of the importance of No’s sociocultural milieu in his creation of the Tongp’ae naksong is the fact that the collection exists within an intricate matrix of collections of tales whose origins and circulations are connected to the Hong household. Hong Ponghan’s maternal grandfather Im Pang 任埅 (1624–1724) wrote Ch’ŏnyerok 天倪錄 (Records of the Invisible Workings of Heaven), and several of its entries are retold in the Tongp’ae naksong. Im Mae 任邁 (1711–1779), Im Pang’s grandson, wrote Chapki kodam 雜記古談 (Miscellaneous Records of Old Tales; also known as Nansil manp’il 蘭室漫筆 [Leisurely Brushstrokes by Nansil]), the contents of which are also reflected in the Tongp’ae naksong. The textual genealogy that we can trace, furthermore, indicates that the Tongp’ae naksong in turn inspired Yi Hŭip’yŏng 李羲平 (1772–1839), a grandnephew of Hong Ponghan through his wife Hansan Yi-ssi (1713–1755), to create Kyesŏ chamnok 溪西雜錄 (Miscellaneous Records by Kyesŏ).26 Physically and figuratively, the Tongp’ae naksong was born from this rich sociocultural interaction in late eighteenth-century Seoul as a privileged place of dynamic cultural exchange and a site of fictionalized anecdotal narratives now called yadam. A rather underappreciated aspect of No Myŏnghŭm’s life in Seoul and his association with the Hong Ponghan family is No’s exposure to imported Chinese books, including Chinese vernacular fiction and drama and the works of late-Ming and Qing writers. The mid- through late eighteenth century that No Myŏnghŭm knew was an epoch when Chosŏn cultural elites, especially dwellers of Seoul or those who had social ties with Seoul-dwelling 25 書 冊 莊 ，過 夏 雨 ，能 無 傷 損 否 ，吾 雖 未 歸 ，汝 雖 未 學 ，此 皆 一 一 先 人 手 澤，敢不珍惜耶，先人四十餘年，窓下燈前，拂署河凍，矻矻謄抄，其書滿家 矣，自我來此，有誰披見，念其塵蠧掩蝕，字畵漫䵝，眞可痛哭也. No Kŭng, “Letters” (Sŏ), Collected Works of Hanwŏn (Hanwŏn chip), cited in Kim Yŏngjin (1998: 32n). 26 For the Tongp’ae naksong as a reception context of prior story collections connected to the Hong family and a catalyst for later story collections within and beyond the Hong family, see the fourth chapter of Park (2020).

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cultural elites, became readers of the imported Chinese books brought back through yŏnhaeng 燕行 (lit. “Embassies to Beijing”), the Chosŏn court’s official missions to Beijing that served as a major occasion of book shopping sprees (Kim Yŏngjin 2006). Some members of the Hong family with whom No formed close relations were participants in this cultural trend. For example, No Kŭng—No Myŏnghŭm’s son—and Hong Nagin 洪樂仁 (1729–1777), Hong Ponghan’s first son, wrote a poem about Jin Shengtan’s 金聖歎 (1608–1661) edition of the Shuihuzhuan 水滸傳 (Water Margin; K. Suhojŏn). Entitled “Ch’ŏng Kim yŏkkwan Hongch’ŏl tok Suhojŏn” 聽金譯官弘喆讀水滸傳 (Listening to Yŏkkwan Kim Hongch’ŏl’s recitation of Shuihuzhuan), the poem reports on Hong’s experience of listening to an off-duty official interpreter (yŏkkwan 譯官) named Kim Hongch’ŏl 金弘喆 (fl. mid 18th c.) giving an oral reading of the Jin Shengtan edition of Water Margin. A line from the poem reads: Sŏngt’an munjang kwan p’aega 聖歎文章冠稗家 ([Jin] Shengtan’s writing outperforms that of other writers of fiction).27 Given that Hong Nagin was closest to No Myŏnghŭm among all members of the Hong family and was also close to No Kŭng, it is safe to assume that No Myŏnghŭm too was familiar with this cultural activity, if not participating in it himself.28 An important point here is the cultural status of the Jin Shengtan edition of Water Margin in the late Chosŏn literary landscape. As scholarship has shown, Jin Shengtan’s literary criticism of works like Water Margin and Xixiangji 西廂記 (Romance of the Western Chamber) gained not only critical acclaim for Jin as a writer of an “alternative canon” in China (Patricia Sieber 2013), but his literary fame and the specific critical editions of his works inspired a wide-ranging literary activities in other parts of East Asia such as

27 The poem appears in Anwa yugo 安窩遺稿 (Remaining Works by Anwa; 1764), vol. 1, quoted in Kim Yŏngjin (1998: 35n57). 28 A related anecdote about oral reading of Chinese vernacular fiction that merits our attention is found in Haeam yugo 海巖遺稿 (Remaining Works by Haeam) by Yu Kyŏngjong 柳慶種 (1714–1784). Yu tells us that he once witnessed a skillful reciter of the Xiyouji 西遊記 (Journey to the West) (見有誦西遊記者), written in a mixed script style with sinographs and the Korean graphs intermixed (chin-ŏn sangjap 眞諺相雜). Sin Sangp’il (2011) speculates that like Kim Hongch’ŏl’s recitation, the reciter that impressed Yu Kyŏngjong could have been an off-duty yŏkkwan. The curious description of the reciter’s mixed-script book awaits further investigation. In any case, these accounts suggest that many of No Myŏnghŭm’s contemporaries were becoming increasingly aware of and familiar with the relationship between the written and oral forms. For more cases of Chosŏn literati’s enjoyment of Chinese vernacular novels through oral recitations by offduty yŏkkwan, see Yu Ch’undong (2011).

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Korea and Japan.29 In late Chosŏn, the favorable reception of Jin Shengtan’s editions of both Romance of the Western Chamber and Water Margin led to the emergence of fiction glossaries (sosŏl ŏrokhae) of not only these two works but also of Sanguozhi yanyi 三國志演義 (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) and Xiyouji 西遊記 (Journey to the West)—to be discussed below in connection with the lexical texture of the Tongp’ae naksong. That Hong Nagin wrote a poem about his first-hand taste of the Jin Shengtan edition of Water Margin lends a sense that the literary culture of the Hong family, especially the part closest to No Myŏnghŭm, was attuned to cultural trends of the time and exposed No Myŏnghŭm to a larger cultural force that was sweeping Seoul-dwelling cultural elites—literary connoisseurship. This is important especially in connection with King Chŏngjo’s 正祖 (r. 1777–1800) literary rectification (munch’e panjŏng 文體反正) in the last decade of the eighteenth century, when the popularity of contemporary Chinese literature, especially late-Ming and early-Qing works of fiction and other works featuring Chinese Vernacular Sinitic, became a clear target of criticism because of the threat they posed to orthodox thinking (Evon 2007; Wang 2019). Furthermore, fiction reading in the Hong household was an activity that inspired literary production. Hong Yonghan, the aforementioned younger brother of Hong Ponghan who wrote a biography of No Myŏnghŭm, wrote a necrology of his nephew Hong Nagwŏn 洪樂園 (1743–1775) who had died prematurely. Hong marvels at how the young Hong Nagwŏn generates a text using Literary Sinitic based upon what he overhears someone nearby reading aloud from a book of historical tales written in the vernacular script: sang pangch’ŏng ŏnp’aesa, sok i sŏngmun 嘗傍聽諺稗史, 繹以成文) (Kim Yŏngjin 1998: 35). This account captures a scene where there is a combination of vocal reading of fiction written phonetically in the Korean script that was probably meant to be shared by multiple individuals, and a child learner of Literary Sinitic giving a logographic transcription—not phonetic transcription—of what he casually overhears (pangch’ŏng 傍聽), probably for the first time. Even though what the boy wrote did not survive, we can glean from this account that the Hong household was an environment where fiction reading was not vilified and was conducted as a multi-generational family activity and where opportunities for literary production were numerous and multifaceted. According to Hong Ch’wiyŏng’s (1759–1833) preface and Hong Chigyŏng’s (1782–1842) postface to the Tongp’ae naksong, storytelling, especially historical tales of yore and the more recent past, abounded in the house. Both writers make a direct link 29

For the reception of Water Margin in Edo Japan and its rise to the Japanese national canon, see Hedberg (2019).

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between their experience of listening to tales and the Tongp’ae naksong. Hong Ch’wiyŏng tells us that “seven or eight out of ten” (sip chi ch’ilp’al 什之七八) of the stories in the Tongp’ae naksong were ones he had personally heard when young (Kim Yŏngjin 1998: 45). It is in this context that we should interpret No Myŏnghŭm’s literary innovation in his later years. As we have seen above, Hong Yonghan’s biography, along with the prefatory materials written by other members of the Hong family, points out a certain shift in his style, from conventional to experimental. Even in the absence of the prefatory material writers’ pinpointing No Myŏnghŭm’s literary innovation, we can detect that they, and No Myŏnghŭm himself, viewed the Tongp’ae naksong as belonging to the category of fiction writing, especially the kind associated with the tradition of anecdotal reports. No Myŏnghŭm gave his collection a title where three words are combined: Tong (the Eastern Kingdom; Korea), p’ae, and “repeatedly recited,” a phrase originating from the Zhuangzi indexing learning that one receives by hearing, prior to textual learning.30 The word p’ae 稗 (C. bai), literally meaning “coarse millet; trivial, insignificant,” goes back to “baiguan” 稗官 (K. p’aegwan), the petty officials commissioned to collect hearsay and lore so that the state could rule more wisely by using orally circulating stories to ascertain people’s grievances and gauge their level of satisfaction. The word originates from the Han Shu (History of the Han Dynasty), but by late Chosŏn, it had begun to mean fiction more generally, often synonymous with compounds like 稗說 and sosŏl 小說. All three men who dedicated paratexts to the Tongp’ae naksong unanimously praised the collection as a work of p’ae that surpasses all other p’ae—a clear indication of the literary merit of the Tongp’ae naksong. They pointed out how the stories can be corroborated and the contents can supplement what official history has left out. But what they all emphasize is the collection’s stylistic merit. We cannot know for sure what they detected precisely, but it is clear that they saw something praiseworthy. As the next section will show, the most conspicuous merit seems to be a certain linguistic consciousness, reaching for a written medium evocative of language as spoken in all its heterolexical richness. 5

The Heterolexical Texture of the Tongp’ae naksong

This section proposes that the stylistic innovation of the Tongp’ae naksong lies in No Myŏnghŭm’s use of words—the words he uses and how he uses them to tell his stories. Thus, this section illustrates the lexical texture of the Tongp’ae 30

For an interpretation of the title, see Park (2020: 109–113).

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naksong using numerous examples by referring to entries from the Tongp’ae naksong using the formula “Story of X,” with “X” being the given story’s protagonist. My central point is that the language of the Tongp’ae naksong exhibits (1) noticeable lexical hybridity and disinterest in the stylistic purity expected of orthodox Literary Sinitic composition, and (2) a kind of lexical hybridity that achieves lexical vernacularity by deploying wide-ranging idioms and lexical configurations, creating a simple phraseology, generally free of the allusions and references typical of Literary Sinitic composition and richly evocative of the linguistic reality of contemporary Chosŏn society. No Myŏnghŭm’s innovation is in his creative choice to not only utilize Korean colloquialisms, traits of idu documentary style writing, and simple baihua expressions that had permeated Chosŏn written culture. It also lies in his use of classical expressions that he would have mastered himself during his preparation for the civil service examinations and that he would have taught his pupils at the Hong household. To conclude this section and to argue that the lexical texture of the Tongp’ae naksong exhibits a case of lexical vernacularity, I will point out the affinity between the Tongp’ae naksong in its original medium and in parallel renditions written out phonetically in the Korean script. The opening scene of the “Story of a Pyŏlgunjik [Special Guard]” in the Tongp’ae naksong serves as a good example for explaining the general traits of the collection’s lexical texture. It is written exclusively in sinographs and the language follows the typical svo syntax of Literary Sinitic. But upon closer examination, its lexical items form a mixture of different types. The first are made-in-Korea expressions and lexical items found in orthodox Literary Sinitic writing. Examples of made-in-Korea expressions are proper nouns for the names of persons and places, customs, and institutions of Chosŏn society: e.g., Hyomyo 孝廟, pukpŏl 北伐, pyŏlgunjik 別軍職, Ch’ungju 忠州, Naenongp’o 內農圃, p’oin 圃人, and kongsang 供上. The opening reads as follows: (1) 孝廟意在北伐多尙武力有別軍職一人卽忠州人也往內農圃圃人備置供 上西果數十箇別軍乘圃人少出盡數剖食之. Parsed, the same text would look something like (1–1): (1–1) 孝廟意在北伐，多尙武力，有別軍職一人，卽忠州人也，往內農圃，圃人 備置供上西果數十箇，別軍乘圃人少出，盡數剖食之． Insofar as readers are equipped with the ability to comprehend Literary Sinitic and the meaning of sinographs, they would be able to comprehend the

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text’s meaning represented in (1-a) below. The lexical items in bold indicate made-in-Korea expressions. The lexical items highlighted in bold would be easily understandable by contemporary Chosŏn readers without the annotations that would be needed for anyone unfamiliar with contemporary society. Thus, a typical late Chosŏn reader of the passage would read (1–1) and easily obtain (1-b). (1-a) King Hyojong had his heart set on pukpŏl. He greatly upheld military power. There was a pyŏlgunjik and he was from Ch’ungju. He went to Naenongp’o. The p’oin had prepared ten-some watermelons for kongsang purposes. The pyŏlgunjik, seizing an opportunity while the p’oin had stepped out for a short while, took all the watermelons, cut them, and ate them. (1-b) King Hyojong, the seventeenth Chosŏn monarch who reigned between the years 1649 and 1659, had his heart set on the “Northern Expedition” (pukpŏl), a political campaign whereby the Chosŏn court pledged vengeance against the Qing dynasty based on the belief that the Manchus had usurped the Mandate of Heaven to rule the civilized world that the Ming had formerly possessed. The King greatly upheld military power. There was a special guard called p’yŏlgunjik, whom Hyojong had hired as part of his Northern Expedition campaign. He was from Ch’ungju, one of the biggest towns in Ch’ungch’ŏng province. He went to Naenongp’o, the plot of cultivated land located near the palace for growing crops used in regular tribute to the court called kongsang. The p’oin, the one in charge of the Naenongp’o, had prepared ten-some watermelons for his tribute duties. The special guard, seizing an opportunity while the p’oin had stepped out for a short while, took all the watermelons, cut them, and ate them. Within these made-in-Korea terms, we find two different types. On the one hand, there are terms denoting Chosŏn-specific institutions such as Naenongp’o and p’oin, the latter of which is derived from the former. On the other hand, there are terms that explicitly mark the Chosŏn state’s ideological and cultural assertions, such as pukpŏl (the “Northern Expedition”) and pyŏlgunjik (lit. “special guards”). Pukpŏl is a late-Chosŏn political slogan that proclaims Chosŏn’s commitment to Ming loyalism and its desire to avenge the destruction of the Ming at the hands of the barbaric Manchus. Pyŏlgunjik refers to royal guards recruited specifically for the pukpŏl campaign. These terms embodying Chosŏn’s ideological stance in an era of post-Ming~Qing transition

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and Qing sovereignty characterized by anti-Manchu and pro-Ming sentiments. Words like pukpŏl and pyŏlgunjik would have been sensitive words in interstate displomacy, best used only with a great deal of circumspection lest they travel beyond the geopolitical boundaries of Chosŏn society. Moreover, many terms specific to the society and cultural atmosphere of Chosŏn would have struck anyone unfamiliar with the written culture of contemporary Chosŏn as oddities. By contrast, for those immersed in contemporary Chosŏn written culture, such words would have been a natural and necessary type of vernacular inscription, even for refined, orthodox Literary Sinitic composition, because of their denotational value and because they were straightforward words with little in the way of metaphorical functions. Let us then turn to another passage to further explore No Myŏnghŭm’s lexical repertoire. Below is an excerpt from “Story of a Poor student of the Capital,” first presented unmarked, unparsed, and untranslated—as the text ordinarily appears, followed by the original with my annotations and an English translation to reflect how a Chosŏn reader would have interpreted the meaning of the lexical items. (2) 洞內富弁李先達願買以爲入京所來而李之早稻畓三十斗落在金門前請 以畓換馬

(2-a) 洞內 (tongnae: in the same neighborhood) 富弁 (military official or someone on track to become a military official) 李先達 (sŏndal: title referring to examination passers yet to enter officialdom) 願買以爲入京 (idu style) 所來，而李之早稻畓 (tap: rice paddy) 三十斗落 (majigi: counter: a patch of field) 在金門前，請以畓 (tap: rice paddy) 換馬. (2-b) In the same neighborhood was a military official Yi sŏndal, who came by, wanting to buy his [rice paddy] in order to go to the capital. Moreover, Yi’s thirty majigi of rice paddy for early season rice was located in front of Kim’s gate. He asked to exchange the paddy land for Kim’s horse. While the general texture of the passage (2) is similar to that of the passage (1), it contains different categories of words. The first type is a word that Chosŏn literati would have recognized as a non-Literary Sinitic, colloquial Chinese expression: the counter “箇” (kae). While this expression survives in contemporary Korean as a generic suffix for counting objects (han kae 한 개, tu kae 두 개, etc.), in both speech and written form, it not only belongs to Vernacular Sinitic but, more importantly, was also seen as such by Chosŏn literati, as evidenced

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in the word’s appearance as an entry in the Ŏrokhae, a glossary of vernacular Chinese (baihua) developed for Chosŏn literati studying the Zhuzi yulei 朱 子語類 (Recorded Sayings of Master Zhu Xi; 1270), a text in which orthodox Literary Sinitic and vernacularisms are “combined or alternated.”31 The second type is words or word configurations associated with idu documentary writing (idumun 吏讀文), a method of vernacular composition that uses sinographs and borrows the svo word order of Literary Sinitic and that by late Chosŏn had become associated with a secondary-status (as seen by yangban) hereditary social group called sŏri 書吏 (petty clerks, scribes). Examples of idu-derived expressions are: 爲入京, 畓, and 斗落. More will follow below about the nature of words associated with ŏrokhae and idu documentary writing. For now, it is sufficient to point out that these two types of lexical items are what Chosŏn literati would have considered unsuitable for refined literary composition. Importantly, the made-in-Chosŏn words appearing in the Tongp’ae naksong and the expressions associated with idu documentary writing and the glossaries of vernacular Chinese (baihua) co-occur with classical Literary Sinitic expressions such as “意在,” meaning “intending to,” and “多尙,” meaning “to greatly uphold.” At one level, it is this co-occurrence and combination that makes the lexical texture of the Tongp’ae naksong one of hybridity and vernacularity. At another level, the lexical vernacularity of the Tongp’ae naksong pertains to what types of classical idioms tend to be used and how classical idioms are appropriated to align with lexical items typically of a non-orthodox Literary Sinitic nature and to achieve a plain style of writing. 5.1 Vernacular Forms of Address One of No’s most striking stylistic choices is his incorporation of wide-ranging Korean forms of address. According to Jerry Norman (1988: 90), the use of honorific expressions is not unprecedented in Literary Sinitic writing. Even so, what we detect in the Tongp’ae naksong is situation-specific honorifics such as age-based hierarchy, social status-based hierarchy, and generally polite terms that would have been ubiquitous in spoken Korean. In terms of age-based hierarchy, younger family members address their older members using the suffix -nim 主 (it could also be read chu according to its Sino-Korean pronunciation) affixed to kinship terms, e.g., hyŏng + nim 兄主 and suk 叔 (more likely sukpu) + nim 叔(父) 主. The suffix is a full noun that has become a honorification suffix, and its earliest example is found in the hyangga “Sŏdong yo” 薯童謠 (Song of Potato Boy), in which a princess is 31

For an introduction to the Ŏrokhae of the Zhuzi yulei, see An Pyŏnghŭi (1983). For a general description of Chinese written vernaculars, see Wei, Shang (2014).

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referred to as “Her Highness Princess Sŏnhwa” 善化公主主, with the first “主” forming the latter half of the disyllabic compound “公主” for “princess” and the second “主” being the suffix (Kim Chonghun 2000). More commonly, honorific expressions pertain to social hierarchy. Some concern interactions between slaves and their masters, such as sangjŏn 上典 or sangjŏn naŭri(-nim) 上典進賜(主), while others are for official-rank holders such as yŏnggam 令監 and taegam 大監 for ministers and governors and anjŏn 案前 and satto 使道 for local magistrates. If the master is a young lady, she is called aga-ssi 阿哥氏 or agi-ssi 阿只氏, also used to refer to a child of the yangban status. In one story, a kisaeng 妓生 (professional female entertainer; one of the lowborn classes in Chosŏn’s social stratification) calls her lover’s mother of the yangban status maruha/manura 抹樓下, which was a non-gender specific word also used for addressing high-ranking officials (in present-day Korea it is used sometimes to mean “my wife”). Young aristocratic men are called sŏbang-nim 書房主 by their wives, servants, and kisaeng paramours. Honorifics can also mark politeness, such as when travelers are politely called haengch’a 行次. Along with such diversity, some honorifics in the Tongp’ae naksong are excessive-sounding. For example, servants use words such as so sangjŏn sŏbangnim 小上典書房主 to refer to the son of the master of the house (in “Story of a Certain Kwŏn of Andong”) and no sangjŏn 老上典 and so sangjŏn hyŏngje 小上典兄弟 to distinguish his original master from his two young masters who are brothers and children of his original master (in “Story of a Certain Rich Man of Sunhŭng”). A guest visiting someone’s house can refer to the master of the house in his banter with the servant by referring to the owner as i taek chuin saengwŏn-nim 此宅主人生員主, meaning “the master of this honorable house who holds the classical licentiate degree.” This not only specifies whom he wishes to speak to but also displays his good manners. Native Words and Nativized Loanwords in Contemporary Lexicography While the practice of sinographic inscription of topolects itself has a long history, such words found in the Tongp’ae naksong deserve our attention because of a certain philological awareness that No’s contemporaries manifested in lexical compilations that contain sections called expressions from the “present court” (ajo 我朝) for Chosŏn. For example, some lexical items found in the Tongp’ae naksong appear in the following lexical compendia. First, the Kogŭm sŏngnim 古今釋林 (Forest of Interpretations, Old and New; 1789) is a forty-volume dictionary of multiple languages (Classical Chinese, Sanskrit, Mongolian, Manchu, Japanese, Vietnamese, and various languages in the “western regions” [xiyu 西域]) based 5.2

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on over 1500 sources, and compiled by the scholar-official Yi Ŭibong 李義鳳 (1733–1801). The Kogŭm sŏngnim integrates nearly all the foreign language textbooks and dictionaries of colloquial Chinese known at the time of compilation, including: – Textbooks for training official-interpreters, such as Nogŏltae 老乞大 (The Old Cathayan) and Pak T’ongsa 朴通士 (Interpreter Pak); – Ŏrokhae of the Zhuzi yulei 朱子語類 (Recorded Sayings of Master Zhu; 1270); – Ŏrokhae of the Sanguozhi yanyi 三國志演義 (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), Shuihuzhuan 水滸傳 (Water Margin), Xiyouji 西遊記 (Journey to the West), and Xixiangji 西廂記 (Romance of the Western Chamber); – Dictionaries of foreign languages such as the Yŏgŏ yuhae 譯語類解 (Classified Dictionary of Translated Words and Phrases for Interpreters); – Yŏgŏ yuhae po 譯語類解補 (Supplemented Classified Dictionary of Translated Words and Phrases for Interpreters); – Mongŏ yuhae 蒙語類解 (Classified Dictionary of Translated Words and Phrases of Mongolian) and Waeŏ yuhae 倭語類解 (Classified Dictionary of Translated Words and Phrases of Japanese). Volumes 27–28 are dedicated to vernacular idioms categorized into historical periods—e.g., Tan’gun Chosŏn 檀君朝鮮, Kija Chosŏn 箕子朝鮮, Wiman Chosŏn (衛滿) 朝鮮, Nangnang 樂浪, Mahan 馬韓, Chinhan 辰韓, Puyŏ 扶餘, Karak 駕洛, T’amna 耽羅, Koguryŏ 高句麗, Paekche 百濟, Silla 新羅, T’aebong 泰封, Koryŏ 高麗, and the “current dynasty” (ponjo 本朝). The section’s title is “Tong Han yŏgŏ” 東韓譯語 (Literary Sinitic Translations of the Eastern Lexicon) (Sim 1981: 227–242). Yi Ŭibong viewed the expressions collected in it as insufficiently official because of their unsophisticated, contemporary, and “local/ vernacular” (sok 俗 and hyang 鄕) nature. The other source is the Songnam chapchi 松南雜識 (Miscellaneous Records by Songnam; ca. 1855) compiled by Cho Chaesam 趙在三 (1808–1866). This fourteen-volume work comprises 4378 entries under 33 categories. Cho claims that he created it to edify his two sons. Of relevance here are volumes 5 and 6, entitled “Pangŏnnyu” 方言類 (Classified Vernacular Idioms) and “Kŭnch’wi p’yŏn” 近取篇 (Recent Gleanings), respectively. The items in “Kŭnch’wi p’yŏn,” containing bi-, tri-, and quadri-syllabic phrases, are culled from Ahŭi wŏllam 兒戱原覽 (An Easy-to-Read Reference Source for Children; first published in 1803) by Chang Hon 張混 (1759–1828).32 32 “Kŭnchw’i p’yŏn” was first published in woodblock print in the late nineteenth century as part of an anonymously compiled phrase book titled Muncha yujip 文字類集 (Classified Collection of Words and Phrases). For details on this text, see Yi Yunsŏk (2009: 199–226).

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Table 13.1 Tongp’ae naksong vernacular idioms listed in the Kogŭm sŏngnim and the Songnam chapchi, “Kŭnch’wi p’yŏn,” and “Pangŏnnyu”

Expression

Listed in

上典

sangjŏn

先達

sŏndal

都令

toryŏng

水汲

sugŭp

兩班

yangban

狼狽

nangp’ae

行李

haengni

別監 小科, 大科

pyŏlgam sokwa and taekwa, respectively

Meaning

Kogŭm sŏngnim [My] master (Chosŏn) Origins unknown. Slaves call their masters sangjŏn 上典. Kogŭm sŏngnim Sir; mister (Chosŏn) “Pangŏn yu” Passers of the examinations (civil and military) who have yet to enter the bureaucracy are called sŏndal 先達. Kogŭm sŏngnim Unmarried man “Pangŏn yu” Toryŏng-gong 都令公 used to refer to a holder of sŭngji 承旨 (senior thirdranking post for scholar-officials). Kogŭm sŏngnim Water-drawing slave girl at a local magistracy Kogŭm sŏngnim Civilian and military officials “Pangŏn yu” Kogŭm sŏngnim Flabbergasted; not knowing what to do “Pangŏn yu” The compiler quotes “Biography of Zhou Bao” (“Zhou Bao zhuan” 周勃傳) in the Han shu 漢書 (History of Han). Kogŭm sŏngnim Travel paraphernalia “Pangŏnnyu” The compiler remarks that this is a mistaken use of “messengers” (haengni 行李) to mean “travel paraphernalia” (haengjang 行裝); original meaning of 行李 is found in Zuo commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu zuo zhuan 春秋左傳). Kogŭm sŏngnim Assistant attached to local magistracy Kogŭm sŏngnim Civil service examinations

“Pangŏnnyu”

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Table 13.1 Tongp’ae naksong vernacular idioms listed in the Kogŭm sŏngnim (cont.)

Expression

Listed in

濶狹

hwalhyŏp

擧子

kŏja

舍廊

sarang

惡少年

aksonyŏn

令監, 大監

良人 伻人 名下士

yŏnggam and taegam, respectively yangin p’aengin myŏnghasa

內行

naehaeng

阿只氏

agi-ssi

傳 赤手

chŏn chŏksu

彷彿

pangbul

露積

nojŏk

案前

anjŏn

骨髓

kolsu

孟浪

maengnang

Meaning

Kogŭm sŏngnim Distance “Pangŏnnyu” The compiler quotes “Biography of General Li” (“Li jiangjun zhuan” 李將 軍傳) in the Shiji 史記 (Records of the Grand Historian) Kogŭm sŏngnim Candidates for the civil service “Pangŏnnyu” examination Kogŭm sŏngnim Guestroom in the house; hangout place for men in the house “Kŭnch’wi Ill-behaving boys; hooligans p’yŏn” Kogŭm sŏngnim (Honorific) Mister “Pangŏnnyu” Refers to holders of high-ranking posts

Kogŭm sŏngnim Kogŭm sŏngnim “Kŭnch’wi p’yŏn” Kogŭm sŏngnim

Commoners (Chosŏn) Employee (Chosŏn) Scholar known for his literary skills or scholarship Entourage protecting a yangban lady on the road Kogŭm sŏngnim Little master “Pangŏnnyu” Kogŭm sŏngnim Message Kogŭm sŏngnim Bare-fisted; poor; without means “Pangŏnnyu” “Kŭnch’wi Similar p’yŏn” Kogŭm sŏngnim Grains stored in the courtyard (Chosŏn) Kogŭm sŏngnim Lit. “be before a desk”; form of address “Pangŏnnyu” for magistrates; governors “Kŭnch’wi Bone marrow; core p’yŏn” Kogŭm sŏngnim Preposterous “Pangŏnnyu”

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Table 13.1 Tongp’ae naksong vernacular idioms listed in the Kogŭm sŏngnim (cont.)

Expression 圭角 狼藉 殺風景 除拜 伶俐 總角 觀光 橫財 迂闊 武弁 上舍 本倅 進賜主

Listed in kyugak

Kogŭm sŏngnim “Pangŏnnyu” nangja Kogŭm sŏngnim “Pangŏn yu” salp’unggyŏng “Kŭnch’wi p’yŏn” chebae Kogŭm sŏngnim “Pangŏnnyu” yŏngni “Kŭnch’wi p’yŏn” ch’onggak Kogŭm sŏngnim “Pangŏnnyu” kwan’gwang Kogŭm sŏngnim “Pangŏnnyu” hoengjae Kogŭm sŏngnim “Pangŏnnyu” uhwal Kogŭm sŏngnim “Pangŏnnyu” mubyŏn Kogŭm sŏngnim “Pangŏnnyu” sangsa Kogŭm sŏngnim “Pangŏnnyu” ponswi Kogŭm sŏngnim “Pangŏn yu” Kogŭm sŏngnim naari, naŭri or “Pangŏnnyu” chinsaju

Meaning Disharmony Things in disarray Killjoy; desolate atmosphere Receive a royal recommendation Clever; talented Unmarried boy or girl To go on a journey to take the civil service examination Windfall; an unexpected good fortune Be high-sounding and impractical Military officer Passers of saengwŏn and chinsa examinations (Honorific) Local magistrate; magistrate of this county (Honorific) Master; mister Kogŭm sŏngnim: Unknown origin; the low-born call their social superiors naŭri 進賜; speculated to have derived from the custom of calling tanghagwan officials naŭri in reference to their commute (按今稱 堂下官曰進賜, 盖謂將進於仕也, 俗 稱 나아리).

Songnam chapchi: A mistake for the Chinese 老爺 (an honorable person)

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Table 13.2 Tongp’ae naksong idioms found in Yijo sillok nanhaeŏ sajŏn (1993)

Expression 客舍 結卜 京所/鄕所 立案 新來 遊街 風聞 紅牌

Meaning guest house for the local magistrate as in 卜數: harvest amount local advisory committee draft a document new examination passer parade a new examination passer through the streets rumor certificate conferred upon a successful candidate for the civil service examination

Some of the items are found in Yijo sillok nanhaeŏ sajŏn (Abstruse Words in the Veritable Records of the Chosŏn Dynasty) (Sahoe kwahagwŏn 1993), a list of “oddities” or “difficult-to-understand expressions,” compiled by North Korean scholars who produced the North Korean translation of the Chosŏn wangjo sillok 朝鮮王朝實錄 (Veritable Records of the Chosŏn Dynasty). That is, these expressions were considered non-orthodox Literary Sinitic words. Table 13.1, then, indicates Korean colloquialisms that late Chosŏn lexicographers may have deemed unworthy of noting or else failed to recognize as idioms from the Chosŏn period. Note that the number of syllables of the Korean expression and of their sinographic renditions generally match. For instance, “straw hat” p’aeraengi (three syllables) is rendered by a combination of two sinographs, p’yŏng 平 and ryang 凉, or sometimes by three sinographs with “子” at the end. Tan’gol, a twosyllable word for “patron,” is rendered by a disyllabic compound “單骨.” Other examples include kwaengi for “hoe” rendered as “廣耳” and kwiri for “oats” rendered as “耳牟.” Other examples include sŏbang 書房 for “a married man” and toryŏng 都令 for an “unmarried boy from the yangban aristocracy.” Some of these expressions can appear in a string of sinographs to form an idiom, as seen in kŭp oesang 給外上 “to give oesang,” with oesang meaning to “allow someone to buy something on credit.” Many survive in today’s spoken and written Korean. 5.3 Made-in-Korea Sinographs A small number of the lexical items are made-in-Korea sinographs. They are either kinship relations—e.g., nam 娚 (older male sibling from a woman’s

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perspective) and si 媤 (a wife’s in-law family)—or counters commonly used in idu documentary writing such as tap 畓 (rice paddy). 5.3.1 Phonetic-cum-Semantic Borrowing of Sinographs Even rarer than made-in-Korea sinographs are cases when a Sino-Korean word appears in a combination of semantogram and phonogram use of sinographs. “斗乙暗牛” (probably read as tul-amso) consists of three parts: (1) “斗乙” (tu-l) referring to a Korean adjective for barren animals, with the second sinograph 乙 indicating the syllable-final consonant “l” (ㄹ); “暗” (am) taken for its Sino-Korean sound value to render the colloquial Korean for “female” for animals; and finally “牛” (so), an interpretive reading (semantogram) to indicate the Korean word for “cow.” It is also possible that “斗乙” was meant to be expressed as “乧,” a made-in-Korean sinograph indicating the sound value “tul.” 5.3.2 Semantic Borrowing of Sinographs Some of the lexical items are made-in-Korea compounds where the semantic values of sinographs are used to translate Korean expressions. Those without a knowledge of spoken Korean might find them odd, off, or nonsensical. Words belonging to this category are as follows. “作情” means “bribe (someone),” where “情” (chŏng; lit. “sentiments; passion; emotion”) is short for “人情” (injŏng; lit. “human sentiments”) and is a euphemism for “bribe.”33 “內外” (lit. “inside and outside”) indicates “husband and wife.” “善生” (lit. “to live a good life; live well”) means “be born with blessings in terms of outward appearance” and has an equivalent in spoken Korean today, chal nada/chal natta “잘나다/ 잘났다.” “誤入” (oip; lit. “enter into the wrong place” or “to be misled”) means “to have an illicit affair,” usually denoting men sleeping with women other than their wives. 5.3.3 Aphorisms Several characters in the stories of the Tongp’ae naksong use pithy aphorisms in their speech. On all such occasions, these pithy aphorisms are spoken expressions translated into Literary Sinitic according to the principles of logographic inscription. For example, in the “Story of Kim Tŏngnyŏng 金德齡 [1567–1596],” slaves threatening to kill their master describe their master’s plight by saying “入甕鼠” “a mouse that has entered into a jar” (“between the devil and the deep blue sea”). This expression survives in Korean: tok an e tŭn chwi 독 안에 든 쥐: 독 = 甕; 안에 든= 入; 쥐 = 鼠. And it can also be found in the aforementioned 33

A similar usage of “人情” is also found in spoken Chinese.

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A Hundred Vernacular Expressions, Explained by Yi Ik, whose life plan partially overlaps with that of No Myŏnghŭm. Other pithy sayings found in the Tongp’ae naksong include: “掛於鯨齒” (lit. “to get caught between a whale’s teeth,” meaning “be in danger of drowning at sea/becoming food for fish”); “鳶壽千年亦捉一雉” (lit. “a thousand-year-old falcon can surely catch a pheasant”) meaning “experience makes a person excel at whatever he does”; and “晨虎不暇僧狗者也” (lit. “a dawn tiger hasn’t the leisure to tell the difference between a dog and a monk”), meaning “beggars can’t be choosers.” A four-syllable idiom that goes against the grain somewhat is “擢髮織履” (lit. “to pluck out one’s hair to make shoes from it”), meaning “to ease the journey of the deceased to the netherworld,” found in the “Story of Yŏm Hŭido.” This idiom is uttered by a slave’s daughter who expresses her gratitude to Yŏm Hŭido for his act of good conscience helping exonerate her father falsely accused of theft. Unlike other aphorisms, this expression is probably tied to an actual burial custom practiced in Andong, Kyŏngsang province.34 5.3.4 Affinities with idu Documentary Writing As mentioned previously, the Tongp’ae naksong contains lexical items associated with idu documentary writing. The relationship between the lexical texture of the Tongp’ae naksong and idu documentary writing is multilayered. At one level, this relationship can be explained as a simple adoption of lexical items conventional in idu documentary writing, such as the prefix “矣-” as in “矣身” (I; myself; this person) and “矣兄.” Again, what merits our attention is not just the presence of such words but also the manner in which they appear. Utterances connected to idu documentary writing are not random and typically appear in scenes where such diction would have been called for, had they occurred in real life—stories that contain scenes of document drafting, petitioning, and criminal interrogation. This context-specific nature of No Myŏnghŭm’s use of words associated with idu documentary writing indicates that his adoption of such words results from a deliberate stylistic choice. But first, a discussion of the nature of idu documentary writing is in order.

34

In 1998, the grave of a yangban family in Andong, Kyŏngsang Province was disinterred for reburial. In it, a stash of letters was found along with a few mummies and some ninety relics. The relics included a vernacular letter written by the wife of the deceased, now called the “Yi Ŭngt’ae puin ŏn’gan” (“Letters in the vernacular by Yi Ŭngt’ae’s wife”; 1586). The letter’s envelope was wrapped around a pair of shoes woven from human hair and hemp. An English translation of this letter along with a brief introduction of the excavation is available in Sun Joo Kim (2009).

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Idu documentary writing is one of the two styles of non-orthodox Literary Sinitic writing used for administrative documentation, the other being imun 吏文 (“clerkly writing/documentation writing”). Imun refers to a highly, if not the most highly, specialized and punctiliously maintained style of writing used almost exclusively for diplomatic documents dispatched between Korea (late Koryŏ and Chosŏn) and China (Yuan through Qing). By contrast, idu documentary writing refers to sundry documentary styles of writing used within the Chosŏn state bureaucracy.35 Sometimes the two terms are used synonymously (An Pyŏnghŭi 1987: 8), but the specific contexts that required each of the styles makes distinguishing them rather easy despite the confusing nomenclature. Perhaps akin to modern-day business writing, imun and idu documentary writing served pragmatic functions. Due to their context-bound and practical orientation, they were considered unsuitable for literary expression.36 As discussed previously in connection with Fujimoto (1978) and Sim (2008), idu documentary writing encompasses a host of writing styles used in all levels of Chosŏn administrative documentation. Idu documentary texts incorporate wide-ranging vernacular elements, encompassing vernacular case markers and verb endings, vocabulary, and sometimes syntax. It is especially the use of vernacular morphosyntactic elements—e.g., “敎是置,” “爲去在乙,” “是白去 乙,” “爲白有如乎”—that is the most obvious characteristic of idu documentary writing. Fujimoto (1978: 32) describes idu documentary writing as “primarily concerned with Korean particles, auxiliary verbs, and occasional inclusion of adverbs and nouns, and the use of sinographs as phonograms and semantograms (a method evocative of the manyōgana inscriptional method), and word order following the syntax of Korean.” Idu documentary writing had an intimate connection with spoken Korean elements and colloquialisms, although these expressions were never a straightforward transcription of spoken language but an approximation thereof 35

36

Yang Ojin (2002) offers an overview of the distinction between imun and idu documentary writing. Imun composers were first-grade literati belonging to the Sŭngmunwŏn 承文院 (Office of Diplomatic Correspondence) and were trained to be well-versed in specialized terms and set-phrases for protocols used in diplomatic writing. Their writings assumed grave importance, as imun was meant to index not only the individual writer’s erudition in the classics and literary paragons but also the level of civilization and sophistication of the state of Chosŏn as a whole. Imun was an important social institution that sustained the Chosŏn foreign relations policy of “serving the great” (sadae 事大) vis-à-vis China. Like Literary Sinitic, imun was an exclusively written language that was extremely formulaic and whose vocabulary consisted of a certain degree of baihua (Chŏng Kwang 2006). Imun was difficult to master, and only a tiny fraction of superbly lettered Chosŏn literati were capable of it. But see King (2022a) for some rare examples of the literary deployment of idu.

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according to pre-existing and often quite ossified conventions. In terms of its day-to-day documentary administration, Chosŏn was managed through texts composed in idu documentary writing by people of varying bureaucratic ranks and social statuses, i.e., a mixture of hereditary yangban who were holders of official ranks and responsible for policy-making, as well as secondary-status hereditary professional groups such as petty clerks. Idu documentary writing was an institutionalized means of keeping records in central government organs—records such as the Ŭijŏngbu tŭngnok 議政府謄錄 (Documents of the State Council) and Pibyŏnsa tŭngnok 備邊司謄錄 (Documents of the Border Defense Command)—as well as local magistracy records, interrogation reports (ch’uan kŭp kugan 推案及鞫案), contracts between individuals, petitions, inheritance documents, and records of sundry ceremonies pertaining to the court and the royal family. All these records are inscribed in idu documentary writing, but the inscriptional conventions found in the different types of record and sometimes within the same document indicate there were no strict guidelines for best practices. Despite the fact that users of idu documentary writing included both office-holding scholar-officials (yangban) and petty clerks (non-yangban), the yangban literati developed a certain disdain toward it because it was a style of writing for practical writing purposes rather than for literary composition written for aesthetic effects. The aforementioned Kim Ch’unt’aek’s refusal to use idu grammatical elements in his writing reflects how literati tended to minimize their use of idu grammatical elements. It is possible that the literati’s disdain originated from the inconsistency and largely unstandardized approaches to idu documentary writing (Sim 2018: 218). This disdain was probably due to and further enforced by the fact that editorial intervention in publication (whether scribal or printed) often involved jettisoning (sansak 刪削) of idu grammatical elements or syntactic reordering. Dismissal of idu documentary writing among scholar-officials, King Chŏngjo tells us, reached the point where they grew ignorant of the basic conventions of idu documentary writing. Comparing the relationship between idu documentary writing and official documentation drafted by literati with that of giving vernacular readings using kugyŏl 口訣/t’o 吐 (oral glosses) and translation (ŏnhae 諺解) of the Confucian classics, he attempted to promote idu documentary writing among his scholar-officials (Sim 2018: 218–219).37 It is within this cultural practice that 37 A sixteenth-century literary miscellany called Kijae kii 企齋記異 (Compendium of Records of Hearsay) by Sin Kwanghan 申光漢 (1484–1555) contains a humorous story of an official incompetent in idu documentary writing though masterful in literary composition (長於文詞 而短於吏事 … 不解吏文). Whenever issuing memos, the official writes

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No Myŏnghŭm’s integration of words associated with idu documentary writing effects lexical hybridity and heterolexicality. Moreover, while the use of idu grammatical elements clearly marked idu documentary writing, it, too, demanded writers’ familiarity with certain classical allusions and refined idioms. For example, Chosŏn petty clerks used the Chŏndŭng sinhwa kuhae 剪燈神話句解 (Jiandeng xinhua, Punctuated and Annotated; 1559), a parsed and annotated (kuhae 句解) version of the Jiandeng xinhua 剪燈神話 by Qu You 瞿佑 (1347–1433) of the Ming that contains tales where administrative writing and legal writing feature prominently (e.g., interrogations and verdicts) as a template for Chosŏn petty clerks’ idu documentary writing, especially for Qu You’s rich use of classical idioms and allusions. How, then, are words associated with idu documentary writing expressed in the Tongp’ae naksong? In the “Story of Cho Hyŏnmyŏng 趙顯命 [1690–1752],” when Cho the magistrate interrogates a criminal about an alleged murder, the criminal refers to himself as “矣身” (I; myself; this person) and uses “矣兄” (my brother; this person’s brother) to refer to his brother. In the “Story of U Hahyŏng 禹夏亨 [fl. early to mid-17th c.],” the female protagonist, cross-dressed to hide her identity as U Hahyŏng’s former lover, visits U’s magistracy to ask for an audience with him and introduces herself as a “白活民” (commoner filing a petition) who “仰達” (to offer up words with respect) some “白事” (matters to report). The word “白活” is read palgwal, instead of the expected Sino-Korean *paekhwal. The expression pok 卜, a counter for a “bale or parcel to be loaded,” appears in almost all stories dealing with people on the road, along with related compounds. Thus, travelers go on journeys on a pongma 卜馬 (a horse loaded with stuff) with pongmul 卜物 (stuff to be loaded or that has been loaded). In stories dealing with real estate transactions, the idu term “斗落” (read as majigi in idu instead of the expected Sino-Korean reading *turak) for counting plots of land appears. Stories of property inheritance employ kyunbun 均分, a term for equal division of property among children, and pyŏlgŭp 別給, a term for partial inheritance money that parents give their children while they are still alive. Scenes of interrogation contain expressions like noehwi 牢諱 (to deny resolutely), chŏnmal 顚末 (beginning and end; the ins and outs of an affair), chimjak 斟酌 (to speculate; surmise), and somae 素昧 (to be complete strangers

highly flowery and poetic diction using classical allusions to give the simplest orders. Clerks mock this imbalance. This anecdotal account is important for its illustration of how idu documentary writing was perceived as a skill and a distinct form of literacy in and of itself.

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to each other), all of which make frequent appearance in interrogation documents such as ch’uan kŭp kugan 推案及鞫案.38 Most interestingly, the Tongp’ae naksong contains numerous disyllabic verbs or verb+noun compounds that appear in tandem with a pleonastic “爲” (wi; to do). “爲” is the postnominal verb “to do” (hă- in earlier Korean) and what follows it in Literary Sinitic is an uninflected noun. Thus, according to the principle of orthodox Literary Sinitic writing, the “爲” here is superfluous. The redundancy of 爲 indicates that these disyllabic phrases are being treated as nativized loanwords; it may also indicate that the 爲 was likely read in hundok 訓讀 “reading by gloss/vernacular reading” fashion as vernacular Korean hăwith a mental word order inversion. The construction manifests itself in one of the two following ways: {爲 + (Verb + Verb)} or {爲 + (Verb + Object)}. This type of construction suggests that these disyllabic verbal noun + hă- collocations probably existed in spoken Korean at the time, similar to the large volume of such forms in the Korean language today (e.g., 讀書하다 [to read] or 入學하다 [to enter school]). In this case, then, the lexical vernacularity is connected to syntactic vernacularity. Examples include: – 爲出來 (wi + ch’ullae): come out; – 爲入京 (wi + ipkyŏng): enter the capital; – 爲投筆 (wi + t’up’il): cast down one’s brush, i.e., (metaphorically) become a military official by giving up one’s dream of entering officialdom through the civil-service examination; – 爲縮頭 (wi + ch’uktu): lower one’s head; – 爲下諭 (wi + hayu): send down one’s order, command; – 爲出去 (wi + ch’ulgŏ): go out and leave for a place; – 爲卜妾 (wi + pokch’ŏp): take up a concubine; – 爲自擇 (wi + chat’aek): select personally; – 爲接待 (wi + chŏptae): treat someone with hospitality; – 爲捲歸 (wi + kwŏn’gwi): pack up and withdraw; – 爲退去 (wi + t’oegŏ): retreat; give ground; – 爲久留 (wi + kuryu): stay for a while; – 爲留坐 (wi + yujwa): stay seated for a while; and – 爲還衙 (wi + hwana): return to one’s office (for a magistrate or clerks belonging to a local magistracy). 38

Expressions like “noehwi” 牢諱, “chŏnmal” 顚末, “chimjak” 斟酌, and “somae” 素昧 are also part of the Chinese vernacular lexicon. Given that idu documentary writing is almost always assumed to have strong ties with the Korean language, and in light of the ties between imun and idu documentary writing, the lexical affinities between idu documentary writing and Chinese Vernacular Sinitic deserve further research.

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Could this vernacular syntactic feature be the inadvertent vestige of a vernacular construction that was meant to be expunged in the editorial process, as argued in Fujimoto (1978), rather than a writer’s deliberate stylistic choice? One answer may be found by turning to how a manuscript edition of the Tongp’ae naksong held by Tenri University in Nara, Japan, treats such vernacular constructions. The Tenri edition is unique among surviving editions because, as Kim Tonguk (1996) rightly points out, it is a rather unique composite whose contents are in part entries originating from the Tongp’ae naksong and in part entries originating from Yi Hŭip’yŏng’s Kyesŏ chamnok, a later story collection under the influence of the Tongp’ae naksong.39 In the Tenri edition, nearly all the 爲 constructions listed above are absent. We may interpret this rejection as an act of stylistic improvement. For example, the 爲 construction, is not uncommon in Sŭngjŏngwŏn ilgi 承政院日記 (Records of the Royal Secretariat), the kind of document that Fujimoto (1978) identifies as typically containing vernacular inscription, and which habitually gets cleaned up when relevant parts undergo the process of publishing (and often printing). Following Fujimoto’s observation, then, should we assume that No did not intend to use include the 爲 construction? While more research will shed light on the topic and improve our understanding of the place of the 爲 construction in Chosŏn written culture more generally, it should be pointed out that the Tenri edition is in fact an aberration among surviving editions of the Tongp’ae naksong. That this construction is preserved in other surviving manuscript editions of the Tongp’ae naksong strongly suggests that reader~copiers of the Tongp’ae naksong either did not mind this construction and likely deemed it a stylistic trait of the collection. Finally, the lexical texture of the Tongp’ae naksong features a typical rhythm of idu documentary style: the use of four-syllable phraseology, clearly visible with strings of four sinographs forming a phrase. According to Yang Ojin (2002: 198–199) and Sim Kyŏngho (2008: 220–225), imun and idu documentary writing commonly feature a four-syllable rhythm. In some stories in the Tongp’ae naksong, especially where scenes contain descriptions of people, things, and situations or explanations of reasons, four-syllable rhythms evocative of idu documentary writing are prominent. The contents of the four-syllable phrases are largely free of allusions. Below are some examples:

39

See the fourth chapter of Park (2020) for an overview of surviving editions of the Tongp’ae naksong.

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a. “Story of General Im Kyŏngŏp 林慶業 [1594–1646]” 目光如電 [His] eyes flashed like lightning 照燿一軒 Illuminating the entire complex of the magistracy 欲羃 As if it were to envelop the sunlight 太陽之輝 The servants in the master’s house 主家傔人 Every single one of them passed out 一齊喪魂 Knocked out unconscious 昏窒不省

b. “Story of a Mute Scion of a Royal Family” 有 A skeleton came drifting down 骸骨漂來 half-submerged and half-exposed. 半翳半露 Worn away by the water and scraped by the rocks. 湍嚙礫撞

…

君家地處 實難保全 門宗無寧 使君新兒 永爲病人 僅至不死 以爲 免禍之地 然後 吾所報恩 乃全矣

Where your house is currently located It has become truly difficult to preserve it Your entire clan will experience turmoil. If your newborn son Becomes disabled for the rest of his life And manages to cheat death He may avoid great calamity. Only then will I be able to repay my debt of gratitude.

c. “Story of General Kim Tŏngnyŏng” 奴輩告曰, The gang of slaves implored him: 遐鄕奴僕 “Us slaves, living out in this remote village, 無由遠訴 have no means to plead our case from afar. 上典今當發行 Master’s journey today Will take you along the coast; 玆行濱海 The view from your boat will be spectacular.” 海上船遊 頗爲壯觀

…

金下陸 解奴縛 逐老漢 勢如飄風 皆被踢死

Upon landing, Kim released his tied-up slaves and Pursued the old hands, His force like a raging storm. All were kicked to death.

The Lexical Vernacularity of the Tongp ’ ae naksong 馳還村中 男女老少 一撞 金之拳頭 無不立斃 亂屍如麻 籍盡群財 其數近萬

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He rushed back to the village. Men and women, young and old Were struck dead by a single blow By Kim’s fist; They died on the spot. Corpses were strewn about like tangled threads. Kim confiscated their property, Which was nearly ten thousand [yang].

The various stylistic traits shared between idu writing and the lexical texture of the Tongp’ae naksong have several implications. First, this affinity puts the Tongp’ae naksong in conversation with other fictional narratives in which varying elements and degrees of idu documentary writing are expressed. For example, the fictional narrative Oksŏnmong 玉仙夢 (Dream of the Jade Immortal) contains scenes of court cases where idu documentary writing, with idu grammatical elements clearly in evidence, while a manuscript entitled Yoram 要覽 (Handbook) held by the National Library of Korea contains fictional narratives written entirely in idu documentary style writing, presumably serving as a kind of vade mecum for petty clerks. The “Story of a Faithful Wife Named Pak,” an entry in the Changsŏgak Library edition of Kyesŏ yadam 溪西野談 (Stories of Kyesŏ; ca. late 19th or early 20th c.), an anonymous story collection to be distinguished from Yi Hŭip’yŏng’s Kyesŏ chamnok depite many overlapping entries, concludes with a putative excerpt from an actual interrogation report. In light of King (2022a), which offers an excellent overview of idu documentary writing, and especially in its discussion of the intersection of late Chosŏn developments in idu documentary writing and narrative text composition, what we observe in the Tongp’ae naksong seems to be the onset of a larger cultural phenomenon whereby idu documentary writing, too, is gaining traction for creative purposes in Chosŏn written culture. Furthermore, No’s use of idu writing-derived expression would have facilitated prima vista, as it were, in making the text easy to parse and comprehend for those who had no prior exposure to a given text or an associated tale in circulation through written or oral forms. I will revisit this issue of a composition being “easy-to-parse” and “easy-to-comprehend” for first time readers. 5.3.5

Elements of Chinese Vernacular Sinitic (baihua) and the Generic Traits of Chinese Vernacular Fiction The language of the Tongp’ae naksong clearly shows that No Myŏnghŭm’s connection to the Hong family exposed him to reading Chinese books in Chinese Vernacular Sinitic (baihua). It is important to note here the distinction

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between baihua and spoken Chinese, of which latter was referred to in Chosŏn sources as hanŏ 漢語. Similar to the status implication of idu documentary writing, Chosŏn literati developed a certain disdain toward proficiency in spoken Chinese due to status implications. Within Chosŏn social stratification, official interpreters (yŏkkwan 譯官) of foreign languages belonged to the category of secondary-status social groups collectively called chungin 中人 (lit. “middle people”).40 Typically, then, literati were uninterested in learning spoken Chinese.41 That is not, however, to say that Chosŏn literati were entirely ignorant of baihua. In fact, there were certain books written in baihua that Chosŏn literati read through the help of books generically called ŏrokhae 語錄解 (glossaries of [Chinese] colloquialisms; lit. “explications of ŏrok”). Ŏrokhae are glossaries of Chinese colloquialisms that served as reference tools for Chosŏn readers of baihua texts. As glossaries, they were tied to specific book titles and their contents are lists of expressions deemed to lie outside the bounds of orthodox Literary Sinitic proper. The first ŏrokhae was developed in the mid-sixteenth century as a companion to the Zhuzi yulei 朱子語類 (Recorded Sayings of Master Zhu; 1270), a classified glossary of the works of Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200). The ŏrokhae of the Zhuzi yulei was created first by Confucians such as Yi Hwang 李滉 (1501–1571) and Yu Hŭich’un 柳希春 (1513–1577). Later it was edited into a single volume, along with a glossary of unknown origin of some fictional narratives, and printed by Chŏng Yang 鄭瀁 (1600–1688) in 1657. In 1669, Chŏng Yang’s edition was updated for royal lectures (kyŏngyŏn 經筵) for King Hyŏnjong 顯宗 (r. 1659–1674), with the addendum associated with fiction removed. In the eighteenth century and onward, a new set of ŏrokhae appeared, all of them anonymously compiled, and tethered to four titles of late imperial Chinese fiction: Romance of the Western Chamber, Water Margin, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Journey to the West.42 Overlapping lexical items between the Tongp’ae nakong and ŏrokhae texts show that certain colloquial Chinese expressions, especially short ones, took root in the soil of Chosŏn written culture as lexical items. Further meriting our attention is the fact that the expression “ŏrok,” loosely meaning “words 40 See Wang (2014) for the cultural dynamics surrounding spoken Chinese and Literary Sinitic in Korea, especially in early Chosŏn. 41 A rare exception is Hong Taeyong 洪大容 (1731–1783) who actively learned hanŏ using textbooks for yŏkkwan trainees, as discussed in Ledyard (1982). 42 Although it had been previously speculated that ŏrokhae of late imperial Chinese fiction emerged in the seventeenth century, they probably appeared contemporaneously with the critical reception of the Jin Shengtan editions of the Xixiangji and Shuihuzhuan in the eighteenth century. See the three chapters dedicated to late Chosŏn reception of these Chinese works in Ecologies of Translation in East and South East Asia, 1600–1900, edited by Guo Li, Patricia Sieber, and Peter Kornicki (University of Armsterdam Press, 2022).

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deriving from colloquialisms” (probably referring to baihua, rather than Korean colloquialisms), appears in Chosŏn discourse on literary styles. For example, according to Ŏ Kangsŏk (2006), the late-Koryŏ scholar-official Yi Saek 李穡 (1328–1396) used “annotative ŏrok style” (chuso ŏrok ch’e 注疏語錄 體) in some of his prose works, using the phrase to mean a style of writing that interweaves colloquial vocabulary and dialogue that imitates speech. It is said that Kim T’aegyŏng 金澤榮 (1850–1927) cited the following four Chosŏn stylists—Kwŏn Kŭn 權近 (1352–1409), Kim Chongjik 金宗直 (1431–1492), Yi Chŏnggu/Chŏnggwi 李廷龜 (1564–1635), and Sin Hŭm 申欽 (1566–1628)—as writers who adopted Yi Saek’s ill habit (pyŏngp’ye 病斃). Although Chosŏn writers’ use of baihua remains largely underexplored and current research tends to focus on the influence of late imperial Chinese vernacular fiction on story lines rather than language per se, research on the intersection of ŏrok and literary style promises to improve greatly our understanding of Chosŏn written culture and the development of literary vernacular in Korea by taking us beyond the simplistic Korean language-vs.-Literary Sinitic dichotomy.43 That the Tongp’ae naksong contains words listed in ŏrokhae texts evidences the breadth of its heterolexical repertoire. It also seems to point to No Myŏnghŭm’s interest in “ŏrok style,” however simple and inchoate in comparison with other stylists before and after him. Below are some examples of such overlapping expressions between the Tongp’ae naksong, the two types of ŏrokhae, and the yŏgŏ yuhae po, the aforementioned reference material for interpreters. Table 13.3 Ŏrokhae (Glossaries of Chinese colloquialisms and slang expressions) of the Zhuzi yulei

Expression

Ŏrokhae

箇 他 是 跟 漢 渠 做 須 解 恰

General counter for things Someone else; something else Copula (Physically) follow someone (Derogatory) a man Third-person pronoun Do Must Know; comprehend Appropriately

43

See also Ross King’s chapter in the Li, Sieber, and Kornicki volume (2022) for the current state of research on “ŏrok style.”

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Table 13.3 Ŏrokhae (cont.)

Expression

Ŏrokhae

討 宿留 去處 何物人

Seek: e.g., 討飯 (“ask for food” in general, not just for beggars) Stay overnight (cf. 留宿 in Tongp’ae naksong) Place; destination. See also Yŏgŏ yuhae po What kind of person: e.g., 何物村翁 (What old country bumpkin [are you]?) 由: reason; cause command; give directions clever; talented. See also Kogŭm sŏngnim many; most livelihood; work (not) at all nowhere talk; say something a round of; a bout of at the same time; simultaneously a great many; heap more or less hitherto; previously hitherto; previously most; utterly a set of

以 分付 伶俐 大段 活計 都是 無所 打話 一場 一齊 許多 多少 從來 從前 十分 一件

Table 13.4 Sosŏl ŏrokhae (Glossaries of Chinese colloquialisms and slang expressions found in Chinese vernacular novels)

Expression

Sosŏl ŏrokhae

入眼

as in “入眼男子”: pleasing to the eye; a person to one’s liking (‘눈에 들다’ in modern Korean) dare; flout (=侮) hassle for a short while transaction capital; seed money (also Yŏgŏryuhae po) Buddhist monk

敢 煩 些/些少 買賣 本錢 和尙

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Table 13.4 Sosŏl ŏrokhae (cont.)

Expression

Sosŏl ŏrokhae

頭陀 可憐 冉冉 一倂 一路 水陸 如此 朦朧

Buddhist monk pitiful softly; gradually together with the whole way; all the way food like this hazy; unclear

Table 13.5 Yŏgŏ yuhae po (Supplemented Classified Dictionary of Translated Words and Phrases for Interpreters)

Expressions

Yŏgŏ yuhae po

班師 合掌 瞥看 張口 納幣 本錢 再三 如何 去處

withdraw troops (Buddhists) put one’s palms together catch a glimpse of something or someone open one’s mouth wide sending of wedding gifts capital; seed money (also found in Sosŏl ŏrokhae) two or three times like how place; destination (also found in Ŏrokhae)

6

Plain Diction, Linguistic Consciousness, and the Heterolexical Korean Vernacular Sinitic

The previous section concentrated on depicting the overall nature of the lexical texture of the Tongp’ae naksong by illustrating how No Myŏnghŭm culled from wide-ranging lexical categories beyond the pale of orthodox Literary Sinitic composition. From the standpoint of stylistic innovation, then, what is the significance of this lexical versatility and hybridity in the Tongp’ae naksong? First, the lexical hybridity of the Tongp’ae naksong resulted from No Myŏnghŭm’s

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creative decision. That is, as someone who dedicated decades of his life to preparing for the civil service examinations as a candidate and teacher, No mastered the fundamentals of orthodox Literary Sinitic composition. As someone who was exposed to diverse kinds of books, he would have gained familiarity with different styles, genres, and discourses of literary composition. The intermixing of different types of lexical items, especially when such expressions were either points of debate or objects of denigration within the lateeighteenth century context of orthodox Literary Sinitic composition, lends a sense that when No’s contemporaries spoke of his literary innovations, it was his intermixing of wide-ranging non-orthodox Literary Sinitic lexical items they had in mind. But to better understand the heterolexicality of the Tongp’ae naksong, we must also turn to how No engaged with classical idioms. 6.1 From Connotational to Denotational: Plain Diction Commenting on the way allusions and metaphors are used in Tang 唐 (618– 907) classical tales, Glen Dudbridge notes that the author may expect the reader to recognize a given phrase’s function as an allusion or may have internalized the phrase so thoroughly that it is likely that he used it unconsciously. Alternatively, a phrase may become so widely used as to cease to carry any special weight as an allusion and devolve into a “common stock of current literary usage” (Dudbridge 1983: 20). This observation is useful in considering how some classical idioms appear in the Tongp’ae naksong—they are demoted, as it were, from connotational and metaphorical to literal and denotational. For instance, “依門” or “倚門” means “to be standing against the door” or “to rely on someone (parasitically) for a particular purpose.” As a classical idiom, the expression is associated with one of two situations. The first is a family member (often a mother) or a close acquaintance leaning against the gate of the house anticipating the beloved’s return, as in “倚門倚閭” (leaning on the door, leaning on the alley way) “倚門俟之” (leaning on the door and awaiting for him) and “倚門而望” (leaning on the door and anticipating). The second is a situation where someone parasitically relies on another for a particular purpose (often used to refer to courtesans).44

44

Using the key word “倚門,” I searched the Database of Korean Classics (www.db.itkc.or.kr): one similar usage is found in Yi Ik’s writings, in which he uses “倚門賣笑” to refer to prostitution, while all the other cases (a total of sixty) are used metaphorically to mean a parent’s waiting for the return of his or her child. A search for the phrase “依門” yields two hits; in both cases the phrase means “rely on (a famous teacher).” Examples of the latter are found in the Samguk yusa 三國遺事 (Memorabilia of the Three Kingdoms; ca. 1280) from late Koryŏ: “倚門赤手” (living empty-handedly). The story “Aiqing zhuan” 愛卿傳

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Now let us see how the Tongp’ae naksong handles this expression. The male protagonist in the “Story of Oksosŏn” is in disguise as a servant sweeping snow, hoping that his former lover, a kisaeng who is sitting outside the door of her room, will recognize him. The girl’s eyes meet the boy’s. When the protagonist later describes the situation to his old acquaintance, he depicts it as “leaning against the door, she recognized my face” (倚門省識吾面). On another occasion, in the “Story of Chŏng the Grave Keeper,” when a local clerk explains the close relationship between himself and his neighbor, the situation is described as: “The old lady leans against the house’s twig gate and does not avoid talking to me” (老夫人依扉而無避所). In both cases, the people leaning against the door are not waiting for anyone. The phrase simply denotes that their bodies are leaning against an actual door. Some classical phrases preserve their metaphorical functions, but they act more as handy set phrases. In the “Story of Hwang the Rich Man of Yŏju,” for instance, an old commoner man feels that he has expended all his life’s energy on striving to accumulate wealth only. He now wishes to put his money to a good cause and agrees to financially support his neighbor’s poor son-in-law who has been delaying his plans to go to the capital to take the civil service examinations due to limited means. The old man refers to his commitment to do away with his ludicrously parsimonious former self by saying, if he continues his old ways, “I cannot avoid being the keeper of the armory of General Wang’” (將未免王將軍之庫子). Here, the keeper of “General Wang’s armory” (王將軍之武庫) refers to the storage of precious and effective weapons that metaphorically mean capable individuals who would aid General Wang. The phrase originates from the “Tengwang ge xu” 滕王閣序 (Preface to the Prince of Teng’s Pavilion) by Wang Bo 王勃 (649–676) of the Tang dynasty. The old man may have wanted to impress the young man with this Literary Sinitic idiom. In any case, given that he is portrayed as a man who never studied the classics himself and who has spent all his life amassing wealth, it is unlikely he actually engaged in bookish learning. A more plausible explanation is that he is simply uttering a set phrase that is part and parcel of spoken Korean expression. The p’ansori (one-person narrative singing) version of Ch’unhyang chŏn (The Tale of Ch’unhyang) contains the line “Wang changgun chi koja,” a Sino-Korean phonetic reading of the phrase “王將軍之庫子,” meaning “unnecessarily and unwisely parsimonious.” The kasa work called “Kwŏnju ka” 勸酒歌 (Drinking Song), too, contains the same phrase. The old man in the Tongp’ae naksong is probably using it as a stock phrase. (Tale of Aiqing) from the Jiandeng Xinhua, too, contains this phrase in the meaning “to know only to smile and sell entertainment” (惟知倚門而獻笑).

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In the previously introduced “Story of a Pyŏlgunjik,” the special guard dies at the hands of an emaciated, jaundiced scholar whose attack on him is likened to “a speeding falcon striking a small sparrow” (快鷹之搏小雀). This phrase probably originates from “ten thousand sparrows cannot measure up to a single falcon” (萬雀不能抵一鷹) found in the Baopuzi 抱朴子 (Master Who Embraces Simplicity), a Daoist text by Ge Hong 葛洪 (283–343) of the Eastern Jin (317–420). Not a perfect match, the former, like the original metaphorical expression, points to the incomparable superiority of one over the other and is possibly a more vivid and straightforward colloquial variation. (Chŏng Yagyong would have wanted to eliminate such expressions as a case of incorrect oral transmission, preferring instead to come up with substitutes.) Perhaps the most unique treatment of a well-known classical allusion (kosa 故事) is the case of “Nang chung chi ch’u” 囊中之錐 (lit. “an awl in a sack”). The phrase is from “Ping Yuan Jun liezhuan” 平原君列傳 (Biography of Ping Yuan) in the Shiji 史記 (Records of the Grand Historian), meaning “exceptional talent that naturally reveals itself like an awl in a sack.” In the “Story of Hong Yŏl,” the protagonist, after spending a delightful night with a fairy woman, finds himself on the back of a tiger sprinting to an unknown place. Desperately searching for a way to remove himself from the tiger, he rummages through his sack and finds an awl: “all [he] had was an awl in [his] sack” (囊中只有錐). The phrase’s original usage is completely immaterial; to any reader familiar with this famous allusion deriving from the Shiji, it would have been a case of “pun intended.”45 All in all, there is a pattern in No Myŏnghŭm’s classical idiom usage. First, the idioms themselves are well-known phrases in written culture, phrases that have become stock phrases with specific meaning, or straightforward expressions that can be taken literally. Then, the ways in which classical idioms are used in the Tongp’ae naksong resonate closely with the ways in which nonorthodox Literary Sinitic lexical items are used in the collection: they make the written text remarkably easy to parse and comprehend for those equipped with the ability to decipher the literal meanings of sinographs and to apply the svo Syntax of Literary Sinitic. The kind of literacy level a reader needs to understand the textual meaning of the Tongp’ae naksong differs from what was demanded of a typical literatus’s education in the classics and canonical literary texts forming the core of Literary Sinitic literacy. Those with such knowledge and literary erudition would have certainly appreciated the intricate ways in which No Myŏnghŭm creates meaning through a wide-ranging 45

I thank David Lurie and Catherine Swatek for this point.

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lexical repertoire. Without it, however, one could still enjoy the tales. The overall upshot of No’s stylistic innovation, then, can be called plain diction, rather comparable to baihua (often called ‘plain speech’) (Guo, Sieber, and Kornicki 2022) and deserving to be recognized as a type of Korean Vernacular Sinitic. 6.2 Storyteller-Narrator Still, the affinity between baihua and the language of the Tongp’ae naksong goes deeper than the lexical level. On the one hand, the narrative world of the Tongp’ae naksong is reminiscent of that of Chinese vernacular fiction because of how characters and the narrator talk. The human beings in the Tongp’ae naksong have speech mannerisms and are capable of changing their linguistic footing, or register, when the situation calls for it to influence others or to seem a certain way (Agha 2005). In understanding this linguistic aptitude of the protagonists in the Tongp’ae naksong, it is useful to yet again turn to the language of late Imperial Chinese fiction. According to Ge (2001: 186), what distinguishes the language of late imperial fiction as written vernacular is the presence of “different types of linguistic consciousness,” contrasted with Literary Sinitic as a classical medium, which is “sustained by a linguistic detachment from the narrated world” (Ge 2001: 184). Thus, in tales written in the classical medium, characters “do not speak in their own voices” and instead their language is restricted to an “illusory image of verbal-ideological homogeneity of the social reality” (Ge 2001: 186). That is to say, Chinese vernacular fiction constructs a narrative world within which characters speak individually (or at least as diverse social types) and dialogically in a way that gives a “simulacrum of the stratified language” in reality (Ge 2001: 187). Furthermore, the narrator of the Tongp’ae naksong is evocative of what Patrick Hanan has identified as a generic marker of the vernacular register in late imperial fiction: “the deployment of the generalized narrator, a storyteller-narrator in dialogue with a generalized audience.” These two traits—linguistic consciousness and the generalized narrator—are unmistakable in the Tongp’ae naksong. Bearing in mind Ge’s idea of linguistic consciousness, let us now turn to the following scenes from the Tongp’ae naksong. The “Story of Chŏng Kiryong 鄭起龍 [1562–1622]” portrays a non-yangban family of three (father, mother, and an unmarried daughter) headed by the father who is a local hereditary clerk (hyangni 鄕吏), engaging in a dynamic discussion about the daughter’s future marriage when the daughter introduces a shabby-looking young man to her parents. The parents wish to select a better man, but the daughter resists their criteria:

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母叱曰:汝不許父母之 擇配，而期以自擇神 通者， 今乃以衣鶉乞兒 自定， 汝之眼孔可刺也． 女曰:母勿雜言． 有頃，吏房至，亦如妻 之言， 女曰:吾父眼力終是卑 劣．何得以識此兒 此兒雖在襤褸中，  各離其耳目口鼻，而細 察之， 豈有一處不善生乎． 其父細觀似然， 乃曰:汝意牢定不得不 依汝願矣．

“A woman’s whole life depends on her husband. A single mistake will put her in unfathomable regret. How could one sit silently with a shy look on her face and wait for her parents’ selection of her spouse? In this town, Father, you are versed in administrative work, but you are of low status. How could you have developed the discernment to recognize a worthy person? I will use my own eyes to select my spouse. Even if I surpass the marriageable age, I will not stop until I have found the right person.” Her parents could not force her. … The mother rebuked [the daughter], saying, “You do not allow your parents to pick a spouse for you and promise that you will select an exceptional person on your own. Now you have chosen this shabbily clothed beggar on your own. Your eyes would better be gouged out.” The daughter said, “Mother, stop your nonsense.” After a while, the clerk [the father] came home and said the same thing as his wife. The daughter said, “Father, your taste is truly despicable. How can you not recognize what a wonderful person this person is? Although this person is in rags, if you take his ears, eyes, mouth, and nose bit by bit and examine each, how could there be a single thing that is not well-formed?” A close examination showed that what she said was indeed the case. Then the father said, “If your mind has already been made up, I cannot but follow your wish.”

The characters speak in a straightforward way so that their personality and state of mind are explicit in the way they speak (e.g., the girl’s rudeness and resistance, the mother’s exasperation, the girl’s insistence, and the father’s resignation). The mutual aggression between mother and daughter reflected in their language conveys little sense of propriety; the daughter’s words are

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unfilial and the mother’s words lack benevolence. However, when the same girl speaks to her husband-to-be, she quickly switches registers and starts using more respectful language by addressing her parents as “my [dear strict] parents” (吾嚴親). This shift is telling for two reasons. The speech mannerisms of the family are indicative of their social status—members of the hyangni class—who are not so concerned with propriety, with neither filial submission nor parental authority, and irrespective of how much affection they have for one another. Second, they are capable of switching footing as they see fit. The girl’s polite speech betrays her desire to seem proper, and her ambition to marry a man in whom she sees the potential to rise as a prominent official someday. Subordinate-superior relationships are another area where register shifting happens in changing social dynamics. A good example is an exchange between slaves (nobi 奴婢) and their young new master in the aforementioned “Story of Kim Tŏngnyŏng.” General Kim marries the daughter of a widow. On the day after his wedding ceremony, his mother-in-law asks him to go to a faraway village to track down the family’s runaway slaves—a practice known as ch’uno 推奴—and to avenge her husband who had tried doing it himself and probably died at the hands of the slaves. When Kim reaches the village created by the original runaway slaves and their descendants, the slaves at first feign enthusiasm upon seeing Kim, and say, 上典宅聲聞，積年 阻絶，奴輩戀慕常 切，今因何好風，有此 新書房主之降臨也．

“About the news of our masters’ house, we have been cut off for all these years. For us slaves, our yearning for you has remained loyal. Today, what fair wind has brought you to grace us, our newlywed master?” (italics indicate Korean forms of address such as “sangjŏnt’aek” and “saesŏbangnim,” respectively)

But when their plan to kill Kim is exposed, their language shifts as they begin calling him “you” (汝), a neutral, and hence disrespectful word in this context: 汝之岳翁，以壯大 者，亦死吾輩手， 汝以僅免黃口 者，乃敢生推奴之 行，眞妄也． 汝自來送死，吾等之 一快也． 汝欲穢死乎潔死乎．

“Your father-in-law, though a man of imposing stature, died by our hands. You, still wet behind the ears, have some nerve to do ch’uno. How foolish! You come here alive. Sending you away dead is our singular pleasure. Do you want a dirty death or a clean one?”

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Furthermore, register matters not only for the characters but also for the storyteller-narrator. In the “Story of Ilt’ahong,” the narrator addresses the same character by several different names. When first introduced, the male protagonist is called “Minister Sim Hŭisu, sobriquet Ilsong” (一松沈相國喜壽). As the story unfolds to depict the life of the protagonist as a young boy, the narrator calls him “the boy Sim” (沈童). For the most part, the protagonist is referred to as “Sim” (沈) or “he” (渠). After Sim passes the civil service examination and visits one of his father’s old friends, the narrator calls Sim by the vernacular Korean expression “Newly Matriculated” (sinŭn 新恩) to mark Sim’s position vis-à-vis the old friend of Sim’s father. Could these dynamic shifts exhibited by the narrator be interpreted as No Myŏnghŭm’s narrator engaging in a lively manner with his audience? The following words uttered by the narrator of several stories in the Tongp’ae naksong suggest an affirmative answer, in that the narrator simulates dialogue with an implied audience as if to build rapport with an imaginary audience and arouse sympathy or disdain for those involved in a given situation, usually by way of asking a rhetorical question or by supplying information unbeknownst to the characters (in a “little did he know” sort of way). Examples are as follows: Twice in the “Story of Kwŏn of Andong”: 1. 年少男女湥夜 A young boy and girl are spending time in each 同席，豈無合懽之 other’s company deep into the night. How could 事乎 they not engage in love-making? [He] was strict by nature. Under his command, 2. 性本嚴正，號令 who among these slaves and servants would dare 之下，奴僕輩孰敢慢 忽擧行乎 to tarry in carrying out his order? “Story of Kim pyŏlgam”: The thief’s mouth was hereupon forever sealed.

偸兒之口於是乎永滅

“Story of Yŏm Hŭido”:

盖希道從曾祖 曾，以狂疾而出 走，不知去矣，生佛卽 其人也

Hŭido’s great-grandfather’s brother had once run away from home after having gone insane and no one knew where he had gone. The so-called “Living Buddha” was none other than that person.

“Story of Yi Changgon 李長坤 [1474–1519]”: 其家卽柳器匠家也 That house happened to be a wicker weaver’s 京華貴骨無以猝業織 household. A high and mighty aristocrat from the capital had no way to quickly pick up wicker 柳器 weaving.

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Along with its lexical diversity, the affinity between the language of the Tongp’ae naksong and that of late imperial Chinese vernacular fiction is yet another piece of evidence that the lexical texture of the Tongp’ae naksong should be taken as a case of lexical vernacularity where words and expressions are used to construct a written medium that increases the distance between itself and orthodox Literary Sinitic and decreases the distance between itself and speech. Importantly, the desired effect here is not transcription or documentation of actual speech but staged speech evocative of actual language use—i.e., linguistic verisimilitude. Stephen Owen’s description of the model literary language that May Fourth literary reformers at the turn of twentiethcentury China envisioned is useful to understand this desired effect of the language of the Tongp’ae naksong: “the primary link to the spoken language [of the vernacular] is that it could be understood aurally” (Owen 2001: 170). The relevance here is that the lexical texture of the Tongp’ae naksong was configured in such a way that the written text, when read aloud, would have been remarkably easily to understand aurally in a way that orthodox Literary Sinitic, with its stylistic purity, allusion-heavy diction, and concision, could not and never meant to achieve. 7

The Affinity between the Language of the Tongp’ae naksong and Its Vernacular Renditions

If the lexical texture of the Tongp’ae naksong makes the language of the collection a case of Korean Vernacular Sinitic, how does it compare with the lexical texture of similar types of texts that circulated in a medium that was written entirely phonetically in the Korean alphabet? Among surviving editions of the Tongp’ae naksong, there are three that can be called renditions written entirely in the vernacular script.46 Here I compare the lexical texture of the “Story of General Kim Tŏngnyŏng” and its vernacular rendition found in the Loyola Library at Sogang University, Korea. If we were to take the contents of the texts that are not only written entirely in the Korean script but were originally composed in the vernacular—especially vernacular works of narrative prose, we can posit that however the text sounds when read aloud, it would have been meant to be comprehensible for the intended audience. Similitude or proximity between the sinographic and han’gŭl versions, then, can serve as evidence that the language of Tongp’ae naksong is a case of Vernacular Sinitic rooted in Chosŏn written culture. Uppercase letters indicate Sino-Korean expressions. 46

For surviving vernacular-script renditions of Tongp’ae naksong stories, see the fourth chapter of Park (2020).

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Bold letters indicate an exact match. Italicized letters indicate direct, word-forword transcoding. Lowercase letters in neither italics nor bold indicate Korean particles or connectives (grammatical elements). 金將軍德齡

KIM CHYANGGUN TONGNY̆ ONG i 醮於寡家女

KWAbu chip stăl uyge 醮之翌日

CHYANGGĂ tŭn itŭnnal 入拜岳母

ANGMO ŭige tŭrŏgă chyŏl hăya poego inhăya 問岳翁卒年

AGONG ŭi sangsă năn hăe rŭl murŭndăe …

無子無兄弟，惟有女一塊肉而已，未亡人，夙夜至祝

adăl to ŏpko sto HY̆ ONGDYE ŏpko tăman i YANGNY̆ O IL KORYUK spun ira MIMANGIN i ILYA pinăn panŭn … All proper nouns (such as personal names, place names, official titles, era names) are almost without exception Sino-Korean phonetic readings. Poly­ syllabic words (whose parts of speech include verb, noun, adverb, and adjective) also tend to be phonetically read. Monosyllabic expressions are sometimes translated and sometimes rendered phonetically. But more commonly they are substituted with vernacular lexicon. For example, “寡” (widow), “一塊肉” (a piece of [my own] flesh), and “夙夜” (day and night) are substituted with Sino-Korean compounds whose meaning generally match. When original expressions are substituted with Sino-Korean compounds from the vernacular lexicon, the latter frequently contain one or more words from the original expression. All in all, there is noticeable overlap between the language of the two texts. If the same pattern were to be found in all cases of vernacular renditions of Tongp’ae naksong stories, even though the task of creating a new vernacular rendition exceeded simple script-conversion (sinography to the Korean script) and demanded interpretation of the source text, this vernacularizing task is not particularly formidable and could certainly be done by a single person, unlike the vernacularizing of classics and canonical texts—a task that could only be carried out by erudite scholars joining forces through research, inquiries,

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and conversation over many years.47 This simplicity was possible due to the fact that the lexical configuration of the Tongp’ae naksong makes the written text eminently reader-friendly in a way that facilitates first-time readers’ comprehension and invites readers without any rigorous classical training. As vernacular stories, the language of the Tongp’ae naksong was already considerably vernacular, and distant from orthodox Literary Sinitic. When read aloud, both the original language and its vernacular rendition would have been understood by the audience of widely varying educational backgrounds. Given that the Tongp’ae naksong played a formative role in the spread of yadam in the nineteenth century and onward as a template for writing new stories and as a repository of raw materials for telling old stories anew (see Park 2020), the proximity between the Tongp’ae naksong stories in their original medium and their vernacular renditions explains, at least partially, why prefaces to not only the Tongp’ae naksong but also other yadam collections associate the verb “聽” with reading the stories or characterize the merit of the stories using the expression “可聽,” implying oral and aural reading of the texts. That the readability of the Tongp’ae naksong (and yadam texts by extension) is associated with aural reading indicates that the written text was able to evoke, imitate, and stage the spoken language, and was not unmediated transcription of speech. Herein lies No Myŏnghŭm’s literary innovation: a stylistic experimentation using Literary Sinitic that resulted in a Vernacular Sinitic rooted in Chosŏn written culture. That the language of the Tongp’ae naksong was a case of Korean Vernacular Sinitic, furthermore, seems to explain why the stories traceable to the Tongp’ae naksong, not only at the level of plot and character but at the level of their very diction, were among the very first yadam texts—indeed, they were the first such Chosŏn narrative texts at all of this sort—that found their way into modern newspapers (Kyŏnghyang sinmun 京 鄕新聞 [Capital and Provinces Weekly, 1906.10.19–1910.12.30]) as early as 1909. It also explains why a large portion of the Tongp’ae naksong stories enjoyed commercial success in the 1920s in the hyŏnt’o 懸吐 format (glossed-style), which was a method commercial publishers used to reprint widely known Chosŏn-dynasty texts with as little modification as possible in terms of phraseology by interspersing the necessary kugyŏl reading glosses (Park 2022).

47

For the vernacularization of the Confucian Classics and to an extent the Buddhist sutras sponsored by the Chosŏn court, see Park (2019).

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Conclusions

Through a deep analysis of the lexical texture of the Tongp’ae naksong, this chapter has shown that the compiler No Myŏnghŭm shaped the language of his compilation into one of significant lexical diversity, hybridity, and versatility. Literary Sinitic and a variety of non-orthodox Literary Sinitic elements coexist and intermix in the text, putting it at a noticeable remove from typical orthodox Literary Sinitic composition. The lexical diversity of the Tongp’ae naksong strongly suggests, then, a will to effect a new mode of literary vernacular, i.e., a new vernacular medium for literary composition. The lexical diversity of the Tongp’ae naksong manifests No Myŏnghŭm’s creative choice to write his tales using what can be called Korean Vernacular Sinitic. No’s creative choices were not his alone; he was responding to the cultural forces of the time whereby his contemporaries were deeply interested in how best to express themselves innovatively—and sinographically—in written forms rooted in contemporary Chosŏn society, while staying tethered to Literary Sinitic, the only written form of erudition and prestige and the only literary medium par excellence that they knew. It is significant, then, that the spectrum of No Myŏnghŭm’s lexical choices is greater than simply elements tied to the speech sounds, colloquial expressions, or syntactic features of the Korean language alone. No’s vision of a vernacular mode of writing began by altering certain conventions of Literary Sinitic, accommodating more diverse words and expressions from beyond the pale of the received literary tradition, and incorporating words and expressions intimately related with the ways in which people actually used language. No Myŏnghŭm’s textual weaving, therefore, may be viewed as in conversation with the literary innovations of Yi Ok manifested in his Tongsanggi 東廂記 (Story of the Eastern Chamber) (Wang 2019), and may even be a precursor to it. I hope that this chapter makes the case that the Tongp’ae naksong and the yadam genre more broadly deserve closer, more critical scrutiny as a neglected site for the study of premodern Korea’s written culture and vernacularization process. It should be clear by now that we can reject a script-based view of Korean vernacular and recoginize that the boundaries of Korean vernacular literature should be mapped based upon multi-layered approaches that consider script, grammar, and the lexical texture of written texts. Putting forward the language of the Tongp’ae naksong as a case of Korean Vernacular Sinitic, this chapter suggests that we need to look beyond the demise of Literary Sinitic as a no longer viable or superior written medium at the turn of the twentieth century or the Korean script as a sine qua non for the life of Korean vernacular literature. Instead, it is the presence or absence

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of particular types of words and how they are used for literary effects that are important. Thus, this chapter proposes that we consider lexical vernacularity as yet another thread for tracing the history of vernacularization in Korea. By turning to words, rather than script or syntax, this chapter has also explored the relationship between baihua and Korean Variant Sinitic (idu documentary writing) in order to suggest that the boundaries between baihua and Korean Vernacular Sinitic may have been more porous than previously thought. By extension, this chapter contributes to broadening our perception of “vernacularization” as a process whose complexity will be better explained when we think about written vernacular beyond just the usual transregional versus local dynamics and consider also ideas such as transtemporal (classical) versus contemporary diction and allusion-heavy, intertextually compositions linked to received literary paragons and references versus simple, straightforward, and plain diction. References Agha, Asif. 2005. “Voice, Footing, Enregisterment.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1): 38–59. An Pyŏnghŭi. 1983. “Ŏrokhae haeje” [Bibliographic Note on the Glossary of Classified Conversations of Master Zhu]. Han’guk munhwa 4: 153–315. An Pyŏnghŭi. 1987. Imun kwa imun taesa [Imun and Imun taesa]. Seoul: T’al Ch’ulpansa. An Taehoe. 2002. “Kyunyŏl kwa chaŭisik ŭi sanmun—No Kŭng ŭi sop’ummun” [Prose of Rupture and Self-consciousness—No Kŭng’s sop’um]. Munhak kwa kyŏnggye 4: 271–288. An Taehoe. 2008. Kojŏn sanmun sanch’aek: Chosŏn ŭi munjang ŭl mannada [A stroll through Classical Prose: An Encounter with Chosŏn Composition]. Seoul: Hyumŏnisŭt’ŭ. Barthes, Roland. 1972. Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Noonday Press. Breuker, Remco. 2010. Establishing a Pluralist Society in Medieval Korea, 918–1170: History, Ideology and Identity in the Koryŏ Dynasty. Leiden: Brill. Chin Chaegyo. 2005. “Yijo hugi hanmunhak esŏ ŏnŏ saenghwal ŭi suyong kwa kyosŏp: ch’angjak esŏ ŏnŏ ŭi suyong munje rŭl chungsim ŭro” [Embracing and Negotiation in Linguistic Life in Late Chosŏn Korean Literature in Hanmun: with a Focus on the Adoption of Speech in Literary Creation]. In Han’guk hanmunhak yŏn’gu ŭi sae chip’yŏng [New horizons for Korean Literature in Literary Sinitic], edited by Yi Hyesun, 880–913. Seoul: Somyŏng Ch’ulp’an.

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Hong Sŏnp’yŏ et al., eds. 2006. 17, 18 segi Chosŏn ŭi oeguk sŏjŏk suyong kwa toksŏ munhwa [Receptions of Foreign Books and Reading Practice in Chosŏn Korea of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries]. Seoul: Hyean. Hwang Wiju. 1998. “16, 17 segi akpu si ŭi ch’ulhyŏn tongin kwa chŏn’gae kwajŏng” [The Rise and Development of Akpu Poetry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries]. Han’guk hanmunhak yŏn’gu 12: 227–264. Kim Chonghun. 2000. “Chonch’ingsa ‘-nim’ e taehayŏ.” In Kugŏ hwapŏp kwa taehwa punsŏk, edited by Han’guk Hwapŏphakhoe, 145–166. Seoul: Yŏngnak. Kim Myŏngsun. 2005. Chosŏn hugi hansi ŭi minp’ung suyong yŏn’gu [Incorporation of Folk Elements in Late Chosŏn Hansi]. Seoul: Pogosa. Kim, Sun Joo. 2009. “A Wife’s Letter to Her Deceased Husband.” In Epistolary Korea: Letters in the Communicative Space of the Chosŏn, 1392–1910, edited by JaHyun Kim Haboush, 393–396. New York: Columbia University Press. Kim Tonguk, trans. 1996. Kugyŏk Tongp’ae naksong [Repeatedly Recited Stories of the East, Translated into Modern Korean]. Seoul: Asea Munhwasa. Kim Yŏngjin. 1998. “Chosŏn hugi sadaebu ŭi yadam ch’angjak kwa hyang’yu ŭi il yangsang: No Myŏnghŭm, No Kŭng puja wa P’ungsan Hong Ponghan-ga wa ŭi kwan’gye rŭl chungsim ŭro” [Late-Chosŏn Elite’s Creation and Appreciation of Yadam: With a Focus on the Relationship between No Myŏnghŭm and His Son No Kŭng and the Household of Hong Ponghan of the P’ungsan Hong]. Ŏmun nonjip 37: 21–45. Kim Yŏngjin. 2006. “Chosŏn hugi Chungguk sahaeng kwa sŏch’aek munhwa” (The Late Chosŏn Culture of Books and Chosŏn Embassies to China). In 19 segi Chosŏn chisigin ŭi munhwa chihyŏngdo [The Cultural Geography of Nineteenth-century Chosŏn intellectuals], edited by Hanyang Taehakkyo Han’gukhak Yŏn’guso, 591–648. Seoul: Hanyang Taehakkyo Ch’ulp’anbu. Kim Yŏngsuk. 2011. “Chosŏn yŏngsa akpu ŭi Sŏae Ŭigo akpu suyong kwa hanminjoksa ŭi sichŏk hyŏngsang” [Reception of the Sŏae Ŭigo akpu in Chosŏn Yŏngsa akpu and Poetic Representations of the History of the Korean People]. Taedong hanmunhak 35: 353–384. Kim, Young Wook. 2010. “A Basic Understanding of Hyangga Interpretation.” Korea Journal 50(2): 72–96. Kin Bunkyō. 2010. Kanbun to Higashi Ajia: Kundoku no bunkaken [Literary Sinitic and East Asia: A Cultural Sphere of Vernacular Reading]. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten. Kin Bunkyō. 2021. Literary Sinitic and East Asia: A Cultural Sphere of Vernacular Reading, edited by Ross King. Leiden and Boston: Brill. King, Ross. 1998. “Nationalism and Language Reform in Korea: The Questione della Lingua in Precolonial Korea.” In Nationalism and the Construction of Korean Identity, edited by Pai Hyung Il and Timothy R. Tangherlini, 33–72. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California. King, Ross. 2014. “Introduction.” In Infected Korean Language, Purity vs. Hybridity: From the Sinographic Cosmopolis to Japanese Colonialism to Global English, by Jongsok

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Koh, 1–16. Translated with a Critical Introduction by Ross King. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press. King, Ross. 2015. “Ditching Diglossia: Describing Ecologies of the Spoken and Inscribed in Pre-modern Korea.” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 15(1): 1–19. King, Ross. 2022a. “Idu in and as Korean Literature.” In The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature, edited by Heekyoung Cho, 123–140. New York: Routledge. King, Ross. 2022b. “‘Out of the Margins’: The Western Wing Glossarial Complex in Late Chosŏn and the Problem of the Literary Vernacular.” In Ecologies of Translation in East and South East Asia, 1600–1900, edited by Guo Li, Patricia Sieber, and Peter Kornicki. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. King, Ross. (forthcoming-a). “‘Chosŏn-style Hanmun’: North Korea’s Search for ‘Ethnonational Characteristics’ in Korea’s Literary Sinitic Heritage.” In The Politics of Language: Sinitic Scripts in Asia Since 1900, edited by Fei Chen. King, Ross. (forthcoming-b). “Accessing Literary Sinitic through Fiction: the Role of the Chŏndŭng sinhwa kuhae 剪燈新話句解 in Chosŏn.” In Sinography and Literary Sinitic on China’s Periphery: Mokkan, Glossing, and Primers, edited by Ross King. Kornicki, Peter Francis. 2018. Languages, Scripts, and Chinese Texts in East Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ledyard, Gari. 1982. “Hong Taeyong and His Peking Memoirs.” Korean Studies 6: 63–103. Ledyard, Gari. 1998. The Korean Language Reform of 1446. Seoul: Sin’gu Munhwasa. Lee, Jongmook (Yi Chongmuk). 2008. “Hansi and Diglossia in the Chosŏn Period: Focusing on the Translation of Hansi for Women and Children.” Seoul Journal of Korean Studies 21(1): 29–49. Lee, Peter H. 2003. A History of Korean Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mair, Victor. 1994. “Buddhism and the Rise of Written Vernaculars in East Asia: The Making of National Languages.” Journal of Asian Studies 53(3): 707–751. Nam P’unghyŏn. 2000. Idu yŏn’gu [Studies of Idu]. Seoul: T’aehaksa. Norman, Jerry. 1988. Cambridge Language Surveys: Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ŏ Kangsŏk. 2006. “Mogŭn sanmun ŭi ‘chuso-ŏrok chi ki’ sogo” [A Study of the “Annotative-Colloquial Style” in Mogŭn Yi Saek’s Prose]. Hanmun hakpo 14: 43–78. Ok Yŏngjong. 2007. “Tongguk munhŏn pigo e taehan sŏjihak-chŏk koch’al” [A Bibliographical Examination of the Tongguk munhŏn pigo]. Chindan hakpo 104: 227–250. Owen, Stephen. 2001. “End of the Past: Rewriting Chinese Literary History in the Early Republic.” In The Appropriation of Cultural Capital: China’s May Fourth Project, edited by Milena Doleželová-Velingerová, Oldřich Král, and Graham Martin Sanders, 167–192. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Oxford English Dictionary Online, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/200031?rskey=HA bgda&result=1&isAdvanced=false (accessed 7 June 2015).

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Pak Kwangyong. 2007. “Tongguk munhŏn pigo p’yŏnch’an ŭi yŏksajŏk paegyŏng” [A Historical Contextualization of the Compilation of the Tongguk munhŏn pigo]. Chindan hakpo 104: 211–224. Park, Si Nae. 2019. “The Sound of Learning the Confucian Classics in Chosŏn Korea.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 79(1/2): 131–198. Park, Si Nae. 2020. The Korean Vernacular Story: Telling Tales of Contemporary Chosŏn in Sinographic Writing. New York: Columbia University Press. Park, Si Nae. 2021. “Romancing Precolonial Korea: The Making of Chosŏn Yadam as Heritage Tales in Early Twentieth-Century Korean Publishing.” East Asian Publishing and Society 11: 111–153. Park, Si Nae. 2022. “Vernacular Eloquence in Fiction Glossaries of Late Chosŏn Korea.” In Ecologies of Translation in East and South East Asia, 1600–1900, edited by Guo Li, Patricia Sieber, and Peter Kornicki, 223–255. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Plassen, Jörgen. (forthcoming). “Some Preliminary (and Mostly Prefatory) Remarks on the Production of Buddhist Ŏnhae Texts in Early Chosŏn.” In Sinography and Literary Sinitic on China’s Periphery: Mokkan, Glossing, and Primers, edited by Ross King. Pollock, Sheldon. 2006. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Porter, Deborah. 1993. “Toward an Aesthetic of Chinese Vernacular Fiction: Style and the Colloquial Medium of Shui-hu chuan.” T’oung pao LXXIX: 113–153. Ryu Chunp’il. 2008. “Kŭndae kyemonggi ŏmun hyŏnsil kwa Chŏng Yagyong—Chosŏn hugi ŏmun insik ŭi kŭndaejŏk kulchŏl yangsang yŏn’gu sŏsŏl” [The LinguisticLiterary Reality of the Modern Enlightenment Period and Chŏng Yagyong—A Preliminary Discussion of a Modern Refraction of Late Chosŏn Linguistic Consciousness]. In Hŭndullinŭn ŏno tŭl [Languages on the Brink], edited by Im Hyŏngt’aek, 175–205. Seoul: Sunggyunkwan University Press. Sahoe Kwahagwŏn. 1993. Yijo sillok nanhaeŏ sajŏn [Abstruse Words in the Veritable Records of the Chosŏn Dynasty]. P’yŏngyang: Sahoe kwahagwŏn. Sieber, Patricia. 2013. “The Imprint of the Imprints: Sojourners, Xiaoshuo Translations, and the Transcultural Canon of Early Chinese Fiction in Europe, 1697–1826.” East Asian Publishing and Society 3: 31–70. Silverstein, Michael. 1979. “Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology.” In The Elements, edited by P. Clyne, W. Hanks, and C. Hofbauer, 193–248. Chicago: Chicago, Linguistic Society. Sim Chaegi. 1981. “Yi Ŭibong ŭi Tonghan yŏgŏ e taehayŏ” [On Yi Ŭibong’s Tonghan yŏgŏ]. Sŏnch’ŏng ŏmun 11, 12: 227–242. Sim Kyŏngho. 1999. Chosŏn sidae hanmunhak kwa Sigyŏng non [The Shijing and Chosŏn Literary Sinitic Studies]. Seoul: Ilchisa.

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Chapter 14

Language Use and Language Discourse in Pak Chiwŏn’s Yŏrha ilgi Marion Eggert 1

Introduction: Language Consciousness in the Eighteenth Century and Pak Chiwŏn1

In the history of Korean intellectual appropriation of their national script, known for most of the Chosŏn dynasty as ŏnmun 諺文 but since the early twentieth century as han’gŭl, the later part of the eighteenth century was a pivotal stage. From Sin Kyŏngjun’s 申景濬 (1712–1781) Hunmin chŏngŭm unhae 訓民正 音韻解 (Explanation of Hunmin chŏngŭm Phonetics; 1750) onward, a series of studies on the Korean script appeared, climaxing in Yu Hŭi’s 柳僖 (1773–1837) Ŏnmun chi 諺文志 (On the Vernacular Script; 1824, first version ca. 1800). Although their point of departure was the correct recording of the pronunciations of sinographs, these works not only expressed a heightened pride in the qualities of the Korean script, they also marked a growing distance from the earlier sinocentric view of the Korean language as a kind of corollary to Sinitic language and writing. Thus, in the early eighteenth century, Noron veteran Pak Ch’ihwa 朴致和 (1680–1767) had described the relation of the two languages in the terms of “text” and “commentary”: The ten thousand things all have their own sounds. Human beings cannot make them out; only the great sages and the divinely gifted were able to recognize them. When they looked at the things with their spiritually receptive mind, they were prompted to utter the sounds corresponding to the things, and thus the sounds and tones manifested themselves. Looking at the sky, we therefore say, ch’ŏn, looking at the earth, chi. The ancient sages did not create these words artificially but fixed them according to the sounds innate to things. When the sages first devised 1 The first draft of this chapter was written for the symposium “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular: The Politics of Language in the Diglossic Culture of Korea” held in Bellagio, Italy in 2004. The symposium was organized by the late JaHyun Kim Haboush whose inspiration and scholarly creativity have set an example for which I am forever grateful.

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the characters it was nothing more than seeing the sky and saying ch’ŏn 天, seeing water and saying su 水 and after having found the right sound, depicting it by help of the six strokes. […] The characters thus devised consist of meaning, image, and sound. Take for example the graph ku 口, “mouth”: the visible form of the graph is the image of the shape [of the mouth]; it is interpreted by the meaning of entering; its sound correlates to the tone u. In the Central Plains the graphs are only a transformation of the sounds [of things], while in our country [the graphs] are glossed using our regional language (pangŏn 方言). Therefore, we pronounce the graph ku [mouth] as ip [mouth], because things all enter [Sino-Korean: ip 入] through the mouth.2 While attempting, not without strain on the reader’s credulity, to imbue the Korean language with a special dignity, this text still fully subscribes to the image of Sinitic as the “natural language,” and of the sinographs as chinsŏ 眞書, or “veritable script.” While Sinitic language and writing systems thus appear as the embodiment of truth, their Korean counterparts can only serve to explicate this truth. By the time Yu Hŭi wrote his Ŏnmun chi, a very different view of the Korean writing system had begun to take root: The vernacular letters can form ten thousand two hundred and fifty “letters” [i.e., syllabograms] that are completely adequate to all the sounds a human mouth can utter. The ten thousand two hundred and fifty sounds a human mouth can utter correspond completely to the number of the myriad things between heaven and earth. […] The vernacular writing (ŏnmun 諺文) is really one of the most admirable things in the world. In comparison to sinographs, it has two strong points. Sinographs consist of six different categories; their shapes are extremely variegated, and one cannot infer the manifold appearances from one example. In vernacular 2 Pak Ch’ihwa, “Chapchi,” Sŏlgye surok 雪溪隨錄, kwŏn 24, 23a–b, 28a. 萬物各有其聲　人 莫能辨　而惟聖神知之　見物氣機自鳴因其物　而其物之聲音出焉　如見天則 曰쳔　見地則曰지　此非聖人創出　皆因其物之聲音而制焉…聖人始制文字只 是見天則曰天　見水則曰水　自中聲而因以六書形成焉　(23a–b) 制字有意象  音　如以口字言之　則其體象形也　其釋入意也　其音羽聲也　中原文字只用 聲音　而我國解釋皆是方音也　如口字解以入者　言物皆入於口也　(28a). Since the text gives ch’ŏn and chi not in sinographs but in han’gŭl, there is no doubt that for Pak Ch’ihwa the Chinese words are the natural names of things. Pak Ch’ihwa’s original name was Ch’iwŏn 致遠; library catalogs usually carry Sŏlgye surok 雪溪随錄 under this name. In order not to confuse the reader, here and in the list of references I stick to his later name.

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writing, the middle sound follows the initial sound, and the final sound follows the middle sound in clear sequence, so systematically that womenfolk and children can all comprehend it. The alterations are like those of the Yijing trigrams, alternating in perfect order. This is the strong point in terms of original substance. In the case of sinographs, in addition to the phonetic make-up the ancients gave them, lots of radicals have been added over time; and in addition to the readings the ancients gave them, later literati have added altered readings in order to fit their rhyming needs. […] But in the case of vernacular writing, one can only use different syllabograms; there is no way to change the shape or pronunciation of a letter. This is the strong point in terms of application.3 It is perplexing to the historian, however, that this burgeoning interest and pride in the Korean script was not accompanied by a corresponding upsurge in Korean-language writing, at least as far as the sphere of belles lettres is concerned. Both sijo and kasa, for example, were beyond their flower as literary genre by the eighteenth century.4 On the other hand, a marked downward diffusion of these vernacular genres in han’gŭl had set in, and the first anthologies of Korean language poetry were compiled. These observations preclude any teleological perspective on literary history as a perhaps unidirectional, albeit unsteady, march of progress towards acceptance and ever more widespread use of Korean language writing.5 Instead, they open up a number of questions 3 Yu Hŭi, “Chŏnja ye,” Ŏnmun chi, 18f.: 諺文字總數一萬零二百五十．以該盡人口所出 聲．人口所出聲一萬零二百五十. 以應盡天地萬物之數．諺文…實世間至妙之 物．比之文字．其精有二．文字則制以六義．爲形散亂．不可以一例推萬狀．諺文則 以中係初．以終係中．各有條脈. 縱橫整齊．婦女孩子．咸能頓悟．其變化殆如大 易之爻．錯綜往來．無不各從其次序．此體之精也．文字則古人諧聲之外．偏旁之 加．漸久漸多．古人轉注之外．後來詞客．任意變讀．以協其押韻…諺文則若移動全 部則已．欲誤一字之形．得呼．欲改一字之音．得呼．此用之精也． 4 Sijo cycles, which are better suited for complex literary composition than single sijo, were produced no more; instead of carrying political and ethical messages, sijo served for light entertainment; and instead of exploring the possibilities of the Korean language, the (regular) sijo produced at banquets were often no more than re-assemblages of Sinitic poems in Korean grammar. The high tide of kasa as poetic art was in the sixteenth century; later, the form was used primarily for narrative and didactic purposes. 5 While such assumptions have long prevailed, scholars of Korean literature have recently laid solid foundations for a more differentiated view of the history of Korean “diglossia.” See, for example, the special issue of Han’guk hanmunhak yŏn’gu dedicated to the relationship between hanmun and kungmun 國文 literature (volume 22, 1998). See also King (2015) for a critical discussion of the usefulness of the term “diglossia” in discussing premodern Korean literary culture.

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about possibly shifting social spaces of, and ascriptions of function and prestige to, hanmun 漢文 (Literary Sinitic) and ŏnmun genres, respectively. Foremost, they speak to the necessity of reconsidering the relationship between awareness of han’gŭl’s properties and the actual use of writing systems, i.e., between language discourse and linguistic practice. What impact did the discovery of han’gŭl’s usefulness and value by sirhak6 (“empirical studies”) scholars of the later eighteenth century have on text production in Korean, and why do we, in spite of their efforts,7 see so little vernacularization of Korean literary life before the Enlightenment (kaehwa) period beginning in the mid1890s? There are many angles from which to approach this question; certainly, social history is not the least important among them. This chapter treats it from the perspective of literary history by scrutinizing the language discourse and language practice of one literary master of the later eighteenth century, Yŏnam Pak Chiwŏn 燕巖 朴趾源 (1737–1805). “Sirhak” scholars were definitely among the driving forces in the interest in “things Korean” that pervaded the later eighteenth century, and especially the “Northern scholars” (pukhakp’a 北學派) variety played an important role in the process of redefining Chosŏn’s relation with the outside world and giving new impulses to Korean identity discourses. Pak Chiwŏn as one of the representative pukhak scholars has been much credited for his efforts at decentering China while at the same time exhorting his fellow Koreans to keep abreast of the cultural and technical developments in the great neighboring country. Still, Pak Chiwŏn may appear an unlikely subject of research into diglot written culture of this period. He had little to say about writing in Korean script, nor did he practice it: among his transmitted works there is no text in Korean.8 In one letter contained in his collected works, he even claims to have “not known a single letter of Korean script (ŏnja 諺字) all my life,” although this

6 Needless to say, my use of the “sirhak” epithet is not synonymous with the assumption of a “school” or coherent movement. Still, and in spite of the somewhat inflational use of the term that has become common, I find it useful for roughly designating a certain orientation of certain Chosŏn literati. 7 The common assumption is that sirhak scholars strengthened a more “nationally conscious” use of writing systems; among others, the work on ŏnmun history of Yi Sanghyŏk (1998, 1999) is built upon it. 8 Although a han’gŭl version of the Yŏrha ilgi exists, this is obviously a later translation of the original Sinitic text; it is also incomplete, covering only some parts of the diary and completely omitting the thematically ordered records. Only the second kwŏn of the translation has survived; this work also contains a partial translation of a 1790 travel record by another person. See Kim T’aejun (2001).

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is not a very trustworthy statement.9 Rather, he is known as a force in renewing hanmun style, the Yŏrha ilgi having been singled out as the main target of King Chŏngjo’s 正祖 (1752–1800; r. 1776–1800) “literary rectification movement” (munch’e panjŏng 文體反正). Indeed, his mastery of a great variety of Chinese writing styles shows deep immersion not only in the classical tradition up to Song times, but in more recent writings as well; his indebtedness to late Ming and Qing masters has been convincingly shown by Yi Chongju (2001).10 However, his thrust for enlivening hanmun writing did not stop at mastering new as well as old Sinitic styles. In addition, he advocated enriching hanmun self-assuredly with local expressions, a stance often referred to as “Chosŏn p’ung” 朝鮮風 (Chosŏn style, lit. “Chosŏn wind”), following his use of this expression in one important preface.11 But rather than directly tackling Yŏnam’s discussions of literary aesthetics, which are mainly found in letters and forewords to his collected works, I will use his record of a journey to China, the Yŏrha ilgi (Jehol Diary; pref. 1783) as my primary source. For one thing, this bulky literary masterpiece can serve to demonstrate not only literary views but literary practice on a more sustained basis; and secondly, as a diary rich in observations of matters in all spheres of life, it carries the promise to inform on language practice on more levels than just that of high literary composition as is treated in the prefaces and letters. In line with this twofold motivation in studying this text, I will in the following sections first probe into the discourse on language/script use in the Yŏrha ilgi (hereafter, yi), and then attempt an interpretation of the narrative and linguistic techniques in yi in the light of the diglot problematic as viewed by Pak Chiwŏn. 2

Language, Learning, and Script as Narrative Material in the Yŏrha ilgi

Remarks on language are probably a rather common feature of the rich embassy literature of Chosŏn times. Visiting China meant for many of the literati who took part in the missions, either as functionaries or as their personal

9 “Tap chokson Hongsu sŏ” 答族孫弘壽書, Yŏnam chip 3, 37b. See Hwang P’aegang (2000: 128) for a very brief evaluation of this statement in the light of scattered occurrences of han’gŭl insertions into hanmun text within his collected works (munjip 文集). 10 Yi’s book is based mainly on his earlier essays on the influence of Ming-Qing xiaopin 小品 writers on Pak Chiwŏn. 11 “Yŏngch’ŏ ko sŏ” 嬰處稿序, Yŏnam chip 7, 8b.

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companions,12 the first sustained contact with Chinese as a spoken language, and it is not beyond expectation that this experience should have found expression in their journey records.13 While any claim of an exceptional attention to linguistic matters in the yi would therefore be premature, the text does offer a rich variety of notes and discussions on language, script, and their relationship with education in the literary tradition. Before delving into them, however, some remarks are in order about the textual character of the yi and the inevitable constraints on quoting from it that follow from the former. Much has been written on Pak Chiwŏn’s narrative techniques.14 While these writings together represent a tremendous advance in our understanding of Pak Chiwŏn’s literary mind, as far as the yi is concerned, they seem to share a certain limitation that arises from looking at the yi as a collection of individual texts.15 The fact that the yi does contain independent essays16 within its diary parts, besides openly fictional narratives that have long 12

Pak Chiwŏn undertook his 1780 journey to Peking and Jehol as military aide to his older cousin Pak Myŏngwŏn 朴明源 (1725–1790), who served as first emissary. Among the several hundred records of missions to China that have come down to us, quite a number have been written by the first or second emissaries themselves, but even more are the works of either the embassy secretaries (who counted as the third official emissary) or of such private companions, who of course had more leisure both for sightseeing and for keeping records of their impressions. See also Ledyard (1982: 64). 13 See Eggert (1997: 74). However, of the three embassy records inspected there, one is the Yŏrha ilgi itself, and the other two may be seen as closely related to it: Kim Ch’angŏp’s 金昌業 (1658–1722) Yŏnhaeng ilgi 燕行日記 (1712) was definitely read by Pak Chiwŏn, and Sŏ Kyŏngsun’s 徐慶淳 (1804–?) Monggyŏngdang ilsa 夢經堂日史 (1855/6) was influenced by the latter in turn. Sŏ Yumun’s 徐有聞 (1762–1822) interest in language questions as testified to by Cho Kyuik (2002) was also evidently influenced by earlier records (a number of the passages quoted by Cho have immediate precedence in the Yŏnhaeng ilgi and Yŏrha ilgi). As previous literature on the yŏnhaengnok genre has, to my knowledge, not yet tackled the question comparatively, it remains to be investigated whether records of linguistic experience really belonged to the stock of the yŏnhaengnok genre, or rather originated together with the deepened interest in material (i.e., vernacular) culture as described by Kim Hyŏnmi (2002) for the earlier part of the eighteenth century. 14 Among the more recent works on the subject, I have consulted especially the following: Yi Kangyŏp (2003), Kim Hyŏlcho (2002), Yi Chongju (2001), Ch’oe Ch’ŏnjip (1997), Ch’oe Inja (1996), and Yi Hyŏnsik (1995). 15 A noteworthy exception is Yi Kangyŏp (2003), who uses the simile of an “omnibus” for Yŏrha ilgi’s style of connecting scenes (271) and realizes the rounded character of certain of its chapters (272), arguing in favor of overcoming artificial generic borders between text passages (276). He seems rather unaware, however, of the literary traditions behind this narrative technique. 16 These essays have been given an individual title by the author himself and are usually mentioned within the diary in the following manner: “There exists an additional ‘Record on …’” (pyŏl yu … ki 別有 … 記).

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since been subsumed under the heading of hanmun sosŏl 漢文小說 (“fiction in Literary Sinitic”) and accordingly been anthologized as independent stories, certainly helped to create a tradition of reading the yi as a collection of a wide variety of prose genres rather than as a continuous work. Although the revelation that even the story that was given a title by Pak Chiwŏn himself, Hojil 虎叱 (“Tiger’s Reprimand”), needs to be read within the context of the diary entry in which it appears struck as early as 1975,17 the trend to single out certain scenes from the diary as individual essays and provide them with a title of their own persists to date.18 But while these selected scenes certainly are imbued with a special literary passion that warrants their treatment as “works” (chakp’um 作 品), the generic make-up of the yi should not be confounded with a collection of essays. Rather, it must be understood in the tradition of the sup’il 隨筆 (“casual notes”) genre;19 and, as I have argued elsewhere, at least the masterpieces among the sup’il tend to evince a structural make-up that does not allow one to read the author’s mind from isolated entries. Rather, meaning is constituted in these texts through subtle interplay of sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory narrations and statements.20 In what follows, I will therefore attempt to counterbalance the reductionist effect of the sampling of statements with at least partial accounts of argumentative procedures.21 The resulting complexities of argument faithfully mirror the intellectual subtlety of the text itself. 17 Yi Chaesŏn brought forth this argument in his Han’guk tanp’yŏn sosŏl yŏn’gu (1975). See also, Pak Kisŏk (1986: 456). 18 Typical examples are “Hogokchang ki/ron” 好哭場 記/論 (“Record of a Good Place for Crying”), Togangnok 渡江錄 (07.08) and “Ibyŏllon” 離別論 (“On Parting”), Makpuk haengjŏngnok 漠北行程錄 (08.05). As this procedure is followed quite without exception, I refrain from providing citations. 19 The yi as we have it is not a diary as jotted down during a journey but a crafted piece of literary art. For what we know about the writing process, see the first chapter of Kim Myŏngho (1990). The conscious choice of the diary genre for about the first half of the book must have been made with the specific potentials of this—like sup’il—seemingly spontaneous genre in mind. 20 See Eggert (1999: 71–73). Kim Manjung 金萬重 (1637–1692), whose sup’il-work Sŏp’o manp’il 西浦漫筆 was the object of this study, belonged to the same (Noron 老論) faction as Pak Chiwŏn; his views on Korea’s diglot situation appear like a precursor to Pak Chiwŏn’s. The two are also connected by their fascination with (Chinese) novels, which tend to employ a similar weaving technique. For Pak Chiwŏn’s high interest in Ming-Qing fiction criticism (which put much stress on the writing techniques in question), see Kim Tongsŏk (2003: 241). 21 The yi consists of 26 parts with individual titles, of which the first seven, comprising almost half of the bulk of the work, are in the diary format (although interspersed with titled “records”). The present study is mainly based on the diary portions.

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2.1 The Babel Experience The Qing empire was a multinational unit, and especially the northeastern part traversed by Korean embassies was home to Chinese as well as Manchu, Mongols, and even Koreans.22 The journey therefore provided experience of a multilingual environment. The yi vividly reflects, and probably even exaggerates, this experience. Exposure to a living foreign language entails, first of all, the experience of linguistic incompetence. Upon entry into the Qing empire at the so called “Palisade Gate,” the travelers have to realize that even as far as their knowledge of spoken Chinese goes, it is inadequate for effective communication: the unit for ordering wine, liang (“ounce”), means not the price to be paid but the quantity of wine.23 Later in his travels, the narrator repeatedly encounters the situation of not being able to communicate due to his ignorance of the Manchu and Mongolian languages.24 Of course, communication with educated people of any ethnic background through Literary Sinitic was no problem (scarcity of paper and ink was no concern). But even in the context of “brush conversations” (K. p’iltam, C. bitan 筆談), not being able to speak the language could be experienced as deficiency, as the Chinese interlocutors would sometimes (obviously at critical junctures of the conversation) discuss among themselves for quite a while before taking up the brush again. But as the narrator is not a solitary traveler but part of a large group of compatriots, linguistic incompetence cannot remain a one-sided phenomenon. At one point, Chinese p’iltam friends try themselves at pronouncing a Korean word, kangch’ŏl 罡鐵, the name of a strange dragon which seems to have been brought into the narrative especially in order to produce the following scene: Scholar Pei said [obviously in writing]: “The dragon’s name is antique and strange [i.e., has a mysterious quality]”; […] so he recited with much emphasis: “kang—ch’ŏ 罡處.” I called out: “Kangch’ŏl!” Scholar Pei again uttered: “Kangch’ŏn 罡賤.” I smiled and said: “No, it is not the sound ch’ŏn [or: the sound is not base], it is like the ch’ŏl in toch’ŏl 饕餮 [C. taotie, 22

On their way to Peking, embassies passed two places explicitly connected with or inhabited by Korean expatriates. Besides, Pak’s embassy had contact with several Qing nationals claiming Korean descent. 23 Yŏrha ilgi (yi), Togangnok (Record of Crossing the River), I 524. Here, as in the following, I quote the yi from the original Sinitic text contained in Yi Kawŏn’s two-volume Korean translation (Minmun’go 1989). Citations are in the form of chapter title, vol. (Roman), and page number (Arabic). 24 yi, Ilsin sup’il 馹迅隨筆 (Notes on Courier Stations and Military Posts), I 580; yi, Kuoe imun 口外異聞 (Strange Hearsay from Beyond the Pass), II 626f.

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a monster which is part of ancient iconography].” Dongya laughed and cried loudly: “Kangch’ŏng 罡靑!” Everybody laughed. For when the Chinese pronounce words rhyming on kal, wŏl, and the like, they are not able to produce the rolling sound (chŏnsŏng 轉聲).25 In a context where the narrator depicts himself as functioning as a transmitter of culture,26 the tables are turned; not only do the Chinese find themselves trying hard, but still failing, to speak accurate Korean, the Chinese language itself appears as phonologically deficient. The same phenomenon is demonstrated more often, and more definitely tied to spoken language, with Manchu speakers. The man provided by the Qing side as the main interpreter and guide, Shuanglin, a Manchu fluent in Chinese and well-versed in Korean, appears twice within the diary narrative. When the embassy just enters the Palisade Gate, he takes a man to task who broke the rule of etiquette by not dismounting from his horse; but while he shouts with great vigor, his Korean sounds as if uttered “with a heavy and obstructed tongue, like a babbling baby or a mad drunkard,” obviously impairing his authority (Togangnok, I 523). During the second instance of his appearance, which is interestingly again tied to matters of etiquette—this time the main interpreter of the Korean side berates Shuanglin for not halting or dismounting when the Korean ambassadors cross his path—Shuanglin’s linguistic ability is denigrated even more: “When people say he is good at speaking Korean, this is not really adequate. If he is in a hurry, he falls into Chinese” (Ilsin sup’il 馹汛隨筆, I 573f.). A kind of language proficiency contest which Shuanglin conducts with Pak Chiwŏn’s servant Changbok results in the former’s utter defeat: Changbok had only picked up [his Chinese] on the road since we had entered the Palisade Gate, but spoke it so much better than Shuanglin [the Korean] he had studied all his life. Thus, I realized that Chinese is easier than the language of the east. ibid.: 574

The difficulty the Korean language posed to Manchu speakers had been proven earlier by an accompanying Manchu soldier on night watch duty, who explained his presence to the startled Koreans with the self-introduction: “to-i no-ŭm i-yo” (toenom io, “I’m a barbarian”) (Togangnok, I 535). Both the hardly 25 yi, Sŏnggyŏng chapchi 盛京雜識 (Miscellaneous Records of the Flourishing Capital), I 553. 26 See the sub-section, “Hanmun Culture and Vernacular Culture” below.

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intelligible pronunciation27 and the use of a denigrating term for himself made the Manchu speaker of Korean appear rather ridiculous. However, the yi language narrative does not seem to aim at chauvinistic pride in the difficult and sophisticated Korean mother tongue. For lower-class Koreans are shown to make the very same mistake by picking up Chinese expressions they do not quite understand, unwittingly calling bad odors Gaoli-chou 高麗臭 (“Korean stench”) and using the expression “Eastern Barbarian” when things have been lost (Kuoe imun, II 620).28 And lastly, Korean appears as a foreign language to the narrator himself, who drowsily rides his horse one early morning after a night spent with Chinese acquaintances: The moon had just set, the stars in the sky winked at each other, village cocks took turns crowing. After a few li, white mist filled the plain, which became a sea of watery silver. A pair of Ŭiju merchants passed by talking to each other, vague and indistinct as if reading a strange book in a dream. Sŏnggyŏng chapchi 盛京雜識, I 556

Thus, to a certain degree, the experience of a multilingual environment as described in the yi results in a claim of equality of living languages, which are from this perspective distinguished not by levels of culture but by being more or less—but never totally—“home” to an individual speaker. 2.2 Language of Learning and Learning of Language However, the Babel image of spoken languages of equal importance and meaningfulness is crisscrossed by another, perhaps more prominent, image of Chinese as the language of culture and learning. If in the yi languages are basically seen as equal partners in a multilingual world, cultures are to some degree perceived as hierarchically ordered, and insofar as language is both an expression and carrier of culture, this hierarchy affects their relationship as well. Some of the instances quoted above could also be used to demonstrate the relatively low esteem in which the Manchu and Mongolian languages seem to be held by the narrator—or at least by the conventions from which the narrative departs: being asked whether he speaks Mongolian or Manchu, 27 28

He has to repeat himself several times before he is understood. Kuoe imun is a chapter written in pure sup’il style. The entry quoted here is the last in a series of six entries that together present a picture of polyglossia in—mostly—written culture, treating (1) han’gŭl’s potential as a secret script; (2) a Chinese southern dialect word; (3) Mongolian remnants in present-day Korean; (4) Mongolian remnants in the Chinese written tradition; and (5) several Manchu expressions that seem worthwhile knowing.

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for example, the narrator “answered in jest: ‘How would a yangban speak one of these languages?’” (Kuoe imun, II 626f.). But rather than by downgrading the “barbarian” languages, an unequal relationship is established by stressing the special character of Chinese. While crossing a side-arm of the Yalu River, the narrator first experiences the spoken Chinese language as culturally charged. A boatman who has carried him onto the ferry jokes about his weight—and, according to one edition, implies a mild abuse29—by alluding to a certain scene in the Chinese novel Shuihuzhuan 水滸傳 (Water Margin). The narrator wonders: “How can somebody like him create such deep literary meaning upon just opening his mouth?” Secretary Cho answered: “He belongs to the people of whom we say, ‘they don’t even know the character chŏng 丁.’ But the novels and stories of marvel provide the phrases of common usage they have constantly on their lips. This is what is called Mandarin.” Togangnok, I 518

Even before having completely crossed over into Qing territory, the traveler encounters a spoken language that appears as a direct continuation of the written literary tradition (mun 文) that his own language can only refer to as the contents of learning. Comments on this phenomenon reappear quite frequently throughout the yi. More often than not, they are connected with discussions of the different ways of learning, especially of studying the classics: Here they have the two ways of declamation (songsŏ 誦書), and explication (kangŭi 講義) of the books. This is different from our East, where beginners are introduced to sound and meaning together. The Chinese begin by learning to recite loudly the sentences of the Four Books. Once they have learned them by heart, they search out a teacher who can instruct them about their meaning. This is called “explication.” Even if somebody receives no explication all his life, the sentences he has learned by heart [still] make up the Mandarin he speaks in everyday life. Chinese is therefore the easiest and the most sensible language among the local idioms of the myriad countries (man’guk pangŏn yu hanŏ ch’oe yŏk ch’a ch’oe yuri). Togangnok, I 52530

29 Part of the scene quoted here is missing from Pak Yongch’ae’s edition of Yŏnam chip. 30 所謂誦書講義 有兩道 非如我東初學之兼通音義 中原初學者 只學四書章句 口誦而已 誦熟然後 更就師受旨 曰講義 設令終身未講義 所習章句 爲日用  官話 所以萬國方言 惟漢語最易且有理也．

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A long paragraph in a later chapter of the yi that takes the form of sihwa 詩 話 or “anecdotes on poetry” discusses this strength of the Chinese language at length. As the context demands, the focus this time is on the natural acquisition of poetic expression that growing up with Chinese as mother tongue presumably allows: In China, one proceeds from written characters towards spoken language, whereas we in our Eastern country proceed from speaking to writing. This makes the difference between Chinese/civilizational flower and outsiders. By “proceeding from speaking to writing” I mean that language and writing are separated. When, for example, we read the character tian/ch’ŏn 天 (“heaven, sky”) as “hanŭl ch’ŏn,” this implies that besides the character, there exists a layer of spoken language which is hard to understand. How can a small child which still does not know what [Korean] hanŭl means understand [Chinese] ch’ŏn? It has been transmitted for a long time as a tale of refinement that Zheng Xuan’s female servants were able to communicate with lines from the Shijing 詩經 (Book of Odes).31 But in fact, Chinese women and children all use literary language (kae i munja wi ŏ 皆以文字爲語); even those who cannot discern the [extremely simple] character chŏng 丁 are able to sing of the phoenix with their spoken words, and the classics, histories, masters and collected writings are their everyday language material. One of our countrymen was most astonished when he first witnessed a Chinese child on the banks of a brook calling out to his mother: “Shui shen du bu de” 水深渡不得 (“the water is too deep for crossing”).32 He thought, in China, five-yearolds compose poetry as soon as they open their mouths. This is not at all the case; it was spoken language, not willful composition. When Kim Ch’angŏp traveled in Qianshan, he met upon a country woman who sold wine. When he asked what customers she might find in this solitary place, she answered: “Hua xiang die zi lai” 花香蝶自來 (“when the flowers are fragrant, butterflies will naturally come”). Without much ado, with simple words and clear message, she formed a poetic line. This is nothing else but miraculous proof of proceeding from written characters to spoken language. Our young maidservant used to be quite muddleheaded. Sent to buy rice-cakes, she returned with caramel. Undisturbed, she excused herself: “Ba and Shu are both within the pass” (p’a ch’ok yŏk kwan chung 巴蜀亦關中). This sentence is known through playing cards. 31 See Shijing, “Shishuo xinyu” 世說新語 4, wenxue 文學, 3. 32 Even with regard to tonal sequence, this might be the first line of a five-syllable-verse.

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She has no idea what Ba and Shu are, but she got it right that the saying means “no difference between this and that.” This taught me that Chinese is not difficult, and that Zheng Xuan’s maidservants cannot monopolize elegance for all ages.33 Speakers of Chinese thus appear enormously privileged by their mother tongue. Three great literary idioms—fiction, classical learning, and poetry—are shown by the three passages adduced above to be at their disposal without the efforts of learning, imbuing them with natural refinement and elegance. The last sentences of the above quote, however, give a certain twist to this view of a special position for the Chinese language; for the Korean maidservant is able to fulfill a feat similar to that of the famed maids of antiquity,34 and to rob them of their uniqueness, by virtue not of the spoken but of the written word.35 And not only do Koreans share the Chinese (hwa 華) elegance in their written culture; the certain degree of effort they have to put into acquiring it also entails an advantage. A “brush conversation” that Pak Chiwŏn supposedly leads with a couple of literate shop vendors in Shenyang contains the following passage: Pei Guan wrote: “It is said that there are no gods and immortals in heaven who cannot read, but on earth there exist parrots that can talk. […] This is called ‘learning which enters through the ear and exits through the mouth.’ At present, schools and academies train only reading the texts aloud, without providing explication. Students therefore carry the texts in their ears, but to their eyes they appear hazy and vague; their mouths spill over with the Hundred Writings, but when they have to put something down in writing, they hesitate at each character.” Li asked me: “How about your country?” I answered: “We teach reading texts by providing both pronunciation and meaning.” Mr. Pei underlined these characters and wrote: “This method is most adequate.” Sŏnggyŏng chapchi, I 547

The Korean level of refinement through hanmun culture, this passage obviously argues, can be regarded as even higher than that of the Chinese, as the 33 yi, P’isŏrok 避暑錄 (Records of the Summer Residence), II 557. 34 The story in Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 also entails a mistake made by one of the literate maidservants. 35 It is, of course, an intriguing question whether the playing cards carried the saying in sinographs or in han’gŭl; regrettably, Pak Chiwŏn gives no hint in either direction.

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difference of languages allows no parroting without comprehension. Only the language that is (consciously) learned can be a true language of learning. But though such a line of argumentation is provided here, it should not simply be regarded as a direct expression of “the” view of Pak Chiwŏn. His ideas on the matter appear rather more complex when the context of this quote is taken into account. 2.3 Hanmun Culture and Vernacular Culture It has long been noted by readers of the yi that even within the diary portion, each chapter appears to focus on certain topics. However, rather than exchanging one topic for another, chapters present different aspects of the issues most at the heart of the yi.36 Matters of language, writing, and learning are thematically introduced in the first chapter, Togangnok, but are treated more comprehensively in the following three chapters: Sŏnggyŏng chapchi, Ilsin sup’il, and Kwannae chŏngsa 官內程史.37 These four chapters cover the route from Ŭiju (at the Korean—Chinese border) to Peking. They are roughly, but not consistently, divided along geographical lines. While Togangnok (covering the journey from Ŭiju to Liaodong) relates the traversal of the borderlands leading up to the truly Chinese Liaodong plain,38 Sŏnggyŏng chapchi (from Shilihe to Xiaoheshan), from which the above quote was taken, ends at some undistinguished place along the route. Ilsin sup’il (from Xiaoheshan to Shanhaiguan) and Kwannae chŏngsa (Chronicle of the Journey inside the Pass, from Shanhaiguan to Peking) again have a clear geographical dividing point at the entry into China proper. While Sŏnggyŏng chapchi centers on sights and events in Shenyang, the motivation for letting this diary end at Xiaoheshan seems to lie exactly in the realm of matters of language and writing, as I will show presently. As far as these matters are concerned, the focus of Sŏnggyŏng chapchi seems to lie on an evaluation, and at times even celebration, of the narrator’s cultural achievements, which are firmly tied to hanmun literacy. Upon entering Shenyang, the narrator encounters a couple of sophisticated-looking men, who, however, turn out to be illiterate (Sŏnggyŏng chapchi, I 546). He soon makes 36 Other important topics include the advanced material culture of the Qing empire, and the question of “placing [oneself] well at the border-line,” i.e., matters dealing with identity and alterity. 37 The narrative technique of spreading a web of motifs in the beginning, which then reappear and are elaborated upon in later chapters, also derives from Chinese novels. 38 The hilly landscape between Ŭiju and Liaodong is seen as a continuation of the Korean landscape (and territory), while the Liaodong plain is celebrated as the first harbinger of chungwŏn 中原, the Chinese “Middle Plain.”

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out, and purportedly39 meets for two consecutive nights, whatever intelligentsia live in town (consisting of the vendors of two antique shops, who tell him that neither in Shenyang nor on the way to Shanhaiguan is there anybody else worth talking to). Even so, they are introduced as rather limited in education and ability: one is knowledgeable in antiquities, one is good at reading aloud, one is handsome but illiterate, one is clumsy at writing but has an amicable character, one is good at painting and at explaining the classics, one is a hearty drinker and good at calligraphy. During their two meetings, the narrator himself excels in almost all of the cultural techniques that are so unevenly mastered by his acquaintances: he carries away his audience in turn by his reading aloud of Chinese texts (“without ŏnt’o 諺吐,” i.e., Korean grammatical endings), his philological explanations on obscure passages in the canonical writings, his calligraphy and painting. Besides, he proves to be more knowledgeable about metropolitan literati than his Shenyang friends (Ibid.: 546–552). During his sojourn at Shenyang, the Korean traveler thus appears as a cultural hero rather than as cultural adept; the passage about the superiority of Korean learning styles belongs in, and is reinforced by, this context. However, things take an ironic turn after the traveler has left the “flourishing [Manchu] capital.” In one of the villages he passes the next day, he is asked, after having provided examples of his writing skills, to write a piece of calligraphy for the front board of a pawn shop. He tosses down a set of characters he has seen repeatedly on shopfronts along the way and which he believes to conjure up the trustworthiness of the shop owner, only to find that the shop owner and his companions are somewhat taken aback. He puts this down to their inability to value his superior calligraphic style (Ibid.: 557), but has to realize during a similar situation the next day that the characters he chose are used by rice vendors to advertise the whiteness of their product; he had utterly misunderstood their implications (Ibid.: 561). With pride thus turning to (albeit mild) humiliation, Sŏnggyŏng chapchi comes to a close. According to the yi, just as the spoken Chinese language has two faces—being both one among equals, and the queen of languages—so does Chinese as a written medium: Hanmun is, on the one hand, a cosmopolitan realm of high culture to which the Korean traveler can belong and contribute; on the other hand, it is also the written expression of a peculiarly Chinese vernacular culture, exclusion from which may turn him into a near-barbarian.

39 The narrative takes a number of (not always completely convincing) turns in order to convince readers that Pak Chiwŏn socialized with these people all on his own, thus giving rise to doubts about the factual veracity of the depicted events.

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The next diary chapter, Ilsin sup’il, investigates the relationship between high/cosmopolitan and low/vernacular Han (Chinese) culture from the angle of Manchu participation. The first entry is dominated by Pak’s now famous discussion of cultural highlights witnessed during his journey. The naïve perspective of the politically uninitiated, who on being asked about the “foremost sights” would just list touristic sites, is contrasted first with several versions of old-fashioned chunghwaron 中華論, the view that no culture to speak of has been left to China since the Manchu takeover, and finally with his own choice, the “broken tiles and dung heaps” which stand in for technical ingenuity and economical thinking. Included in this passage, which serves as standard example of Pak Chiwŏn’s ideas on furthering livelihood, is a consideration of language matters: the Korean noblemen’s complaints that “the language [of China] has become the vulgar speech of Eastern Dwarfs” (Ilsin sup’il, I 564)40 are countered by his own “base” (yŏ hasa ya 余下士也) view that “where broken tiles are not thrown away, the refined writings of the Realm are extant” (ch’ŏnha chi munjang sa chae i 天下之文章斯在矣).41 Vulgar Manchu speech cannot obliterate the achievements of refined Chinese culture, especially when the latter is looked at from its vernacular, quotidian side. Pak Chiwŏn certainly did not himself believe in the debasement of “high” Chinese culture that he lets his hypothetical countrymen put forward as argument; his list of great Qing intellectuals who “all became barbarians and robbers since they cut their hair” is of course ironic. However, at this point he does not tackle this argument directly but instead shifts attention from written to lived culture. In a similar vein, the common Korean prejudice against the ethnic Manchu as unsophisticated country bumpkins is not countered but, at first sight, reinforced in Ilsin sup’il, which carries the main narrative about the linguistically unrefined Manchu interpreter Shuanglin. This view is further bolstered by two scenes in the first and last third of this diary, which appear to be symmetrically arranged: both scenes concern a fortuitous encounter with two men, in both instances an adult and a youngster, and both make use of the Lunyu 論語 (Analects). In the earlier scene, the narrator beholds a Chinese boy on the street and, attracted by his polite demeanor, converses with him and the accompanying grandfather about the child’s education; he learns that the boy studies the Lunyu at present (Ilsin sup’il, I 572). In the second instance, he tries The Manchu were equated with ancient references to a “dwarf” (K. chuyu 侏儒) country to the east of China. Chuyu also means “lacking knowledge and education.” 41 One might object that munjang here may simply mean “cultural refinement.” However, the next sentence parallels munjang with hwado 畵圖 (“pictures”), thus specifying the meaning of “texts” for the former.

40

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to enter into a brush conversation with a shopkeeper along the roadside. But although “brush and ink-stone were most elegant,” the shopkeeper is obviously illiterate and turns for help to a youth from the shop next door who “busily filled a page with Manchu characters”—unintelligible, of course, to the narrator. Attempts at conversing in spoken Chinese are thwarted by their pronunciation being mutually unintelligible, except for the following exchange: When the youth wrote in Manchu script, the shopkeeper said: “Is it not delightful to have friends coming from distant quarters?” [Lunyu I, 2]. I said: “I cannot read Manchu.” The youth said: “Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application?” [Lunyu I, 1]. I said, “If you two are able to recite the Lunyu, how come you do not know [Chinese] characters?” The shopkeeper answered: “Is he not also a man of complete virtue who is not angered by not knowing?” [Lunyu I, 3].42 I wrote down and showed them the three sentences they had uttered, but they just stared at the writing and could not at all discern what words these were. Ilsin sup’il, I 580

In contradistinction to the elegance with which the educated boy had answered the narrator’s question a couple of days earlier by writing with a stick in the dust, the crude, literal use of Lunyu quotes by these vendors of obviously Manchu origin appears all the more ridiculous. Access to the subtleties of hanmun culture is not easily obtained by Manchu barbarians, it seems. However, Pak Chiwŏn, although he may well have shared the anti-Manchu prejudice of his contemporaries to some degree, opens his text for evidence to the opposite effect. For one thing, even in the scene just quoted, hanmunderived cultural hierarchy is visibly at odds with the equal footing of vernacular languages. If the narrator draws a certain superiority from his cognizance of hanmun, he is, on the other hand, handicapped by his illiteracy in Manchu: when the three interlocutors are unable to communicate satisfactorily either by writing or speaking, “this was really what is called ‘not deaf but unable to hear, not blind but unable to see, not dumb but unable to speak’; the three of us, sitting together like the feet of a tripod, assembled the disabilities of the world” (Ibid.). Secondly, in the next diary chapter, cosmopolitan hanmun may open to the traveler a small circle of like-minded persons on the road (Kwannae chŏngsa, 42

I have given here the Legge rendering for the first two quotes but provided my own, more literal translation, for the last. For the last quote, Legge gives: “who feels no discomposure though men may take no note of him” (Legge 1983: 123).

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I 594), but in Peking, where cosmopolitan turns into metropolitan, exclusion of the Korean foreigner on account of his strangeness becomes palpable (Kwannae chŏngsa, I 607). At this point, amidst the narrator’s now-famous musings about the fallacy of (ethnic) delimitation and separation (“when looked at from the standpoint of the ‘not-I,’ then there is no difference between the ‘I’ and the myriad things”; K. i pia kwan a i a su yŏ manmul mu i 以非我觀 我。而我遂與萬物無異), the Lunyu quote misused to such comic effect by the Manchu is introduced again, this time in the sense of its standard interpretation: “Is not he a man of complete virtue who feels no discomposure though men may take no note of him?” Inclusion into or exclusion from the guarded realm of wen 文 (high culture/hanmun) cannot in itself serve as criterion for the evaluation of men (Ibid.).43 From this point of view, vernacular culture of any origin must logically experience an enhancement of status.44 Korean vernacular culture/language naturally profits as well, as seen for example in a remark on popular stage art: what they sang was [the Yuan drama] Xixiangji 西廂記 [The Western Chamber]. They are completely illiterate, but most eloquent and witty with their tongues, just like those in our eastern country who recite the “Story of General Im” (Im changgun chŏn 林將軍傳) on the streets and in marketplaces.45 However, for eighteenth-century literatus Pak Chiwŏn, the realization that vernacular idioms could be objects of cultivation and sophistication in their own right could not and did not mean that they were in any way suited to replace 43 This passage concludes, and probably sums up, the Kwannae chŏngsa chapter, which devotes much space to demonstrating deficiencies in cultural refinement in Koreans and Chinese alike: the Korean travelers are avoided and shut out in both a Chinese and a “Korean village” (K. Koryŏbo, C. Gaolipu 高麗堡), a settlement of people with Korean ancestry, for their repeated misbehavior and disregard of etiquette (I 586, I 594 f.), and Chinese moral degradation is seen in the existence of shrines to Tang rebel An Lushan and imperial concubine Yang Guifei, as well as of male prostitutes (yi 600). 44 Such high esteem of quotidian techniques as witnessed in the statement on “broken tiles and dung heaps” quoted above (which is, of course, the mainstay for the yi’s fame as a “sirhak” work) thus appears as grounded not primarily in economic and welfare concerns but as an outflow of this readjustment of the cultural value system. Befittingly, it is explicitly awarded to Manchu achievements in a context that has little to do with livelihood and much to do with the vernacular expression of high culture when stone steles erected for Manchu officials at Fenghuang are applauded, in spite of the inferior style and calligraphy of the engraved texts, for the dignified austerity of their execution (Togangnok, I 524f.). 45 “Kwanjemyo ki” 關帝廟記, Togangnok, I 540.

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hanmun. The tension that can be sensed throughout the yi between veneration for the richness, grandeur, and cosmopolitan flair of the hanmun tradition and the desire to be a valiant part of it, and appreciation of the local peculiarities and cultural idiosyncrasies that are not easily contained by the former, is most conspicuously expressed in two nearly consecutive passages in the last of the diary chapters, Hwan yŏn tojungnok 還燕道中錄 (Records of the Return Journey to Beijing). The first concerns “Camel Bridge” (Nakt’agyo 酪駝橋) in the Koryŏ capital of Kaesŏng, which received its name from a herd of camels that had been left there to starve as a sign of repudiation of their “barbarian” donors, the Khitan: At the side of the bridge a stone stele says “Nakt’agyo.” The citizens, however, do not say “Nakt’agyo” but “Yaktaedari”; in the local language, “yaktae” means “camel,” “tari” means “bridge.” This is further transformed into “Yadari.” When I first came to the Middle Capital and asked for the location of Camel Bridge, they could not tell me. To such an extreme is the local language void of meaning (ŭi 義).46 The vernacular is “void of meaning,” or of moral sense (ŭi), because it does not take part in historical memory—which is, in this instance, palpably preserved by the hanmun inscription on the stone stele. But in the entry for the very next day, upon crossing a river full of different kinds of boats, the vernacular is put in its own right: Sinographs are often made to resemble outer appearance, like when the [graph/radical] boat (zhou 舟) is supplemented as dao 舠, die 艓, ze 舴, hang 航, meng 艋, ting 艇, jian 艦, or meng 艨; in all these cases the names are conferred according to form. In our country, small boats are called kŏru, ferry boats naru, large ships manjangi, grain transporters songp’ungbae, ocean-going ships tangdori, boats that go against the current murubae; in the Kwansŏ region, they call the boats masangi. Although all these are different in outlay, there is only one sinograph to cover them, sŏn 船 (“ship”). Even if one borrowed the graphs dao, die, ze, meng, and so on, the name and object would not fit.47 The ideology which supported hanmun use—the idea that hanmun is a more direct revelation of truth than any vernacular can possibly be, most succinctly 46 Hwan yŏn tojungnok, I 641. 47 Ibid.: 642.

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expressed by the appellation of “true writing” (chinsŏ 眞書) for the Chinese script—is both backed up and refuted in these two passages, depending on which kind of truth is concerned. The veracity of quotidian life finds adequate expression only in vernacular language, but sticking to this idiom would mean the loss of more fundamental truths. It is this tension that backgrounds Pak Chiwŏn’s own linguistic choices in the yi. 3

Polyglossia or Uniglossia? Language Use and Narrative Strategies in Yŏrha ilgi

3.1 Language Multiplicity in Yŏnam ch’e The peculiarity of Pak Chiwŏn’s writing, and foremost among these, the yi, which has been called (rather fondly) Yŏnam ch’e (“Pak Chiwŏn style”) by King Chŏngjo himself, has long been recognized to consist mainly of the free admixture of styles: in contradistinction to the prevailing high esteem of pure “ancient style” (komun 古文), Pak Chiwŏn ad libitum used literary techniques and linguistic expressions typical for parallel prose, feuilletonistic prose (K. sop’um, C. xiaopin 小品)48 and fiction.49 From the latter derives one of the most noted stylistic aspects of the yi: the use made of literary vernacular Chinese (baihua 白話, though this is a twentieth-century term) mainly for recording dialogues conducted in Chinese (while direct speech that according to the situation would have been uttered in Korean is rendered in Literary Chinese).50 Thus, throughout the diary parts the yi is, in fact, a diglot work with situational code-switching between literary and vernacular Chinese. However, diversity of linguistic codes does not stop at enlivening direct speech by recourse to the Chinese spoken language. The Korean language figures as well in certain ways. Kang Tongyŏp has listed the following four procedures by which tribute is paid to the author’s mother tongue: 1) Use of Korean proverbs in Chinese translation. Of the ten examples adduced by Kang, three are not actually Korean sayings.51 The remainder fall into two 48 I borrow this characterization of sop’um (xiaopin) from Andrea Riemenschnitter (1998). 49 See, e.g., Kang Tongyŏp (1988: 75ff), and Ko Misuk (2003: 127), who sums up recent scholarship for a more general readership. 50 Pak Chiwŏn seems to have picked up a little bit of spoken Chinese on the road. His ability to write baihua, however, derives from his acquaintance with baihua novels. 51 Mu bu shi ding 目不識丁 (“not recognize the sinograph ding/chŏng”) is a common Chinese saying, not a translation of the Korean proverb nat nok’o kiyŏk cha morŭnda (“not recognize the [Korean] character kiyŏk (ㄱ) in the sickle”); perhaps the latter is a creative translation of the former. This misunderstanding is repeated in Hwang P’aegang (2000:

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categories. Often they are introduced in the author’s voice, i.e., as part of the auctorial narration or in brush talk sections ascribed to the narrator; in these cases their provenance is invariably explained (e.g., “as they say in the vernacular” [ŏn so wi … 諺所謂]). In fewer cases, they are part of the direct speech uttered by Koreans and are left unexplained. It is especially this (rather rare) second category of translated Korean proverbs that serves to fulfill a function similar to the use of baihua: the creation of the illusion of directly transmitted, true-to-life human speech. 2) Translation of Korean vernacular songs. The single instance of this procedure, the Chinese version of a few lines of a Korean boat song,52 is of great importance as it can be seen as an illustration of Pak’s ideas on a discrete Chosŏn style of hanmun literature, Chosŏn p’ung: “Provide local language with [Chinese] characters,53 provide folk songs with [Chinese] rhymes, and beautiful language will naturally form, the true impulse of writing will reveal itself.”54 3) Transliterations of Korean words in sinographs. A fair number of the 22 examples given by Kang Tongyŏp appear in the context of historicalphilological considerations (names of persons, places, and titles).55 In most of the other cases, Korean words are mentioned for lack of Chinese equivalents; these include the boat names quoted above, and kaejari (dog’s seat) for a certain part of the ondol system (the latter being of special interest as it is the only among Kang’s examples that uses hundok 訓讀 vernacular reading of sinographs).56 More puzzling is the insertion of the Korean word musamagwi for “warts,” in addition to the Chinese word, but the medical context makes it probable that this is meant to eliminate ambiguity for Korean readers (Kŭmnyo soch’o 金蓼小抄, II 601).

52 53 54 55 56

127). “A robber does not enter a house with five daughters” is put into the mouth of a Chinese interlocutor in a context where the narrator asks for an explanation; it is therefore most unlikely that this was a Korean proverb at the time. “A stone figure turns around” is not closely related in content to the Korean proverb quoted by Kang; the phrase seems rather individually composed to parallel the following “an iron breast melts completely.” See Kang (1988: 87). Makpuk haengjŏngnok (Record of a Journey through the Northern Desert), I 611. “The local languages of non-Chinese countries usually have sounds but not characters,” P’isŏrok, II 548. “Yŏngch’ŏgo sŏ” 瓔處稿序 (Preface to a Poetry Collection by Yi Tŏngmu 李德懋), Yŏnam chip 7, 107. See also Kang (1988: 85). Nos. 10–12, 14, 15, 17, 21 in Kang (1988: 88f). Kang’s no. 10, a place-name he reads Non’gol, seems to be another example, but han’gŭl travelogues make clear that the place in question was actually called Taptong, thus representing ŭmdok 音讀 transliteration (tap 畓 being a made-in-Korea sinograph [kukcha 國字] anyway).

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Of most interest, however, are the three instances57 where transliterated Korean words appear in direct speech. Shuanglin in his speech contest with the narrator’s servant Changbok at one point exclaims pulssang (“how pitiful!”), duly explained as an expression of compassion. This probably is to remind the reader that he is supposed to speak Korean throughout this dialogue, although his speech is otherwise recorded in baihua (Ilsin sup’il, I 574). The remaining two instances belong to a self-mocking joke about having turned into “three fishes” on the basis of three puns, one of them with baihua homonyms, the other two with Chinese-Korean sound similarities.58 4) Baihua in Koreanized transliteration. Of course, baihua passages are usually written according to Chinese usage, with disregard to matters of pronunciation. In one instance, however, Pak Chiwŏn uses sinographs that in their Korean pronunciation would approximate the original Chinese sound of the phrase in question, thus actually writing Chinese in the ŭmka 音價 (phonetic) variant of hyangch’al script. Again, this occurs in rendering Shuanglin’s words. Talking to the main interpreter in Pak’s presence, Shuanglin inquires whether the latter is a member of the yangban elite. For the sake of discretion, he uses a Chinese pun, yi liang wu qian 一兩五錢 (“one tael five cash”), i.e., (yi) liang ban 一兩半 (“one-and-a-half taels”) = yangban 兩班. Yi liang wu qian (K. il ryang o chŏn) is rendered yi liang yu qian (K. i ryang u ch’yŏn). This “local” vernacular use of the cosmopolitan, venerable Chinese script had been prepared by the preceding sentence. For Shuanglin first had inquired whether Pak Chiwŏn was an illegitimate son (sŏja 庶子), using the following, equally disguised phrasing: “Four dots (si dian me 四点麽)?” As his interlocutor readily understood, he referred to the four dots at the bottom of the character sŏ 庶, thus utilizing the “character dissection” (pozi 破字) tradition put to various uses in Chinese vernacular culture. Although these instances of reference to Korean language material make up only tiny parts of the bulky work, together they serve an important function in diversifying the linguistic codes employed in the yi, making the Korean vernacular to some degree a counterpart of Chinese baihua. Thereby, the contents of the narrative as described above are reinforced on the level of literary technique: the multiplicity of linguistic codes gives voice to the “Babel experience”; 57 58

The Manchu night watchman calling himself toenom would also belong here, but is listed by Kang Tongyŏp under the next heading (Kang 1988: 91). The Chinese title Pak Chiwŏn carries during the journey, bandang 伴當, puns with the Korean pandang/paendaengi, a small ocean fish (Harengula zunasi); due to his knightly outfit, people on the streets supposedly often call him xia 俠 (“knight”), which puns with xia 蝦 (“crab”); and lastly, the Chinese appellation for Korea, Gaoli 高麗, puns with the Korean kaori (“ray”) (P’isŏrok, II 547).

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the juxtaposition of Chinese and Korean vernacular usages (proverbs,59 puns, adaptation of sinographs) underlines the equality of living languages. Linguistic codes and notation systems are chosen according to convenience, often for the sake of the greatest possible verisimilitude, in utter disregard for prevailing purist ideologies. What, then, made Pak Chiwŏn stop short of using han’gŭl itself, if only for portions of his text? 3.2 The Question of Addressee One likely answer would relate to the implied addressees of his writing. Was the yi probably meant to be read by a Chinese readership? This question is all the more pressing as most cases of reference to Korean language material are accompanied by detailed explanations that would have been unnecessary for a Korean readership: We rested for lunch at Caohekou. It has been called Taptong 畓洞 [“paddy hamlet”] by our people, it is said, because it is always marshy. (Author’s commentary: for tap there existed originally no character. The scribes of our East combined the characters for “water” and “field” to create a “combined meaning” character. The pronunciation follows the [similarlylooking] character tap 踏, “to tread”). Togangnok, I 536

It is hardly conceivable that Pak Chiwŏn supposed his Korean readership to require explanation for the rather common, if indigenous, character tap. Still, this commentary might be ascribed to Pak’s special interest in Korean traditions of any kind.60 But why would he have to alert Korean readers to the fact that the characters that render the Chinese “giddy up,” haohu 好護, are read almost like the characters oho 嗚呼 in Korean in order to explain his pun on the plaintive cry oho? (Togangnok, I 536). What necessitates his explanation, in a commentary, of ŏnt’o 諺吐 (i.e., Korean grammatical particles and verb endings used in reading a hanmun text aloud) as kudu 句讀 (“oral reading”) (Sŏnggyŏng chapchi, I 548), and who in Korea would not know what a yangban 59 E.g., the brush conversation record “Sangnu p’iltam” 商樓筆譚 in Ilsin sup’il that so conspicuously features the Korean proverb on the kangch’ŏl dragon (I 553) carries several references to Chinese proverbs on the subsequent page; they are introduced by the Chinese interlocutors with the same ŏn so wi 諺所謂, or ŏn so ch’ing 諺所称, as the Korean proverbs usually are (Ilsin sup’il, I 554). 60 At the beginning of the last diary chapter, Hwan yŏn tojungnok, Pak states that he had “wanted to cultivate Korean Studies (kukhak) in concealment, but could not attain it” (I 636).

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is (Ilsin sup’il, I 573)? All these insertions must be regarded as superfluous if not directed towards a Chinese readership. One might surmise, then, that the yi was written on the way with the expectation of meeting Chinese scholars to whom Pak wanted to have something to show. Plausible as this sounds, we know fairly well that the yi was put into its present shape after Pak’s return;61 the traits of artistic composition mentioned earlier render it unlikely that traces of note-taking during the journey were unwittingly retained. Still, Pak Chiwŏn might have authored the yi with transmission of the text (through later embassies) with a Chinese readership in mind; this would have been a rather common aspiration for a mid-Chosŏn scholar, and even more so for a person as oriented towards linking up with the Chinese scholarly community as he was. Only a couple of years prior to his China journey, a poetry collection of four of his younger friends, the Han’gaek kŏnyŏn chip 韓客巾衍集 (Korean Sojourner’s Collection of the Small Bookcase), had been brought to the attention of Chinese literati, who showed enough interest to even prepare a printed edition.62 However, the book contains countless passages that would have been regarded as seditious by Manchu censorship;63 bringing it to China would have endangered at least some of the Chinese acquaintances mentioned and quoted in the book, and probably even any scholar who would have been found owning it. If Pak had aimed at literary fame in China, he would certainly have exerted more caution. But if an intended Chinese readership is out of the question, why go to explanatory lengths at odds with the needs of the domestic audience? The answer, I believe, is that the implied readership is neither Chinese nor Korean; it is rather a nationally and ethnically undefined, cosmopolitan hanmun readership. By addressing not those whom he could expect to read his book, but an audience that might not be aware of the existence and pronunciation of the character tap, that might not recognize Korean proverbs as such and that might need to be informed about the social context of Korean boat songs, Pak Chiwŏn stresses the universally communicative function of his medium, the

61 62 63

See Kim Myŏngho (1990: 18–27), for a reconstruction of the process of writing and revising that obviously lasted until late in Pak Chiwŏn’s life. The poets were Yi Tŏngmu 李德懋 (1741–1793), Yu Tŭkkong 柳得恭 (1748–1807), Yi Sŏgu 李書九 (1754–1825), and Pak Chega 朴齊家 (1750–1815). The mid-Qing is considered the high tide of Chinese interest in Korean writings; see Pak Hyŏn’gyu (1998: 93). Qi and Chu (1996: 233f.) argue that even Pak’s records on Chinese vernacular literary life would have been subject to censorship in China; to say nothing of his explicit discussions of early Manchu history, the behavior of Manchu princes, and so on.

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ability of hanmun to transcend the boundaries of place and time. The use of hanmun instead of Korean is thus marked as a functional choice, not one of tradition, status, or ideology (i.e., considerations of “truth”). Language Osmosis in the Yŏrha ilgi: The Relationship with the Tamhŏn yŏn’gi and Ŭlbyŏng yŏnhaengnok Functionalizing the choice of hanmun as medium appears as one way out of the dilemma between “truth” and “veracity” noted above, as it moves the grounds for the decision to another plane of reasoning. But at stake in the choice of medium are not only the message this choice implies but, more importantly, the narrative possibilities each of the alternatives entails. The question of respective gains and losses in using hanmun or ŏnmun for literary works is, of course, far too broad to be considered here in detail. But evidence from the yi seems to suggest that Pak Chiwŏn was aware of certain differences between the two literary languages, as far as expressive possibilities developed through literary tradition in each of them were concerned, and that he exerted conscious efforts to combine the strong points of both. In other words, Chosŏn p’ung as put into practice in the yi consists of more than occasional use of Korean language material; “providing the local language with characters” means rather to adapt vernacular literary procedures to the Chinese text. I will try to demonstrate this through reference to the two Peking travelogues of Yŏnam’s close friend Hong Taeyong 洪大容 (1731–1783), his Chinese-language record Tamhŏn yŏn’gi 湛軒燕記 and the vernacular Ŭlbyŏng yŏnhaengnok (uby). Influences of Hong’s Peking memoirs on Pak Chiwŏn have been noted by several scholars;64 however, their inquiries remained bound to questions of content.65 Chinese literati befriended by Hong during his journey feature repeatedly in the yi; and the theory on earth rotation he propounded may be regarded a pivotal element of the worldview put forward in Pak’s magnum opus. As these “topics of speech” (hwaje 話題) are to be found in Hong’s hanmun as well as his ŏnmun writing, they do not allow us to trace the specific influence of either of his travelogues.66 In fact, as far as I can see, direct references to Hong’s 3.3

64 65

Some early examples are Ledyard (1974: 10); Kim T’aejun (1984); So Chaeyŏng (1984: 27ff.). A notable exception is Gari Ledyard (1982: 85–91), who treats the indebtedness of Yŏrha ilgi’s structural originality to the innovative layout of Tamhŏn yŏn’gi. While fully agreeing on this point, I do not share the concomitant judgment on the relative literary value of the two works—the yi certainly has faded no less than the Tamhŏn yŏn’gi, at least if the focus of attention is the text’s intellectual depth rather than the author’s personality. 66 So Chaeyŏng (1984), who specifically treats Ŭlbyŏng yŏnhaengnok, makes no explicit attempts to distinguish influences of this memoir from those of Tamhŏn yŏn’gi.

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written work in the yi are few,67 and refer exclusively to Tamhŏn yŏn’gi. The only explicit quote from Hong Taeyong I could verify is the phrase taegyumo sesimbŏp 大規模細心法 (“great in outlay, delicate in execution,” on the Chinese way of executing construction projects),68 which Pak Chiwŏn was so fond of that he used it several times.69 But if quoting Hong Taeyong was possible for Pak Chiwŏn only with regard to the former’s hanmun memoir, in narrative technique, the yi is actually far more indebted to Ŭlbyŏng yŏnhaengnok. Most of those narrative traits of the yi that estranged Pak’s contemporaries and endeared the text to twentiethcentury readers can be found in the uby as well: attention to quotidian detail, lifelike dialogue, humorous scenes. Thus, while the yi’s inclusiveness with regard to objects of description and literary techniques bordered on the outrageous for a hanmun text, it appears far less path-breaking when read against the background of the uby. Sometimes, the yi even seems to take up an intimate dialogue with the uby. Two noteworthy instances are to be found at important junctures of the journey that are developed into pivotal scenes in the yi: crossing the Yalu River into Qing territory, and arriving at the Liao plain, which is equated to the Chinese heartland (zhongyuan 中原). Their respective treatments of these places are best understood against the background of earlier travelogues. I have consulted four hanmun travelogues from the late seventeenth century onwards (concerning journeys of 1690, 1694, 1712, and 1729), as well as the two kasa 歌詞 on China journeys that existed before Hong’s time (Yŏnhaeng pyŏlgok 燕行別曲; 1694; Sŏjŏng pyŏlgok 西征別 曲; 1695).70 While both kasa accord relatively great weight to these emotionally 67 Of the 25 references Kim T’aejun lists (1984: 136–141), most are of the kind mentioned above. Even in those instances where Kim seems to assume that the yi is quoting the Tamhŏn yŏn’gi, this is not always the case. For instance, his hwaje no. 18 on an inscription in the Jiangnu shrine near Shanhaiguan bears, in my eyes, no relation with the Tamhŏn yŏn’gi at all, except for the fact that both authors visited the same shrine. The inscription is even quoted quite differently in both records (see Tamhŏn yŏn’gi 8 14b, “Yŏllo kiryak” 沿 路記略,” 33; yi, P’isŏrok, II 556). Ŭlbyŏng yŏnhaengnok gives a lengthy, educational explanation of the inscription, but contains no comment on its calligraphic quality, which is Pak Chiwŏn’s topic (Chuhae uby, 127–128). One instance of direct indebtedness of the yi to the uby, which is not mentioned by either Kim or So, might be the Chinese appellation of daughters as “robbers” (Togangnok, I 531), on which a lengthy dialogue in the uby centers (Chuhae uby, 76). 68 Tamhŏn yŏn’gi 8 11b, “Yŏllo kiryak,” 32. 69 The quote first appears when the narrator catches the first glimpses of Qing civilization at the Palisade Gate (Togangnok, I 522). Kim Myŏngho (1990: 96) lists four more borrowings of this phrase. 70 For details, see the list of primary sources.

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important points of passage, the hanmun works are rather reticent about any emotional responses to these places their authors may have experienced. The earliest among the consulted works, Sŏ Munjung’s 徐文重 (1634–1709) Yŏnhaeng illok 燕行日錄, responds with only one sentence to the fact of crossing the border—“this was very apt to arouse feelings of parting” (Sŏ 1962: 262)—and upon reaching Liaodong city makes no mention of the plain at all (Ibid.: 263). Even more illustrative is the complete absence of any markers of emotional response to both places in Yu Myŏngch’ŏn’s 柳命天 (1633–1705) Yŏnhaeng ilgi 燕行日記 (1694), as Yu is considered to have authored Yŏnhaeng pyŏlgok as well; for this latter work has almost nothing to say about the places between the highly marked border stages of the journey.71 Kim Ch’angŏp in his Yŏnhaeng ilgi (1712), which was read by both Hong Taeyong and Pak Chiwŏn, mentions, very briefly, tears of parting at the river crossing (Kim Ch’angŏp 1989: 23); upon approaching Liaodong he comments: “I came out from a valley: an endless plain opened before my eyes. This is the Liaodong plain” (Ibid.: 29). Finally, Kim Sunhyŏp 金舜協 (1693–1732), in his Oudang yŏnhaengnok 五友堂 燕行錄 (1729), devotes a few brush strokes to hinting at the emotional implications these two places have. On the Yalu banks: At this time the sun was covered by clouds and it was about to rain; everybody seemed worried. I entered the same boat with the second ambassador and crossed the river first. [In smaller letters, added later to the manuscript:] My house servant said goodbye in front of the ship; this doubled my feelings.72 And about the Liaodong plain: The mountains ended, and a wide plain opened; Liaodong lay before our eyes. From here on, there were no more mountains, and the plain touched the sky. Old green trees completed the saying: “A wide plain, and under the sky, trees.”73 It appears from these examples that while the emotional impact of these two places on the traveler was expressed in Korean-language kasa, it was not

71 72 73

The river crossing takes three lines of this rather short kasa; after only three more lines, the narrative already turns to the Liaodong plain. See Im Kijung (2001: 125). Kim Sunhyŏp, Oudang yŏnhaengnok (kugyŏk version, 49; wŏnmun, 641). Kim Sunhyŏp, Oudang yŏnhaengnok (kugyŏk version, 70; wŏnmun, 634).

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deemed appropriate to dwell on it in hanmun records.74 In his two records, Hong Taeyong seems to follow this division of labor between the two written languages: while Tamhŏn yŏn’gi speaks only factually about the river crossing (Hong 1974: 30) and makes no mention at all of the Liaodong plain, the uby gives full personal accounts of both. Hong Taeyong uses his vernacular record not only to venture feelings at greater length than hanmun records would allow; the emotions he expresses clearly depart from the conventional mold. If prior travelogues mentioned feelings at crossing the river at all, it was sorrow at parting from the homeland. Hong Taeyong, however, records the following response: All the more as this was the time of the midwinter sun setting over the mountains, to part from the parental home, leave the homeland (koguk) behind and set out for this mission of ten thousand li to Peking could not but overwhelm one’s heart, but to have suddenly realized the dream of my life, and, as a simple scholar, wear military clothes and ride my horse over this land filled me with such joy and chivalrous feelings that unwittingly I stretched out my arms wide, while sitting on the horse, and at last I found words to a tune and sang the following song […]75 In Pak Chiwŏn’s lengthy entry for the day of the river crossing (ca. 3500 characters), both the hopes and fears of the departing travelers are accounted for: Licenciate Chŏng [personal name Kak, adjutant to the ambassador] greeted me with a smile: “Today we will actually cross the river.” No Ijŏm chimed in: “So now we’ll cross over.” I simply confirmed: “Yes, yes.” Now the ten days of our sojourn in the guest house had been boring for all of us, and everybody was eager to set out. Unending rain and the swollen river had added to our impatience and depression. But on this day, at this time it had become impossible not to cross the river, even if one would prefer not to. On the journey ahead of us dampening heat would bathe us in our sweat; home was far removed behind clouds and mountains. At such a juncture it is utterly human to be suddenly filled with 74 It appears from the above examples that hanmun records slowly opened up to records of emotional experience during the eighteenth century. In order to actually put forth such an argument, more of the extant travelogues need to be consulted, especially as this impression seems to contradict Ledyard’s observation of the travel diaries becoming “more public” from the early eighteenth century onward (Ledyard 1974: 6). 75 Ŭlbyŏng yŏnhaengnok, 35–36.

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remorse and thoughts of retirement. What we had called a great journey of our lifetimes, the sights we had always wanted to see at least once, all this was now of secondary importance. When we now said, “Today we will cross the river,” these were not joyful words of heart’s content, but expressed the inevitable. Interpreter Kim Chinha was unable to join us because of old age and illness and parted with polite words; unwittingly, I felt depressed.76 Not the sorrows of parting, but manly resolve and expectations towards the journey ahead are treated here as the “given” which needs be supplemented by a fuller account of complex emotional states. In light of the yŏnhaengnok tradition as sketched above, and the close friendship between the two authors, it seems likely that Pak Chiwŏn’s treatment responds to the uby in further differentiating the latter’s refreshing departure from earlier clichés. Even more conspicuously related are the respective passages on the first encounter with the Liaodong plain. Hong Taeyong’s narration creatively expands traditional attention to this place by rendering entrance into the plain as epiphanic experience: After ten more li we passed Stone Gate Pass. Since crossing the Yalu River, we had travelled among steep mountains and valleys; road and villages were all between the mountains, not different from roads in remote regions of our country. Now, after leaving this pass ten or so li behind, we emerged from the mountains, and a large plain stretched towards the sky, with no more mountains in sight. The faraway woods and the vaguely visible villages half hiding behind clouds were not only a good sight, in fact they dissolved the pressures on one’s heart, and one could completely forget one’s more narrow-minded moods. Looking back at my life, I had been like a turtle in a pot or a frog in a well, and had never imagined that a large place like this existed under heaven. At this time, it rained, and clouds covered the plain, so that one could not gain a distant view, but sitting in my cart I felt as if floating on the sea in a small boat. Really this was a great vista of my life, a wonderful experience for a man. Hong 1997: 69–70

76 Togangnok, I 516. This is the first of a number of literary ritardandos that serve to create the appropriate suspense for an intellectually climactic river crossing scene.

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At the same juncture, the yi features a narrative that for its remarkable content and literary execution has been singled out by scholars as “Hogokchang ki” 號哭場記 (“Record of a Good Place for Crying”). As it is too long to bear quoting in full here, the first lines must suffice to give an impression: Going hurriedly for a few dozen more steps, we stepped out of the foothills. There was a flickering before my eyes, and suddenly a black ball leapt up and down. This day, I came to know that human life has nothing to rely upon; there is no way but to head towards the sky, tread the earth and step forward. I halted my horse to look around, and unwittingly I raised my hand to my forehead and said: “Good-crying-place, here it is possible to cry!” Licentiate Chŏng answered: “Coming upon this singularly great vista, how can you think of crying?” I said: “You are right, and are also wrong […]” yi, Togangnok, I 537

Again, Pak Chiwŏn seems to have made use of a foil laid out by Hong Taeyŏng, only to outdo him in psychological depth and literary grandeur. If this observation holds true, it would imply that Pak Chiwŏn could reach the literary climax that the yi represents to us only by building upon the narrative achievements of the earlier ŏnmun record. In the following lines of “Hogokchang ki,” he identifies the “crying” made possible by the spiritus loci with the spontaneous, purely expressive crying of a newborn baby: As long as the child lives in the womb, it is constricted in the dark and has to crouch in confinement; now one morning it is thrown out into open space, able to extend hand and feet and to expand its breast: then it cannot but sound its true voice and fully express its feelings. Thus, one should take the newborn as teacher and stop using one’s voice for pretensions. ibid.

In view of the fact that the stage of this epiphany is exactly the perceived border between Korean and Chinese cultural spaces, the actual object of exaltation is certainly more than a spot on the map. It is the open space where hanmun and ŏnmun literary traditions and expressive potentials merge—a wide plain where the “Chosŏn wind” may blow as it pleases—that allows the Chosŏn literary man to “sound his true voice and fully express his feelings.”

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Conclusions: What Became of the Chosŏn Wind?

Scrutiny of language discourse and language use in the yi has brought to light the deeply ambivalent situation of this late-Chosŏn literatus. While striving for a literature based on life experience instead of on earlier literature, and situating the truth of (at least some of) the Korean experience in the Korean language, Pak Chiwŏn found both another level of truthfulness and a literary splendor in hanmun writing that Korean language-writing obviously could not offer. He certainly would have agreed to what (most likely after his lifetime) Yu Hŭi wrote in the closing paragraphs of his Ŏnmun chi: When the vernacular is used for literary composition, it cannot communicate as divinely as Chinese writing can. But the reason that the people of today venerate the Chinese script and look down on the vernacular lies not in its deficiencies as a literary language; rather, they have hard-tochange preconceptions about the venerable and the base. Yu Hŭi 2000: 19

Sinitic writing could not only be used to more literary effect due to the lack of a rich literary tradition in Korean, it was also the language of historical memory, concerning both the past and the future: in the experience of late-Chosŏn literati, hanmun alone carried the promise of a text’s ever becoming treasured as part of the common heritage of mankind. These were powerful reasons to keep sirhak scholars from carrying their interest in their native writing system over into literary production in the Korean language. Thus, Pak Chiwŏn chose to combine the best of both worlds by exhibiting instead of covering up his Korean heritage, and by using narrative techniques of various backgrounds to serve his literary needs, including those he may have found mainly in native literary texts. Chosŏn p’ung as a hanmun style did not persist, however; good examples for it seem to stem only from a small group of friends and disciples of Pak Chiwŏn. Certainly, the court’s harsh reaction to the new style, including the rejection of examination papers that seemed to smack of it as well as repeated demands on its exponents to publicly distance themselves from it, played a decisive role in checking its proliferation. But there may have been intrinsic reasons as well. For example, the way out of the diglot dilemma that Yŏnam provided was not a recipe to be used successfully by just anybody; it required much erudition, creativity, and literary sensibility. All this may have precluded Chosŏn p’ung from being implemented on a broader base.

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It is noteworthy, however, that in contrast to the scarcity of such texts before the uby, a handful of vernacular China records were written after the first versions of Yŏrha ilgi began to circulate in 1783:77 1) 1790–1791—Kyŏngsul yŏrha ki by Yi Paekhyŏng 李百亨 (1737–?), secretary to the First Ambassador Sŏ Hosu 徐浩修 (1736–1799, son of Sŏ Myŏngŭng). This recently discovered diary is attached to the second kwŏn of a han’gŭl version of a small part of Yŏrha ilgi.78 2) 1793—Puk yŏn kihaeng by Yi Noch’un 李魯春 (1752–?). 3) 1798—Muo yŏnhaengnok by Sŏ Yumun 徐有聞 (1762–1822). Of these three, two are clearly connected with the yi: Kyŏngsul yŏrha ki by virtue of its place of record, and Muo yŏnhaengnok through references to the work of both Hong and Pak.79 This might be pure circumstance, or it may result from the “wind” of the times rather than from any direct influence of Yŏnam. But it is also possible that his stress on the literary, instead of the social, function of languages served to encourage those who did not and could not aspire to such cosmopolitan glory as Yŏnam himself to express themselves in their own language. In such subtle ways, Yŏnam’s and other sirhak scholars’ revision of language ideology may indeed have stimulated some writings in Korean, even if their impact did not survive the pressures of those with “hard-to-change preconceptions about the venerable and the base.” References

Primary Sources

Hong Taeyong. [1765] 1974. Tamhŏn yŏn’gi [Envoy Diary of Tamhŏn]. In (Kugyŏk) Tamhŏn sŏ. Vol. 6. Seoul: Minjok munhwa ch’ujinhoe. Hong Taeyong. [1765] 1997. (Chuhae) Ŭlbyŏng yŏnhaengnok [Annotated Envoy Diary of 1765]. Annotated by So Chaeyŏng et al. Seoul: T’aehaksa. 77

This is the date used in the preface to the yi’s first diary chapter, Togangnok. It is widely assumed that this preface already contains a reaction to criticism leveled against earlier manuscript versions of part of the text. 78 See Kim T’aejun (2001) for detailed descriptions. I owe a debt of gratitude to Kim Hyŏlcho who provided me with a copy. 79 The Sŏ family, although belonging to a different affiliation, obviously had contact with the “Yŏnam group”: the munjip of Sŏ Yugu, another grandson of Sŏ Myŏngŭng (and son of Sŏ Hosu), contains literary criticisms by Yi Tŏngmu, and carries statements on the derivative character of Korean hanmun writing. See Kang Min’gu (2003: esp. 271). Sŏ Isu 徐理 修 (1749–1802), an illegitimate son, served as Kyujanggak librarian together with Yŏnam’s close friends and followers Pak Chega, Yi Tŏngmu and Yu Tŭkkong.

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Kim Ch’angŏp. [1712] 1989. Nogajae yŏnhaeng ilgi [Diary of the Qing Envoy Nogajae]. Seoul: Minmun’go. Kim Sunhyŏp. [1929] 1987. Oudang yŏnhaengnok [Diary of the Qing Envoy Oudang]. Translated by Ch’oe Kanghyŏn. Seoul: Kukhak charyowŏn. Pak Ch’ihwa, “Chapchi,” Sŏlgye surok [Miscellaneous Notes from the Snow Creek]. Sŏngnam: Han’guk chŏngsin munhwa yŏn’guwŏn, 1995. Pak Chiwŏn. [1967] 1989. Yŏrha ilgi [Jehol Diary], trans. Yi Kawŏn. Seoul: Minmun’go. Pak Chiwŏn. [1932] 2000. Yŏnam chip [Collected Writings of Yŏnam]. Pak Yŏngch’ŏl ed. Seoul: Minjok munhwa ch’ujinhoe (P’yojŏm yŏngin Han’guk munjip ch’onggan, vol. 252). Sŏ Munjung. [1690] 1962. Yŏnhaeng illok [Daily Record of a Qing Envoy]. In Yŏnhaengnok sŏnjip [Collection of Travel Accounts by Envoys to the Qing]. Vol. 2. Sŏnggyun’gwan taehakkyo: Taedong munhwa yŏn’guwŏn. Yu Hŭi. [1823] 2000. “Chŏnja ye,” Ŏnmun chi [On Vernacular Writing]. Reprint. Han­ hŭinsaem Chu Sigyŏng yŏn’gu 13: 159–186 (1–19). Yu Myŏngch’ŏn. [1693–1694] 1962. Yŏnhaeng ilgi [Diary of an Envoy to Qing]. In: Yŏn­ haengnok sŏnjip [Collection of Travel Accounts by Envoys to the Qing]. Vol. 2. Sŏnggyun’gwan taehakkyo: Taedong munhwa yŏn’guwŏn.



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Cho Kyuik. 2002. “Chosŏn hugi kungmun sahaengnok yŏn’gu III: Muo yŏnhaengnok ŭi naeyong kwa ŭimi” [On Late Chosŏn Vernacular Embassy Accounts III: Contents and Significance of the Qing Envoy Account of 1798]. Sungsil ŏmun 18: 269–299. Available online at http://www.riss.kr/search/download/FullTextDownload.do?con trol_no=b9d3567e1acf7737ffe0bdc3ef48d419&p_mat_type=1a0202e37d52c72d&p _submat_type=&fulltext_kind=&t_gubun=undefined&DDODFlag=&redirectURL =%2Fsearch%2Fdownload%2FFullTextDownload.do&loginFlag=1&url_type =&query=%EC%A1%B0%EA%B7%9C%EC%9D%B5+%EC%82%AC%ED%96 %89%EB%A1%9D+). Ch’oe Ch’ŏnjip. 1997. “Yŏrha ilgi ŭi p’yohyŏn pangsik kwa kŭ ŭido” [Modes of Expression and their purpose in Yŏrha ilgi]. Munhak kwa ŏnŏ 18: 185–209. Ch’oe Inja. 1996. “Yŏnam Yŏrha ilgi e nat’anan kŭlssŭgi palsangbŏp ŭi han wŏlli” [One of the Principles of Literary Expression of Ideas in Yŏnam’s Yŏrha ilgi]. Mogwŏn kugŏ kungmunhak 4: 255–272. Eggert, Marion. 1997. “A Borderline Case: Korean travelers’ views of the Chinese border.” In China and Her Neighbours: Borders, Visions of the Other, Foreign Policy 10th to 19th Century, edited by Sabine Dabringhaus, Roderich Ptak and Richard Teschke, 49–78. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Eggert, Marion. 1999. “The Balance of Words: The Sŏp’o manp’il on Language and Literature.” In Language and Literature: Japanese and the Other Altaic Language: Studies

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in Honour of Roy Andrew Miller on his 75th birthday, edited by Karl H. Menges and Nelly Naumann, 67–90. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Hwang P’aegang. 2000. “Han’guk kojŏn sosŏl kwa ijung ŏnŏ” [Korean Classical Fiction and Diglossia]. Kungmunhak nonjip 17: 113–129. Im Kijung, ed. 2001. Yŏnhaeng kasa yŏn’gu [A Study of China Travelogue kasa]. Seoul: Asea munhwasa. Im Kijung, ed. 2002. Yŏnhaengnok yŏn’gu [A Study of China Travelogues]. Seoul: Ilchisa. Kang Min’gu. 2003. “P’ungsŏk kohyŏp chip ŭl t’onghae pon 18-segi huban munhak pip’yŏng yŏn’gu” [Literary Criticism of the Late Eighteenth Century as Seen through Sŏ Yugu’s Collection of Classical Learning]. Tongbang hanmunhak 25: 267–299. Kang Tongyŏp. 1988. Yŏrha ilgi yŏn’gu [A Study of the Yŏrha ilgi]. Seoul: Ilchisa. Kim Hyŏlcho. 2002. Pak Chiwŏn ŭi sanmun munhak [Prose Literature of Pak Chiwŏn]. Seoul: Sŏnggyun’gwan taehakkyo taedong munhwa yŏn’guwŏn. Kim Hyŏnmi. 2002. “18 segi chŏnban yŏnhaeng ŭi sajŏk hŭrŭm kwa yŏnhaengnok ŭi chakchach’ŭng sigo” [First Inquiries into the Historical Flow of China Travels and the Authors of China Travelogues in the Early Eighteenth Century]. Han’guk kojŏn yŏn’gu 8: 109–130. Kim Myŏngho. 1990. Yŏrha ilgi yŏn’gu [A Study of the Yŏrha ilgi]. Seoul: Ch’angjak kwa pip’yŏngsa. Kim T’aejun. 1984. “Yŏrha ilgi rŭl irunŭn Hong Taeyong ŭi hwajedŭl” [Hong Taeyong’s Topics of Speech in the Yŏrha ilgi]. Tongbang hakchi 44: 135–156. Kim T’aejun. 2001. “Yŏrha ilgi han’gŭlbon ch’urhyŏn ŭi ttŭt” [The Significance of the Discovery of a Han’gŭl Version of the Yŏrha ilgi]. Minjok munhaksa yŏn’gu 19: 282–295. Kim Tongsŏk. 2003. “Yŏrha ilgi ŭi inmul hyŏngsanghwa kibŏp” [Methods of Literary Characterisation in Yŏrha ilgi]. Tongbang hanmunhak 25: 239–265. King, Ross. 2015. “Ditching ‘diglossia’: Describing Ecologies of the Spoken and Inscribed in Pre-modern Korea.” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 15(1): 1–19. Ko Misuk. 2003. Yŏrha ilgi, usŭm kwa yŏksŏl ŭi yuk’waehan sigonggan [Yŏrha ilgi, Delightful Space and Time of Laughter and Paradox]. Seoul: Kŭrinbi. Ledyard, Gari. 1974. “Korean Travelers in China over Four Hundred Years, 1488–1887.” In Occasional Papers on Korea, 2, edited by James B. Palais, 1–42. Seattle: Joint Committee on Korean Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. Ledyard, Gari. 1982. “Hong Taeyong and his Peking memoir.” Korean Studies 6: 63–103. Legge, James. 1983. Zhong Ying dui zhao Si shu = The Four Books. Taibei: Wen hua du shu gong si. Pak Hyŏn’gyu. 1998. Chungguk myŏng mal ch’ŏng ch’o chosŏn sisŏnjip yŏn’gu [Anthologies of Korean Poetry from Late Ming and Early Qing China]. Seoul: Taehaksa.

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Pak Kisŏk. 1986. “‘Hojil’ ŭi chakcha” [The Author of “Hojil”]. In Han’guk munhaksa ŭi chaengjŏm [Controversies in the History of Korean Literature], edited by Chang Tŏksun et al., 343–355. Seoul: Chimmundang. Pollock, Sheldon. 1998. “The Cosmopolitan Vernacular.” Journal of Asian Studies 57(1): 6–37. Qi Yuan, and Chu Dakang. 1996. “Cong Rehe riji kan qingdai tongsu wenzi de zhuanbo” [The Transmission of Qing Vernacular Writings as Seen through Yŏrha ilgi]. Chung Han inmun kwahak yŏn’gu 1(1): 233–238. Riemenschnitter, Andrea. 1998. China zwischen Himmel und Erde. Literarische Kosmographie und nationale Krise im 17. Jh. [China between Heaven and Earth: Literary Cosmography and National Crisis in the Seventeenth Century]. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. So Chaeyŏng. 1984. “Ŭlbyŏng yŏnhaengnok ŭi han yŏn’gu” [A Study of the Ŭlbyŏng yŏnhaengnok]. Sungsil ŏmun 1(1): 5–33. Yi Chaesŏn. 1975. Han’guk tanp’yŏn sosŏl yŏn’gu [A Study of the Korean Short Story]. Seoul: Ilchogak. Yi Chongju. 2001. Pukhakp’a ŭi insik kwa munhak: sangdaejuŭijŏk sigak kwa yŏksŏl ŭi mihak [Ideas and Literature of the pukhakp’a: Relativist Perspective and Aesthetics of Paradox]. Seoul: T’aehaksa. Yi Hyŏnsik. 1995. “Yŏnam Pak Chiwŏn munjang ŭi susajŏk yangsang e taehan koch’al” [On Narrativity in Yŏnam Pak Chiwŏn’s Writings]. Tongbang hakchi 87: 141–181. Yi Kangyŏp. 2003. “Yŏrha ilgi ŭi uŏnmunhakchŏk haesŏk” [An Allegorical Interpretation of the Yŏrha ilgi]. Kukche ŏmun 27: 253–279. Yi Sanghyŏk. 1998. “Ŏnmun kwa kugŏ ŭisik. Chungse wa sirhak sidae ŭi hunmin chŏngŭm kwa ŏnmun kaenyŏm ŭi pigyo rŭl chungsim ŭro” [Vernacular Writing and Notions of Mother Tongue: A Comparison of the Concept of the Korean Alphabet and Vernacular Writing during the Middle Ages and the Period of Empiricism]. Kugŏ kungmunhak 121: 55–73. Yi Sanghyŏk. 1999. “Munja t’ongyong kwa kwallyŏndoen munja ŭisik ŭi t’ongsijŏk pyŏnch’ŏn yangsang” [Diachronic Change in Notions on Writing Systems in Regard to Their Common Use]. Han’guk ŏhak 10: 233–256.

Chapter 15

Late Chosŏn Korean Intellectual Discourse on the Discrepancy between Speech and Writing Ahn Daehoe 1

Introduction

Since the end of Japanese colonial rule in 1945, Koreans have been able to achieve a certain congruity between speech and writing in their language practice (ŏnŏ saenghwal 言語生活). By contrast, for more than a millennium before the creation of the Korean alphabet (i.e., hunmin chŏngŭm 訓民正音, now known in South Korea as han’gŭl), a complex form of diglossia had existed on the Korean Peninsula, where people used vernacular Korean in their everyday speech, while for inscription, government organs and the elite class adopted sinography for writing orthodox Literary Sinitic or for borrowed-graph transcriptions (e.g., idu 吏讀). With the creation of the alphabet in the mid-fifteenth century, Koreans for the first time had a native vernacular writing system. Its usage, however, was limited largely to women and commoners, while Literary Sinitic remained the official written language for the government and the yangban elite, and idu inscription was used by government clerks, until 1910 when Korea became a Japanese colony (Kim Sŭrong 2005). The Korean language in its various dialectal forms was the spoken language of all Koreans throughout the Chosŏn era, yet their literary activities varied vastly according to class and gender. In the first place, the great majority of people remained illiterate, unable to read and write even after the invention of the alphabet. The use of the alphabet as a vernacular writing system was largely limited to women from the upper class. Hence it was this small population of literate women who first achieved a semblance of unity between speech and writing (ŏnmun ilch’i 言文一致) in their language life. Meanwhile, the educated male elite almost exclusively used Literary Sinitic as their written language, hence their language life was characterized by a disconnect between speech and writing. Throughout the course of Korean history until the late nineteenth century, Korean linguistic life was characterized by this complex mix of spoken language vs. multiple inscriptional practices, a source of linguistic distress that must have stimulated debate on the question of the unity between speech and

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163

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writing. This is not to say that Koreans never developed a writing system to record their vernacular language. In fact, since at least the time of the Unified Silla kingdom (668–935), Koreans used writing systems like idu 吏讀 (“clerk readings”) and hyangch’al 鄕札 (“local letters”) to represent Korean grammatical particles and words by borrowing sinographs. Nonetheless, these “borrowed graph” orthographies (ch’aja p’yogi-pŏp 借字表記法) were clumsy and inefficient means for recording vernacular Korean, hence their usage was limited to composing legal and administrative documents, or serving as reading aids for texts in Literary Sinitic. It was not until the mid-fifteenth century that Koreans developed a vernacular script called hunmin chŏngŭm 訓民正音 (correct sounds for teaching the people) to write effectively in Korean. Even after the invention of the alphabet, however, Literary Sinitic was not ousted from its privileged position as the only written language for government documents and high literature. The Korean alphabet was elevated to the status of “national script” (kungmun 國文) only following the modern Kabo Reforms in 1894. Thus, Korean endeavors to achieve unity of speech and writing began little more than a century ago, and the long years of pronounced diglossia and digraphia characterized by a polarization of Korean speech and sinographic writing persisted until quite recently. By the time of late Chosŏn it appears that the linguistic problems caused by the disjunction between speech and writing had emerged as an important agenda item in discussions of the country’s language life. Furthermore, there emerged a growing national awakening to the value of the native, vernacular language as an effective vehicle for literary works amid the entrenched establishment of Literary Sinitic as the universal language of government and literature.1 This is not to say that the linguistic and inscriptional landscape of late Chosŏn Korea marked the beginning of a tumultuous transition from the “sinographic cosmopolis” (hancha kongyu ch’e 漢字共有體) to a vernacular national community, which came about only at the turn of the twentieth century in the case of Korea (see Hwang Hoduk’s chapter in this volume, and Hwang Hodŏk 2005). It should be noted that from the seventeenth century onward discussions of Korea’s complex language situation and suggestions for reforms thereof figured prominently in discussions among the literati class of intellectual and practical desiderata. Yet, in sharp contrast to the great wealth of studies of the ideas and activities surrounding language reform introduced after the modern

1 For the connection between cosmopolitan and vernacular languages, see Pollock (2006).

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Kabo Reforms of 1894,2 pre-1894 language reform debates and proposals have received only scant scholarly attention.3 Therefore, this chapter aims to supplement the history of Korean debate on language reform, including the unity of speech and writing, by exploring the relevant language discourses conducted by Korean intellectuals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 2

Discourses on the Unity of Speech and Writing in Korea before the Seventeenth Century

As there had been a long-felt need for a phonetic script prior to the invention of the alphabet, there were discourses pertaining to the unity of speech and writing that preceded those advanced by seventeenth-century Korean intellectuals. It is necessary then to examine those discourses first. The need for a phonetic script was expressly articulated in the creation of hunmin chŏngŭm in the mid-fifteenth century, but what were Koreans’ attitudes toward the obvious incongruity between their spoken and written languages prior to the advent of the Korean alphabet? Due to the scarcity of extant materials that treat Koreans’ awareness of and proposed solutions to language problems, language policies, and communication with foreigners, the question remains largely unanswered. Nevertheless, it seems highly unlikely that pre-alphabetic Koreans had no notion that their written language (i.e., hanmun/Literary Sinitic) did not align with the vernacular language they used in everyday life. There is little doubt that ancient and medieval Koreans clearly recognized the problem of the imported foreign language—how clumsy and ineffective it was to write the Korean vernacular language using borrowed sinographs. In the case of Silla, the elite used hanmun for their literary activities, yet they devised a sort of localized writing method, called hyangch’al 鄕札 (“local letters”) using sinographs. Therefore, though the literate elite of Silla are mute on the problem in surviving documents, it may be safely conjectured that they were distressed by the disconnect between their speech and writing. This guess is vindicated when we read the statement made by Ch’oe Haenggwi 崔行歸 (dates unknown), an early Koryŏ scholar, who translated Buddhist Master Kyunyŏ’s native Korean songs (hyangga 鄕歌) inscribed with 2 For language and script, and unity of speech and writing in the formative stage of the Korean nation-state, see Hwang (2005). 3 For a study of the Hunmin chŏngŭm and Korean classical literature from the perspective of the unity of speech and writing, see Chŏng (1991: 13–38).

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hyangch’al 鄕札 into Literary Sinitic. Ch’oe’s statement in his preface to the translation clearly shows that he was acutely aware of the linguistic differences between Literary Sinitic and the Korean language: What is regrettable is that while talented and renowned Koreans can appreciate Chinese poetry, scholars and sages in China cannot understand our native poetry. Furthermore, while Chinese graphs lie spread out like Indra’s net and are easy for Koreans to read, sinographs in the Korean style of transcription, the hyangch’al, run together as in a Sanskrit book and are difficult for the Chinese to decipher. Though Chinese works from the Liang and Liu Sung, as fine as round and square pieces of jade, have reached Korea, the songs of Silla, as beautiful as embroidered brocade, are seldom transmitted to China. This is regrettable indeed! Ch’oe Haenggwi 1986: 59–614

Ch’oe Haenggwi made a clear distinction between Literary Sinitic poetry and the Korean (i.e., Sillan) songs inscribed in hyangch’al. It is important to note that Ch’oe’s regret was not caused by any lack of beautiful songs from Silla written in the vernacular, but by the inaccessibility of such Korean songs to contemporary Chinese readers due to the clumsy and ineffective system of transcribing vernacular Korean, namely, hyangch’al. Thus, his frustration with the limitations of hyangch’al can be construed as the first documented instance of Korean recognition of the problems stemming from the disjunction between their spoken and written languages. Great Master Kyunyŏ 均如大師 (923–973), a learned monk-poet who composed Buddhist devotional poems in vernacular hyangch’al, stated in his preface that “If one does not express oneself in the common language, one cannot make known the path of universal salvation” (Kyunyŏ 1986: 44–45). Likewise, he was committed to the vernacular language as an effective medium for communicating with the common people. As a devoted evangelist of Buddhist teachings, Kyunyŏ found the value of vernacular songs (sanoega 詞腦歌) in teaching them orally and encouraging the congregation to chant and memorize them (Lee 2003: 81). Thus, it seems highly likely that his choice of hyangch’al inscription to popularize Buddhism pointed to a unity of speech and writing in favor of popular usage. 4 “而所恨者，我邦之才子名公，解吟唐什，彼土之鴻儒碩德，莫解鄕謠．矧復唐文如帝 網交羅，我邦易讀，鄕札似梵書連布，彼土難諳！使梁宋珠璣，數托東流之水，秦韓 錦繡，希隨西傳之星，其在扃通，亦堪嗟痛． ” The English translation, with modifications, is from Peter H. Lee (2003: 69).

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Following Ch’oe Haenggwi’s precedent of translating native Korean songs into Literary Sinitic, some Koryŏ writers attempted the same with Koryŏ songs. Notably, Yi Chehyŏn 李齊賢 (1287–1367) and Min Sap’yŏng 閔思平 (1296–1359) translated some folk songs current in late Koryŏ, entitled So akpu 小樂府 (A Small Collection of Folk Songs). Their translation of Korean songs into cosmopolitan Literary Sinitic can be viewed as a cultural act to legitimize their indigenous literature. But it is easy enough to surmise that the Koryŏ translators faced the same dilemma that Ch’oe Haenggwi had lamented when translating their native literature into a foreign language. This issue resurfaced among late-Chosŏn writers, as will be shown below. It was only after the creation of the Korean alphabet in 1443 that Koreans were able to record accurately the sounds and words of their own language and thus gained the means to lead a language life based on the unity of speech and writing. King Sejong 世宗 (r. 1418–1450), who personally led the effort behind this creation of one of the most remarkable writing systems ever devised in the world, described his motivation for inventing the alphabet as follows: The sounds of our country’s language are different from those of the Middle Kingdom and are not confluent with the sounds of characters. Therefore, among the ignorant people, there have been many who, having something they want to put into words, have in the end been unable to express their feelings. I have been distressed because of this, and have newly designed twenty-eight letters, which I wish to have everyone practice at their ease and make convenient for their daily use.5 King Sejong succinctly summarized the predicament suffered by common people who had hitherto no means of written communication other than the Literary Sinitic that had been reserved for the educated elite. Though it is hard to deny that one important motivation for creating the alphabet was also to design a system of letters to accurately transcribe and gloss Literary Sinitic and sinographs (Chŏng Taham 2009: 269–305), more importantly the alphabet was intended to provide the common people with a system of writing to express the sounds of their speech in daily life. Hunmin chŏngŭm as designed by King Sejong and his scholarly ministers after years of painstaking research into contemporary East Asian linguistic theories and practices was a phonetic writing system completely disengaged from the Chinese script, permitting Koreans to write out almost perfectly the sounds of their vernacular language (Yi 2001: 118–120). Thus, the Korean alphabet laid the linguistic foundation for 5 Translation from Ledyard (1998: 170).

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succeeding generations of Koreans to achieve unity between their speech and writing. It is well known that Chinese words began to enter the Korean lexicon en masse from the Unified Silla (668–935) and continuing through the Koryŏ (918–1392) period. By the time of the creation of the alphabet in the midfifteenth century, however, these Sino-Korean words were hardly a unified, consistent body of pronunciations (Ledyard 1998: 94–95). Hence, it is very likely that one important practical motive behind the creation of hunmin chŏngŭm was to provide a phonetic writing system to transcribe standardized pronunciations of Chinese (Sino-Korean) vocabulary then used by Koreans (Yi 2001: 154–161). Thus, it was by no means King Sejong’s intent to diminish the use of Literary Sinitic or sinographs in favor of the vernacular script; rather, he desired to devise a native writing system that could effectively embrace the foreign language (i.e., “Chinese” in various guises), that had come to constitute such an integral part of the Korean language. The invention of the Korean alphabet script carved out a new literary space in Korean written culture, accessible to common people in general and to women in particular. It coexisted along with idu and Literary Sinitic—the latter remaining as the hegemonic official written language in government administration and literature throughout the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1910). Still, it should be remembered that the spread of the alphabet made it possible for Korean non-elite classes, including women and even slaves, to participate in the literary life of the country, as they could finally access a means of communication and expression (Ko et al. 2003: 281–282). The popularity of the Korean alphabet among commoners not only pointed to the success of King Sejong’s language policy, but also refueled the debate over the unity of speech and writing among language reformers in late Chosŏn. 3

Discourses on the Unity of Speech and Writing among Seventeenth-Century Korean Intellectuals

From the seventeenth century onward, the Korean alphabet was increasingly used as a vehicle for literary works to be read by a growing number of common readers. Still, the Sinitic-oriented elite held on to Literary Sinitic as the one true and unchangeable means of reading and writing literature. With the increase in vernacular works and their readership, however, a minority of writers began to advance their views on the unity of speech and writing beginning in the seventeen century, though more extended and deepened discussions of the issue came only in the eighteenth century. The vernacular Korean literature

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developed in such popularly oriented genres as folk songs and novels was inscribed using the alphabet. Thus, it was only natural that writers and poets who were interested in such popular literature were the first to voice their views on the unity of speech and writing. For example, Kim Manjung 金萬重 (1637–1692) declared as follows: The Korean kasa poems by Chŏng Ch’ŏl, such as “Song of a Journey to Kwandong” (“Kwandong pyŏlgok” 關東別曲) and two “Songs of Thinking of a Beautiful Woman” (“Sa miin kok” 思美人曲), are comparable to [Chinese] Qu Yuan’s 屈原 (ca. 340–278 bce) “Encountering Sorrow” (“Lisao” 離騷). And yet, since it is hard to translate those [Korean] songs into Sinitic, they have only been transmitted through the mouths of singers, or written down in the vernacular language. The “Song of a Journey to Kwandong” has in fact been translated into a heptasyllabic Sinitic poem, but it is hardly satisfactory…. Abandoning our own unique language, we write poetry and prose in a foreign tongue. However much we might try to approximate it, it is like parroting another’s words. Songs chanted by woodcutters and women carrying water, however simple and vulgar, cannot be discussed on the same level with poetry and prose of scholar officials in terms of their truthfulness or falsehood. Kim Manjung 2010: 664–6676

In appraising the works of Chŏng Ch’ŏl 鄭澈 (1536–1593), a master of the Korean kasa 歌辭 genre, Kim Manjung put forth a revolutionary view on the importance of vernacular literature. He advocated the intrinsic values of vernacular Korean literature, even though it represented the simple nature and emotions of the common people, compared with the highly mannered literature written in Literary Sinitic by the educated elite. His sharp criticism of the poetry and prose of sinophilic scholar officials went to the point of denouncing them as a sort of foreign-language imitation. As Kim charged, Korean upper-class writers had become so accustomed to writing in Literary Sinitic that it had not occurred to them as ironic or paradoxical that their spoken language had not been represented in their literary life. Kim Manjung, in fact, brought a serious charge against Korean literati writers: 6 “松江關東別曲，前後思美人歌，乃我東之離騷．而以其不可以文字寫之，故惟樂 人輩口相授受，或傳以國書而已．人有以七言詩飜關東曲而不能佳．… 今我國詩 文，捨其言而學他國之言，設令十分相似，只是鸚鵡之人言．而閭巷間樵童汲婦咿 啞而相和者，雖曰鄙俚，若論眞贋，則固不可與學士大夫所謂詩賦者同日而論．” A portion of the English translation is quoted from Lee (2003: 326). For more on Kim Manjung and his views of writing and literary, see the chapter by Gregory Evon in this volume.

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that they did not recognize writing in Literary Sinitic as ill-fitted for expressing vernacular Korean experiences. Thus, his high praise of Chŏng Ch’ŏl’s Korean kasa poems as equal to Qu Yuan’s “Encountering Sorrow” was meant as a clarion call to Korean literati to take vernacular songs and poems as their poetic models. Kim Manjung was urging that Korean poetry be written in vernacular Korean in order to capture the true values of Korean sensibilities. His advocacy of vernacular literature was epochal in that Korean elite writers for centuries, stretching from Ch’oe Haenggwi of the early Koryŏ to the seventeenth century, had not given any serious thought to the possible limitations and defects of the literature they composed in Literary Sinitic. Thus, Kim Manjung’s awakening to the values of vernacular literature opened up a new path reexamining the language of Korean literature in the context of the unity of speech and writing. While Kim Manjung expressed his preference for the spoken Korean language as the language of Korean poetry, some intellectuals like Yu Hyŏngwŏn 柳馨遠 (1622–1673) chose to point out the problems of spoken Korean arising from the fact that Sino-Korean pronunciations of sinographs differed from those in contemporary spoken Chinese. Yu raised the issue of language as part of a broader discussion of Chosŏn institutions in his Collected Works of Yu Hyŏngwŏn (Pan’gye surok 磻溪隨錄): In our country, speech and writing have long been divorced from each other. Hence, the terms of not only state administration and classical learning but also the names and quantities of things are difficult to communicate properly. In diplomatic contexts with China, whenever important matters of state are discussed, everything has to be left to the interpreters to handle. How can this situation be a matter of small importance? … In the past, our King Sejong ordered all the names of things to be pronounced in spoken Chinese, so there still remain those who learn such Chinese pronunciations. Yet, in everyday speech native Korean pronunciations have been used ever since. Therefore, now that only a minority of people speak Chinese amid a vast majority of Korean-speaking people, spoken Chinese has fallen into disuse without making any changes to the Korean pronunciation of Chinese. At this point there are absolutely no civil officials who are able to understand spoken Chinese. If you want to follow the intentions of our former king [Sejong] and convert [us] barbarians to Chinese culture, no matter how difficult it may be to completely change the speech of the common people, [you could still have] people pronounce all sinographs in the spoken Chinese manner. When the sons of scholars study the classics [in Literary Sinitic]

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and their vernacular exegeses [ŏnhae], you could have them use the Correct Rhymes of the Hongwu Emperor (Hongwu zhengyun 洪武正韻) for reciting the texts. As a result, the vocalizations of the sinographs would become identical, even while the languages [Korean and Chinese] remain different. Yu Hyŏngwŏn 1958: 4977

Yu Hyŏngwon’s distress arising from the disparity between living speech and written language in Korea was widely shared by succeeding generations of scholars in the eighteenth century. For example, Yu Manju 兪晩柱 (1755– 1788) also lamented that “in Korea speech and writing are separated from each other.”8 While Kim Manjung discussed the proper language of literary works, Yu Hyŏngwŏn was concerned over the inefficiencies caused by the disparity between speech and writing in handling state affairs. He regretted that in Korean language life, Literary Sinitic was used in designating the names of institutions and things, as well as in conducting state affairs and diplomacy with China, whereas in daily speech Korean language was used. In order to manage domestic affairs and carry out diplomatic affairs with China more efficiently, he argued for the unity of speech and writing. If a wholesale change in people’s speech (from Korean to Chinese) was too difficult, he recommended Chinese-style pronunciations of the sinographs and sinographically-derived vocabulary used in Korea. Yu Hyŏngwŏn’s approach to the question of the unity of speech and writing was completely opposed to that of Kim Manjung, in that he proposed to make speech correspond to writing rather than vice versa. In other words, instead of bringing spoken language and written language closer to each other, Yu wanted to substitute Sinitic vocabulary for vernacular Korean words, and to replace Sino-Korean-style vocalizations of sinographs with Chinese pronunciations. His attitude toward Chinese language was in a sense similar to that of King Sejong. Like Sejong, Yu also assumed that a complete unity between the Korean and Chinese languages was out of the question because of their 7 “本國言語文字，旣爲二途．政事經學以及事物名數，多礙滯難通．至於事大之 際，國家機務，徒憑舌人，是豈小事哉？ （中略）昔我莊憲大王， （中略）又令凡百名 物，皆稱以漢語，至今尚有傳習者．然日用言語，仍其鄕談，故眾楚一齊之勢，不能 漸變， 而終至還廢， 今則文官之通漢語者， 絶無矣． 如欲追先王之志， 而變夷爲夏， 卽民 間言語，縱難一變，凡諸文字，皆從華音，士子所習經書諺解，一以洪武譯音，使之 講誦．如此則言語雖異，字音則同也．” Translation adapted from Palais (1996: 640). 8 “東方言語文字，分爲二途.” Yu Manju, Hŭmyŏng 欽英, sixth ch’aek, in Kyujanggak charyo ch’ongsŏ (Collection of Materials from Kyujanggak Library, 1997).

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fundamental differences, but he nonetheless believed that both countless vernacular Korean words as well as Sino-Korean-style pronunciations of sinographs could be replaced with Chinese vocabulary pronounced in Chinese and Chinese pronunciations, respectively. Yu considered such Chinese-oriented changes in Korean lexicon and pronunciation as a form of substantial progress toward unity of speech and writing, and mentioned that “such changes may well be counted as a halfway point toward success in the matter of speech and writing.”9 It is unlikely that Yu Hyŏngwŏn’s language policy was intended for the entire population of Koreans. His methods for effecting the unity of speech and writing were targeted primarily at government officials, and, to a lesser degree, to educated yangban intellectuals. Thus, he was well aware of the enormous difficulties that would be faced by any unrealistic attempt to convert the common people’s language once and for all to an entirely different language. The aim of Yu Hyŏngwŏn’s proposals for even a limited form of unity or approximation of Korean and Chinese was to raise Korea’s level of civilization. For him, Chinese civilization, including its language, was the universal and cosmopolitan standard, so it was only natural for him to try to bring Korean civilization—including its language—closer to Chinese models. In fact, Yu’s proposal for changes in the Korean language would not have appeared outlandish or reprehensible to the contemporary educated Korean elite who conceded the inferior position of Korea vis à vis China in political and cultural relations. As a result, his proposal for replacing Korean words and Sino-Korean vocalizations of sinographs with Chinese terms and pronunciations found an attentive audience, especially among sirhak 實學 (“Practical Learning”) scholars and reformers in the eighteenth century and onward, who had a keen interest in addressing the real problems of the country, and in coming up with practical solutions to them. 4

Discourses on the Unity of Speech and Writing among Eighteenth-Century Korean Intellectuals

As Korean intellectuals in the eighteenth century extended their interests to practical areas including language and writing (Kim Tongjun 2007; Yi Kunsŏn 2007; Pak Sumil 2007), the issue of reconciling speech and writing received renewed attention (Cho 2009: 177–202). As a result, deep interest in the Korean vernacular script found expression in many scholarly debates and publications. 9 “如此則其於言語，亦思過半矣” (Yu Hyŏngwŏn, op. cit.).

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With regard to the unity of speech and writing, questions like the following came to the fore. First, many scholars of the eighteenth century were concerned with standard pronunciations and meanings for sinographically derived words used extensively in Korea. Their distress lay with the Sino-Korean-style pronunciation of sinographic vocabulary, which they perceived as hindering communication with Chinese, on the one hand. On the other hand, they were dismayed by the fact that identical things were named differently in the spoken and written languages used in Korea. Many proposed a solution similar to that of Yu Hyŏngwŏn, who had argued for the adoption of spoken Chinese pronunciations and vocabulary at the expense of Sino-Korean-style pronunciations and vernacular Korean words. Phonological studies such as Yi Yonghyu’s 李用休 (1708–1782) Chaun pyŏnhae 字韻辨解 (Exegesis on Sinograph Rhymes) and Yi Kwangsa’s 李匡 師 (1705–1777) “Oŭmjŏng sŏ” 五音正序 (Preface to Standardization of the Five Sounds) addressed the question of how to identify pronunciation with writing. For example, Yi Yonghyu argued that “in the earliest times there had existed only sounds with no sinographs, yet with the passage of time sinographs began to emerge to record sounds. Since sinographs were produced originally to record sounds, it is possible therefore to record all sounds in the world using sinographs” (Yi Yonghyu 1750).10 Yi Yonghyu’s phonological study of Chinese is interesting because he tried to assess the potential of sinographs—which had been hitherto considered to represent only meanings—to represent sounds as well. He argued that Sanskrit had gained wider currency among other countries than Chinese because the former had “seven sound diagrams” (ch’irŭmdo 七音圖) which allowed it to transcribe various languages. His evaluation of sinographs in terms of their facility for representing the sounds of spoken language placed this otherwise sanctified language in a comparative and relativized perspective, and created a space for appreciating the excellence of the Korean alphabet in its role as a phonetic script to represent the sounds of the Korean language. In order to produce correct pronunciations of sinographs, Yi Kwangsa wrote a rhyme book—Standardization of the Five Sounds (Oŭmjŏng 五音正)—and said in it that “In our country, speech and writing are not in agreement. Writing should follow that of China. Yet in China ancient music ceased to exist long ago, hence the sounds of the country’s language are different from province to province. Since everybody claims that his pronunciations are the correctly 10 “盖上古有音無字，中古以字通音，字本爲聲而制也．然則天地間一切諸聲，皆可 以字通之． ”

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transmitted ones, there cannot exist a standard system of pronunciations” (Yi Kwangsa n.d.). He proposed that since the rhyme dictionaries in China were hardly unified, providing no standards for pronunciation, there was no choice but to adopt as the standards the pronunciations defined in the ŏnhae editions of Buddhist texts published with Korean explanations and pronunciations in early Chosŏn. It is noteworthy that the above two scholars attempted to understand language and writing objectively, and showed reservations when it came to dogmatic acceptance of absolute and timeless standards for Chinese pronunciation, in favor of approximating Sino-Korean pronunciations to contemporary Chinese pronunciations. In achieving unity between speech and writing, some scholars focused on the specific area of indicating things and affairs (samul 事物), as quoted below: [At first] written indications of things and affairs were based on sounds, thus using sounds to indicate things and affairs. Every single thing and affair came to be referred to by way of sinographs based on sound. Therefore, in ancient books sinographs [muncha 文字] are referred to as speech [ŏn 言]. For Chinese people, speech and [a system of] sinographs are one and the same. Therefore, by recognizing a sinograph’s shape its pronunciation and meaning can be known. For Koreans, however, speech and [the system of] sinographs are different from each other. Therefore, meaning is explained and pronunciation clarified through local speech [pangŏn 方言], before a sinograph’s shape can be identified. This is because [language life in Korea] is cumbersome and difficult. Chŏng Yunyong 1985: 3–511

Chŏng Yunyong 鄭允容 (1792–1865) compiled a dictionary of sinographs for clarifying the names of things and affairs, and in its preface pointed to the problems in Korean language life arising from confusing references to them. He simply accepted the unfounded premise that both ancient and contemporary Chinese languages had achieved unity in speech and writing, perhaps to bring into relief the disjunction between speech and writing in Korea. As a consequence, terms for things in Korea were expressed both with vernacular Korean names and via sinographically-derived Sino-Korean terms as well. In many cases, the terms for things in Korean and Chinese did not match, 11 “書契之作也，以言爲字，言以道事指物，而事與物各有其字．故古書謂字曰 言．華人言與字一，故識其字體而音義具焉．東人言與字二，故以方言釋義辨 音，而復求之字體，所以煩而難也． ”

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or confusion arose because of incongruence between the names and things, entailing confusion in Korean language life. In the face of such problems, a number of glossaries and dictionaries that categorized the names of things and traced their etymological origins were produced in late Chosŏn by scholars like Hwang Yunsŏk 黃胤錫 (1729–1791), Yi Tŏngmu 李德懋 (1741–1793), Yu Tŭkkong 柳得恭 (1748–1807), Yi Sŏgu 李書 九 (1754–1825), Yi Kyugyŏng 李圭景 (1788–?), and Yu Hŭi 柳僖 (1773–1837). In an effort to promote standardized names for things, a number of “categorized glossaries” (mulboryu 物譜類) that defined terms for things in sinographs were produced; for example, Kwang chaemulbo 廣才物譜 (Extended Catalogue of Things) and Chaemulbo 才物譜 (Catalogue of Things), to cite only two (Sim 1997). Chŏng Yagyong 丁若鏞 (1762–1836) aptly pointed to the longstanding need for compiling such glossaries, as quoted below: In China speech and writing are unified. To call a thing by name is to write it, and vice versa. Therefore, there is no discrepancy between names and their objects, and no separation between elegant [words] and vulgar [words]. But such is not the case with our country…. In China a single learning [of language] is sufficient, but even a three-fold learning is still insufficient in our country. Chŏng Yagyong n.d.12

Chŏng Yagyong did not recognize the disparity between Literary Sinitic and spoken Chinese. Yet, he assumed that China had standardized names for things written in Literary Sinitic, which he presumed allowed the Chinese to learn vocabulary much more efficiently than Koreans. By contrast, he lamented that in Korea things were not correctly indicated by standardized terms, thus creating confusion in language education. His distress with the discord between vernacular Korean names for things and their Literary Sinitic counterparts was eventually translated into his compilation of a “categorized glossary” titled Aŏn kakpi 雅言覺非 (Refined Words to Rectify the Incorrect). Chŏng Yagyong’s demand for standardized names for things was shared by many scholars who compiled similar categorized glossaries for naming Korean things and affairs using sinographically derived terms. The need for standardized the naming of Korean things and affairs was felt not only in the area of language education but also when translating Chinese works. For example, Yi Chaewi 李載威 (1745–1826) maintained that in 12 “中國言與文爲一，呼一物便是文，書一物便是言．故名實無舛，雅俗無別．東國 則不然．… 中國學其一已足，東國學其三，猶不足也． ”

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translating Chinese works one needed to use categorized glossaries that listed standardized names of things and affairs, because the Korean terms varied over time and were different from the Chinese terms. He warned that the lack of standardized terms would lead to erroneous translations of things Chinese (Yi Chaewi 2002: 243).13 Second, the remarkable literary movement of the period bears witness to the problems arising from the discrepancy between speech and writing, and to the search for alternatives. Through their creative writings, eighteenth-century intellectuals became acutely aware of the limits of literature written in Literary Sinitic in expressing genuine Korean feeling and sentiment. They charged that since Korean prose and verse written in Literary Sinitic did not represent the living realities of Korea, such works created in Literary Sinitic by Korean literati remained but an awkward translation of vernacular originals. Pak Chiwŏn 朴趾源 (1737–1805) and Pak Chega 朴齊家 (1750–1805) were leading critics in this vein, as seen in their respective statements below: In Korea, writers try to convert “local speech” [pangŏn 方言, i.e., vernacular Korean] expressions that are difficult to understand into an archaic and easily-misunderstood language [i.e., Literary Sinitic]. Is it not true that the vague meaning and mistaken diction of their writings derive chiefly from this? Pak Chiwŏn n.d.14

Even so-called shaman’s songs and singer’s gibes and satires along with the everyday speech of the streets and villages have the force to inspire virtue and to reprove vice. Therefore, it seems that these pieces still preserve the intent of the songs from the Book of Odes (Shijing 詩經). Yet, as soon as the brush holder attempts to translate them into Literary Sinitic, and however similar in sense the results may be, the expressions are too vapid to capture genuine feelings. This is because the spoken Korean language and written Literary Sinitic are divorced from each other. Pak Chega n.d.15

13 “古今殊號，華東異言，譯飜之際或稍失眞．故我先人蕓圃先生，病東人之踈於物 名，輒有收錄． ” 14 “我東作文者，以齟齬易訛之古字，更譯一重難解之方言．其文旨䵝昧，辭語糊 塗，職由是歟！” 15 “夫 今 之 所 謂 巫 覡 之 歌 詞 倡 優 之 笑 罵，與 夫 市 井 閭 巷 之 邇 言，亦 足 以 感 發 焉，懲創焉而已矣，庶幾猶有古詩遺意歟．然而執筆而譯之，言無不似也，索然而 不得其情者，聲與字殊道也． ”

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To Pak Chiwŏn and Pak Chega, “local speech” (pangŏn 方言) meant the spoken language of Korea. They agreed that translation of spoken Korean into Literary Sinitic could only convey the basic rough meaning, but could not convey the essence of Korean emotions, things, and scenes. Pak Chega felt deep frustration at the fact that the translation of Korean songs and conversations into Literary Sinitic merely turned them into vapid renderings devoid of any inspirational force. They doubted the possibility of expressing vividly in Literary Sinitic what Koreans actually observed and heard, and therefore made it clear that using Literary Sinitic to express Korean experiences was nothing more than a foreign translation. Twentieth-century Korean nationalists would resolve this literary dilemma caused by the disjunction between spoken and literary language by resorting to the Korean alphabet to record the vernacular. Korea’s eighteenth-century Confucian intellectuals, however, were unable to accept the alphabet as a legitimate literary means to express their thoughts and feelings, and to record their everyday and firsthand realities. It is true that some Korean writers like Chŏng Ch’ŏl and Kim Manjung created highly treasured works using the vernacular language and script, and not a few writers were quite adept at the uniquely Korean genres of sijo and kasa songs written in the vernacular. Nonetheless, these writers of vernacular works constituted a tiny minority among a vast majority who regarded works in Literary Sinitic as the only bona fide literature (An 2001). Even Pak Chiwŏn and Pak Chega deviated but little from this line of thought, despite their emphasis on Korean realities, experiences, and emotions as the subject material of literature. Contemporary Korean intellectuals found no value in the alphabet as a literary vehicle for describing Korean realities and experiences, but this did not mean they were blind to its usefulness in Korean language life. Yi Kwangch’an 李匡贊 (1702–?), who had read a memorial address written in Literary Sinitic by Yi Kwangsa 李匡師 (1705–1777) on behalf of a deceased wet nurse, found reason to translate it into the “vernacular script” (ŏnmun 諺文), as below: Since this type of writing should be composed in plain language, it may well be translated into “vernacular [common] script.” If it were composed in excessively unfamiliar and difficult words, how could the ghost of a woman who had been completely illiterate her entire life understand its meanings, even though it is said that ghosts [in general] have a form of spiritual intelligence? This is laughable. Yi Kwangch’an n.d.16

16 “此等文宜作平鋪語，如譯諺文可也．過爲奇僻難解之語，神道雖有靈明之 道，而平生目不識丁之女鬼，何以解其意耶．可呵． ”

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In the above critique, Yi Kwangch’an was arguing that the author should have given preference to the literacy of his intended audience. Thus, he advocated the use of the vernacular script for the benefit of the mass of people who were illiterate in Literary Sinitic. Yi Kwangsa’s argument in favor of vernacular documents mirrored the spread of biographies and memorial addresses recorded in the Korean alphabet among yangban families in late Chosŏn. The increased demand for and use of the alphabet as Korea’s vernacular written medium in the eighteenth century was even seen as a critical challenge to the entrenched status of Literary Sinitic as the official written language of the country, as shown below: It can be said that the vernacular script of each country belongs to the yin 陰 language, whereas the age-old sinographs invented by Cang Jie 倉 頡 belong to the yang 陽 language. It can also be said that the vernacular writings of each country belong to the yin literature, whereas Literary Sinitic writings recording the virtues of the ancient sages belong to the yang literature. The published amount of vernacular writing in vernacular script is expanding by two to four times in each country, while that of classical writings in Literary Sinitic is diminishing everywhere in the world. Here in Korea, when I observe the growth and decline of these two forms of writing, it seems probable that the vernacular script could soon replace Literary Sinitic as the official writing system. It is said that there have appeared memorials written in vernacular script. Moreover, the composing of official documents in Literary Sinitic cannot be accomplished immediately, even in emergency situations. Instead, people resort to vernacular script to meet their needs. This is one signal of change [in the language life of Koreans]. Yi Kyusang 193517

Yi Kyusang 李奎象 (1727–1799), a scholar of the mid-eighteenth century, foresaw the future adoption of the vernacular script as the official writing system on the grounds that vernacular writing was now allowed in official documents which had hitherto strictly prohibited the vernacular script. Thus, he perceptively witnessed a shift in the language life of Koreans whereby the entrenched position of Literary Sinitic as the official language of writing gradually began 17 “各國諺書，可屬於陰，古來蒼頡製字，可屬於陽也．各國科式文，可屬於陰，古人 義理文，可屬於陽也．故諺文科文，到處倍簁；古字古文，到處漸縮．如持東方一 域，而日觀於其消長之勢，則不久似以諺文爲其域內公行文字．卽今或有諺文疏 本者云，若公移文字，難書倉卒者，不無副急，間間用諺文者，此其兆矣． ”

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to erode (An 2006). This new phenomenon likely brought about an awareness of the importance of vernacular language and literature among progressive reform-minded intellectuals in eighteenth-century Korea. Third, the frustration arising from the disjunction between spoken and literary languages was acutely felt when translating forms of vernacular literature like sijo and kasa into Literary Sinitic. Like Pak Chiwŏn and Pak Chega, many Korean writers were fascinated by the honesty and beauty of vernacular literature, and attempted its translation into Literary Sinitic. In trying to do so, they immediately faced the difficulty of conveying candid and honest emotions of Korean protagonists by way of Sinitic, as noted by Hwang Yunsŏk 黃胤 錫 (1729–1791) who translated many sijo into Literary Sinitic: The above lyrical songs have issued from various lots in life including worthy men, poets, bawdy singers, and longing women. Such songs frequently carry startlingly lovely contents that can rectify customs and mores. All the songs may well be transmitted to posterity, and may well rival the Chinese songs compiled by the Music Bureau (Yuefu 樂府) in quality. Yet our speech is different from Chinese sounds. The native songs comprise many vulgar words but only a few words in Literary Sinitic. Consequently, they cannot be transmitted to later generations, however much one might wish to do so. Since their true meanings cannot be conveyed from generation to generation, how can the native songs possibly be compared to the songs from the Music Bureau? … Of late during my leisure time I have translated a few of them into Sinitic [muncha 文字]. Staying true to the original words, I have simply added a slight touch of refinement. There is no need to be mired in the ancient styles of the Music Bureau at the cost of losing the original meanings in our native songs. Hwang Yunsŏk 1994: 5618

Hwang pointed out that vernacular Korean songs used mostly vernacular words, and adopted few Chinese words; hence it was necessary to translate them into Sinitic in order for them to be accepted in the literary world of the literati. To Hwang, it was deplorable that the expressive force of the vernacular language evaporated when it was translated into Literary Sinitic. 18 “ 右 歌 詞 雜 出 於 賢 人 騷 客 蕩 子 思 婦 之 屬 ，而 其 間 往 往 有 礪 俗 之 意 驚 人 之 韻，皆可傳諸後世，而與中原諸樂府馳騁而上下．而顧我方言異於華音，故其爲 歌也，悉以俚諺，而文字者實尠，雖欲傳諸後世，曾未幾傳，何便失其眞，矧能 與古樂府齊驅哉？… 頃於閑隙，搜得若干，譯以文字，要隨本語，而少加潤色而 已．又不必拘拘於古樂府之效顰，而反失其本意云爾． ”

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Sin Hŭm 申欽 (1566–1628) also lamented that the translation of Korean everyday expressions into Literary Sinitic deprived them of their ingenuity (Sim 1984: 882). In expressing their frustration with translations of vernacular literature into Literary Sinitic, some writers like Chŏng Hyŏnsŏk 鄭顯 奭 (1817–1899) erroneously evoked the language situation in contemporary China, where they believed writers simply recorded what they spoke (Chŏng Hyŏnsŏk n.d.). Still others like Kim Sangsuk 金相肅 (1717–1792), who translated Chŏng Ch’ŏl’s “Song for the Beloved” (“Sa miin kok” 思美人曲) and “Song for the Beloved, Continued” (“Sok miin kok” 續美人曲) into Literary Sinitic, tried to embrace more native words in his translation: The sounds of Korea are different from those of China. All the songs of the streets adopt local speech to compose phrases and sentences…. [In translating] these two kasa into Literary Sinitic, local words are used altogether. If the people of Korea are given to listen to them, even women and children will understand their meanings. Yet if the men of other countries see them, they will certainly not know which language is being used. Kim Sangsuk 1964: 40819

Many writers like Chŏng Hyŏnsŏk agreed that native songs consisting of spoken Korean carried high expressive value in terms of natural and honest feelings. But it did not occur to them that such songs might well be recorded in vernacular Korean for publication and transmission, because they believed that literature written in the vernacular would not gain universal recognition and appreciation in the literary world of their time. Even though they came to acknowledge an autonomous sphere for vernacular Korean literature insofar as they lamented that translating such works into Literary Sinitic would do linguistic violence to them, they did not consider, let alone champion, the substitution of vernacular written Korean for Literary Sinitic. 5

Discourses on the Unity of Speech and Writing among the Scholars of Northern Learning

Present-day Koreans may well be struck by the proposal offered by a group of Korean intellectuals in the eighteenth century that Korean language be 19 “東方之音，與中國不同，其里巷歌謠，皆以方言爲章句．… 此兩辭之文，合用 方言，使東方之人聽之，雖婦孺無不知之，而若異方之人見之，則必不知其爲何 語也．”

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completely assimilated into Chinese in order to resolve the question of the disjunction between speech and writing. They came up with this radical solution on purely practical grounds. Some scholars from the so-called School of Northern (i.e., Qing China) Learning (Pukhakp’a 北學派) like Hong Taeyong 洪大容 (1731–1783), Pak Chiwŏn, Pak Chega, and Yi Hŭigyŏng 李喜經 (1745–?) openly praised the accomplishments of the Manchu Qing dynasty, and argued for studying them in order to bring changes and innovations to the stagnant Chosŏn economy and society. As serious learners of or even experts in spoken Chinese themselves (Hong 1983: 2–3; Yi Hŭigyŏng 2011: 75), these scholars deemed Korean a linguistic barrier to studying and importing the superior Qing civilization, and thus called for the adoption of both spoken and written Chinese as the official language of Korea. They advocated for importing not only advanced Chinese civilization but also science and technology from Japan and the West in order to develop Korean civilization, which they deemed backward. Pak Chega, in particular, was a fervent exponent of international trade, not only with China but also eventually with the Western powers, with the purpose of building a strong and wealthy nation out of its current state of poverty and weakness. Otherwise, he warned, Chosŏn Korea would face a great national crisis. Their package of reform proposals also included a language policy as radical as their trade policy. Pak Chega and Yi Hŭigyŏng, among others, advocated total abolition of the Korean language in favor of Chinese. They assumed that the Korean language in its state of diglossia and digraphia posed a great obstacle to learning advanced Chinese civilization. Pak Chega remarked: Spoken Chinese is the basis for written Chinese (文字). For example, the character tian 天 is identified simply with its pronunciation, tian. There is no need for an additional layer of translating it into vernacular Korean. Thus, it is easy [for Chinese] to distinguish between names of things. Even the everyday speech of illiterate women and children constitutes whole phrases and sentences [in written language], and the texts of the classics, histories, and philosophical works issue straight from people’s mouths. This is because in China they use speech to generate language, instead of seeking out graphs with which to interpret spoken language. Therefore, in spite of the fact that foreigners pay respect to Sinitic literature, love to read books [in Literary Sinitic], and approximate China in this way, ultimately the gap between the two cannot be removed because it is impossible to escape the great linguistic membrane between them. [Fortunately], however, since our country is geographically close to China, and our sounds are roughly identical with those of China, there can be no reason for not abandoning our native language wholesale. Thereafter

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Korea would be exempted from the label of barbarian, and its entire territory would be opened up to the customs and mores of the Zhou, the Han, the Tang, and the Song dynasties. Would this not be a great delight? Pak Chega 201320

Pak Chega sought to solve the knotty problem of language by abolishing Korean language entirely. Pak was thus willing to abandon his native language if it stood in the way of Korea’s assimilating the more advanced Chinese civilization. He tried to mitigate the severity of that striking proposal by pointing to the fact the Korean language was already quite sinicized in its pronunciation and vocabulary. A general consensus among Korean intellectuals in late Chosŏn was that the disjunction between speech and writing in Korea constituted a cultural liability in their bid to raise Korean civilization to the standards of Chinese civilization. It was out of the question for them to effect the unity of speech and writing by adopting the vernacular script as Korea’s written language, because to them this meant sinking to the level of barbarism. For contemporary Korean intellectuals, Pak Chega’s proposal to adopt Chinese as the national language at the expense of Korean might well have sounded impractical, but it would hardly have seemed eccentric, because assimilation of Korean culture and language to Chinese was a common ideal among them (Cho 2009, 190). Needless to say, this sinocentric attitude of Chosŏn intellectuals is anathema to twentiethcentury Korean nationalists. As a result, modern-day North Korean scholars purposefully deleted Pak’s proposal for language reform from their modern Korean translation of his Treatise on Northern Learning (Pukhagŭi 北學議). Another “Practical Learning” scholar, Yi Hŭigyŏng, echoed Pak Chega in calling for nation-wide learning of Chinese to facilitate the importation of higher Chinese culture, as follows: Now, if Koreans desire to learn from the Middle Kingdom, and thus alter our customs and mores extensively, nothing comes before knowing Chinese. After this the rest will come as a matter of course. Jizi 箕子 came to Korea to govern and to teach people the Eight Prohibitions (p’alcho kŭmpŏp 八條禁法). How would it have been possible for him to govern his people, if they did not communicate in the same language? If Jizi 20 “ 漢 語 爲 文 字 之 根 本 ．如 天 直 呼 天 ，更 無 一 重 諺 解 之 隔 ．故 名 物 尤 易 辨，雖婦人小兒不知書者，尋常行話，盡成文句，經史子集，信口而出．盖中國因 話而生字，不求字而釋話也．故外國雖崇文學，喜讀書，幾於中國，而終不能無閒 然者，以言語之一大膜子莫得而脫也．我國地近中華，音聲略同，擧國人而盡棄 本話，無不可之理．夫然後夷之一字可免，而環東土數千里，自開一周漢唐宋之 風氣矣，豈非大快！”

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spoke Chinese, whereas the people spoke their own native tongue, how would it have been possible to illuminate his principles and lead the people? This is still unknown. At the time of Jizi, if the lowly institutions of Korea had been supplanted, and people had been taught in Chinese institutions, its lofty prominent culture would have persisted one hundred or one thousand years later. Is it not the case that in the intervening time Wiman 衛滿 and his followers transformed themselves into barbarian customs, and did away with the Way of sage Jizi? Yi Hŭigyŏng 2011: 21121

It was obvious to Yi Hŭigyŏng that general use of Chinese was essential to learning Chinese civilization and changing Korean customs. He saw a possible precedent in the Chinese sage Jizi’s rule over ancient Korea. Yi supposed that Jizi communicated by way of Chinese in teaching his Way to Korean ancestors. In advocating learning and speaking Chinese, he had in mind not just an elite subgroup but the entire population. Thus, his language policy was basically the same as Pak Chega’s—adoption of Chinese as the official national language. In line with his logic, Yi downplayed the significance of the creation of the hunmin chŏngŭm 訓民正音 as follows: In the past our King Sejong, with his brilliant sagely insight, considered how to harmonize the sounds of spoken Chinese and created ŏnmun 諺 文 [the vernacular script], thereby clarifying the meaning of panjŏl 反切 pronunciation spellings [used in Chinese dictionaries to indicate the initials and rhymes of sinographs]. With the passage of time to later generations, however, people came to rely on its ease of learning, did not study [difficult] Chinese poetry and history, and competed with each other in learning and transferring it, using it in communicating in letters with womenfolk. Hence, ŏnmun 諺文 came to constitute a separate written language in Korea, going against the principle of [maintaining] identical writing (tongmun 同文) [between Korea and China]. This is all the more deplorable. Yi Hŭigyŏng 2011: 210–21122

21 “今若欲學中國，丕變風俗，莫如先解華音，而餘皆自化矣．箕聖來治朝鮮，敎民 八條，豈一國之人，與君言語不通而出治乎？君爲華音，民爲東話而何能明其理 而導之乎？是未可知也．箕聖之時，若欲一掃東陋，敎以華制，則千百歲煥然可觀 也．中間衛滿之輩自夷其俗，蕩殘箕聖之法而然耶？” 22 “昔我世宗大王之聖鑑孔昭，思叶華音，刱爲諺文，以明反切之義，而寢及後 世，緣其易曉，不學詩書，競相傳習，只用於婦人書札之相通．然則諺之爲文　別 是東國之文，而又非同文之義也．尤可歎也． ”

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To Yi Hŭigyŏng, creating an independent Korean script was hardly a commendable venture, because it entailed the neglect of learning both literary and spoken Chinese, which he regarded as the universal language of the civilized world. Thus, he was willing to turn a blind eye to the various commendable qualities of native Korean language that distinguished it from Chinese in his commitment to advancing Korea’s backward civilization according to the Chinese model. The calls to abolish Korean in favor of Chinese by these two scholars were grounded in their mistaken belief that Jizi’s rule over ancient Korea was a historical reality, and that his rule resulted in the transformation of not only Korean customs and laws but also the Korean language. Both Yi Hŭigyŏng and Pak Chega lamented that it was difficult to understand why the Korean language had not been assimilated to Chinese after the profoundly transformative rule of Jizi. They went on: When the sage Jizi came to Korea and stayed so long, our customs must have been sinicized. Why is it that the institutions and culture [of Jizi’s time] did not survive at all? As it happened, language and speech have become different from each other and sinographs and their vocalizations have also become different. No one knows the reason for this difference. In general, sinographs constitute the basic elements of speech. Yet in Korea, speech is not based on sinographs, but formed separately. Therefore, tian 天 (heaven) is not pronounced as “tian,” but read instead as “hanŭl ch’ŏn”—[a combination of Korean gloss and Sino-Korean pronunciation]. All words go like this. In Korea, the same sinograph has separate readings in pronunciation and meaning, and thus speech and writing are separated from each other. Yi Hŭigyŏng 201123

In the past Jizi, leading five thousand people, established himself at the capital city of P’yŏngyang. It is evident that the people must have learned his language [i.e., Chinese]. The Han dynasty subjugated [a kingdom at P’yŏngyang] and established four commanderies (C. sijun 四郡) there. Since then, the Chinese language has not been transmitted. Is it not the case that when the kingdom of Parhae 渤海 was incorporated 23 “箕聖東出，歷年旣久，則必能用夏變俗．是何制度文物，一無所存，至於言語 相殊，文音不同．究之而莫得其故也．盖文者言之本，而不以文爲言，別作其 言．故呼天不曰天而曰漢乙天，他皆如此．是其一字之中音義判異，言自言而文 自文也．”

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into Liaodong 遼東, all its people (willingly) gave allegiance to it without reverting [to allegiance to Parhae]? Pak Chega 201324

The total adoption of both spoken and written Chinese as national language at the expense of Korean as proposed by Yi Hŭigyŏng and Pak Chega may well sound a total embarrassment to modern-day Korean nationalists. Yet their admiration for the superiority of Chinese culture and their sense of inferiority about Korean customs would not have appeared outlandish or reprehensible to most educated Koreans at the time. What distinguished them from most educated Koreans at the time, however, was their boldness in praising the material culture of the Manchu Qing dynasty, which had been condemned by many educated Koreans as the political destroyer of the Ming dynasty that had saved Korea from the Japanese invasions, and also as a cultural barbarian who had degraded the tradition of Chinese civilization. This group of scholars, now known as the School of Northern Learning (Pukhakp’a 北學派), seemed to share a keen sense of the crisis of Korean backwardness in technology, commerce, and the well-being of the people. In their commitment to bringing their own people up to the advanced level of Chinese culture, these scholars were willing to abolish their native language, which they perceived as a serious linguistic impediment in assimilating Chinese culture. Apart from their belief in Chinese as the standard civilized language, Pak Chega and Yi Hŭigyŏng saw Chinese as a linguistic vehicle for learning advanced culture. This instrumentalist view of language was expressed more fully by another Practical Learning scholar of the nineteenth century, Ch’oe Han’gi 崔漢綺 (1803–1877). For him, each country’s script was basically a system of signs for communication. Therefore, he argued that the script of each country was meant to be understood within each given country, and that naturally it would lose its communicative function when transmitted to a foreign country (Ch’oe Han’gi 1986b). It is noteworthy that Ch’oe’s relativist and instrumentalist theory of language departed from the time-honored notion in East Asia that sinographs should be respected as the single standardized script valid throughout the whole world (Ch’oe Han’gi 1986a). Even though Ch’oe accepted the reality of an independent language and script for each state, he suggested that the language used by a larger population such as Chinese would be a better means of communication between states (Ibid.). Thus, it seems that Ch’oe 24 “昔 箕 子 以 五 千 人 來 都 平 壤，民 必 學 其 語，在 漢 爲 內 服，置 四 郡，語 之 不 傳 者，豈渤海之地，盡入於遼，而民遂內附不歸歟！”

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Han’gi, like Pak Chega and Yi Hŭigyŏng, preferred Chinese rather than Korean as a language of contact and exchange between states. 6

Conclusions

Even though Korea prior to the nineteenth century can be seen as a society of multiple languages and writing systems, there had been no balanced development between these different codes and scripts, because the Literary Sinitic used by the educated elite occupied a preeminently higher and unchallenged status in the language life of Koreans. The creation of the vernacular script in the mid-fifteenth century did not pose a serious challenge to Literary Sinitic as the language of government and high culture in Korea. Consequently, a complex state of diglossia and digraphia persisted until the late nineteenth century. The disjunction between speech and writing had been a source of concern for Korean intellectuals ever since they adopted Literary Sinitic as the country’s official language. It did not occur to them that the vernacular language written in the vernacular script might replace Literary Sinitic because for them, writing in Literary Sinitic was synonymous with participating in the cultural activities of the civilized world and fitting their country into the hierarchical world order presided over by the Middle Kingdom (Im 2000). As noted above, many Korean scholars and writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suggested solutions to the problems arising from the disconnect between speech and writing. But it can hardly be said that their approaches presaged the late nineteenth-century language reform movement that aimed to enhance the position of the vernacular script in writing Korean. Still, their debates on the issues related to the unity of speech and writing left meaningful insights which could be appreciated by later generations of Korean language reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First of all, the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries witnessed a growing awareness of the value of native Korean literature and language among Korean scholars and writers. Vernacular words and expressions were considered an effective vehicle for conveying the honest emotions of Koreans. Second, many writers—especially translators of native sijo and kasa—came to realize that translation into Literary Sinitic did not do these genres justice. Hence, a wealth of vernacular Korean words (albeit written in sinographs) was incorporated into the translations as well as into the creative works of Korean writers. Third, a new kind of instrumentalist view of language came into being, whereby some Korean Practical Learning scholars argued for Chinese as an effective means of communication in cultural contact and exchange. Therefore, it can

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be argued that future in-depth studies of the language debates prior to the rise of the language reform movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may well reveal a range of undercurrents that connect the two eras in terms of language debates and reforms. Translated by Son Cheolbae and W. Scott Wells References

Primary Sources

Ch’oe Haenggwi 崔行歸. 1986. “Pohyŏn sibwŏn ka hanyŏk sŏ” 普賢十願歌漢譯序 [Preface to the Chinese Translation of the Songs of the Ten Vows of Bodhisattva Samantabhadra]. In Yŏkchu Kyunyŏ chŏn [Annotated Translation of the Biography of Great Master Kyunyŏ], translated by Ch’oe Ch’ŏl, An Taehoe, and Chŏng Hyŏngnyŏn, 59–61. Seoul: Saemunsa. Ch’oe Han’gi 崔漢綺. 1986a. “Kihak” 氣學 [Qi Learning]. In Myŏngnamnu chŏnjip 明南 樓全集 [Complete Works of Ch’oe Han’gi], 2:232. Seoul: Yŏgang ch’ulp’ansa. Ch’oe Han’gi 崔漢綺. 1986b. “Sahae muncha p’yŏnt’ong” 四海文字變通 [Communication in the Scripts of the Four Seas]. In Myŏngnamnu chŏnjip 明南樓全集 [Complete Works of Ch’oe Han’gi], Singit’ong 神氣通 [Circulation of Shenqi], 14. Seoul: Yŏgang ch’ulp’ansa. Chŏng Hyŏnsŏk 鄭顯奭. n.d. “Kyobang kayo sŏ” 敎坊歌謠敍 [Preface to Kyobang kayo]. In Kyobang kayo 敎坊歌謠 [Songs of the Bureau of Music], chang 1–2. National Library of Korea manuscript, call number 古貴 3618-1. Chŏng Yagyong 丁若鏞. n.d. “Pal Chungnan mulmyŏng ko” 跋竹欄物名攷 [Postface to A Study of the Chungnan Glossary of Names of Things]. In Yŏyudang chŏnsŏ 與猶堂 全書 [Collected Works of Chŏng Yagyong], 1 chip, kwŏn 14, chang 30–31. Han’guk munjip ch’onggan 韓國文集叢刊 261. Accessed April 16, 2020. http://db.itkc.or.kr /dir/item?itemId=GO#/dir/node?dataId=ITKC_MP_0597A_0140_020_0420. Chŏng Yunyong 鄭允容. 1985. “Charyu chusŏk sŏ” 字類註釋序 [Preface to Annotated and Explained Dictionary of Sinographs]. In Charyu chusŏk 字類註釋 [Annotated and Explained Dictionary of Sinographs], 3–5. Seoul: Kŏn’guk taehakkyo ch’ulp’anbu. Hong Taeyong 洪大容. 1983. Ŭlbyŏng yŏnhaengnok 乙丙燕行錄 [Record of a Journey to Beijing in the Year 1765]. Seoul: Myŏngji taehak kugŏ kungmun kakkwa kukhak charyo kanhaeng wiwŏnhoe. Hwang Yunsŏk 黃胤錫. 1994. “Koga sinbŏn isipku chang pyŏng sŏ” 古歌新翻二十九 章幷序 [New Translations of 29 Old Songs, with Preface]. In Ijae nan’go 頤齋亂 藁 [Drafts by Hwang Yunsŏk], kwŏn 1, 56. Sŏngnam: Han’guk chŏngsin munhwa yŏn’guwŏn.

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Kim Manjung 金萬重. 2010. Sŏp’o manp’il 西浦漫筆 [Sŏp’o’s Stray Notes]. Translated by Sim Kyŏngho. P’aju, Korea: Munhak tongnae. Kim Sangsuk 金相肅. 1964. “Pŏn Sa miin kok pyŏng sŏ” 飜思美人曲幷序 [Translation of Song of Thinking of a Beautiful Woman, with Preface]. In Songgang pyŏlchip ch’urok 松江別集追錄 [Addenda to the Supplementary Literary Collection of Songgang Chŏng Ch’ŏl], kwŏn 1, 408. Seoul: Taedong munhwa yŏn’guwŏn. Kyunyŏ 均如. 1986. “Pohyŏn sipchong wŏnwang ka chasŏ” 普賢十種願王歌自序 [Preface to the Songs of the Ten Vows of Bodhisattva Samantabhadra]. In Yŏkchu Kyunyŏ chŏn [Annotated Translation of the Biography of Great Master Kyunyŏ], translated by Ch’oe Ch’ŏl, An Taehoe, and Chŏng Hyŏngnyŏn, 44–45. Seoul: Saemunsa. Pak Chega 朴齊家. 2013. “Chunggugŏ” 中國語 [Chinese Language]. In Pukhagŭi: wanyŏk chŏngbon [A Complete Translation of Treatise on Northern Learning], translated by An Taehoe, 152–153. P’aju, Korea: Tolbegae. Pak Chega 朴齊家. n.d. “Yu Hyep’ung sijip sŏ” 柳惠風詩集序 [Preface to Collection of Yu Hyep’ung’s Poetry]. In Chŏngyugak chŏnjip 貞蕤閣全集 [Complete Works of Pak Chega]. Han’guk munjip ch’onggan 韓國文集叢刊 261. Accessed April 16, 2020. http://db.itkc.or.kr/dir/item?itemId=MO#/dir/node?dataId=ITKC_MO_0583A _0080_010_0090. Pak Chiwŏn 朴趾源. n.d. “Kokchŏng p’iltam” 鵠汀筆談 [Brush Conversation at the Edge of Swan Lake]. In Yŏnam chip 燕巖集 [Collected Works of Pak Chiwŏn], kwŏn 14. Han’guk munjip ch’onggan 韓國文集叢刊 252. Accessed April 16, 2020. http://db.itkc .or.kr/dir/item?itemId=MO#/dir/node?dataId=ITKC_MO_0568A_0140_010_0020. Sin Hŭm 申欽. 1984. “Pang’ong sirok sŏ” 放翁詩錄序 [Preface to Sin Hŭm’s Poems]. In Chŏngbon sijo taejŏn [Compendium of Sijo], edited by Sim Chaewan, 882. Seoul: Ilchogak. Yi Chaewi 李載威. 2002. “Mulbo sŏ” 物譜序 [Preface to Catalogue of Things]. In Kŭn’gi sirhak yŏnwŏn chehyŏn chip [Collections of First-Generation Practical Learning Scholars from the Area near the Capital], edited by Taedong munhwa yŏn’guwŏn, 6:241–243. Seoul: Sŏnggyun’gwan taehakkyo ch’ulp’anbu. Yi Hŭigyŏng 李喜經. 2011. Pukhak tto hana ŭi pogosŏ, Sŏlsu oesa 雪岫外史 [Sŏlsu oesa, Another Report of Northern Learning]. Translated by Chin Chaegyo. Seoul: Sŏnggyun’gwan taehakkyo ch’ulp’anbu. Yi Kwangch’an 李匡贊. n.d. “P’yŏng Tunam che yuon mun” 評斗南祭乳媼文 [A Critique of Yi Kwangsa’s Memorial Address for his Wet Nurse]. In Tunam chip 斗南集 [Collected Works of Yu Kwangsa], kwŏn 2. Accessed July 10, 2020. http:// archive.aks.ac.kr/viewer/viewer.do?itemId=book#imgnode.do?itemId=book&gubun =booktree&depth=4&upPath=54%5E5408%5EL540808&dataId=G002%2BAKS %2BKSM-WC.0000.0000-20101008.B034a_054_00006_YYY. Yi Kwangsa 李匡師. n.d. “Oŭmjŏng sŏ” 五音正序 [Preface to Standardization of the Five Sounds]. In Wŏn’gyo chip 員嶠集 [Collected Works of Yi Kwangsa], kwŏn 8. Han’guk

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munjip ch’onggan 韓國文集叢刊 221. Accessed April 16, 2020. http://db.itkc.or.kr /dir/item?itemId=MO#/dir/node?dataId=ITKC_MO_0522A_0080_010_0120. Yi Kyusang 李奎象. 1935. “Segye sŏl” 世界說 [Discourse on the World], “Ilmong ko” 一夢稿 [Draft of a Dream]. In Hansan sego 韓山世稿 [Collected Works of Generations of the Hansan Yi Clan], kwŏn 23, chang 20. Kungnip chungang tosŏgwan (National Library of Korea), call number 古 3647-175-255-1-2. Yi Yonghyu 李用休. 1750. Chaun pyŏnhae 字韻辨解 [Exegesis on Sinograph Rhymes]. In Hyehwan chapchŏ 惠寰雜著 [Miscellaneous Writings by Yi Yonghyu]. Kungnip chungan tosŏgwan (National Library of Korea). Yu Hyŏngwŏn 柳馨遠. 1958. Pan’gye surok 磻溪隨錄 [Collected Works of Yu Hyŏng­ wŏn], kwŏn 25. Seoul: Tongguk munhwasa. Yu Manju 兪晩柱. 1997. Hŭmyŏng 欽英 [English],6 ch’aek. Kyujanggak charyo ch’ongsŏ. Seoul: Sŏul taehakkyo kyujanggak.



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An Taehoe (Ahn Daehoe). 2006. “Chosŏn hugi ijung ŏnŏ t’eksŭt’ŭ wa kŭ e kwanhan nonŭi tŭl” [Dual-Language Texts of Late Chosŏn and the Debates about Them]. Taedong hanmunhak 20: 203–232. An Taehoe (Ahn Daehoe). 2001. “Hanmunhak esŏ minjokchŏgin kŏt kwa segyejŏgin kŏt―chosŏn hugi hakcha ŭi minjok ŏnŏ e taehan nonŭi rŭl chungsim ŭro” [The National and the Universal in Korean Literature Written in Literary Sinitic― Focusing on the Debates on Vernacular Language among Late-Chosŏn Scholars]. In Kungmunhak kwa munhwa [National Literature and Culture], edited by Han’guk kojŏn munhakhoe, 305–328. Seoul: Wŏrin. Cho Sŏngsan. 2009. “18 segi huban~19 segi chŏnban chosŏn chisigin ŭi ŏmun insik kyŏnghyang” [Trends in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Chosŏn Intellectuals’ Language Awareness]. Han’guk munhwa 47: 177–202. Chŏng Taerim. 1991. “Kojŏn munhak kwa ŏnmun ilch’i noryŏk [Korean Classical Literature and Efforts for the Unity of Speech and Writing]. Sejong taehakkyo nonmunjip 18: 13–38. Chŏng Taham. 2009. “Yŏmal sŏnch’o ŭi tongasia chilsŏ wa chosŏn esŏ ŭi hanŏ, hanimun, Hunmin chŏngŭm” [The East Asian World Order during the Transition from Koryŏ to Chosŏn, and (the Relations) between Literary Chinese, idu, and han’gŭl]. Han’guksa hakpo 36: 269–305. Hwang Hodŏk [Hwang Hoduk]. 2005. Kŭndae neisyŏn kwa kŭ p’yosang tŭl―t’aja, kyot’ong, pŏnyŏk, ek’ŭrit’wirŭ, kungmun tamnon [The Modern Nation and Its Representations: National Language Discourse in the Formative Period of the Nation-State in Korea]. Seoul: Somyŏng ch’ulp’an.

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Im Hyŏngt’aek. 2000. “Han minjok ŭi muncha saenghwal kwa 20 segi kukhanmunch’e” [Language Life of the Korean People and Sino-Korean Mixed Script in the Twentieth Century]. Ch’angjak kwa pip’yŏng 28(1): 284–308. Kim Sŭrong. 2005. “Chosŏn wangjo sillok ŭi han’gŭl kwallyŏn kisa rŭl t’onghae pon muncha saenghwal yŏn’gu” [A Study of Inscriptional Practice as seen through Entries Concerning han’gŭl from the Veritable Records of the Chosŏn Dynasty]. PhD diss., Sangyŏng University. Kim Tongjun. 2007. “Soron-gye hakcha tŭl ŭi chaguk ŏmun yŏn’gu hwaltong ŭi yangsang” [Studies of Korean National Language and Writing by Scholars of the YoungDoctrine Faction]. Minjok munhaksa yŏn’gu 35: 8–39. Ko, Dorothy, JaHyun Kim Haboush, and Joan R. Piggott, eds. 2003. Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ledyard, Gari. 1998. The Korean Language Reform of 1446. Seoul: Sin’gu munhwasa. Lee, Peter H. 2003. A History of Korean Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pak Sumil. 2007. “Chosŏn hugi ŏnŏ munchagwan ŭi t’odae wa chŏn’gae: 18 segi Yŏnam kŭrup mit Tasan, Hanghae wa ŭi pigyo rŭl chungsim ŭro [Foundation and Development of Late-Chosŏn Perspectives on Language and Writing: Focusing on a Comparison between Pak Chiwŏn, Chŏng Yagyong, and Hong Kilchu in the Eighteenth Century]. Han’guk hanmunhak yŏn’gu 40: 465–499. Palais, James B. 1996. Confucian Statecraft and Korean Institutions: Yu Hyŏngwŏn and the Late Chosŏn Dynasty. Korean Studies of the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Pollock, Sheldon. 2006. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Sim Kyŏngho. 1997. “Chosŏn hugi hancha ŏhwi pullyujip e kwanhayŏ” [On Categorized Glossaries of Sinographic Words in Late Chosŏn]. In Chosŏn hugi hancha ŏhwi kŏmsaek sajŏn [Dictionary for Searching Sinographic Words from Late Chosŏn], edited by Chŏng Yangwan, 1–34. Sŏngnam: Han’guk chŏngsin munhwa yŏn’guwŏn. Yi Kunsŏn. 2007. “Chosŏn sain ŭi ŏnŏ muncha insik” [Perceptions of Language and Writing among the Chosŏn Literati]. Tongbang hanmunhak 33: 35–54. Yi Kwangho. 2001. “Sejong tae ŭi ŏnŏ chŏngch’aek kwa Hunmin chŏngŭm ŭi ch’angje” [Language Policy of the Sejong Era, and the Creation of Hunmin chŏngŭm]. In Sejong sidae ŭi munhwa [Culture during the Sejong Era], edited by Yi Sŏngmu and Han’guk chŏngsin munhwa yŏn’guwŏn, 118–120. Seoul: T’aehaksa.

Chapter 16

The Geopolitics of Vernacularity and Sinographs: The Making of Bilingual Dictionaries in Modern Korea and the Shift from Sinographic Cosmopolis to “Sinographic Mediapolis” Hwang Hoduk 1

The Invention of Han’gŭl and the Age of Bilingual Dictionaries: Sinicization, De-Sinicization, and the Question of Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Languages1

One of the first works initiated by King Sejong following the creation of hunmin chŏngŭm 訓民正音—known today as han’gŭl—was the publication in 1455 of the Hongmu chŏngun yŏkhun 洪武正韻譯訓, a vernacular translation of the official Ming rhyme book, Hongwu zhengyun 洪武正韻 (Correct Rhymes of the Hongwu Emperor).2 This marvelous feat was carried out in parallel with the publication of the Tongguk chŏngun 東國正韻 (Correct Rhymes of the Eastern Country; 1448), which systematized the Sino-Korean pronunciations of sinographs. This is not at all strange when we consider the response of Sejong, 1 A portion of this chapter was presented at the conference, “Thinking about Cosmopolitan and Vernacular’ in the Sinographic Cosmopolis: What Can We Learn from Sheldon Pollock?” University of British Columbia, July 2–4, 2012. This work presents new facts and arguments in its attempt to examine the historical context of bilingual dictionaries, but also contains excerpts from Hwang and Yi (2012a, 2012b, 2012c). 2 The invention of the Korean script was explained in the following way in Sin Sukchu’s 申叔 舟 (1417–1475) “Preface to the Hongmu chŏngun yŏkhun” (Hongmu chŏngun yŏkhun sŏ 洪武 正韻譯訓序): “King Sejong the Great intensely pursued the study of rhymes; having created the simple and concise graphs of hunmin chŏngŭm, there is now no sound in all the four quarters of the earth that cannot be transmitted…. Hence King Sejong, perceiving that, though our country had relations with China, the sounds of our two languages were not mutually comprehensible and required us to rely on interpreters, ordered that the translation of the Hongmu chŏngun proceed post haste” (我　世宗莊憲大王。留意韻學。窮硏 底蘊。創制訓民正音若干字。四方萬物之聲。無不可傳…非特字韻而已也。於是以吾 東國世事中華。而語音不通。必賴傳譯。首命譯洪武正韻。). Cited from the online version of Sin’s Pohanjae chip 保閑齋集, kwŏn 15, https://db.itkc.or.kr/dir/item?itemId=MO# /dir/node?dataId=ITKC_MO_0059A_0160_010_0200&solrQ=detail%E2%80%A0D$dtlType %E2%80%A0book$query%E2%80%A0.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 | doi:10.1163

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the script’s inventor, to the objections of the Hall of Worthies (Chiphyŏnjŏn 集賢殿) member Ch’oe Malli 崔萬里 (d. 1445), who wondered why the script was needed at all—what with Literary Sinitic already in use, it was tantamount to abandoning Chinese civilization (chungha 中夏) and becoming barbarians (ijŏk 夷狄). Countless arguments for the vernacular script’s legitimacy were made in later centuries based on its utility for the standardizing of Sino-Korean pronunciations (chŏngŭm 正音) or for “rectification of names” (chŏngmyŏng 正 名). Sin Kyŏngjun 申景濬 (1712–1781) wrote that “Chŏngŭm is of benefit not only to our country, but is a grand model able to record the sounds of all things under Heaven.”3 Likewise, Chŏng Yunyong 鄭允容 (1792–1865) wrote: Hunmin chŏngŭm can ably be used for all things under Heaven. Had hunmin chŏngŭm been created and phonetic writing come to us from the time when the ancient Sages lived, the [local] pronunciations of sinographs would not have changed. Hunmin chŏngŭm is able to record not only the Eastern [Korean] sounds and Chinese sounds, but the sounds of all things under Heaven. 訓民正音可以通用於天下者也 … 若其時有成人作而刱物製字如訓民正音 則豈復有音之譌哉.4

These excerpts show that the Confucian scholars of later generations valued hunmin chŏngŭm more for its capacity as a phonetic script and its utility in rhyme books than as a means for “instructing the people.” The distance between chŏngun 正韻 (correct rhymes) and chŏngŭm 正音 (correct sounds) was closer than one might think. Also, when orderliness in sounds is understood as orderliness in governance, the script had the advantage of correctly inscribing all sounds under heaven and transmitting them unchanged. The “hunmin” of hunmin chŏngŭm clearly refers to the people of Chosŏn, but the “chŏngŭm” has in addition a trans-regional and trans-historical 3 Sin also stated that, “The correct sounds are not just a benefit to our country, but a grand codification of all speech sounds under Heaven” (正音不止惠我一方可以爲天下音聲大 典也) (Sin 1750). 4 Cited from Chŏng Yunyong (1985: 911). Another example of this sort of reasoning comes from Yu Hŭi 柳僖 (1773–1837): “Generally speaking, if the readings of graphs are transmitted by the readings of [other] graphs, old sounds and current sounds will be mixed up and change according to the trends of the time. If the pronunciations are recorded in ŏnmun, they can be transmitted in perpetuity without change” (夫以字音傳字音此變彼隨變古叶今韻舛宜 也若注以諺文傳之久遠) (Yu Hŭi 1974: 1).

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element. There is room then to rethink whether or not, in its origins, the native script was indeed a sort of vernacularization project. Though the particular (here, the vernacular) is of course “anchored to the land” and the universal (or the cosmopolitan) “transcends any one place in particular,” just as “vernacular” may refer to “a slave born on his master’s estate” (Baker 1984: 2), in like manner the cosmopolitan and the vernacular are already intertwined. The realization of a Latin, Sanskrit, or Sinographic Cosmopolis requires a mediating apparatus (Foucault’s dispositif). This apparatus is the very place, the topos, of the particular. As can be seen in the case of the Ch’ilsŏ ŏnhae 七書諺 解 (Vernacular Exegeses of the Seven Classics; 1590), though it was the native script that enabled their very existence, its usefulness was more than anything else a device for understanding the Confucian canon.5 This was especially true in the case of the production of vernacular exegeses to the Buddhist and the Confucian canon, where texts in the vernacular script exist largely as a kind of diaphonic text. The particular (the vernacular) and the universal (the cosmopolitan) were interconnected rather than occupying discrete spheres. As seen in the case of the vernacular script, the original idea for vernacular writing itself was deeply connected to the universal medium (Literary Sinitic), particularly in the fixing of sinographs’ sound values. Those naturalized Koreans of Chinese descent who had come into power with the ascension of T’aejong and who were responsible for diplomatic documents had died off by the time of Sejong’s reign and so were unable to transmit the pronunciations of sinographs in writing. The learning of spoken Chinese (hanŏ 漢語) pronunciation using ŏnmun or hunmin chŏngŭm became important. Among the very first to learn hunmin chŏngŭm (apart from those who participated in its creation) were of course the official interpreters and translators of the chungin 中人 class.6 However, also among the first to learn it were the kangigwan 講肄官—the group of officials, comprised of sons of the ruling yangban, who learned colloquial Chinese and imun-style documentary Sinitic (imun 吏 5 For more on the creation of the native script and the Chosŏn-era discourse surrounding it, along with the early-modern discourse on han’gŭl and hancha, see Hwang (2005) and the chapter by Ahn Daehoe in this volume. Kang Sinhang (2001) has previously described theories about the native script by dividing them into three categories. First, the native script was understood to be a superior phonetic script that could record any and all sounds without those sounds changing. Second, the script was recognized as the characters of the country of the “Eastern sounds,” created on the basis of profound principles by the sagely King Sejong. Third, the script was understood to be an easy script that could be used even by women and the lower classes. 6 The chungin were an intermediate class in dynastic Korea consisting of mainly technical specialists (interpreters, physicians, accountants, etc.) and petty bureaucrats, positioned below the yangban and above the lower-class sangmin 常民 in the social hierarchy.

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文) in order to preside over duties of state that required specialized knowledge and skills. Moreover, in short order the Correct Rhymes of the Eastern Country, which recorded standard (albeit artificial) pronunciations for sinographs in the native script, emerged from the conjunction of the Correct Rhymes of the Hongwu Emperor and hunmin chŏngŭm. The Korean script, then, was not simply created out of concern for region, social rank, gender, and the unrefined man, but mediated the gap between the larger world order and daily life—between what could be considered the sacred characters of chinmun 眞文 (“authentic/ true writing,” i.e., Literary Sinitic) and the mere foreign language of sinographs. It was also deeply connected to the technology of governance. Though there was a certain awareness that this convenient new script used by those of both the high and low classes was linked to class and gender,7 there was nothing within Chosŏn-era society like the nationalism or populism that would accrue to the script in the early-modern period. Seen in toto, the work of creating a native script appears to have been carried out with the intent of Sejong educating the people in Chinese civilization and more fully deploying it among them, in the spirit of “the Son of Heaven teaches and guides his people.” This was, however, a two-sided coin. The script itself may have been a technology for realizing the values and virtues inherent in Literary Sinitic learning, but Chosŏn employed only the written idiom of Literary Sinitic, not the spoken idiom of colloquial Chinese language. Because Chosŏn’s policy of international relations, sadae kyorin 事大交隣,8 was reproduced and maintained through the rhetoric of diplomacy, it was therefore a national imperative to develop a comprehensive understanding of the Correct Rhymes of the Hongwu Emperor, the Correct Rhymes of the Eastern Country, and the hunmin chŏngŭm, along with diplomatic Chinese prose (hanimun 漢吏文)—the very things which linked Literary Sinitic with the vernacular. Evidence for this comes from the fact that King Sejong’s second son, King Sejo, chose these four topics as subjects in which civil service examinees would be tested.9 In short, Sinicization and 7 “Hunmin chŏngŭm is so extremely convenient to write and so extremely easy to learn that thousands or even tens of thousands of words can be expressed in detail. And since even women and children can use it, they can communicate their words and convey their feelings” (其文書之甚便而學之甚易千言萬語纖悉形容雖婦孺童駭皆得以用之以達其 辭以通其情) (Sin 1750). For more on the class and gender divisions of the Chosŏn period’s “diglossic written culture” see Ko, Haboush, and Piggott (2003: 280–282). 8 Sadae kyorin was a phrase used at the beginning of the Chosŏn dynasty to describe the country’s relations with China and the region’s other peoples. Sadae (“serving the great”) described Chosŏn’s tributary relationship with the Ming, while kyorin (“being neighborly”) referred to relations with the Jurchen and Japanese. 9 “‘The Ministry of Rites (Yejo 禮曹) declares, because our former King prepared the document Hunmin chŏngŭm and compiled the Correct Rhymes of the Hongwu Emperor and

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de-Sinicization are concepts that cannot be separated.10 Were a real distinction between the two languages to be accepted, the problem would be how to mediate and control between the two. I intend hereafter to describe the whole range of cultural practices arising from the gap between Literary Sinitic and the Korean script and between cosmopolitan and vernacular with the phrase “domination of relations.” A vernacular writing project such as that of hunmin chŏngŭm is concerned from the outset with compatibility with the cosmopolitan language, or at least such was true in the case of the persuasive rhetoric and political justifications surrounding the script’s creation. Therefore, this is not merely the vernacular in and of itself, but is also connected to the “control of relations” between cosmopolitan writing and vernacular writing. If we borrow Walter Benjamin’s metaphor, the relationship between cosmopolitan literature and the spoken vernacular is different from the relationship between adults and children, mankind and the natural world, or between the empire and the barbaric. “According to the teachings of the imperialists, control of the natural world is the fundamental characteristic of all technology. But who would believe a teacher proclaiming that the meaning of education is the control of children by adults?” (Benjamin 1996: 487).11 This technology that we call han’gŭl, more than being something for simply teaching and controlling the people, was connected with Correct Rhymes of the Eastern Country, and because imun writing is an essential component of our relations with China (sadae), we request that from the first civil service examination the three books (samsŏ) be taught and examples be based upon the classics of the Confucian canon (sasŏ ogyŏng 四書五經), and that in the final phase of the examination an imun test form the basis of the taech’aek 對策 examination.’ King Sejo assented to this” (禮曹啓訓民正音，先王御製之書，東國正韻洪武正韻，皆先王撰定之書； 吏文又切於事大，請自今文科初場試 ‘講三書，依四書，五經例給分，終場幷試吏 文，依對策例給分，’從之) (Sejo sillok, kwŏn 28, 8th year, 6th month, kyeyu day; 6th year, 5th month, kyemyo day). 10 For an excellent account of the simultaneous nature and meaning of the language policies of Sinicization and de-Sinicization, see Chŏng (2009). For information on the language of the “Central Efflorescence” order (chunghwa 中華), the development of the translation discipline for the reception of Sinographic writing, and the issue of hanimun 漢吏文, see Chŏng (2008). It is worth comparing the Korean historical case with that of Vietnam, namely the creation of the Chữ Nôm script during the Tran dynasty (陳朝, 1225–1400), a script that was “Chinese but at the same time not Chinese.” Much like the Tran dynasty, Yi dynasty Chosŏn also derived its literature initially from China. See Shimizu, Le, and Momoki (1998; 2006). 11 “According to the teaching of imperialists, control of the natural world is the fundamental characteristic of all technology. But who would believe a teacher proclaiming that the meaning of education is the control of children by adults? Above all else, education is the indispensable hierarchical relationship between generations. To talk resolutely about domination, is this not to speak of the ‘domination’ between generations rather than the

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the “domination of relations” between China and Chosŏn, Sinicization and deSinicization, the king and his subjects, or the people, and among the people themselves. This dispositif that we call han’gŭl is a technology-cum-strategy for exercising power—a structure intended to stimulate the flow of power and discourse. The relationship therefore between the Korean and Chinese languages, or rather between the Korean script and Literary Sinitic, is perhaps best viewed from the perspective of a “cosmopolitan vernacular” and a “vernacular cosmopolis”12 rather than as simply a relationship between discreetly vernacular and universal languages. This is because the historical discursive reality was such that sinograph pronunciations were fixed within a vernacular system of writing and the Korean script was prescribed as a medium for recording all the world’s sounds. The relationship between Literary Sinitic and han’gŭl is evidenced in Korea’s first “bilingual” dictionary. Modern-day ideas about han’gŭl rooted in populist tributes and one-sided nationalistic evaluations fundamentally misapprehend the relationship between the cosmopolitan and vernacular languages. A clear understanding of the two languages’ relationship and the history of bilingual dictionaries in which both act as mediating dispotifs can help to remove these fundamental misconceptions. However, to discuss all the fluctuations regarding the relationship between cosmopolitan and vernacular after han’gŭl’s creation would not only be beyond my ability but a physical impossibility. In the present study, therefore, the discussion is limited to a total of thirteen dictionaries published from 1880 to 1931, including foreign language-to-Korean and Korean-to-foreign language dictionaries. As a topos for questioning the relationship between two languages—or two intentions—bilingual dictionaries offer a rare perspective. 2

The Sinographic Cosmopolis—The Communal and the Imperial

We can consider the issue of the transnational, transregional, long-distance community not in terms of political economy but through linguistic experience, a notion recently explained in the history of Euro-American knowledge

domination of the child? Likewise, technology is not the control of the natural world, but rather the control of relations between man and nature” (Benjamin 1996: 487). 12 Some examples of vernacular methods for “maintaining” in substance the Sinographic Cosmopolis include Korean idu 吏讀 script, kugyŏl 口訣, and hun 訓 glosses.

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with the term “Republic of Letters”13 (Goodman 1994; McNeely and Wolverton 2009). Through a time-honored community of learning, occasional contact, textual correspondence, and readings and writings constructing a transregional reality, European knowledge society formed a type of long-range Republic of Letters, a phenomenon which is thought to have made possible the historical transformations of the sixteenth-century Renaissance through the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Sheldon Pollock, in his Sanskrit-focused examination of the intellectual and literary histories of India and adjacent societies during a roughly two thousand-year period, suggests the existence of a “socio-textual community” separate from the political community (Pollock 2003). Often referred to by Pollock as “communities of literature,” and substantiated by a systematic and vast volume of literary texts, these socio-textual communities are understood in parallel with Latinitas in Europe, and their articulation in political communities is studied in Pollock’s later works as the dynamic between cosmopolitan and vernacular. Looking from a long-term analytical perspective beyond Foucault’s discourse analysis linking language and power, Pollock’s paradigm describes for us in terms of comparative civilizational history a trans-regional, transhistorical collective past experience. From Pollock’s perspective, the process of shift from universal to local language occurred through a materialization of the so-called modern public sphere (Habermas 1989) seen from a modernist linguistic ideology, but it may be more helpful to view this process as one of long-term historical relativization. In particular, Pollock’s criticism of “the dichotomy of cosmopolitanism and vernacularism” (2003: 567–568), which divides literary language from local vernacular languages and distinct writing systems, is relevant to the argument I make below. Some scholars have treated the issue of language by analogy with the East Asian tributary system (chogong 朝貢) (Hamashita 1990),14 or with reference to the system of investiture (ch’aekpong ch’eje 冊封體制) (Nishijima 1983),15 and can also find analogous yet conventional concepts such as the Sinographic Cultural Sphere (J. kanji bunkaken 漢字文化圈) (Kamei, Ōtō, and Yamada 1963),16

13 The term “republic” itself is of course related to the emergence of the state system. 14 The theory of the tributary state and its center-vs.-periphery structure put forward by Hamashita Takeshi seems similar to Europe’s dualist transformation from empire to state. 15 As evidence for East Asia’s unity as a single cultural sphere, Nishijima Sadao (1983) points to sinographic culture, Confucianism, the legal system, Buddhism, and other concepts. 16 Kamei Takeshi 亀井孝 later recalled that the term Sinographic Cultural Sphere (J. kanji bunkaken) was first used by him in this book. Due to the fact that the geographical designation “East Asia” had no concrete connotation, and the fact that Chinese, Korean, Japanese,

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the Sinosphere (J. kanjiken 漢字圈) (Murata and Ramāru 2005),17 the cultural sphere of reading-by-gloss (J. kundoku bunkaken 訓讀文化圈),18 the Confucian cultural sphere (J. jukyō bunkaken 儒敎文化圈) (Tu 2006),19 and the theory of Central Efflorescence and Barbarism (hwairon 華夷論). But the vast reach of these terms is also a conceptual weakness. Recently, Saitō Mareshi (2010) has proposed the concept of Literary Sinitic Context (J. kanbunmyaku; K. hanmunmaek 漢文脈),20 a notion that has come to be widely employed in both Japan and Korea, and which warrants comparison with the above concepts. Within this notion of the Literary Sinitic Context, as Literary Sinitic is combined with vernacularity primarily along a temporal axis, not only Literary Sinitic but its derivative languages and literary styles, thoughts, and sensibilities go hand-inhand with the matter of cultural translation. From this perspective, the notion of “Literary Sinitic Context” is a useful concept for examining “the pulse” (myaku 脈) of Literary Sinitic, as well as the Literary Sinitic/sinographic “cosmos.” However, more thought must be given to the supra-state, supra-regional unit of the political, the core of the sinograph. This is because the discourses on Literary Sinitic and the sinograph concern not only the single-polity dimension, but are a kind of barometer that directly reflects the fluctuations of the East Asian international order. The usage of the concept “Sinographic Cosmopolis” requires certain revisions and analytical premises. The concept of Sinographic Cosmopolis must be able to assist us in denying the a priori existence of categories such as Sinographic culture and Confucianism. Furthermore, this concept must contribute to the understanding of the history of Literary Sinitic not as a self-evident relationship between the past and present of the sinograph, but as a form of technology in the “relationship” or “relationship of dominance” between space-time and cultural power, political strategies and hegemonies. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, etymologically speaking, cosmopolis and Vietnamese Confucian practices differed, he put forth the concept of “Sinographic Cultural Sphere,” a supposedly neutral term that contained a concrete cultural element. 17 This volume focuses on the dismantling of the Sinosphere through the processes of formation of nation-states and national languages. Thus, Murata avoids employing the communal concept of “Sinosphere.” 18 Rather than Literary Sinitic itself, Kin Bunkyō (a.k.a. Kim Mun’gyŏng) attempts to discover the commonality of reading practices themselves as a vernacular language system. 19 Although Tu Weiming uses the expression “Confucian civilization” liberally, it is used in combination with the term Confucian cultural sphere. “In East Asia, new hegemony is found in the so-called Confucian cultural sphere” (Tu 2006: 213). 20 According to Saitō Mareshi, there is within modern Japanese language and literature a universe centered on the sinograph and Sinitic poetry and prose (kanshibun 漢詩文), where Literary Sinitic knowledge and the inscriptional system of Literary Sinitic tone or idiom (kanbunchō 漢文調) play a foundational role. See Saitō (2010) for the Korean translation, and Saitō (2021) for the English translation, of his important book from 2007.

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(kosmos + polis) means “world city.” This concept can also be understood in terms of a political sphere including peoples from different regions. Ideally, the notion of the Sinographic Cosmopolis would act as the topos from which the cosmopolis as the political is questioned through the “languages” of Literary Sinitic, the sinograph, or Korean language and Korean vernacular script. The reason I emphasize the issues of polis and politics is that the context of the sinograph is quite different from the cosmopolis forming the basis of either Latinitas or the Sanskrit Cosmopolis. The sinograph is alive and well. Unlike Latin or Sanskrit, the sinograph has since the twentieth century been invariably associated with real state hegemony: it is not historical, but extremely controversial and actual. Considering the case of Korea—which has experienced occupation by China, Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union during its modern history—the sinograph, because it is associated with memories of occupation, cannot be treated casually. During the brief Chinese occupation that straddled the pre-modern and modern periods (1882–1895), the sinograph mediated sinocentrism and the modern transformation of Chinese-style imperialism. Moreover, through made-in-Japan neologisms and Japanese literary style, the sinograph mediated Japanese imperialism in Korean society during the colonial period and well into the modern period. The modern Korean politician and Enlightenment thinker Yu Kilchun 兪吉濬 (1856–1914) is well known for having devised modern Sino-Korean Mixed Script style (kukhanmunch’e 國漢文體). He described this style of writing in his Enlightenment tract Sŏyu kyŏnmun 西遊見聞 (Things Seen and Heard in the West; 1895), stating that “Our (Korean) writing and sinographs are so intermingled that the sentence structure does not contain unnecessary embellishment. Its only aim is to convey its meaning through common language” (Yu 1978: 5; emphasis mine).21 Here, the term “common language” (sogŏ 俗語) does not refer to the vernacular itself, but indicates the syntactical structure of Korean and the usage of han’gŭl. In one sense, Yu’s project was the building of a prototypical “cosmopolitan vernacular” combining cultural memory, tradition, and populism. Unfortunately, the acquisition of such hegemony in literary style was simultaneously actualized by Japan’s concomitant colonization of Korea. Hwang Hyŏn 黃玹 (1856–1910), who famously committed suicide after the Japanese annexation of Korea, viewed the Korean language project that followed the Kabo Reforms (1894–1895) as an invasion of Japanese grammar. He deplored the fact that, due to this invasion, the established order of the cosmopolis based on the distinction between authentic/true/genuine and vernacular/ 21 “我文 kwa 漢字 răl 混集 hăya 文章 ŭi 軆裁 răl 不飾 hăgo 俗語 rŭl 務用 hăya 其意 răl 達 hăgiro 主 hăni.”

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vulgar (chin vs. ŏn 眞~諺) was completely destroyed. Due to Japanese influence, sacred or “true writing” (chinsŏ 眞書) became “Han writing” (K. hanmun, J. kanbun 漢文), and eventually fell to mere sinographic characters, having lost their formerly lofty status as the one true writing system (muncha 文字). Today, Hansŏng’s [Seoul] Official Gazette and every kind of intergovernmental document is written in kukhanmun [Sino-Korean mixed script]. This is due to the imitation of Japanese grammar. From long ago in the language of our country, sinographic writing was termed “true writing” (chinsŏ 眞書), while hunmin chŏngŭm was called “vernacular writing” (ŏnmun 諺文), and together they were known as “chinŏn” (眞諺). However, following the Kabo Reforms, influential people began referring to vernacular writing as the “national writing” (kungmun 國文) while “true writing” became known also as hanmun (漢文). Finally, as the three-character word kukhanmun became part of the language, the term chinŏn fell into disuse. And now, imprudent, thoughtless folk argue for the abolition of hanmun altogether, but these forces will soon be stopped. Hwang Hyŏn 1994: 89

是時京中官報及外道文移皆眞諺相錯以綴字句盖效日本文法也．我國方言 古稱華文曰眞書稱訓民正音曰諺文故統稱眞諺及甲午後趨時務者盛推諺 文曰國文別眞書以外之曰漢文於是國漢文三字遂成方言而眞諺之稱泯焉 其狂佻者倡漢文當廢之論然勢格而止．

Hwang Hyŏn’s argument was overly severe because he regarded the national language movement as part and parcel of invasive Japanese grammar, but his evaluation ended up becoming a kind of cruel prophecy. The Japanese language, which controlled relations between the vernacular language and the cosmopolis through translation and inscriptional style (munch’e 文體), did not cease its decisive influence on Korean inscriptional style, but rather targeted the status of the cosmopolitan through colonial domination. As a result, Sino-Korean mixed script served as a preliminary step to the Japanization of modern Korean discourse. Literary Sinitic, or perhaps what we might call sinographic imperialism, displayed its cohesive nature through the phrase “common script, common race” (K. tongmun tongjong, J. dōbun dōshu 同文同種). At times, phrases such as “the harmony of a common script” (tongmunji ŭi 同文之宜) or “common script, common language” (K. tongmun tongŏ, J. dōbun dōgo 同文同語) used so often by the Qing Empire and Imperial Japan were expressions of euphemistic domination. The terms “common script, common race” and “one family” (K. ilka, J. ikka 一家), however, were by no means expressions of solidarity

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in a common East Asian sinographic sphere. While moments of peace and commonality in values did exist, these were the exceptions. The following are excerpts from official government notices on “Chosŏn-Qing Regulations on Private Maritime and Overland Trade” (朝淸商民水陸貿易章程) by Directing Member of Chosŏn Commercial Affairs (總辦朝鮮商務委員) Chen Shutang 陳樹棠 (dates unknown), and the biography of the Hansŏng chubo (Hansŏng Weekly) supporter and Kapsin Coup (1884) participant Inoue Kakugorō 井上角 五郎 (1860–1938), respectively: Since the time of Kija’s enfeoffment, Chosŏn has existed as a vassal state of China, and for thousands of years has revered only proper decorum (yeŭi 禮義) and the teachings of the Odes and the Documents (sisŏ 詩書), being admired by the world as a country of shining civilization […] Generally, there is no need to talk about trade or commerce among the merchants who do business here, but rather the proper respect of fidelity, in particular the observance of laws and regulations in their comings and goings, and efforts to maintain harmony, and in so doing the amity of sharing the same writing emerges; the entire household must show affectionate warmth to the owner. Quoted in Yun Ch’iho ilgi, November 4, 1883

査朝鮮爲中國屬國自箕子肇封以來至今繡薦年專尙詩書禮義之敎久爲寰 與敬仰正所謂聲明文物彬彬之邦 … 凡來此貿易者無論行商坐賈必須崇尙 信義恪守章程彼此往來務敦雍陸以昭屬國同文之誼以重一家共主之精云

On the matter of Sino-vernacular mixed writing […] when it reached a certain point of development, Kim Yunsik (金允植), members of the Ministry of Presswork and Communication (Pangmun’guk 博文局), and most everyone else agreed that it was “convenient.” After that it was used in written correspondence, and people found that replacing the kana (假名) in Japanese texts with ŏnmun resulted in a very readable text that all could enjoy, prompting many to joyfully proclaim that, “Japan and Chosŏn are truly countries of common writing and speech.” This did not stop at merely providing a literary style for the Korean people, but enhanced amity with a country that is actually of the same writing and speech as our Japan. Inoue Kakugorō sensei denki hensenkai 1943: 99–100

Sinographs arrived in modern Korea not as an a priori collectivity, but as a thoroughly political concept, frequently accompanied by cultural assimilation and

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linguistic imperialism. In an East Asian order reorganized by Western impact, the ideologies of “unity in writing (muncha tong 文字同), unity in governance and religion (chŏnggyo tong 政敎同), and amity between lands(chŏngŭi sangyuk 情誼相陸)” (Kim Hongjip 1976: 306) forming the central value system of Korea—China—Japan solidarity were already facing collapse at the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894. Domestically as well, the contention between the sinograph and the vernacular was not a philosophical or cultural matter, but rather rested on political fluctuations. In place of Literary Sinitic, Sino-Korean mixed-script writing, created through the dialectic between modernity and tradition, became the refuge of cultural conservatism. Not once during Korea’s early modern period was the hegemony of the sinograph ever broken—it merely shifted from Literary Sinitic to Japanese. Arising from these historical circumstances, the northern part of the Korean Peninsula expelled sinographs from public life straightaway after the liberation of 1945, and in the South as well, after a long transition period, sinographs were driven from the face of the writing system, starting with a revolutionary moment in 1987. In the next section, we examine the limitations of the Sinographic Cosmopolis and its reproduction process through the subject of bilingual dictionaries. The dictionaries in question, republished recently by myself and Professor Yi Sanghyŏn, are thirteen volumes of foreign languageto-Korean and Korean-to-foreign language texts reproduced photographically with bibliographic essays, Korean translations, and scholarly analysis (Hwang and Yi 2012a, 2012b, 2012c). Through the compilation of bilingual dictionaries, led mainly by Western missionaries and the colonial authorities, we discuss the treatment of the sinographic dictionary headwords and glosses and how they were acquired, the process of gathering vernacular terms, as well as the nature of the literature and documents that contributed to the process of selecting lemmata. Through the collisions and articulations of the sinograph, French and English, as well as the translations and neologisms that mediated this relationship, we also investigate the process of dismantling the old community of literature, the emergence of a new cosmopolis, and the dominant elements in the relationship between cosmopolitan and vernacular. 3

The Triangular Organization of Research on the Korean Language: The Modern Sinographic Cosmopolis and the Transnational Invention of Bilingual Dictionaries

In previous work I have suggested three principal approaches to research on the Korean language, examples of which I take up below.

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The following newspaper headline from 1909 is revealing of how Koreanlanguage literature was born in modern Korea: “Chu Sigyŏng; an American, Gale; a Frenchman, Father An; and a Japanese, Takahashi Tōru, have organized the Korean Language Research Society”22 (Taehan maeil sinbo, December 29, 1909: 3). Chu Sigyŏng 周時經 (1876–1914) was the symbol of research on the Korean language, as well as a pioneer in linguistic nationalism in modern Korea. The “American” individual Kiil 奇一 was actually Canadian Presbyterian missionary James Scarth Gale (1863–1937). Gale, along with Horace Grant Underwood and others, translated and published the han’gŭl version of the Bible, which exercised a decisive impact on the formation of modern Korean.23 Gale was also one of the few scholars during this early period to elevate the study of Korean classics and history to the level of academic inquiry.24 Takahashi Tōru 高橋亨 (1878–1967), who at the time was an educator at a Taehan Empire government middle school, was an important figure who led the very first lectures on Korean language and literature at Keijō Imperial University, where he taught from the mid-1920s until liberation in 1945. As research at this time was still at a nascent stage of development, it is highly likely that the above scholars’ research functioned as mutually formative. Although minor, the vignette is nonetheless meaningful; it was precisely these transnational academic communities that augured the fate of Chosŏn/Korean dictionaries, dictionaries that were created with the establishment of a bilingual dictionary production paradigm in which translation and exchange occurred between French, English, Chinese, German, and Japanese, and the Korean language. The most remarkable feature was the interaction and articulation between the Sinographic and Latin Cosmopoleis. Although such a claim requires ample evidence, for quite some time this fact alone has either been taken for granted or disregarded. For example, in a publication of Chu Sigyŏng’s pupil Kwŏn Tŏkkyu 權悳奎 (1890–1950), who also served as proofreader for Kim Tongsŏng’s 金東成 (1890–1969) New 22 “周時經과美人｢奇一｣․法人｢安神夫｣․日人高橋亨이韓語硏究會를組織하다.” A translation of this article also appeared in the February 2, 1910 edition of the Sinhan minbo. That Gale himself also mentioned Chu Sigyŏng can be surmised from one remaining source. See Yi, Ryu and Ok (1994). 23 Gale was one of six missionaries who participated in the translation of the Bible. Only Gale and Underwood participated in the entire process of the both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. See Yi, Ryu and Ok (1994). 24 For example, in Cumings (1997) and other works, James Scarth Gale remains a bountiful source for quotations providing historical context of the times. His name appears on sixteen different pages in the index, one number lower than King Kojong (r. 1863–1907) and equal to Inch’on Kim Sŏngsu 金性洙 (1891–1955). He is the single-most frequently quoted scholar, and second only to the New York Times as a source for Cumings.

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Korean-English Dictionary (Ch’oesin cho-yŏng sajŏn 最新鮮英辭典), Kwŏn wrote, “The National Script Research Institute (Kungmun yŏn’guso 國文硏究 所) was established inside the Ministry of Education (Hakpu) and became the backbone of research, while the Korean Language Research Society (Hanŏ yŏn’guhoe 韓語硏究會) was set up by foreigners, becoming a target for ridicule” (Kwŏn 1923: 42). However, it is difficult to see Chu Sigyŏng as the standard bearer while foreigners did nothing but study his works faithfully. Relationships are never this unilateral. For instance, there are indications that Chu’s Korean grammar works were based on the standards of English grammar textbooks from the state of California, and that the han’gŭl orthography debate among Protestant missionaries had a considerable impact on Korea’s revised han’gŭl orthography (Chŏng Sŭngch’ŏl 2003).25 Collective memory is colored somewhat by historical circumstances, including the 1919 Declaration of Korean Independence put forth by thirty-three people’s representatives, the Korean Language Society Incident that resulted in a similar number of imprisoned, and the roiling atmosphere of linguistic nationalism in the post-liberation era. The writings after 1945 by the followers of Chu Sigyŏng (Kim 1996: 340) claiming that Gale lectured at the National Script Research Institute are not entirely believable. Records from the period paint a somewhat different picture. In order to guide the people, they translated the Bible into han’gŭl, and in order to spread the Word to ignorant men and women both young and old, we taught han’gŭl to them. It was introduced along with the establishment of schools in various places; sons and daughters were gathered together and taught, and Confucian education that had formerly been accompanied by hanmun was now carried out in pure han’gŭl. Until then, due to the poisoning of Confucian education, han’gŭl had been so disdained that hanmun was considered the only form of writing, and while not knowing hanmun was a source of great embarrassment, not only was ignorance of han’gŭl not a matter of concern, but people actually prided themselves on this ignorance. However, because treasures do not stay buried forever, Christianity at last performed a meritorious deed by shattering this mistaken way of thinking, elucidating the value of han’gŭl, and exhibiting the splendor of han’gŭl to the world. Kim 1938: 64

25

Ross King, through a comparative analysis of the orthography debate among Protestant missionaries and the orthography revisions proposed by Korean intellectuals in the modern period, also suggests a connection between the two (King 2005).

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Christianity and han’gŭl, enlightenment and foreigners: is it not possible that the narrative of Korean dictionary compilation as a frustrated project or as a form of creation ex nihilo was actually a much more transnational, complex process in which the public authority of the Japanese Governor-General and the Korean Language Society (Chosŏnŏ hakhoe) worked reciprocally on han’gŭl standardization? For example, Ogura Shinpei 小倉進平 (1882–1944), known as the first scholar to systematize the study of the Korean language, categorized established research consistently into a system of three: “works by Koreans, works by Japanese, and works by foreigners (oegugin)” (1940). According to Ogura, “The study of Korean language (chosŏnŏ) history is generally divided into two spheres. The first is the history of research by foreigners and Koreans on the language itself, and the second is the history of research by Koreans on foreign languages” (1940: 1). Here, “foreigners” indicates Western priests and missionaries, Japanese government scholars, and civilian scholars. Ogura’s classification of Korean vernacular exegeses (ŏnhae) in his Chōsengogakushi (History of Korean Language Studies) into annotations of Confucian classics (kyŏngjaryu 經子類), edification (kyohwaryu 敎化類), politics and law (chŏngbŏmnyu 政法 類), history (yŏksaryu 歷史類), language (ŏhangnyu 語學類), religion, technical knowledge, folk songs, and literature is a classificatory scheme which appears to follow that employed in Maurice Courant’s seminal work, Bibliographie Coreénne.26 How shall we elucidate the issue of the Sinographic Cosmopolis and the vernacular? As a preliminary step, I will begin with the history of “research by foreigners and Koreans on the language,” and “research by Koreans on foreign languages”; that is, with a reciprocal examination of the conjunction between the Sinographic and Latin Cosmopoleis. Until 1938 in Korea, there was not a single Korean—Korean dictionary compiled to encompass the Korean language in its entirety. As dictionaries were limited to just the Japanese language, a sort of lexicographical vacuum existed. Although many attempts were made at dictionary compilation, including through organizations such as the National Script Research Institute (Kungmun yŏn’guso), Chosŏn Society for Illumination of the Classics (Chosŏn kwangmunhoe), and Korean Language Society, and by individuals such as Chu Sigyŏng and Ch’oe Namsŏn 崔南善 (1890–1957), financial difficulties, a lack of personnel, and interference from colonial authorities frustrated efforts. This 26 A Japanese relay translation of the English version of the introduction to Maurice Courant’s Bibliographie Coréenne was commissioned by the Library of the Chosŏn Governor-General and published by Kyoto University professor Ogura Chikao 小倉親雄 (1913–1991). See Courant (1936; 1940–1941).

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does not mean, however, that no dictionaries were compiled at all. The publications that did come to fruition were principally bilingual dictionaries by Western missionaries. Therefore, if the issue is not analogy based on context but rather the fixing of clear vocabulary meanings, consulting bilingual dictionaries is essential. These bilingual dictionaries were associated with foreign-language learning, as well as with translation. Specifically, Korea’s modern bilingual dictionaries were born out of translations of Christianity-related texts starting with the Bible, and the need for colonial authority to survey traditional Korean indigenous customs and practices (kyūkan chōsa 舊慣調査). Clearly, then, this was not a language project by native speakers for their own society. However, as Ogura had indicated, numerous Korean intellectuals did participate in the dictionary compilation processes, and these bilingual dictionary projects—through the intervention of a third language—bring into sharp relief the relationship between the sinograph and han’gŭl. This approach suggests the following questions. By the time Korean-language literature had been established as a modern field, had the issue of so-called “cosmopolitan” and “vernacular” not already begun to be considered via a negotiation between the Sinographic and Latin Cosmopoleis? Furthermore, was the question of the Sinographic Cosmopolis not first discovered through the intervention of the Latin Cosmopolis? 4

Antiquated Modernity: From Sinographic Cosmopolis to Sinographic Mediapolis

Chasan An Hwak 自山 安廓 (1886–1946), an early-modern scholar of Korean classical literature, once summarized previous research on han’gŭl in the following way: “Since the time of Sejong, scholars such as Pak Sŏngwŏn, Ch’oe Sejin, and myself have attempted to research the Korean language, but this amounted to no more than translating foreign languages and comparing them with Korean.” Nonetheless, he goes on to state that “The current profusion of demands for a complete abolition of foreign loanwords and a return to using antiquated Korean” (1994: 10–11) are positions based on a doctrine of sophistry and irrationality (kongnon pulhamnisŏl 曲論不合理說). Here, An Hwak points out that it is very difficult from the outset to establish research on the language of a society without a “translational point of view” and that the relationship between the vernacular and foreign loan words is a variable one which cannot be so easily divided. When Literary Sinitic was the cosmopolitan language, the realm of the vernacular would have been limited to pure Korean, but when

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an imperial language like English becomes the cosmopolitan language, even the sinograph may be included within the range of the vernacular. To take an example, Yu Kilchun, the champion of modern Sino-Korean Mixed Script inscriptional style, viewed sinographs as the core of “tradition” and as such actually opposed the exclusive use of han’gŭl. The fact that while promoting the merits and value of research on the Korean language An Hwak points to the Korean dictionaries and grammars compiled by Aston, Scott, Siebold, the French priest Dallet, and the missionaries Underwood and Gale as representative research on the Korean language of the time, is extremely significant. Through the work of their bilingual dictionaries, which acted as both agents of translation and observers of “translating and translated modern Korea,” we can examine the relationship between the cosmopolitan and the vernacular. There are two central relationships to consider here. First, there is the relationship between the vernacular and the previous cosmopolitan language, based on the sinograph, and secondly the relationship between the current and potentially future cosmopolitan languages of French, English, and Japanese and the indigenous language (t’ochagŏ 土着語), including sino-vocabulary (hanchaŏ 漢字語) and now constituting the vernacular. An examination of these central considerations raises the following questions: How was the sinographic-vernacular relationship understood by Western missionaries, and in what manner was the relationship regulated and managed within dictionaries? It was the Paris Foreign Missions Society (Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris) that first established the overall translational connection between Western languages and Korean. The Korean-French Dictionary (Dictionnaire Coréen-Français), published by the central figure in the mission, Father Félix Clair Ridel, adopted han’gŭl spellings for lemmata and set pronunciations, employing both French and sinographs in dictionary glosses. In the preface to the lexicon, the compiler explained briefly the system and creative principles of han’gŭl, and revealed the fact that, unlike Egyptian hieroglyphs or the “ideographs” of Literary Sinitic, han’gŭl was a system of easily mastered phonograms. Ridel stipulated that sinographs were “Koreanized Chinese,” and distinguished between them and the vernacular with an asterisk. He defined the “Chinese words” following the “pure Korean” as translations of the preceding words. Following Ridel’s dictionary, the issue of whether to include sinographs in “Korean” dictionaries has scarcely been raised. In connection with the rearrangement of cosmopolitan vs. vernacular through the connection with the Latin Cosmopolis, it should be noted that Ridel’s dictionary was published at roughly the same time as the Korean-Latin Dictionary published by Bishop

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Daveluy (1818–1866) (Daveluy 1891). The Sinographic Cosmopolis was quickly coming face-to-face with the Latin Cosmopolis. Following Father Ridel, the Protestant Missionary Horace Grant Underwood next took up the tedious work of dictionary compilation. Underwood, who established what would later become Korea’s flagship private post-secondary institution, Yonsei University, worked with Gale to achieve a complete Korean translation of the Bible. In the preface to his English-Korean Dictionary, Underwood (1890) reveals the secret to his English glossing of Sino-Korean words: for all words excepting pure Korean words, he referenced A Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language (1874) by Samuel Wells Williams (1812–1884). As for the etymology of vernacular Korean terms, he received help from indigenous scholars, critically scrutinizing their input. Underwood’s dictionary consisted of a total of 19,446 vocabulary items, 11,718 of which were sinographic. Of these items, roughly half were vocabulary items culled from the Korean-French Dictionary (Yi Chiyŏng 2009: 75–79). In other words, it was actually the Latin Cosmopolis that became linked to the waning Sinographic Cosmopolis. In his obituary for Underwood, Gale reveals the following about the circumstances and process of Underwood’s dictionary compilation: While in Japan, Underwood was able to study the Korean language through his association with the classical scholar Song Tŏkcho 宋德祚. Adopting the vernacular writing protocols fixed by Chŏng Yagyong, Yi Kahwan and Nam Sanggyu, he set to work on the Korean-French Dictionary (Hanbul chădyŏn) and the translation of the New Testament, and this marked the first chapter in the protocols governing modern Korean writing. Gale 1916: 157

In a 1922 article in the periodical Kyemyŏng (Enlightenment), the pioneer scholar of Korean classical literature An Hwak assessed Underwood’s contribution as “one of the important Korean dictionaries currently in use” (An Hwak 1922) and claimed that the dictionary’s orthography was based fundamentally on the Sino-Korean rhyming dictionary Chŏnun okp’yŏn 全韻玉篇 and the Korean-French Dictionary. Of Gale’s numerous sources, he emphasized one particular Korean assistant by the name of Song Sunyong 宋淳容 (sobriquet Tŏkcho 德祚, dates unknown), who he referred to as a veritable walking dictionary. Song had experience teaching Korean to French priests, and had also participated in the publication of the Korean-French Dictionary. Underwood set the pronunciation of sinographs in Korean, and he crossreferenced the meanings of these terms by referring to the traditional Korean

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dictionary of sinographs (okpy’ŏn 玉篇), research on Korean by classical scholars, the research on Korean by French priests, and Chinese-English dictionary publications by Western missionaries in China. As for the “employing of [Song] as a Korean teacher,” Underwood considered this divine “providence” (Yi and Ok 2005–2010: 1:10–11).27 For Underwood, taking on Song as a teacher meant the continuation of a unique succession of Korean language study, beginning with Chŏng Yagyong and Yi Kahwan and their work with Catholic priests.28 In this environment where the boundaries of the Korean vernacular were blurred, the dictionary compilation project increased the range of Korean inscriptional possibilities through a transnational network that exceeded the scope of what Korean had earlier been. In this process, while the boundary between sinographs and the vernacular was for the first time conspicuously drawn, sinographs were also wholly integrated into Korean. This process of bilingual dictionary compilation took place in tandem with the separation and differentiation from Chinese, or perhaps with the rediscovery of the indigineity of their own regional sinographic culture. For example, the British diplomat James Scott (1850–1920), who published his English-Corean Dictionary: Being A Vocabulary of Corean Colloquial Words in Common Use at roughly the same time as Underwood’s dictionary, understood the sinographic vocabulary in Korean not simply as words originating from China, but as a particular regional sound system (Scott 1891). In the preface to his dictionary, Scott explained the Korean “race” and the Korean language family, and according to his claim the current Korean pronunciation of sinographs followed the ancient sounds used in China’s Shandong region, the wellspring of Chinese language and culture. Accordingly, for Scott, Korea’s sinographs were irrelevant to China itself, and were comparable only to modern-day Cantonese. As a diplomat from Britain, which ruled part of Canton, he did not view China as unified, nor did he obediently acknowledge the existence of a monolithic sinographic cultural sphere. Scott recognized that, even if Literary Sinitic or sinographs were able to represent the language situation of the upper class, it was inappropriate for delineating the everyday lives of Koreans. According to Gale’s description, as a “simple language” used for life expression, Korean was able to convey the gospels beautifully, yet faltered when delivering the contents of the Epistles to the Romans and Galatians (Gale 1909: 21–22). However, with the modern 27 For a general account of Underwood’s early work, refer to Yi Manyŏl (2001). 28 According to this source, the reason for Gale’s consideration of the work of Chŏng Yagyong and Yi Kahwan was due to his belief that, through Song Sunyong, the succession of Korean language research by Koreans continued through foreigners.

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transformation of life, the situation changed rapidly: through the influence of modern Japanese, the sinographic and the vernacular were combined in a type of assemblage. Looking at the genealogy of Korean bilingual dictionaries, An English-Korean Dictionary by George Heber Jones (1914) represents the best example of rapid progress in the functionalization and de-sinicization of sinographs. Jones’ dictionary was an experimental work that explained high-level conceptual English terms through modern, imported sinographic terms originating mostly in Japan. Jones’ contribution was to list both the han’gŭl sound and sinographs next to nearly every Korean interpretation of English conceptual terms, a distinctive trait that was absent from the works of Underwood and Scott. However, rather than being an affirmation of the Sinographic Cosmopolis, this was closer to a rebellion against the traditional sinographic concepts that comprised the cosmopolis. This is because, for Jones, the sinograph was nothing more than an effective and functional medium for translating Western civilization. Unlike Underwood’s dictionary, which was for daily conversation, Jones’ dictionary was intended for the education system led by the Japanese Governor-General. According to Jones, “importance was placed not on preparing definitions in Korean (kungmun), but on finding proper equivalents of English terminology” (Jones 1914: iii). He described his dictionary as a “test,” that is, as a kind of experiment. The experiment of finding or making equivalent expressions was a construction project for translation terms, achieved mostly through the sinograph. As a result, “[a] great number of the words used in the dictionary were new and unfamiliar,” and “the concepts incorporated into the semantic field of many terminologies were still extremely unfamiliar to average Koreans, of a level known only to one portion of the scholarly class” (Ibid.: iii). However, through the legality and modern legitimacy of the Governor-General, Jones’ experiment forecasted the drastic changes in the Korean public sphere of the 1920s. In short, Jones’ translation experiment was a success, and the translation terms chosen have become the principal conceptual language in today’s Korea. Of all dictionaries up until that time, Jones’ made the most rapid advances in concentrating attention on the matter of translational terms and neologisms.29 He did not distinguish between “true writing” (chinmun) and “vulgar/vernacular 29 Gale was aware of and anticipated Jones’ dictionary, saying that, “the author’s desire to provide the newest dictionary to satisfy the needs of a Korean language in a transition phase during this time of tumult and crisis has thoroughly been accomplished, and it would behoove students to always keep this book handy for continual aid” (quoted in Gale [1915: 91]).

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writing” (ŏnmun), but rather referred to them inclusively as “national writing” (kungmun). The business of finding equivalent terms without lengthy explanations meant depending on the functional, economic language that was the sinographic. With the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), the rapid expansion in public media in the period 1895–1910, and especially the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, the Sinographic Cosmopolis, which included both conceptual and quasi-religious dimensions, transitioned to a much more functional Sinographic Mediapolis.30 This transformation by no means represented a neutral transition from idea to function. The linkage between language and polis/polity (chŏngch’ich’e 政治體) is a basic condition of human existence. Sinographs had already been transformed into the “medium” that translated the Latin Cosmopolis as a new cosmopolis binding together China, Japan, and Korea, which had now been territorialized as nation-states and/or colonies. The sinograph, no longer the basis of the old Sinographic Cosmopolis, was becoming the medium that ensured East-West interactivity or quasi-interactivity. The integration of vernacular and sinographic vocabulary, the explosion in sinographic terms following the encounter with the Latin Cosmopolis, and the process of the Sinographic Cosmopolis becoming a “mediapolis” are clearly understood when viewing the transition of the Korean language in response to English. I have collected roughly 19,748 English lemmata and Korean glosses from five different English-Korean dictionaries (Underwood 1890; Scott 1891; Jones 1914; Gale 1924; H. G. Underwood and H. H. Underwood 1925). Of these entries, 627 appear in all five dictionaries, and below we examine a portion of the vocabulary items related to academics, literature, and the arts.

30 As I hit upon the concept of the “mediapolis,” I soon came across Silverstone (2006) which had already presented the concept in detail.

Civilization

n. kyohwa 교화

chojyakhăni 조쟉ᄒᆞᆫ 이, chyuin 쥬인

: (painter) hwagong

kyohwa 교화, chohwa 조화, tŏkhwa 덕화

n. kyohwa 교화(敎化): mun­ myŏng 문명(文明): kăehwa ᄀᆡ화(開化)

(writer) munjyang n. chyŏsyulga 문쟝, myŏngp’il 명필 져슐가(著述家)

화공(畵工)

n. kisă 기 ᄉᆞ(技師) : misyulga 미슐가(美術家)

明

kăehwa ᄀᆡ화開化 munmyŏng 문명文

述家

n. kyohwa 교화(敎化), kăedo ᄀᆡ 도(開導) (2) munmyŏng 문명(文明), kăehwa ᄀᆡ화(開化), kăemyŏng ᄀᆡ 명(開明)

chyŏsyulga 져슐가著 n. (1) chyangjojya 쟝조쟈(創造者) (2) chyŏsyuljya 져슐쟈(著述者), chyŏjakchya 져작쟈(著作者), chyuin 쥬인(主人), palgŭiin 발긔인(發起人)

n. chosyŏnghăni

조셩ᄒᆞᆫ이,

쟝이

kŭrimjyangi 그림쟝이, hwagong 화공, ch’ăsăekchyangi ᄎᆞᄉᆡᆨ

Author

Art

n. (1) chăejo ᄌᆡ조(才操), kiye 기예(技藝) (2) kisyul 기슐(技術), misyul 미슐(美術) (3) misyulp’um 미슐품(美術品)

Underwood and Underwood (1925)

yesyulga 예슐가藝術 n. (1) misyulga 미슐가(美術家) (2) 家 hwaga 화가畵家 hwagong 화공(畵工) (3) kiyega hwagong 화공畵工 기예가(技藝家) hwasă 화ᄉᆞ畵師

Gale (1924)

n. hwagong 화공

Jones (1914)

Artist

Scott (1891) kisyul 기슐技術 misyul 미슐美術

Underwood (1890)

chăejo ᄌᆡ조, syul 슐, chăejyo ᄌᆡ죠, somssi n. kisyul 기슐(技術) ŏp 업 솜씨

English Entry

Table 16.1 English lemmata and Korean glosses from five English—Korean dictionaries

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n. haktang 학당, hakkyo 학교, hallimwŏn 한림원

Underwood (1890)

Critic

문쟝

kŭl 글, munjyang

태학관

Jones (1914)

n. (literary) changmun 작문(作文) : (style) munt’ye 문톄(文體)

syŏnggyungwan n. taehakkyo 셩균관, t’aehakkwan 대학교(大學校)

Scott (1891)

평론ᄒᆞᄂᆞᆫ이

n. (1) kodŭng hakkyo 고등학교(高等學校), chyŏnmun hakkyo 젼문학교(專文學校), taehakkyo 대학교(大學校) (2) haksăeng tant’ye 학ᄉᆡᆼ단톄(學 生團体) (3) taehakkyo ŭi kyosil 대학교의 교실(大學校敎室)

Underwood and Underwood (1925)

n. p’yŏngnonhănănjya 평론ᄒᆞᄂᆞᆫ 쟈(評論), pip’yŏnghănănjya 비평 ᄒᆞᄂᆞᆫ쟈(批評), kamdyŏngjya 감뎡쟈(監定者)

changmun 작문作文 n. (1) kŭljyang 글쟝, haphăn kŏt 합 chyŏsyul 져슐著述 ᄒᆞᆫ것, chiŭn kŏt 지은것, changmun 작문(作文) (2) honhammul 혼합물(混合物)

taehakkyo 대학교大 學校 chyŏnmun hakkyo 젼문학교專 門學校

Gale (1924)

n. pip’yŏngga p’yojyun 표쥰標準 n. p’yŏngnonhănăni syŏnsăeng 션ᄉᆡᆼ, sŭsŭng 스승, sigwan 비평가(批 kwebŏm 궤범軌範 評家) : (connoisseur) 시관 kamdyŏngjya 감뎡쟈(鑑定者)

Composition n. kŭljyang 글쟝, haphăn kŏt 합ᄒᆞᆫ것, chin kŏt 진것

College

English Entry

Table 16.1 English lemmata and Korean glosses from five English—Korean dictionaries (cont.)

556 Hwang

ᄌᆡ조

hak 학, kyŏngmulgungni 격물궁리, chăejo

n. hak 학, hangmun

Science

학문

ᄉᆞ젹

ᄉᆞ젹

존졀하다

economical chyŏljyohăda 졀죠ᄒᆞ 다, chyŏryonghada 졀용ᄒᆞ다, kŏmsohăda 검소ᄒᆞ 다, chonjyŏlhada

n. săgŭi ᄉᆞ긔, săjyŏk săgŭi ᄉᆞ긔, săjyŏk

n. chyŏryonghănăn kŏt 졀용ᄒᆞᄂᆞᆫ것, akkinăn kŏt 앗기ᄂᆞᆫ 것, kyumo 규모

Economy

Scott (1891)

History

Underwood (1890)

English Entry

Gale (1924)

n. kwahak 과 rigwa 리과理科 학(科學): haksyul 학 haksyul 학슐學術 슐(學術): (knowledge) hakmun 학 문(學問): chisik 지 식(知識): (in compounds) hak 학(學)

n. săgŭi ᄉᆞ긔(史記) săgŭi ᄉᆞ긔史記 : ryŏksă 력ᄉᆞ(歷史) : ryŏksă 력ᄉᆞ歷史 săjyŏk ᄉᆞ젹(事蹟)

n. chyŏlgŏm kyŏngjye 경졔經濟 졀검(節儉) : kŏmso 검소(儉素) : (a practical system) kyŏngjye 경졔(經濟)

Jones (1914)

Table 16.1 English lemmata and Korean glosses from five English—Korean dictionaries (cont.)

n. (1) kwahak 과학(科學), haksyul 학슐(學術), hak 학(學). (2) hangmun 학문(學問), chisik 지식(智識).

n. săgŭi ᄉᆞ긔(史記), ryŏksă 력ᄉᆞ(歷史), săhak ᄉᆞ학(史學), săjyŏk ᄉᆞ젹(事蹟).

n. (1) chyŏryong 졀용(節用), kyŏngjye 경졔(經濟), rijăe 리 ᄌᆡ(理財). (2) kyŏngjyehak 경제학(經 濟學). (3) chyedo 졔도(制度), chojik 조직(組織).

Underwood and Underwood (1925)

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Lecture

Individual

English Entry

nom 놈

n. wŏ 워, son 손, hăna ᄒᆞ나

kangnonhăda 강론 n. kilge kwŏnmyŏnhănăn ᄒᆞ다 mal 길게권면ᄒᆞᄂᆞᆫ말

Scott (1891)

Underwood (1890)

Gale (1924)

kangŭi 강의講義 n. yŏnsyŏl 연셜(演說) : kangsyŏl kangyŏn 강연講演 강셜(講說) : kangnon 강론(講論)

kăein ᄀᆡ인箇人 n. ilgăein 일ᄀᆡ 인(一個人) : (single) tandok 단독(單獨) : kăein ᄀᆡ인(個人)

Jones (1914)

Table 16.1 English lemmata and Korean glosses from five English—Korean dictionaries (cont.)

v.i.(1) kangŭihăda 강의ᄒᆞ 다(講義), kangyŏnhăda 강연ᄒᆞ 다(講演), kangsyŏkhăda 강셕ᄒᆞ 다(講釋), yŏnsyŏlhăda 연셜ᄒᆞ 다(演說), syŏlgyohăda 셜교ᄒᆞ 다(說敎). (2) hung’yehăda 훈계 ᄒᆞ다(訓戒), syŏryuhăda 셜유ᄒᆞ 다(說諭), kyŏnch’ăekhăda 견ᄎᆡᆨᄒᆞ 다(譴責). -,n. kangŭi 강의(講義), yŏnsyŏl 연셜(演說), kangyŏn 강연(講演), syŏlgyo 셜교(說敎), hun’gye훈계(訓戒),syŏryu셜유(說諭), kyŏnch’ăek 견ᄎᆡᆨ(譴責). kkujinnăn kŏs ᄭᅮ짓ᄂᆞᆫ것.

n. (1) hăna ᄒᆞ나, tan 단(單), tandok 단독(單獨), ilgăein 일ᄀᆡ인(一個人), kăeinŭi ᄀᆡ인의(個人), kakkagŭi 각각의(各各). (2) kăeindyŏk ᄀᆡ 인뎍(個人的), koyuŭi 고유의(固有).

Underwood and Underwood (1925)

558 Hwang

Music

Literature

Lesson

English Entry

Scott (1891)

ilgwa 일과

kŭl 글, mun 문, munjă 문ᄌᆞ

p’ungnyu 풍류, p’ungak 풍악

Underwood (1890)

v.t. kamhăo 감ᄒᆞ 오, tŏrŭo 덜으오 n. hănbŏn kongbuhăl kŏs ᄒᆞᆫ번공부ᄒᆞᆯ것, ilgwa 일과

n. kŭl 글, syŏ 셔

n. p’ungnyu 풍류, norae 노래

munhwa 문화文化 hangmun 학문學問

kyogwa 교과敎課 hakkwa 학과學課

Gale (1924)

n. ŭmak 음악(音樂) : ŭmak 음악音樂 (notes) koktyo 곡됴(曲調) : ŭmnyul 음률(音律) : (score) akpo 악보(樂譜)

n. munhak 문학(文學)

n. konggwa 공과(工課)

Jones (1914)

Table 16.1 English lemmata and Korean glosses from five English—Korean dictionaries (cont.)

n. p’ungnyu 풍류 (風流), ŭmak 음악 (音樂).

n. kŭl 글, hangmun 학문 (學問), simun 시문 (詩文), hak 학 (學), munhwa 문화 (文化), chyŏsyul 져슐 (著述), chyŏsyŏ 져셔 (著書).

n. (1) ilgwa 일과 (日課), konggwa 공과 (工課), kwadyŏng 과뎡 (課程), kyogwa 교과 (敎課), hakkwa 학과 (學課). (2) kărăch’im ᄀᆞᄅᆞ침, kyohun 교훈 (敎訓), hun’gye 훈계 (訓誡), kyŏnch’ăek 견ᄎᆡᆨ (譴責), kkujinnăn kŏs ᄭᅮ짓 ᄂᆞᆫ 것. (3) ryebăehăl ttae ningnăn sŏnggyŏng 례ᄇᆡᄒᆞᆯᄯᅢ 닑ᄂᆞᆫ성경 (禮拜 時誦聖經).

Underwood and Underwood (1925)

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Underwood (1890)

Scott (1891)

Poet

Philosophy

n. chyesyulgun

졔슐군

n. hak 학, hangmun 학문, ri 리

격물ᄒᆞᄂᆞᆫ이

Gale (1924)

n. ch’yŏlhak 쳘학(哲學) n. siin 시인(詩人); sigăek 시ᄀᆡᆨ(詩客)

sigăek 시ᄀᆡᆨ

n. ch’yŏlhak 쳘학 (哲學), ch’yŏlli 쳘리 (哲理), wŏlli 원리 (原理), riron 리론 (理論), hak 학 (學).

n. ch’yŏlhakchya 쳘학쟈 (哲學者), ch’yŏrin 쳘인 (哲人), syŏnghyŏn 셩현 (聖賢)(sage), pangmulgunjă 박물군ᄌᆞ (博物君子).

Underwood and Underwood (1925)

siin 시인詩人 sigăek n. siin 시인 (詩人), siga 시가 (詩家), sigăek 시ᄀᆡᆨ (詩客). 시ᄀᆡᆨ詩客

ch’olhak 철학哲學

ch’yŏlhakchya n. ch’yŏlhakchya 쳘학쟈(哲學者):(sage) 쳘학쟈哲學者 syŏnghyŏn셩현(聖賢)

Jones (1914)

kyŏngmulgungni

격물궁리

pangmulgunjă Philosopher n. kunjă 군ᄌᆞ, syŏngin 셩인, 박물군ᄌᆞ syŏnghyŏn 셩현, haksă 학ᄉᆞ, paksă 박 ᄉᆞ, kyŏngmulhănăni

English Entry

Table 16.1 English lemmata and Korean glosses from five English—Korean dictionaries (cont.)

560 Hwang

Progress

Position

English Entry

나아가오

Gale (1924)

chinhăeng 진ᄒᆡᆼ進 行 chinbo 진보進步 hyangsyang 향상向 上 paldal 발달發達

n. (place) kot 곳(處); tiwi 디위地位 chari 자리(座); ch’yŏdi 쳐디處地 (situation) wich’i 위치(位置); (circumstances) tiwi 디위(地位); (rank) sinbun 신 분(身分): (employment) kwa 과(窠); ilchari 일자리(雇業)

Jones (1914)

natta 낫다, n. chinbo charăgada 자ᄅᆞ가다, 진보(進步); (in nŭrŏgada 느러가다 skill) chyŏnjin 젼진(前進); (in civilization) kăejin ᄀᆡ진(開進); (advance or decline) syŏngsoe 셩쇠(盛衰)

t’ŏ 터, chari 자리, tiwi 디위

n. t’ŏ 터, kot 곳, chari 자리, p’ŭm 픔, tŭngbun 등분

v.t. aphŭro kao 압흐로가오, tŏ kao 더가오, nagao

Scott (1891)

Underwood (1890)

Table 16.1 English lemmata and Korean glosses from five English—Korean dictionaries (cont.)

v.t. (1) naagada 나아가다, chyŏnjinhăda 젼진ᄒᆞ 다(前進), chinhăenghăda 진ᄒᆡᆼᄒᆞ 다(進行). (2) chinbohăda 진보ᄒᆞ 다(進步), ch’yŏsyŏnhăda 쳔션  ᄒᆞ다(遷善), hyangsyanghăda 향상ᄒᆞ다(向上). -, n. (1) naagam 나아감, chyŏnjinhăm 젼진

n. (1) wich’i 위치 (位置), innăn kos 잇ᄂᆞᆫ곳. (2) chindi 진디 (陣地). (3) tiwi 디위 (地位), chigim 직임 (職任). chikpu 직분 (職分). (4) punhan 분한 (分限), kyŏngu 경우 (境遇), ch’yŏdi 쳐디 (處地). (5) sangt’ăe 상ᄐᆡ (狀態), chăsye ᄌᆞ셰 (姿勢), t’ăedo ᄐᆡ도 (態度), hyangbăe 향 ᄇᆡ (向背). (6) rimnon 립론 (立論), ch’yullon 츌론 (出論). -, v.t. tuda 두다, wich’i răl tyŏnghăda 위치를 뎡 ᄒᆞ다 (位置).

Underwood and Underwood (1925)

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561

Public

English Entry

Scott (1891)

to be. kongbŏndoeo păeksyŏng ᄇᆡᆨ셩 공번되오, muinbujihăo 무인부지ᄒᆞ오, rangjyahăo 랑쟈ᄒᆞ오

Underwood (1890)

Gale (1924)

ᄒᆞᆷ(前進). (2) chinbodoem 진보됨(進步), hyangsyangdoem 향상됨(向上), kyŏnggwa 경과(經過)(pyŏng ŭi 병의), chindo 진도(進度)(kwahak ŭi 과학 科學의), syŏngsoe 셩쇠(盛衰), syojyang 쇼쟝(消長)(kugun ŭi 국운의 國運).

Underwood and Underwood (1925)

myoryŏng 묘령妙齡 a. kong ŭi 공의(公), kongnip ŭi a. (not private) kongbyŏn 공 syŏngnyŏn 셩년成年 공립의(公立), konggăe ŭi 공ᄀᆡ 변(公便); (pertain의(公開), konggongdyŏk 공공뎍(公 ing to the state) 共的), kongjyungdyŏk 공즁뎍(公 kukkadyŏk 국가 衆的), nat’anan 나타난, tŭrŏnan 뎍(國家的); (state드러난. owned) kwanyu 관 유(官有); (concerning the public) kongsă ŭi 공ᄉᆞ의(公事上); kongjyungsyang 공즁 샹(公衆上)

Jones (1914)

Table 16.1 English lemmata and Korean glosses from five English—Korean dictionaries (cont.)

562 Hwang

Review

Religion

English Entry

ᄒᆞ오

sălphida ᄉᆞᆲ히다

kyo 교

n. to 도, kyo 교, syŏnggyo 셩교

v.t. sălp’yŏboo ᄉᆞᆯ펴보오, chyunhăo 쥰ᄒᆞ오, tasiboo 다시보오, kanp’ŭmhăo 간픔

Scott (1891)

Underwood (1890)

poksŭp 복습復習 tv. (the post) hoegohăda 회고ᄒᆞ 다(回顧): (examine) kŭmsahăda 금사ᄒᆞ 다(檢査): (a book) kŭmyŏlhăda 금열ᄒᆞ 다(檢閱): (troops) kwanbyŏnghăda 관병ᄒᆞ다(觀兵)

Gale (1924)

chonggyo 종교宗敎 n. chyonggyo 죵교(宗敎): (of a sect) kyop’a 교파(敎派): chyongp’a 죵파(宗派)

Jones (1914)

Table 16.1 English lemmata and Korean glosses from five English—Korean dictionaries (cont.)

v. (1) toraboda 도라보다, nyetkŏsŭl toraboda 녯것을도라보다, hoego­ hăda 회고ᄒᆞ다(回顧). (2) kwan­ byŏnghăda 관병ᄒᆞ다(觀兵), yŏlbyŏnghăda 열병ᄒᆞ다(閱兵). (3) kyojyŏnghăda 교졍ᄒᆞ다(校正), p’yŏngnonhăda 평론ᄒᆞ다(評論), chunhăda 준ᄒᆞ다(準), tasiboda 다 시보다, poksŭphăda 복습ᄒᆞ다(復 習). (4) kanp’umhăda 간품ᄒᆞ다(看 品), kŏmyŏlhăda 검열ᄒᆞ다(檢閱), kŏmsăhăda 검ᄉᆞᄒᆞ다(檢査). -, n. (1) kŏmyŏl 검열(檢閱), kŏmsă 검ᄉᆞ(檢 査), p’yŏngnon 평론(評論), kyojyŏng 교졍(校正). (2) kwanbyŏngsik 관병 식(觀兵式). (3) tasibonăn kŏs 다시 보ᄂᆞᆫ것, poksŭp 복습(複習). (4)(Monthly) wŏlbo 월보(月報).

n. to 도(道), kyo 교(敎), syŏnggyo 셩교(聖敎), chonggyo 종교(宗敎), kyomun 교문(敎門), kyop’a 교파(敎派).

Underwood and Underwood (1925)

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563

Right

English Entry

(correct) olt’a 올타

to be. olso 올소, kahăo 가ᄒᆞ오, kyarŭkhăo 갸륵ᄒᆞ 오, kŭrăji anso 그ᄅᆞ

지안소

Scott (1891)

Underwood (1890) a. olhŭn 올흔(公 平):(correct) parăn 바ᄅᆞᆫ(正當); (just) kongjyŏnghăn 공졍ᄒᆞᆫ(公正): chyŏngjikhăn 졍직 ᄒᆞᆫ(正直): (opp. of left) up’yŏn 우편 (右便): (suitable) tyŏktanghăn 뎍당 ᄒᆞᆫ(適當)

Jones (1914) tori 도리道理 kwŏlli 권리權利

Gale (1924)

Table 16.1 English lemmata and Korean glosses from five English—Korean dictionaries (cont.)

a. (1) olhŭn 올흔, kahăn 가ᄒᆞᆫ(可), chyŭngdanghăn 졍당ᄒᆞᆫ(正當), tangyŏnhăn 당연ᄒᆞᆫ(當然). (2) kyarŭkhăn 갸륵ᄒᆞᆫ, kŭrăji ani hăn 그 ᄅᆞ지안이ᄒᆞᆫ. (3) părŭn ᄇᆞ른, olhŭn 올흔, up’yŏn ŭi 우편의(右便). (4) kŏjyuk ŭi 거쥭의, kŏt’ŭi 것희. (5) chikch’yu 직츄(直推)(kŭihahak ŭi 긔하학의). -, n. (1) olhŭn kŏs 올흔것, chyŏngŭi 졍의(正義), tori 도리(道理), kongdo 공도(公道), kongŭi 공의(公義). (2) kwŏlli 권리(權利), kwŏn 권(權), chyŏn’gwŏn 젼권(專權). (3) olhŭn p’yŏn 올흔편, up’yŏn 우편(右便). (4) kŏjuk 거죽, kŏs 것.

Underwood and Underwood (1925)

564 Hwang

mal 말

n. mal 말, malsăm

Speech

말ᄉᆞᆷ

ᄌᆡ조

hak 학, kyŏngmungungri 격물궁리, chăejo

n. hak 학, hangmun

Science

학문

Scott (1891)

Underwood (1890)

English Entry

n. malsăm 말 ᄉᆞᆷ(言): pangŏn 방언(方言): (formal address) yŏnsyŏl 연셜(演說): kangsyŏl 강셜(講說): (power of) syŏlhwajyŏk 셜화 젹(typo for –ryŏk? 력의 오기?)(說話力) 유言論自由

ŏllon 언론言論 (freedom of) ŏllonjăyu 언론ᄌᆞ

Gale (1924)

n. kwahak rigwa 리과理科 과학(科學): haksyul haksyul 학슐學術 학슐(學術): (knowledge) hakmun 학문(學問): chisik 지식(知識): (in compounds) hak 학(學)

Jones (1914)

Table 16.1 English lemmata and Korean glosses from five English—Korean dictionaries (cont.)

n. (1) mal 말, tamhwa 담화(談話), malsăm 말ᄉᆞᆷ, ŏllon 언론(言論). (2) yŏnsyŏl 연설(演說), kangyŏn 강연(講演). (3) ŏdyo 어됴(語調), ŏt’u 어투(語套), pangŏn 방언(方言), 언(諺).

n. (1) kwahak 과학(科學), haksyul 학슐(學術), hak 학(學). (2) hangmun 학문(學問), chisik 지식(智識).

Underwood and Underwood (1925)

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Hwang

As the above table demonstrates, the shift from vernacular to sinographic and the expansion of sinographic terms in proportion to vernacular is unquestionable. The agent that mediated this was translation, a “process of civilization” which can be termed translational modernity. What was notable about this process was the movement to adopt equivalent sinographic concepts to explain English concepts. In other words, glosses that explained foreign terms along the lines of chojakhan i (“the person who created it”) for “author,” akkinŭn kŏt (“using parsimoniously”) and chŏryong 節用 hanŭn kŏt (“using sparingly”) for “economy,” and kilge kwŏnmyŏn 勸勉 hanŭn mal (“words of exhortation spoken at length”) for “lecture,” as well as term equivalents coined by analogy with traditional concepts, like kyŏngmul kungni 格物窮理 (“the investigation of things”) or chaejo 才調/才操 (“expedience”) for “science,” to 道 (“the Way”), kyo 敎 (“teachings”), or sŏnggyo 聖敎 (“teachings of the sages”) for “religion,” chesulkkun 製述- (“master of literary composition”) and sigaek 詩客 for “poet,” kunja 君子 (“superior man”), sŏngin 聖人 (“sage”), syŏnghyŏn 聖賢 (“literary worthy”), haksa 學士 (“traditional scholar”), kyŏngmul 格物 hanŭn i (“investigator of things”), and pangmul kunja 博物君子 (“superior man of wide learning”) for “philosopher,” all disappear around 1910, at which point the modern-day sinographic words for these concepts are generalized in more or less the form by which we know them today. In particular, we see a definite connection between this type of conceptualization on the one hand, and “ideal” (isangjŏk 理想的) sinographic concepts and ideological tendencies corresponding to English on the other. Examples of this are the Korean expressions that correspond to a term representative of modernity: “progress.” In the earliest source, this word is associated with neutral expressions of direction and movement with glosses such as “go forward” (ap’ŭro kao 앞으로가오), “go more” (tŏ kao 더가오), “go/step/move forward” (naa kao 나아가오), but in the very next dictionary it has gained relatively positive vernacular glosses such as “to be better/superior than” (natta 낫다), “to grow; increase; expand” (charagada 자라가다), and “to extend; grow; multiply” (nŭrŏnada 늘어나다). With the onset of the so-called modern enlightenment period and the Japanese annexation, a parallel construction is established between “progress” and sinographic terms with positive connotations: “progress; advancement; improvement” (chinbo 진보), “an advance; a forward movement; progress” (chŏnjin 전진), “an advance; development” (kaejin 개진), “development; growth; progress” (paltal 발달), “elevation; improvement; progress” (hyangsang 향상). An articulation was formed between the “European literary context” (kumunmaek 歐文脈) and Literary Sinitic context (hanmunmaek 漢文脈), and between the cosmopolitan languages that comprised them,

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as reflected in the above example through the ideology of “progress.” Having been demoted, or rather, having outlived its purpose within the ideological paradigm of “true writing” (chinmun), now a relic of the past that had to be cleared away, Literary Sinitic and the sinograph had now been transformed into a kind of universal language of mediation. Despite the calls for a unity between speech and writing (ŏnmun ilch’i 言 文一致), the segregation between common language and conceptual language, colloquial and literary, quotidian language (saenghwarŏ) and academic language accelerated. Coupled with an increase in sinographs, conceptual, literary, and academic language attained linguistic authority in this process through so-called “conceptualization,” revealing another linguistic phenomenon of modernity. Even though the translation proceeded mainly outside of Korea, being achieved through the mediation of Japanese and Chinese and imported into Korea, these translated terms have more or less settled and stabilized in the Korean language. This can be explained by the political situation in Korea; as Japan seized real political authority in its colony, it was in a unique position to carry out every type of reform and reorganization of the educational system. Accordingly, modern institutions and related concepts streamed into Korea. Due to Korean exchange students studying in Japan, as well as an increase in Japanese texts, a flood of neologisms entered Korea, either directly imported from Japan or via China. A conquest of Korea’s public sphere was taking place without the mediation of Korean, directly through Japanese—English and English—Japanese dictionaries. More than anything else, the conceptualization of quotidian language was proceeding at a rapid pace. A particular ideology was reflected through this process of conceptualization, and the ideology’s diffusion took place through expression. Despite the atrophy of the Literary Sinitic Cosmopolis, the mediational aspect of the sinograph was emphasized even more. As a result, prior imperial implications of the Sinographic Cosmopolis were reactivated, while a counter-discursive formation through the medium of the Sinographic Mediapolis became active. The vocabulary organization project that was serialized in the Korean periodical The Korea Bookman (Taehan kidokkyo sŏhoe 1920–1925) following the March First Independence Movement of 1919 was an illustrative attempt by Koreans at mapping out a monopoly on translation terms in Chosŏn’s new public sphere.31 In addition, as the potential for expression in Korean increased and the breadth of usage of modern Western terms in the actual public sphere 31

Hereafter abbreviated by author name, article title, issue number, year of publication, and page number.

568

Hwang

widened, Gale felt compelled to compile his Present Day English-Korean: Three Thousand Words (Samch’ŏn chădyŏn 三千字典; 1924) in haste, and H. H. Underwood carried on his father’s work with an enlarged edition of An English-Korean Dictionary (Yŏng-cho chădyŏn 英鮮字典; 1925). With the commencement of the modern period, newly shared sinographic translations were generated through the confrontation between the Sinographic and Latin Cosmopoleis, ultimately approaching the threshold of what may be termed the “Modern Japanese Cosmopolis.” If this threshold or topos may also be called the Sinographic Cosmopolis, it should be described as a battlefield of contestation between imperial rule, postcolonial resistance, diffusion, and appropriation. 5

James Scarth Gale’s Supplemental Korean—English Dictionary Publication and the Transformation of the East Asian Cosmopolitan Language

The dramatic transformations in the Sinographic Cosmopolis are clearly demonstrated when examining Gale’s Korean—English dictionaries, which were revised and supplemented a total of three times. Gale, the Canadian Presbyterian missionary who was proficient in French in addition to Korean, was selected to edit the dictionaries following Underwood, who had already achieved a considerable amount. Gale’s appointment was backed by the fervent hope of the whole Protestant denomination that a dictionary could be compiled that would surpass the standard of the Korean-French lexicon. In 1895, when Gale produced Korea’s first translation of a work of Western literature (The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, translated as T’yŏllo ryŏkchyŏng) his Korean ability was not especially remarkable. Nevertheless, his lexicon A Korean-English Dictionary (1897) contained about 12,133 more entries than the Korean-French dictionary. How was such a substantial supplement accomplished in such a short time? According to Gale (1897: v), if “language is rightly defined as the expression of thoughts by means of written words or articulate sounds,” then Korean, “has virtually three languages, the colloquial, the book-form, and the character, book-form being written in the native script, and the character in Chinese.” This claim was made before he had encountered the extensive range of fictional narratives in han’gŭl, and so for Gale “the character” meant Literary Sinitic, while the “book-form” designated the form of language in Korean exegeses of the Chinese classics. Gale defined the colloquial as “a language without a literature, or written correspondent of any kind whatever,” namely, something

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“handed down from antiquity by the sound only” (Ibid.: v), a language unable to carry the mantle of standard language. Judging by one work through which we can infer the process of vocabulary collection, among the 32,789 vocabulary items gathered, 21,417 were sinographic terms, while 11,372 were vernacular words (Gale 1900). A significant point here is the fact that Gale’s enlarged lexicon was drawn out of the relationship between the sinographic and the vernacular. The Korean-English Dictionary was not composed of Korean words alone. Gale organized his dictionary into “Part I: Korean-English Dictionary” and “Part II: Chinese-English Dictionary,” and in the appendix laid out the succession of kings in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean history. The “Chinese” in this title referred not to the modern Chinese language, but to sinographs. In Part II a total of 10,850 sinographs appeared, followed by the Korean gloss and English explanation presented in parentheses, seemingly reflecting the state of diglossia between sinographic and indigenous Korean. However, Gale emphasized the fact that, in order to read the sinographs, one must know concurrently the meaning denoted by the Korean vernacular reading (hun 訓) as well as the Sino-Korean pronunciation (ŭm 音). Therefore, Part II was presented according to the formula {sinograph—vernacular meaning—English meaning}. For example, the Korean sound (아) for the sinograph (阿) was one of a superset (mojiphap 母集合) of specific Korean sounds, under which was organized the following progression of definitions: “阿 (아), 언덕, A bank; A slope.” Although this appeared to reflect the traditional structure of Korean sinograph dictionaries (okpy’ŏn), beginning with the Chŏnun okpy’ŏn, in actuality Gale’s dictionary entries began with the Korean pronunciation, and Korean interpretations were presented concurrently. In relation to the increase in the number of lemmata, the Dictionary of Chinese Characters in Part II played a significant role. Through the painstaking work of collecting texts that contained spoken Korean, as well as the process of tracking down Korean vernacular glosses of sinographs and cross-referencing these with his Korean scholar-informants, Gale was able to uncover 7,700 vernacular vocabulary words. Of the vernacular terms recorded in Gale’s dictionary, at least two-thirds of these were “rediscovered” through this process of translation and annotation. Other than the translations and neologisms newly generated by societal transformation, a large quantity of vernacular terms was collected through this rearrangement of sinographs. The quantitative scope of Gale’s dictionary was secured through active diglossic intervention. That is, through a process of extrapolating the (vernacular) meanings of sinographs—now disconnected from the old Sinographic Cosmopolis—a more complete image of the related vernacular language was translationally

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formulated. Gale’s A Korean-English Dictionary (Han-yŏng chădyŏn 韓英字典) brings clearly into relief the role of English in regulating and controlling the relationship between the sinographic and the vernacular. On the one hand, the Sinographic Cosmopolis was dismantled by the Latin Cosmopolis with English as the medium, and on the other, the Sinographic Mediapolis was reactivated by translational modernity. Sinographic vocabulary, which was achieved through the combination of sinographs, is illustrated through reference to Herbert Allen Giles’ (1892) A Chinese-English Dictionary, which provided simple definitions based on equivalency. In other words, the language which arbitrated the diglossic situation was English, a scion of the Latin Cosmopolis. A contrast between Gale’s “concise definitions that will prove very useful to even Korean students” and Williams’ dictionary referenced by Underwood will illustrate this point clearly: Chinese—English Dictionary consulted by Underwood: Williams 1880

禮礼 From worship and a sacrificial vase; the character ‘體’ body resem-

bles it; the contracted form is common. / A step, an act, particularly acts of worship 事神, which will bring happiness; propriety, etiquette, ceremony, rites; the decent and the decorous in worship and social life; decorum, manners; official obeisance, worship; courtesy; offering, gifts required by usage, vails. Chinese—English Dictionaries consulted by Gale: Giles 1892 禮 Ceremony; etiquette; politeness; Presents; offerings. Worship. Compared to Williams’ Chinese—English dictionary cited by Underwood, Giles’ gloss is noticeably more concise, displaying a clear one-to-one reciprocal relationship between vocabulary items. Gale changed the Chinese—English dictionary entries to conform with the Korean pronunciation featured in the Dictionary of Chinese Characters (Hancha sajŏn), but also recorded both the sinographic language and the individual sinographs one-by-one in Korean print type. However, this method and perspective produced an advantageous result. Not only did Gale widely utilize Giles’ sinographic glosses in his Part II Chinese Character—English appendix, but he also reproduced Giles’ sinographic terms and glosses for “courtesy” (禮義, 禮貌, 禮文, 禮法, 禮度, 禮 節) in the Korean—English dictionary in Part I. In addition, he supplemented previous okp’yŏn and character compilations/glossaries (chahoe 字會) with Korean vernacular hun glosses. Giles’ Chinese—Korean dictionary and Gale’s resultant search for Korean definitions for sinographs was a great boon for the Korean vernacular.

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However, Gale did not agree with Giles’ view that because so many sinographic words had entered Korean there was no such thing as a Korean language. In Gale’s view, Literary Sinitic was not “Chinese” but “the native written language and was in existence as such centuries before the origin of the ‘vulgar’ script” (Ibid.: vi). Kugyŏl notations, a chart of which was included in the dictionary introduction, were for Gale a single, indivisible system which reflected both Literary Sinitic grammatical logic (mulli 文理) according to Chinese word order, and Korean grammar. Gale included all the translation and reading marks that were present between Literary Sinitic and Korean as the so-called vulgar script (ŏnmun). Before it was a cosmopolitan language of East Asia, Literary Sinitic was the “native written language.” Of course, Gale did describe critically the relationship between the vulgar script and Literary Sinitic, where “ŏnmun became the slave of hanmun and performed an inferior role in sentences, used in word endings, connectors and declensions while hanmun occupied the central role as nouns and verbs” (1900: 14). However, only when these two were combined was the formation of Korean possible, and so the sum of these two parts was “Korean.” Depending on the identity and status of the person speaking the cosmopolitan language, Gale’s criticism can also be a hasty, dubious claim. At a point in time not far removed from the Sino-Japanese War, speaking of the Sinographic Cosmopolis was virtually an expression of imperialism. But the sketch of the Korean language in three elements presented in the introduction to Gale’s 1897 dictionary, namely colloquial, book-form (≠ vulgar script) and “character” (hanmun = “native written language”), did not last long. With the experiences of the Sino-Japanese and the Russo-Japanese Wars, the Sinographic Cosmopolis was swiftly being recalibrated into a national language-centered nation-state system. Colloquial and literary han’gŭl were being blended thanks to the movement to unify speech and writing (ŏnmun ilch’i undong), while Literary Sinitic was gradually losing influence and fading from the public sphere. The abolition of the civil service examination (kwagŏ) in 1894 meant a decisive rupture with the tradition of the Sinographic Cosmopolis. In Gale’s words, “The old has gone, and the new has not yet come to be. Japanese ideals, Western ideals, New World thoughts are like wireless messages clashing through the air without anything as yet being clearly defined” (1923: 468).32 In terms of the Sinographic Cosmopolis, Japan-centered translated sinographs represented the reality of the cosmopolis. 32

In a piece entitled “Korean Literature” explaining the field, Gale describes the collapse of the Literary Sinitic world in the following way: “With the promulgation of the new laws of 1894, the Examination ceased to be, and with it ceased also the universal study of the

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As Yu Kilchun explained in 1895 in the preface to his Things Seen and Heard in the West, “Our script is a man-made one devised by our ancestral king, and sinographs are compatible with China. For my part, I simply regret that it is impossible to use our own script exclusively” (1978: 5–6).33 Thus, Yu explained han’gŭl as a traditional cultural inheritance in terms of cosmopolitan culture shared with China. However, the reality is more complex, as the example below illustrates. We can surmise from the following excerpts from Yu Kilchun’s Nodong yahak tokpon 勞動夜學讀本 (Nightschool Reader for Laborers; 1908) and modern Korea’s first new novel (sinsosŏl), Hyŏl ŭi nu (Tears of Blood; 1906) by Yi Injik 李人稙 (1862–1916), that it was “translations” along the lines of Japanese-style kundoku 訓讀 and furigana-style glosses, rather than the cultural inheritance of Korean-style exegeses of Chinese texts (ŏnhae), that brought about a more decisive shift in écriture. 새김생버러지 물고기

종류

다 그 됴화

사람

호올

복

신령

禽獸과虫며魚의種類가皆其造化이어날人이獨로사람되는福을어더靈ᄒᆞᆫ

셩홈

性이잇신즉어디질겁지아니ᄒᆞ리오 Yu 1996: 275

일청전쟁

평양 일경

청인 패

日淸戰爭춍소리ᄂᆞᆫ平壤一境이ᄂᆞ가ᄂᆞᆫ듯ᄒᆞ더니그춍소리가긋치ᄆᆡ淸人의 군사

추풍

낙엽

그러면 무슨ᄭᅡ닭으로 세상

ᄒᆞᆫ軍士ᄂᆞᆫ 秋風에落葉갓치흣터지고 … 然則 何故로 世上에사라잇ᄂᆞᆫ고  한가지일

쥭기

一事를기다리고死를참고잇셧더라 Yi 1906: 171, 189

The so-called “national language” (kugŏ) was congealing as an amalgamation of translation under the guise of tradition and the hybrid union of Sino-Korean Mixed Script (kukhanmun honyong) and han’gŭl exclusive use (han’gŭl chŏnyong). Whether from a class-based or nationalistic perspective, perhaps the cosmopolitan value of sinographs itself was one component of constructed tradition. Translation was even more decisive than tradition. The Korean language’s transformation through translation proceeded from the sentence level

Classics. Confucius died in a night, and so the ship of state slipped its ancient anchor chains and was adrift. For twenty-eight years she has been widening the distance from the ancient anchorage, just as the winds of fortune happened to blow, so that we may truly say today that she is far at sea. The old has gone, and the new has not yet come to be. Japanese ideals, Western ideals, New World thoughts are like wireless messages clashing through the air without anything as yet being clearly defined” (Gale 1923: 467–468). 33 “我文 ŭn 則我先王朝 ŭi 幷刃造 hăsin 人文 io 漢字 năn 中國 kwa 通用 hănăn 者’ ra 余 năn 猶具我文 ŭl 純用 hăgi 不能 hom ŭl 是歉 hănoni” (Yu 1978: 5).

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to arrive at a point where it altered the character and size of the lexicon itself. For his dictionary compilation Gale was now obliged to collect new vocabulary from Sino-Korean mixed script or han’gŭl periodicals of the day. Although he obtained a sizeable number of words from the traditional translation process, the boundaries were clear. With the Japanese annexation of 1910, Gale struggled considerably to adapt to the new “Sinographic Cosmopolitan” paradigm. As is often overlooked, the revised version of Gale’s Korean-English Dictionary appeared in 1911, but the Chinese dictionary in Part II was not published until 1914. As Part II shows, the Chinese dictionary, which belonged to the okpy’ŏn lineage, was indispensible to the Korean language dictionary through the 1910s. However, the ramifications and entailments were undergoing a qualitative transformation through the intervention of modern meanings. By the time of the 1914 version, the sinograph was by no means confined to East Asia, but rather served as a gateway to the world. For example, Gale could not help but insert the modern concept of nitrogen (chilso 窒素) into the definition explaining the sinograph 窒 (magŭl chil): 窒 (makhil) To stop up; to obstruct. (Gale 1897) 窒 (magŭl) To stop up; to obstruct. Nitrogen. (Gale 1914)

In the 1931 version of his dictionary, Gale was obliged to consult English and Japanese bilingual dictionaries and Japanese lists of neologisms because madein-Japan sinographic neologisms were circulating widely in Korea, and were already accepted as a given among language users throughout East Asia. In his introduction to the third edition of the Unabridged Korean-English Dictionary (Han-yŏng taejajŏn 韓英大字典; 1931), Gale clearly indicated that the number of vocabulary words had been augmented due to extensive consultation of several Japanese-produced dictionaries. Gale stated that he added 35,000 new words to his dictionary from the Japanese Governor-General’s Chōsengo jiten (Dictionary of the Korean Language) and other contemporary publications, and praised the “great accomplishment of Inoue,” probably referring here to Inoue Jūkichi’s 井上十吉 (1862–1929) Inouye’s English-Japanese Dictionary (Inoue ei-wa daijiten; 1928). H. H. Underwood also revealed that he “added several hundred vocabulary words from the Osaka mainichi shinbun’s 5,000-word English neologism list” to his final dictionary, a work that encompassed the transformation in language from traditional vernacular to the Enlightenment period and the discourse of the 1920s. He also explained that, other than including these words, he had “consulted as much as possible the sophisticated definitions in the Sanseidō Dictionary [Sanseidō jiten 三省堂辭典], and as for the definitions in Literary Sinitic, they had mostly come from the Sanseido and the Chinese Commercial

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Dictionary”34 (Underwood and Underwood 1925: 4). The fact that dictionaries published in Japan or China were used to interpret English words is proof that modern Korean was significantly influenced by Chinese and Japanese translational language. Underwood’s son placed the mark “ㅣ” next to these types of imported words. The distinction between the sinographic and the vernacular had now been reworked into a separation between made-in-Japan sinographic vocabulary and a sinograph-inclusive vernacular Korean. Not all missionaries agreed with this division. For Gale, however, modern Korean civilization meant that refined culture was treated inhospitably and immature ideas received praise—a labyrinthine conundrum: Today a graduate of Tokyo University cannot read what his father left him as a special heritage—his literary works. Was there ever seen the like? The literary past of Korea, a great and wonderful past, is swallowed up as by a cataclysm, not a vestige being left to the present generation. Of course the present generation is blissfully ignorant of this and quite happy in its loss. It has its magazines and writes with all confidence learned articles on philosophy, on Kant and Schopenhauer. Gale 1923: 468

However, this lost age that Gale spoke of was impossible to recover. As Gale wrote in the conclusion to his essay, “Korean Literature,” “The old has gone, and the new has not yet come to be,” and what was needed was the time to become natural and refined. Regardless of its depth, the terminology of Kant and Schopenhauer and the literary style of Tokyo Imperial University graduates was replacing the classical literature of the East, Literary Sinitic, and the underdeveloped vernacular Korean language. As is commonly known, instances of Korean language or bilingual dictionary production by Koreans prior to liberation were extremely limited. Although a majority were made by foreign missionaries or colonists, a few exceptions include Kim Tongsŏng’s 金東成 (1890–1969) Ch’oesin sŏn-yŏng sajŏn (New Korean—English Dictionary; 1928), Mun Seyŏng’s 文世榮 (1888–?) Chosŏnŏ sajŏn (Korean Dictionary; 1938), or even Sim Ŭirin’s 沈宜麟 (1894–1951) smaller Pot’onghakkyo chosŏnŏ sajŏn (Elementary School Korean Dictionary; 1925). Although it has not been demonstrated concretely how pre-existing “corpora” (bundles of words, mal mungch’i) gathered previously by missionaries were taken over as a “bundle” (mungch’i) and influenced subsequent Korean and bilingual dictionary compilation, this is clearly the case when viewing various memoirs. In the preface of nearly every dictionary that followed, the 34

Probably referring to Kanda (1915) and Yoh (1917), or similar editions.

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contributions of foreigners to dictionary production are disavowed, but even this denial serves as a form of reference.35 However, within this environment of refutation, the sinograph itself was not denied, aside from the extreme linguistic nationalistic stance of those like Ch’oe Hyŏnbae 崔鉉培 (1894–1970). Tradition is the source of the indigenous or autochthonous, and here we see the traces of ‘naturalization’ combining heterogeneity and indigeneity. Thus, the sinograph became legitimized in a vernacular world not because of its status as a product of the old cosmopolis, but rather because of its status as a vestige or trace (hŭnjŏk) of indigeneity. Korean language dictionaries, which epitomized Korean vernacularity, included as a matter of course publications from Japan in their lists of referenced materials. This suggests an inherent crux in Korean research on modern language, sinographic culture, and conceptual history (kaenyŏmsa), as well as the comprehensiveness of this problematik. Although culture usually obtains its authenticity and legitimacy via father-to-son inheritance, it is also handed down through uncles and even neighbors. It is precisely this understanding of transnationality and transcosmopolitanism in the process of bilingual dictionary publication that serves as a specific example demonstrating the inherent cosmopolitanism of the modern nation-state. This understanding itself is perhaps the essence of modern Korean vernacularity. 6

Politics of the Cosmopolis, 1932–1945: The Demise of the Sinographic Cosmopolis

With the onset of the modern period, there has been an explosive increase in sinographic vocabulary in both Korea and Japan. However, this cannot be seen simply as evidence of the continuation of the Sinographic Cosmopolis. It is also difficult to view sinographs as a revitalization of Literary Sinitic because, as the presence of rediscovered vernacular terms within definitions for individual sinographs demonstrates, “vestiges” of the Cosmopolis were mobilized 35

For examples of this type of disavowal, refer to the prefaces of the following dictionaries: Mun Seyŏng (1938); Chosŏnŏ hakhoe (1947). Yi Hŭisŭng’s confession in the preface to his self-published Kugŏ taesajŏn (Unabridged Dictionary of the National Language; 1961) is the rare exception. Confessing that “there will never again be work as difficult as dictionary compilation,” he writes the following: “It is a disgrace that the first dictionary of our language was achieved by foreign hands. However, following the publication of The Unabridged Dictionary (K’ŭn sajŏn) by the Han’gŭlhakhoe, various types of dictionaries have been published by several different actors, and although we cannot help but feeling a belated regret (mansi ŭi t’an), it is indeed a welcome development.” ‘Belated regret’ may well be an accurate characterization of the mentality of the entire field of Korean Studies in Korea.

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for the reinvention of vernacular language in the modern (re-)configuration of the Sinographic Cosmopolis. The sounds of each particular region were instead referenced for evidence of vernacularity. Vestiges of the Sinographic Cosmopolis became fixed in national languages through the sinoxenic pronunciations of each particular region, and written signs became words. Traditional sinographic wordbooks (okpy’ŏn) were organized within a territorialized sinoxenic pronunciation system, and through the disassembling of the semantics of individual sinographs via indigenous Korean glosses, sinographs were reconfigured into sinographic vocabulary items (hanchaŏ 漢字語) in a new realm where the arrangement of particular national languages was possible. In China, in the name of self-preservation and the equal status of “cultural independence,” one could simultaneously call for a casting off of Literary Sinitic along with a preservation of Sinocentric culture. However, the function of cultural independence and Literary Sinitic was more complex on China’s periphery. There were on the one hand calls for casting off China (t’alchungguk 脫中國) and engaging with Europe (ipsŏgu 入西歐), but in order to maintain cultural independence in the face of Western civilization, this had to be reevaluated from a context in which the Literary Sinitic heritage was actively taken up, indigenized, and vernacularized. Through this process, the “true writing” (chinmun) of the traditional Sinographic Cosmopolis gave way to the neutral expression “hanmun” before finally transitioning to hancha—“sinographs,” a term which emphasized its mediational attributes. Moreover, the sinographs were integrated into the vernacular system as an essential element of tradition. The Sinographic Cosmopolis proceeded to the Sinographic Mediapolis through the intervention of the Latin Cosmopolis, in the process serving as a key element in the national language. This transitional process was also a time of resistance to imperialism and colonialism. Although “common script, common race” (tongmun tongjong) rhetoric under an anti-West, anti-White banner intermittently formed the basis of an important East Asian agenda, each time it became the site of resistance and injustice due to imperialistic intentions. For this reason, who uses the term “Sinographic Cosmopolis” when and why is of utmost importance. For instance, in 1920, the Japanese Government-General of Korea (Chosŏn ch’ongdokbu) published its Chōsengo jiten (Dictionary of the Korean Language), a work that reduced Korean vocabulary to exclusively Sinographic Cosmopolitan terms.36 Lexical items connoting civilization or modernity were 36 Another good example of this is Oda Kanjirō (1931: 113): “It has always been difficult to find dictionaries in Korea that reflect the current world; the only dictionaries that do exist are extremely simplistic Chinese character word books like the okpy’ŏn. Today,

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almost absent, and terms related to colonialism were excised as a matter of course. Rather than an Ŏnmun Index (Ŏnmun saegin 諺文索引), the much more voluminous Sinograph Index (Hancha saegin 漢字索引) and Sinograph Pronunciation Index (Hanchaŭm saegin 漢字音索引) were compiled, and all words with sinographic origins were presented in han’gŭl according to their sinographic pronunciation along with Japanese annotations. Although this dictionary could be considered comparatively more comprehensive and arranged based on scientific principles, the han’gŭl script here functioned not so much as a sign of independence, but as a kind of sound annotation (注音) code for reading sinographs. This is due to the fact that, overall, although the order of words seems to be arranged according to the han’gŭl alphabet, related words are subordinated under each sinograph, and han’gŭl letter order is not strictly followed. This was a publication that, while aiming at tradition by emphasizing traditional customs and practices (kusŭp 舊慣) seen as subordinated to China, also took into consideration compatibility with modern Japanese. In this work, Korean was depicted as in the process of shifting from Chinese to Japanese. It was as if the work were published along with the hopeful diagnosis that Korean was gradually becoming “more and more marginalized.” The subordination of Korean within the Literary Sinitic Cosmopolis proceeded in tandem with its annexation to the modern Japanese Cosmopolis. Although the necessary reinvention of politico-cultural independence within the Sinographic Cosmopolis was a more urgent matter, even after the 1930s discourses promoting “common writing, common race” erupted intermittently. For instance, China’s prose author and translator Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–1967) wanted to protect Chinese cultural integrity through Literary Sinitic and sinographs and to establish them as the mediational basis of the East Asian cultural sphere. For Zhou (1982), while sinographs were quite cumbersome, when thinking in terms of the nation-state, they were a considerable force for sustaining a spatio-temporal bond, and possessed mediational potential throughout the East Asian cultural sphere. On the other hand, while with the diffusion of the national language [Japanese] in full swing, it has become rare to find anyone in the capitol or the countryside ignorant of or unable to read Japanese. As Korean has become gradually more and more marginalized (hyup’ye 休廢), without the compilation of an authoritative Korean dictionary not only has it become extremely difficult to read old documents, but naichijin [Japanese in Japan] have had difficulties trying to teach Korean.” According to the same work (Ibid.: 121), this essay was first written on December 5, 1920, but it is not clear if it was ever published. The contents are different from Oda’s postface to the Chōsengo jiten (Chōsen sōtokufu 1920: i–v), titled “Chōsengo jiten hensan no keika” (Compilation Process of the Chōsengo jiten), which is dated December 1, 1920.

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Zhou’s argument is used as evidence of collaboration with Japan, there is also the claim that Zhou, with an eye toward ancient China’s attempts to culturally assimilate its own diverse ethnicities, actually meant his proposal as a caustic affront to Japanese cries for Asian unity—a desperate struggle on Zhou’s part.37 However, the emphasis on cultural homogeneity through the mediation of sinographs also constituted the core logic of Japanese imperialism. In 1930s Japan and Korea, discourses on sinographs (K. hancharon, J. kanjiron 漢字論) and the “unity of script and race” displayed symbolically a kind of political contextual connection. Following Japan’s invasion of China, for example, the China scholar Takeuchi Yoshimi 竹内好 (1910–1977) criticized the revival of rhetoric on the unity of race and script in his reevaluation of the work of assimilation theorist Isawa Shūji 伊澤修二 (1851–1917). Early on, Isawa compiled dictionaries such as the New Dictionary of the Common Script (Dōbun shin jiten 同文新辞典; 1909) and the Concise Dictionary of Correct Chinese (Shinago seion hatsubi 支那語正音発微; 1915), asserting that sinographs were the cultural common denominator, and that each country should utilize each other’s particular variations in sinoxenic pronunciation for mutual language study and exchange. Japanese was naturally at the center of this paradigm, and came to elucidate the actual meaning of “script and race unity” theory with Japan’s ascendance following the Sino-Japanese War. However, Takeuchi placed much more emphasis on the variation in sinoxenic pronunciations, and instead of accepting sinographs as the definitive voice of the Sinographic Cosmopolis, stressed instead the “value of the sinograph as cultural mediator.” Takeuchi explained that, “Looking at the specialization of sinographic meanings in each of the national languages of Japan, China, Chosŏn, Vietnam, etc., as long as language exists as a form of culture, these cannot be denied” (1942: 310–311). In contrast, Korean collaborationist ideologue Hyŏn Yŏngsŏp 玄永燮 (1907–?) had a vastly different appraisal of the Sinographic Cosmopolis. According to Hyŏn, “Koreans’ poor pronunciation of kokugo (Japanese) is due to their teaching of kugŏ (Korean) while failing to limit sinographs. In order to propel the everyday use of kokugo, improvements must be made in national scripts (kukcha 國 字) at all costs” (Hyŏn 1938: 151–173). Hyŏn took a quite progressive approach to discourses on East Asian amity (tongyang ch’insŏn) and the improvement of national scripts for the dissemination of print culture promoted by Ogawa Mimei 小川未明 (1882–1961), and supported the romanization of the Japanese language along with the abolition of sinographs for the benefit of all people

37

For “common writing, common race” theory during the Sino-Japanese War, see Marukawa (2003; 2008).

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throughout East Asia. Hyŏn claimed that sinographs represented “social despotism,” “toadyism,” “irrationality,” “a culture of privilege,” and the “source of ruin,” specifically presenting these as the reason for China’s fall in the following schema: China = sinographs = irrationality = China’s downfall. Even in China, sinographs were already limited to an arbitrary sign or code as in words like dongxi 東西 (thing) or bajie 巴結 (flatter), and the fact that Chinese sinographs and Japanese sinographs were mutually unintelligible precluded any discussion of sharing or tradition. As if dressing up a synthesis of Japan, the West, China, and Korea in casual clothing, here was a proposal to inscribe the Japanese language in roman script so as to guarantee Japanese leadership and create a language that all contemporary East Asians could use. Although originating from completely different political agendas, each argument either directly or indirectly repudiates the Sinographic Cosmopolis, reducing it to, at the most, “mediator” or “arbitrary sign.” The Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War exposed the insolvency of the Sinographic Cosmopolis in impressive fashion. Although there were of course those in each country of East Asia who advocated the resurrection of the Cosmopolis even after this time, due to the contrast between traditional and simplified characters, the simplified Japanese kanji, and han’gŭl-ization in Korea, shareable sinographs had already ceased to exist. That being said, what is this new language that we currently share, this new, communal, linguistic sub-consciousness? In the case of Korea from the mid1930s onward, setting aside all personal preferences and value judgments, the answer seems to be English. In 1937, Yi Chonggŭk 李鍾極 (1907–1987), after several years of work, completed his New Dictionary of Foreign Words in Modern Korean (Sŏn-hwa yangin modŏn oeraeŏ sajŏn 鮮和兩引모던朝鮮外來語辭典), highlighting the shift from premodern “true writing” to modern colloquial Mandarin Chinese (hanŏ 漢語), and finally to the contemporary sinŏ 新語. Although English, in the Korean colonial context, supplemented the Japanese system of inscribing foreign loan words in katakana, Yi firmly believed that English was both a current and future latent component and form of subconsciousness in each regional language. All modern-day people have the ability to take a smattering of foreign language and insert it into Korean sentences (S. Ichikawa: “English Influence on Japanese”). Therefore, in the extreme sense, there is a danger that all foreign languages (especially English) can become foreign loan words in Korean. Not only that, but if compound words and then combinations of these are devised from Japanese and Korean according to the whim of the speaker, an unlimited amount of combinations would result, the

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prospect of which makes me shudder. However, as so-called natural selection applies to the realm of language as well, it is useless to worry about this because the clear operation of the iron-clad law of survival of the fittest (chŏkcha saengjon 適者生存) is history’s remedy. Rather than think about how to prevent the incursion of foreign words into Korean, the problem that confronts us is the consideration of how to naturalize and assimilate foreign words. Yi Chonggŭk 1937: 9–10

As the phrase “period of loan word intrusion” (oeraeŏ t’ŭmip sidae 外來語闖入時 代) clearly demonstrates, this was a foreign loan word (oeraeŏ) dictionary that gathered new words generated from various processes and ideologies, including modernization, urbanization, industrialization, Marxism, and modernism. Yi Chonggŭk had grasped the fact that the entire language hierarchy was irreversibly shifting from a Sinocentric order to a Western language order centered on English. In particular, if we consider Yi’s prognosis that the Koreanization of loan words would inevitably be accommodated, or his indicating that either Japanese or English could potentially become Korean, then Yi Chonggŭk’s language ideology was extremely progressive for his time. Japanese was merely a mediating variable in the Koreanization of English. On the one hand, Yi’s allusion served notice that the sinographic neologismcentered translation environment would no longer be the dominant paradigm, and on the other hand it forecasted the shift in inter-civilizational translation from translation for meaning (hunyŏk 訓譯) to transliteration (ŭmyŏk 音譯). In a sense quite different from Hyŏn Yŏngsŏp mentioned above, Yi displays a progressive post-nationalist tendency. Yi viewed the inundation of foreign words itself as the result of knowledge specialization, popularization of knowledge, and the naturalization and Koreanization of language. In other words, Yi did not view the flood of foreign words as eroding or contaminating the language, but rather accepted it as a source of enrichment. The theory of evolution and the inherent principals of natural selection and survival of the fittest were unassailable according to Yi, and accordingly the naturalization and assimilation of foreign language was more important than its obstruction. Rather than approaching language in terms of origins or the notion of vernacularity, Hyŏn and Yi defined language from a perspective based on production and evolution, seizure and application—an approach akin to linguistic Darwinism. In a way, they were forerunners of today’s English-Only theorists. Although their positions arose out of a modern Korean linguistic environment dominated by the relationship between multiple cosmopolitan forces, rather

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than being radical, one could say that theirs was more a case of playing the devil’s advocate. These bilingual dictionaries should be understood as dissecting the Korean linguistic order into at least three periods, suggesting that there were at least three different Cosmopoleis. During the first period, a diglossia existed between spoken and written language while Literary Sinitic functioned as the cosmopolitan code even while unconscious of its own status, and served as the fundamental mediator to the Sinocentric world order (chunghwa 中華). The first linguistic revolution in modern Korea involved national language consciousness and the exposure to foreign countries and languages. In this process, the methods for the uptake and adoption of sinographs varied greatly according to ideology and circumstance. Regardless of the environment, sinographs had no connection to the health or prosperity of the Sinographic Cosmopolis within a particular political context. The mass production of translated sinographic terms proceeded almost in tandem with the formation of national language ideology, achieved by the impact of individual vernacular words originating in the Latin Cosmopolis and the increase in modern nationalisms based on adherence to tradition. Through this process, sinographs fell from the realm of Literary Sinitic and were inducted as discrete elements in the “indigenous literary language” and “tradition.” The arbitrating factor in this process was the instantiation of vernacular syntactic practices through the unification of spoken and written language, aided by the new translational environment of the Sinographic Mediapolis. However, beginning in the 1930s the second linguistic revolution occurred, namely, the transliteration of foreign loan words. Taking place in Korea, there was overlap between this period and the decline of bilingual dictionary production following the overwhelming influence of Japanese. With the generalization of Japanese as a medium for interpreting global knowledge, the work of Western missionaries no longer generated the wide repercussions it once did. Sinographs were no longer a language that mediated “the East Asian” but rather one that symbolized Japanese supremacy, or perhaps a language that had been integrated into a system of regionalized ethno-languages (minjogŏ). Though by accident, the language that supplanted the Sinographic Cosmopolis was the “fittest” of the Latin Cosmopolis, English. This was no abrupt substitution, but a forewarned transition. As the high concentration of sinographic words in the national languages of each East Asian nation represents, the modern Sinographic Cosmopolis was merely a shock absorber for the force of English, and various other derivatives and vernaculars of the Latin Cosmopolis, for that matter. For roughly the last century of Literary Sinitic’s

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long existence, sinographs served as a shared language but this joint usage did not mean peace or prosperity; rather, it was an historical interlude that suggested what the future of the English Cosmopolis might be. Even following the rise of American supremacy in the East Asian anti-communist bloc, the establishment of linguistic functionalism in China and North Korea, and North Korea’s linguistic Chuch’e ideology, the fact that we can discuss the Sinographic Cosmopolis at all is not due to its status as past or present topos, but due to its future position as u-topia. Many languages throughout history have disappeared, and continue to die off even today. Language death accompanies the forfeiture of a living human’s legal rights, equal to actual death. Linguistic Darwinism, much like social Darwinism, is dangerous not because of its connection to the dissolution of the nation, but because it is linked with the very annihilation of the human race. The issue with the Cosmopolis is that it forces us to raise this same political question. Modern Korean has somehow survived, but countless other languages have perished. Beneath the amicable communication between the Literary Sinitic Cosmopolis, the Sinographic Cosmopolis, the modern Japanese Cosmopolis, and the English Cosmopolis lies a cruel history and melancholic future. From this perspective, the Sinographic Cosmopolis must be understood as a form of inquiry into the interface between humans and language. Korean is a language that was brought to the brink of extinction and survived. As long as there is life at that brink, vernacularity necessarily exists as a limited concept. However, the question of what actually is the authentic vernacular is practically impossible to answer. This is something settled not in questions of origins, but only in the translation and importation of the Cosmopolis through a life-linked vernacularity, and through the attendant struggle therein. It is here that our inquiry must begin once again. Thus, the subject of modern Korean vernacularity and the Sinographic Cosmopolis must be understood as a politico-linguistic trigger that sparks inquiry into the politics of the Cosmopolis. Translated by Daniel Pieper

K→E

(Korean →French) ↘

朝鮮語辭典

1920

Japanese Governor General of Korea (Chosŏn Ch’ongdokbu)

————————————→

(Gale is co-author)

Japanese)

→

1914

Jones

1부

韓英字典

(Rev. ed. Pt. 2)

1914

(Rev. ed. Pt. 1)

1911

(1st ed.)

1897

Gale

(Korean→

→

1891

Scott

韓英字典

1890

1880

韓佛字典 →

Underwood

Ridel

Table 16.2 Materials consulted and other publications related to bilingual dictionary production

1925

Underwood

1928

김동성

1931

Gale

鮮英辭 典

最新

———————————————— 韓英大 ———————→ 字典

1924

Gale

The Geopolitics of Vernacularity and Sinographs

583

E→K

1891

is co-author)

(H. B. Hulbert

1897 英韓 字典

1914

Jones

1920

Japanese Governor General of Korea (Chosŏn Ch’ongdokbu)

—————————————→

↗

Gale

1925

Underwood

三千 → 英鮮字典 字典

1924

Gale

———————————————————————————→

Dictionary

2부

English-

Corean

1890

1880

Scott

韓英字典

Underwood

Ridel

Table 16.2 Materials consulted and other publications related to bilingual dictionary production (cont.)

1928

김동성

모던朝鮮 外來語 辭典

1937

Yi Chonggŭk

1931

Gale

584 Hwang

1890

1880

1891

Scott

Source: author

-Scott (1887)

1924

Gale

1925

Underwood

- Gale (1931): Inoue’s E-J Dictionary 3) Other - Ch’oe Namsŏn, Sin chajŏn (1915)

- Gale: Giles’ Chinese-English Dictionary (1892)

3) Other

- Chi Sŏgyŏng, Chajŏn sŏgyo (1909)

- Mun Seyŏng, Chosŏnŏ sajŏn (1938)

- Yi Chonggŭk (1937)

- Kim Tongsŏng, Ch’oesin Sŏn-Yŏng sajŏn (1928)

- Underwood (1925): Ishikawa’s (石川) J-E Dictionary

Underwood: Williams’ Chinese-English Dictionary (1874)

1928

김동성

2) Dictionaries consulted

- Rev. ed of Gale’s grammar (1916)

1) Grammars

1920

Japanese Governor General of Korea (Chosŏn Ch’ongdokbu)

2) Dictionaries consulted

1914

Jones

- Republication of Underwood’s grammar (1915)

1897

Gale

- Gale (1894)

- Scott (2nd ed., 1893)

Related 1) Grammars 1) Grammars public- -B30:C31Les - Underwood (1890) ations Missionnaires de Corée … (1881)

Underwood

Ridel

Table 16.2 Materials consulted and other publications related to bilingual dictionary production (cont.)

1931

Gale

The Geopolitics of Vernacularity and Sinographs

585

586

Hwang

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Index of Named Individuals Achiki 阿直岐 (Paekche scholar, fl. 3rd c.)  150 Adachi Keijirō 足立銈二郎 (1869–1919) = Honma Kyūsuke 本間九介 380 An Hwak 安廓 (1886–1946) = Chasan 自山  549–551 Aoyagi Tsunatarō 青柳綱太郎 (1877–1932)  370 Asai Ryōi 浅井了意 (ca. 1612–1691) 225, 227–233, 235, 239–241 Ayugai Fusanoshin 鮎貝房之進 (1864–1946)  381–384, 389, 394 Ayugai Morimitsu 鮎貝盛光 (1861–1903) = Ochiai Naobumi 落合直文 381 Bạch Vi (1894–1987) = Bai Wei 白薇 312 Bai Wei 白薇 (1894–1987) = Bạch Vi 312 Ban Nobutomo 伴信友 (1773–1846) 224n6 Bo Yu 伯魚 (532 bce–483 bce) 146 Buck, Pearl S. (1892–1973) 312 Cang Jie 倉頡 74, 521 Cao Cao 曹操 (ca. 155–220) 74 Cao Pi, Emperor 曹丕 (187–226) 74 Cao Zhi 曹植 (192–232) 74 Chang Hon 張混 (1759–1828) 436 Chasan 自山 = An Hwak 安廓 (1886–1946)  549–551 Chen Shutang 陳樹棠 (dates unknown)  544 Cheng Hao 程顥 (1032–1085) 274 Cheng Yi 程頤 (1033–1107) 274 Chigyŏm 至謙 (1145–1229) 196n22 Chijong 智宗 (930–1018) 195 Chindŏk, Queen 真德女王 (r. 647–654) 88 Chinsŏng, Queen 眞聖女王 (r. 887–897) 81 Chinul 知訥 (1158–1210) 195–196 Chit’ong 智通 (dates unknown) 124 Cho Chaesam 趙在三 (1808–1866) 436 Ch’oe Haenggwi 崔行歸 (dates unknown) 208, 422, 508–510, 513 Ch’oe Han’gi 崔漢綺 (1803–1877) 528–529 Ch’oe Hyŏnbae 崔鉉培 (1894–1970) 575 Ch’oe Malli 崔萬理 (d. 1445) 335, 535

Ch’oe Namsŏn 崔南善 (1890–1957) 548, 585 Ch’oe Sejin 崔世珍 (1468–1542) 193, 198–199, 339, 549 Chŏlchung 折中 (826–899) 194 Chŏng Ch’ŏl 鄭澈 (1536–1593) 420–421, 512–513, 520, 523 Chŏng Hyŏnsŏk 鄭顯奭 (1817–1899) 523 Chŏng Munbu 鄭文孚 (1565–1624) 399 Chŏng Yagyong 丁若鏞 (1762–1836) 349, 373, 403, 423, 456, 518, 551–552 Chŏng Yang 鄭瀁 (1600–1668) 197, 450 Chŏng Yunyong 鄭允容 (1792–1865) 517, 535 Chŏngjo, King 正祖王 (r. 1776–1800) 429, 444, 475, 490 Ch’ŏnyong 天英 196n22 Chu Sigyŏng 周時經 (1876–1914) 546–548 Chulalongkorn, King (1853–1910; r. 1868–1910)  301 Ch’ungdam 忠湛 (869–940) 194 Confucius 孔夫子 (551 bce–479 bce) 7, 144–147, 150, 155, 160–161, 178, 205, 326–327 Corthis, André (1882–1952) 312 Courant, Maurice (1865–1935) 548 Cường Để 彊㭽, Prince (1882–1951) 310 Dabit, Eugène (1898–1936) 311 Dahui Zonggao 大慧宗杲 (1089–1163) 195 Daoyuan 道原 (dates unknown) 189, 192 Daudet, Alphonse (1840–1897) 311 Daveluy, Marie Nicolas Antoine (1818–1866)  551 Dōgen 道元 (1200–1235) 205 Dudbridge, Glen (1938–2017) 454 Ennin 圓仁/円仁 (793 or 794–864) 93 Fan Li 范蠡 (515–448 bce) 207 Fayun 法雲 (1088–1158) 199 Fazang 法藏 (643–712) 124 Fujimoto Yukio (1941–) 118, 385–386, 389, 396, 399–400, 415–416, 423, 443, 447

594 Fujiwara no Kiyokawa 藤原清河 (?–778)  89 Fukuzawa Yukichi 福澤諭吉 (1835–1901)  297–299, 302 Gale, James Scarth (1863–1937) 342, 546, 568 Ge Hong 葛洪 (283–343) 456 Genmei, Empress 元明天皇 (r. 707–715)  153 Gia Long 嘉隆 (1762–1820) 249 Giles, Herbert Allen (1845–1935) 570–571 Guan Yunshi 貫雲石 (1286–1324) 191 Gyōnen 凝然 (1240–1321) 124n20 Hanan, Patrick (1927–2014) 457 Hashimoto Shinkichi 橋本進吉 (1882–1945) 110 Hayashi Razan 林羅山 (1583–1657) 35, 225–242 He Yan 何晏 (190–249 ce) 150 Hepburn, James C. (1815–1911) 302 Hồ Thị Hoa 胡氏華, Empress (1791–1807) 249 Hong, Lady 惠慶宮洪氏 (1735–1816)  424n16 Hong Ch’wiyŏng 洪就榮 (1759–?) 429–430 Hong Inu 洪仁祐 (1515–1554) 397 Hong Nagin 洪樂仁 (1729–1777) 428–429 Hong Ponghan 洪鳳漢 (1713–1778) 424–429 Hong Taeyong 洪大容 (1731–1783) 495– 500, 524 Hong Yonghan 洪龍漢 (1734–?) 425–426, 429–430 Hongbŏp 弘法 (ca. 910–1000) 194 Honma Kyūsuke 本間九介 (1869–1919) = Adachi Keijirō 足立銈二郎 380 Huang Kan 皇侃 (488–545) 197 Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962) 188n4, 190n7 Huizong 徽宗, Emperor (r. 1119–1125) 90 Hwang Hyŏn 黃玹 (1856–1910) 542–543 Hwang Yunsŏk 黃胤錫 (1729–1791) 518, 522 Hyech’o 慧超 (704–787) 388 Hyesim 慧諶 (1178–1234) 195 Hyŏn Yŏngsŏp 玄永燮 (1907–?) 578, 580 Hyŏngch’o 逈超 195 Hyŏnjong 顯宗, King (1641–1674, r. 1659–1674) 450

Index of Named Individuals Hyŏnyŏng 玄影 (d. 941) 194 Hyosŏng, King 孝成王 (r. 737–742) 89

Im Mae 任邁 (1711–1779) 427 Im Pang 任埅 (1624–1724) 427 Imamura Tomo 今村鞆 (1870–1943) 381 In’gyŏng, Queen 仁敬王后 (1661–1680; r. 1674–1680) 358 Injong, King 仁宗王 (r. 1122–1146) 79 Inoue Jūkichi 井上十吉 (1862–1929) 573 Inoue Kakugorō 井上角五郎 (1860–1938)  544 Iryŏn 一然 (1206–1289) 80–84, 86 Isawa Shūji 伊澤修二 (1851–1917) 578 Jin Shengtan 金聖歎 (1608–1661) 428–429 Jones, George Heber (1867–1919) 553 Kang Youwei 康有為 (1858–1927) 298, 307 Khái Hưng (1896–1947) 311 Kija 箕子 (C. Jizi, 1122 bce–1082 bce)  329–330, 336, 436, 544 Kim Chajŏng 金自貞 (fl. 1453–1497) 199 Kim Ch’angŏp 金昌業 (1658–1722) 482, 497 Kim Chongjik 金宗直 (1431–1492) 397, 419, 451 Kim Ch’unt’aek 金春澤 (1670–1717) 122, 356, 365–368, 372–374, 421–423, 444 Kim Hongch’ŏl 金弘喆 (fl. mid-18th century) 428 Kim Ip 金笠 (1807–1863, aka Kim Pyŏngyŏn 金炳淵 or “Kim Satkat”) 403 Kim Kan 金榦 (1646–1732) 426 Kim Manjung 金萬重 (1637–1692) = Sŏp’o 西浦 36–37, 351, 355–356, 366, 368–369, 374, 421, 512–514, 520 Kim Pusik 金富軾 (1075–1151) 79–80, 82–84, 88, 90, 92, 120 Kim Pyŏngyŏn 金炳淵 (1807–1863, aka Kim Ip 金笠 or “Kim Satkat”) 403 Kim Sangsuk 金相肅 (1717–1792) 420, 422, 523 Kim Sŏngsu 金性洙 (1891–1955) 546n24 Kim Sunhyŏp 金舜協 (1693–1732) 497 Kim T’aeg’yŏng 金澤榮 (1850–1927) 451 Kim Tŏngnyŏng 金德齡 (1567–1596) 441, 448, 459, 461

Index of Named Individuals Kim Tongsŏng 金東成 (1890–1969) 546, 574 Kim Wanjin 金完鎭 (1877–1948) 390 Kim Yunsik 金允植 (1835–1922) 544 King, Ross (1961–) 33, 37, 324, 333, 415, 423 Konakamura Kiyonori 小中村清矩 (1822–1895) 111 Kornicki, Peter (1950–) 2, 10–11, 29, 76, 116, 231, 327–328 Kumārajīva (344–413) 359–361, 363, 365 Kurozumi Makoto 黒住真 (1950–) 231–232 Kwŏn Kŭn 權近 (1352–1409) 120, 451 Kwŏn Tŏkkyu 權悳奎 (1890–1950) 546 Kyŏngdŏk, King 景德王 (r. 742–765) 84, 88, 89 Kyunyŏ 均如 (923–973) 81, 125, 208, 422, 508–509 Li Bo 李白 (701–762) 207 Li Dongyang 李東陽 (1447–1516) 419 Li Si 李斯 (ca. 280–208 bce) 271–272 Li Xuzhong 李虛中 (762–813) 275–277 Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929) 298, 307 Liu Xie 劉勰 (ca. 465–ca. 522) 161, 273–274 Lu Deming 陸德明 (550–630 ce) 338n31 Lü Shang 呂尙 (fl. 11th century bce) 207 Mair, Victor (1943–) 2, 9, 326–327, 414, 417 Martin, Alexander Parsons (1827–1916) 309 Mass, Jeffrey (1940–2001) 240n21 Matsuo Bashō 松尾芭蕉 (1644–1694) 349 Matsushita Yukitsuna 松下之綱 (1537–1598) 228 Min Sap’yŏng 閔思平 (1296–1359) 419, 510 Minami Jirō 南次郎 (1874–1955) 391 Minamoto no Takaakira 源高明 (914–983)  155 Minh Mạng 明命, Emperor (1791–1841) 249 Mongkut, King (1804–1868; r. 1851–1868) 301 Monmu, Emperor 文武天皇 (r. 697–707)  173 Muan Shanqing 睦庵善卿 (fl. 1088–1108)  189 Mujaku Dōchū 無著道忠 (1653–1745) 193, 209 Mun Seyŏng 文世榮 (1888–?) 574, 585

595 Nagai Kafū 永井荷風 (1879–1959) 311 Nagaya, Prince 長屋王 (684–729) 88 Nam Isŏng 南二星 (1625–1683) 197–198 Ngô Đức Kế (1878–1929) 248 Nguyễn Trường Tộ 阮長祚 (ca. 1830–1871)  283 Nguyễn Tử Mẫn 阮子忞 (1810–1901) 251n8 Nintoku, Emperor 仁徳天皇 (trad. 313–399)  90 No Kŭng 盧兢 (1738–1790) 426, 428 No Myŏnghŭm 盧命欽 (1713–1775) 413, 418, 423–431, 433, 442, 445, 449, 451, 453, 456, 460, 463–464 Ō no Yasumaro 太安万侶 (?–723) 153–154 Ochiai Naobumi 落合直文 = Ayugai Morimitsu 鮎貝盛光 (1861–1903) 381 Oda Nobunaga 織田信長 (1534–1582)  228–229 Ogawa Mimei 小川未明 (1882–1961) 578 Ogura Shinpei 小倉進平 (1882–1944)  548–549 Ogyū Sorai 荻生徂徠 (1666–1728) 111–112, 152, 155, 349–350 Ōjin, Emperor 応神天皇 (201–310, r. 270–310) 77, 148 Okajima Kanzan 岡島冠山 (1674–1728) 193 Ōtomo no Tabito 大伴旅人 (665–731) 180 Ōtsu, Prince (663–686) 83 Ōtsuki Fumihiko 大槻文彦 (1847–1928)  303, 306 Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 (1007–1072) 197 Oze Hoan 小瀬甫庵 (1564–1640) 225–226, 228–231, 236–237, 242 Pak Chega 朴齊家 (1750–1805) 519–520, 522, 524–529 Pak Ch’ihwa 朴致和 (1680–1767) 471 Pak Chiwŏn 朴趾源 (1737–1805) = Yŏnam 燕巖 37, 471, 474–477, 479, 483–484, 486–488, 490, 492–501, 519–522, 524 Pak Myŏngwŏn 朴明源 (1725–1790) 476n12 Pei Yanling 裴延齡 (727–795) 190n9 Phan Bội Châu 潘佩珠 (1867–1940) 299 Phan Chu Trinh 潘周楨 (1872–1926)  299–300 Pou 普愚 (1301–1382) 192, 197, 199

596 Qu You 瞿佑 (1347–1433) 369, 445 Qu Yuan 屈原 (ca. 340–278 bce) 207, 421, 512–513 Rai San’yō 賴山陽 (1781–1832) 294n3 Ridel, Félix-Clair (1830–1884) 550–551 Ryu Sŏngnyong 柳成龍 (1542–1607) 399

Sado, Prince 思悼世子 (1735–1762) 424n16 Scott, James (1850–1920) 552 Sejo, King 世祖王 (r. 1455–1468) 205, 334, 537 Sejong, King 世宗王 (r. 1418–1450) 51, 334–335, 399, 510–511, 513–514, 526, 534, 537 Shen Yue 沈約 (441–513) 259 Shenhui 神會 (684–758) 189, 192, 202 Shinjō Juntei 新庄順貞 (dates unknown)  384 Shiobara Tokisaburō 鹽原時三郞 (1896–1963) 391 Shōtoku, Prince 聖徳太子 (574–622) 93 Sim Kwangse 沈光世 (1577–1624) 419–420 Sim Kyŏngho 沈慶昊 (1955–) 118–119, 355, 387, 395–396, 401–403, 415, 447 Sim Ŭirin 沈宜麟 (1894–1951) 574 Sima Qian 司馬遷 (ca. 145–ca. 86 bce) 80, 88, 229, 271 Sima Xiangru 司馬相如 (ca.179–117 bce) 74 Sin Hŭm 申欽 (1566–1628) 451, 523 Sin Kyŏngjun 申景濬 (1712–1781) 471, 535 Sin Sukchu 申叔舟 (1417–1475) 420n9, 534n2 Sinmi 信眉 (fl. mid-15th century) 204, 360, 362 Sŏ Hosu 徐浩修 (1736–1799) 502 Sŏ Isu 徐理修 (1749–1802) 502n79 Sŏ Kŏjŏng 徐居正 (1420–1488) 330 Sŏ Kyŏngsun 徐慶淳 (1804–?) 476n13 Sŏ Munjung 徐文重 (1634–1709) 497 Sŏ Yumun 徐有聞 (1762–1822) 502 Sŏl Changsu 偰長壽 (1340–1399) = Xie Changshou 191 Sŏl Ch’ong 薛聰 (650?–730?) 337, 383 Song Chaehŭi 宋載禧 (1711–?) 424 Sŏng Haeŭng 成海應 (1760–1839) 421n12 Song Sunyong 宋淳容 = Tŏkcho 德祚 (dates unknown) 551

Index of Named Individuals Sŏngdŏk, King 聖德王 (r. 702–737) 89 Sŏngjong, King 成宗王 (r. 1469–1494) 330 Sŏp’o 西浦 = Kim Manjung 金萬重 (1637–1692) 36–37, 351, 355–356, 366, 368–369, 374, 421, 512–514, 520 Spencer, Herbert (1820–1903) 310 Sunji 順之 (d. 893) 196

T’aego Pou 太古普愚 (1301–1382) 192, 197, 199 Taizong, 太宗, Emperor (r. 626–649) 74 Takahashi Tōru 高橋亨 (1878–1967) 546 Takeuchi Yoshimi 竹内好 (1910–1977) 578 Tao Yuanming 陶淵明 (ca. 365–427) 207 Tenji, Emperor 天智天皇 (r. 661–671) 83, 84 Tenmu, Emperor 天武天皇 (r. 673–686)  84, 88, 153 Thiệu Tri 紹治, Emperor (1807–1847) 249 T’oegye 退溪 (1501–1570) = Yi Hwang 李滉  197, 385, 397, 450 Tokugawa Tsunayoshi 徳川綱吉 (1646–1709)  225n8 Toŭi 道義 (d. 825) 194 Toyotomi Hideyoshi 豐臣秀吉 (1536–1598)  224–225, 294 Trịnh Quốc Quang 310n22 Trương Vĩnh Ký 張永記 (Pétrus Ky/JeanBaptist Pétrus, 1837–1898) 304 Tự Đức, Emperor 嗣德 (1829–1883)  283–284 Ŭich’ŏn 義天 (1055–1101) 120, 196, 208 Ŭisang 義湘 (625–702) 120, 124 Underwood, Horace Grant (1859–1916) 546, 551 Underwood, Horace Horton (1890–1951)  554, 568, 573 Wang Bo 王勃 (649–676) 455 Wang Tonggui 王同軌 (fl. 1620) 423 Wheaton, Henry (1785–1848) 309 Williams, Samuel Wells (1812–1884) 551 Wŏlmyŏng 月明 (dates unknown) 84–87 Wu, Emperor 武帝 (r. 141–87 bce) 74, 79, 326–327 Wu Cheng’en 吳承恩 (ca. 1500–1582) 190 Wuzong, Emperor 唐武宗 (r. 840–846) 93

Index of Named Individuals Xiao Tong 蕭統 (501–531) 74 Xiao Ziyun 蕭子雲 (487–549) 150 Xie Changshou = Sŏl Changsu 偰長壽 (1340–1399) 191 Xing Bing 邢昺 (932–1010) 145 Xitang Zhizang 西堂智藏 (735–814) 193 Xu Heng 許衡 (1209–1281) 191 Xu Shen 許慎 (58–ca. 147) 74, 140, 263 Xu Yuanrui 徐元瑞 (fl. 14th century) 190 Xuan, Emperor 宣帝 (91 bce–49 bce, r. 74–49 bce) 149 Xuanzong 玄宗, Emperor (r. 712–756)  88–89 Yamada Yoshio 山田孝雄 (1873–1958) 110 Yamanoue no Okura 山上憶良/山於億良 (ca. 660–ca. 733) 87, 180 Yamata Kiku 山田菊 (1897–1975) 311–312 Yan Fu 嚴復 (1854–1921) 310–311 Yang Yi 楊億 (974–1020) 189 Yejong, King 睿宗王 (r. 1468–1469) 359 Yi Chaeuk 李在郁 (1905–?) 390 Yi Chaewi 李載威 (1745–1826) 518 Yi Changgon 李長坤 (1474–1519) 460 Yi Ch’angjik 李昌稙 (1866–1938) 342 Yi Chehyŏn 李齊賢 (1287–1367) 419, 510 Yi Chŏnggu/Yi Chŏnggwi 李廷龜 (1564–1635) 451 Yi Chonggŭk 李鍾極 (1907–1987) 579–580, 584, 585 Yi Chonghwi 李種徽 (1731–1797) 121 Yi Chun 李埈 (1560–1635) 121 Yi Hŭigyŏng 李喜經 (1745–?) 524–529 Yi Hŭip’yŏng 李羲平 (1772–1839) 427, 447, 449 Yi Hwang 李滉 (1501–1570) = T’oegye 退溪  197, 385, 397, 450 Yi Ik 李瀷 (1681–1763) 423, 442 Yi Injik 李人稙 (1862–1916) 572 Yi Kwangch’an 李匡贊 (1702–?) 520–521 Yi Kwangsa 李匡師 (1705–1777) 516, 520–521 Yi Kyubo 李奎報 (1168–1241) 120, 195, 382, 419 Yi Kyugyŏng 李圭景 (1788–?) 122, 518 Yi Kyusang 李奎象 (1727–1799) 521 Yi Noch’un 李魯春 (1752–?) 502 Yi Nŭnghwa 李能和 (1869–1943) 187

597 Yi Ok 李鈺 (1760–1812) 372–374, 464 Yi Paekhyŏng 李百亨 (1737–?) 502 Yi Pŏn 李蕃 (1463–1500) 397 Yi Pyŏn 李邊 (1391–1473) 191 Yi Saek 李穡 (1328–1396) 451 Yi Sŏgu 李書九 (1754–1825) 518 Yi Suhoe 李壽會 (1431–1518) 397 Yi Sŭnghyu 李承休 (1224–1300) 419 Yi Sunsin 李舜臣 (1545–1598) 385, 399 Yi Tŏngmu 李德懋 (1741–1793) 423, 518 Yi Ŭibong 李義鳳 (1733–1801) 436 Yi Yonghyu 李用休 (1708–1782) 516 Yŏ Kyuhyŏng 呂圭亨 (1848–1921) 390, 393 Yŏnam 燕巖 = Pak Chiwŏn 朴趾源 (1737– 1805) 37, 471, 474–477, 479, 483–484, 486–488, 490, 492–501, 519–522, 524 Yŏngjo, King 英祖王 (r. 1724–1776) 331 Yongming Yanshou 永明延壽 (904–975)  195 Yŏnsan, Prince 燕山君 (r. 1494–1506) 200, 369 Yu Hŭi 柳僖 (1773–1837) 471–472, 501, 518 Yu Hŭich’un 柳希春 (1513–1577) 197, 398, 450 Yu Hyŏngwŏn 柳馨遠 (1622–1673) 513–516 Yu Kilchun 俞吉濬 (1856–1914) 298, 542, 550, 572 Yu Kyŏngjong 柳慶種 (1714–1784) 428n28 Yu Manju 兪晩柱 (1755–1788) 514 Yu Myŏngch’ŏn 柳命天 (1633–1705) 497 Yu Tŭkkong 柳得恭 (1748–1807) 518 Yuan Hongdao 袁宏道 (1568–1610) 373 Yun Ch’unnyŏn 尹春年 (1514–1567) 200, 369 Yuri, King 琉璃明王 (trad. 19 bce–18 ce)  79 Yuri Isagŭm 儒理尼師今 (trad. 24–57 ce)  79 Zhang Chang 張敞 (d. 48 bce) 149 Zheng Qiao 鄭樵 (1104–1162) 264n26 Zheng Xuan 鄭玄 (127–200) 147, 150, 482–483 Zhou Yong 周顒 (?–491?) 259 Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–1967) 577 Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) 147, 197, 274, 450 Zigong 子貢 (b. 520 bce) 144, 146 Zixia 子夏 (507 bce–400 ce) 146

Index of Terms All-Under-Heaven (C. tianxia 天下) 291– 296, 300, 306, 312–313 akpu 樂府 (C. yuefu) 419–420, 522 ancient style (K. komun 古文) 270, 490 annotation (kunko 訓詁) 150, 152 aŏn 雅言 34, 119, 137, 145, 147, 155–156, 162, 291 Apabhramsha 73, 92, 206, 210 Arabic 19, 104, 161, 301, 302 Aramaic 52 Association for Enlightenment (Hội Ánh sáng) 311 Azuma kagami-tai 東鏡体 111 baihua 白話 34–35, 56, 58, 60, 62, 163, 188, 401–402, 414, 416, 431, 434, 449–451, 457, 465, 490–492 bamboo strips 140 bianwen 變文 (transformation texts)  188–190, 192, 201, 214–216 bilingual dictionary/dictionaries 38, 304, 534, 539, 545–546, 549–550, 552–553, 573–575, 581, 583–585 biliteracy 33, 72–73 bitan 筆談 (brush conversations) 28, 72, 478, 483, 487 borrowed graphs (J. shakuji 借字) 166, 168, 170 Brahmi script 52, 54 bronze inscriptions 159 brush conversations (C. bitan, J. hitsudan, K. p’iltam 筆談) 28, 72, 478, 483, 487 Buddhist Hybrid Sinitic 187, 189, 199, 205 Buddhist inscriptions 124–125 Buddhist Sanskrit 98, 108 bunmei 文明 297, 302–303, 313 bunmei kaika 文明開化 (civilization and enlightenment) 295, 297–298, 343 bunshō 文章 380 buntai 文体 (inscriptional style) 35, 115–116, 223, 225, 231–233, 240–241, 381–383, 389, 400, 550 caoshu 草書 160 ceming 冊命/策命 143

Central Efflorescence (C. zhonghua 中華, K. chunghwa) 294, 330–331, 541, 581 ceremonial language 147–148, 154 ceremonial recitation 155 ceremonial voice 142, 150, 152 ch’aja 借字 (borrowed graphs) 166, 168, 170 ch’aja p’yogibŏp 借字表記法 (borrowedgraph transcriptional techniques)  331–333, 507 ch’an 讚 (eulogies) 81, 84 Chan 34, 188–189, 191–193, 195–200, 202, 206, 208–210 Chan koiné 194–196, 205, 211–214 Chan yulu 語録 188, 193, 201 chikhae 直解 188, 191–193 Chinese vernacular fiction 390, 417, 427, 449, 451, 457, 461 chinmun 眞文 (“authentic/true writing”, i.e., Literary Sinitic) 537, 553, 567, 576 chinŏn 眞諺 543 chinsa 進士 (literary licenciate) 439 chinsŏ 眞書 (true writing) 472, 490, 543, 323 Chiphyŏnjŏn 集賢殿 (Hall of Worthies)  335, 535 chŏngch’ich’e 政治體 554 chŏnggyŏk hanmun 正格漢文 119 chŏngmyŏng 正名 535 chŏngŭm 正音 (correct sounds) 338, 353, 535 chŏngun 正韻 (correct rhymes) 535 Chōsen sōtokufu 朝鮮總督府 (Japanese Colonial Government-General) 370, 576 Chōsen zokukanbun 朝鮮俗漢文 118 Chosŏn 朝鮮 dynasty (1392–1897) 117, 121, 200, 323, 325, 331–332, 338–339, 341, 345, 349, 354–355, 363, 385, 389, 405, 440, 463, 471, 511 Chosŏn ilbo 391–393 Chosŏn kwangmunhoe (Chosŏn Society for Illumination of the Classics) 548 Chosŏn p’ung 朝鮮豊 475, 491, 495, 501 Chosŏnŏ hakhoe (Korean Language Society)  547–548

Index of Terms Chosŏnsik hanmun 朝鮮式漢文 (Chosŏnstyle hanmun) 37, 119, 122, 128, 378–379, 381, 385–386, 390–393, 396–397, 400, 404, 415 Chu 楚 (706 bce–223 bce) 141 Chu ci 楚辭 148, 366, 421 Chữ Nôm 𡨸喃 35, 56–57, 62, 245, 249, 253–254, 256, 268–269, 272, 280, 285, 300 chuandenglu 傳燈録 (lamplight history)  193 Chuch’e ideology 582 chūka 中華 (Central Efflorescence) 294, 330–331, 541, 581 chunghwa 中華 (Central Efflorescence)  294, 330–331, 541, 581 chunghwaron 486 chungin 中人 197–198, 450, 536 ch’uno 推奴 459 civil service examination 85, 119, 121, 198, 201, 294, 312, 328, 341, 343, 424, 431, 437, 440, 446, 454–455, 460, 571 civilization and enlightenment (J. bunmei kaika 文明開化) 295, 297–299, 303, 306, 313, 343 clerical script (C. lishu 隷書) 140, 160, 270, 272 Cochinchina 283, 296, 299 collected writings (K. munjip 文集) 114, 121, 350, 359, 396, 399–400, 423 colloquial (Mandarin) Chinese (K. hanŏ 漢語) 188, 191–192, 196, 200, 205, 433, 436, 450, 536–537, 579 colonial cosmopolitanism 246 colonial modernity 245 Confucian 27, 62, 65, 79–80, 89–90, 124, 146, 188, 197–198, 201, 207–209, 225–226, 229–231, 241, 271, 283, 298, 326–329, 337–339, 341–344, 349–350, 353, 356, 366–368, 372–373, 444, 450, 520, 535–536, 541, 547–548 correct rhymes (K. chŏngun 正韻) 535 correct sounds (正音) 338, 353, 535 cosmological pattern 273 cosmopolitan vernacular 18, 26, 31, 34–35, 73, 96, 100, 109, 127–128, 159, 181, 188, 201, 205, 210–211, 222, 224, 232, 240–241, 246, 291, 539, 542

599 creole 192, 197 cultivated speech (C. yayan 雅言) 34, 119, 137, 145, 147, 155–156, 162, 291 cuneiform 25, 34, 52 daigongen 大權現 (Great Manifestation [Avatar] of Buddha) 227 Daoist 207, 326, 358, 456 dialect variation 141 diglossia 20, 24, 29, 245–247, 506–507, 524, 529, 569, 581 diplomacy 62, 72, 84, 87–90, 92, 147, 206, 234, 328–329, 400, 514, 537 divination 138–139, 274–278, 281, 297 documentary style 143, 431, 434, 443, 447, 449 Đông Du movement 310 Dravidian languages 15, 99–100 Dunhuang 189 Dutch learning (J. rangaku 蘭學) 297 Duy Tân Reform Movement 299–300, 308, 310. See also ishin; Weixin Reform Movement Early Middle Chinese 259 Eastern Jin (317–420) 456 Eastern Zhou 東周 138 Edo period 57, 78, 222, 224, 226, 228, 231–232, 240–241 Enlightenment (kaehwa) period 474, 566, 573 ese kanbun 似非漢文 111 Eurasia 24, 49, 51, 71 European Enlightenment movement 290, 295, 308 fangyan 方言 119, 121, 125, 206, 208, 382, 472, 517, 519–520 fanqie 反切 252, 262–264, 266, 269–270, 281, 340, 352. See also panjŏl; phản thiết fengdu 諷讀 149 fengsong 諷誦 149 folk songs 491, 510, 512, 548 foreign loan words (K. oeraeŏ 外來語) 549, 579–581 four-six parallel prose 201, 208 Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) 296 French colonialism 35, 282

600 Fujiwara 88, 383 fūdoku 諷讀 149 fūju 諷誦 149 gagen 雅言 34, 119, 137, 145, 147, 155–156, 162, 291 gātha verse 88, 91, 166, 358, 422 giji kanbun 擬似漢文 111 gikanbun 擬漢文 111 gloss-reading techniques 73 gongan 公案 189, 192, 196 goroku 語録 188 guanhua 官話 192 Guanyin 觀音 81, 91, 193, 207, 358 gunki (military records) 226 guwen 古文 (ancient style) 270, 490 Haedong 海東 420 haedong akpu 海東樂府 419 hagiography 80, 91, 196 Hall of Worthies (K. Chiphyŏnjŏn 集賢殿)  335, 535 Han 漢 dynasty 7, 27, 74, 80, 85, 187, 250, 263, 270, 326, 327, 329, 419, 430, 527 hancha 漢字 3, 142, 576 hancha kongyuch’e 漢字共有體 507 hanchaŏ 漢字語 550, 576 han’guksik hanmun 韓國式漢文 118 han’gŭl (Korean alphabet, Korean vernacular script, Korean script) 30, 52, 58, 60, 62, 66, 264, 268, 324, 335, 370, 400, 401–402, 404, 412–413, 416, 461, 471, 473–474, 493, 502, 506, 534, 538–539, 542, 546–550, 553, 568, 571–573, 577, 579 hanimun 漢吏文 537 hanmun 漢文 2, 37, 118–119, 122, 124, 128, 324, 335, 343, 378–381, 385–386, 390– 397, 400, 401, 404, 414–416, 474–475, 477, 483–485, 487–489, 491, 493–498, 500–501, 508, 543, 547, 571, 576 hanmun sosŏl 漢文小說 477 hanmunhak 漢文學 473n5 Hanmunkwa 漢文科 324, 344, 345–346, 391 hanmunmaek 漢文脈 38, 541, 566 hanŏ 漢語 450, 536, 579 Hanŏ yŏn’guhoe 韓語硏究會 (Korean Language Research Society) 546–547

Index of Terms hansi 漢詩 420. See also kanshi hanzi 漢字 3, 142 Hanziquan 漢字圏 (Sinographic Sphere)  3–4, 11, 28, 34, 71, 73–75, 79, 83, 89, 137, 140–142, 151–152, 156, 162, 544 hanziwen 漢字文 152, 156 Heian 平安 (794–1185) 53, 59, 61, 78, 86, 93, 114–115, 181, 222, 268, 349 henkaku-no kanbun(-tai) 変格の漢文(体)  111 hentai kanbun 変体漢文/變體漢文 56, 110–118, 168, 380, 386, 397–398, 404 heteroglossia 201 Hideyoshi invasions 199 high vernacular 35, 222–224, 232, 240–241 hikanbun 非漢文 111, 171 hiragana 平仮名 59, 61–62, 65, 113, 268, 352 historical chronicles 33, 77, 82, 225–226, 398 historical fiction 241 hitsudan 筆談 (brush talk) 28, 72, 478, 483, 487 hōgen 方言 119–121, 125, 206, 208, 382, 472, 517, 519–520 Hội Ánh sáng (Association for Enlightenment) 311 huatou 話頭 195, 197–198 hun 訓 570, 569 hundok 訓讀 53, 72, 137, 152, 222, 392, 394, 446, 491, 572 Hundred-Day Reform 298 Hundred Schools of Thought (Zhuzi baijia 諸 子百家) 142–144 hunmin chŏngŭm 訓民正音 339, 506–508, 510–511, 526, 534–538, 543 Huyu 胡語 (Central Asian or Sanskritic language) 152 hwa 華 249, 483 hwairon 華夷論 330, 541 hwaje 話題 495 Hwarang 花郞 (Flower Knights) 84, 86 hyangch’al 鄕札 80–81, 395, 418–419, 492, 507–509 hyangga 鄕歌 57, 78, 80–82, 84–88, 125, 380, 418–419, 422, 434, 508 hyangni 鄕吏 396, 457, 459 hybrid language 27, 98, 116–117, 201, 205 hybridity 14, 18–19, 53, 100, 103–104, 112, 115, 117, 379, 431, 434, 445, 464, 543–545

Index of Terms hyōden 評伝 (critical biography) 226 hyŏnt’o 懸吐 (reading glosses) 393, 402, 463 hyperglossia 246 idu 吏讀 56, 60, 64, 118–119, 122–124, 333–334, 337, 379–389, 394–404, 414–416, 418, 422, 431, 434, 441–445, 447, 449–450, 465, 506–507, 511 idumun 吏讀文 119, 395, 415, 434 idusik hanmun 吏讀式漢文 118, 379 Imjin War 122, 399 Imsin sŏgisŏk 壬申誓記石 (the Imsin oath stone) 416 imun 吏文 188, 382–384, 396, 443, 447, 536. See also liwen India 10, 13–15, 17, 22, 34, 73, 99, 108, 201, 206, 210, 222, 295, 388, 540 Indic 14, 52, 72, 98, 206, 210, 301 inscriptional style 35, 115–116, 223, 225, 231–233, 240–241, 381–383, 389, 400, 550 interpreter(s) 72, 119, 188, 191, 193, 198–200, 304, 342, 369, 384, 400, 428, 436, 450–451, 479, 486, 492, 499, 513, 536 ishin 維新 295. See also Duy Tân Reform Movement; Weixin Reform Movement Japanese Colonial Government-General (J. Chōsen sōtokufu 朝鮮總督府)  370, 576 Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945) 349, 380, 393, 506 Japanese Variant Sinitic 404 jiaguwen 甲骨文 159 jiajie 假借 (phonetic loan) 140–141 jiajiezi 假借字 140 jiandu 簡牘 (wooden tablets) 147 jiaohua 教化 291–294, 295–297, 300, 303–304, 312–313. See also kyōka Jinshin War (672) 84 jukyō bunkaken 儒敎文化圈 541 jun kanbun-tai 準漢文体 111 Jurchen 328, 336 Kabo Reforms (1894–1895) 298, 507–508, 542–543 Kaehwa (Enlightenment) period 474, 566, 573

601 kaishu 楷書 160 Kamakura era (1185–1333) 57, 383 kana 假名 52–53, 66, 111–112, 115, 137, 181, 225–227, 230, 350, 404, 544 kana majiribun 仮名交じり文 111 kana-zōshi 227, 239 kanbun 漢文 2, 35, 110–118, 137, 154, 221–222, 224–234, 239–242, 380, 382, 385–386, 391–393, 543 kanbun kundoku 漢文訓読 116, 152 kanbunchō 漢文調 541n20 kanbunmyaku 漢文脈 541 kangigwan 講肄官 536 kanhua 看話 196 kanji 漢字 137, 225–227, 230, 579 kanji bunkaken 漢字文化圈 (Sinographic Cultural Sphere) 3, 28, 71, 540, 552 kanjibun 漢字文 152, 156 Kanjiken 漢字圏 (Sinographic Sphere)  3–4, 11, 28, 34, 71, 73–75, 79, 83, 89, 137, 140–142, 151–152, 156, 162, 541, 544 Kannada 49, 205, 221–223, 245 kanpu 官府 383 kanshi 漢詩 30, 80, 83. See also hansi kanshibun 漢詩文 30 Kapsin Coup (1884) 544 kasa 歌辭 58, 372, 420, 455, 473, 496–497, 512–513, 520, 522–523, 529 kashaku 假借 140 katakana 片仮名 59, 65, 113, 352, 579 katauta 片歌 77 kāvya 14, 97, 206, 209 Khitan 328, 489 Khmer 54, 267, 294, 301–302 kiroku-bumi 記録ぶみ 111 kiroku-tai 記録体 111 Kitaōtsu 北大津 (excavation site) 151 “King of Japan” 224, 236–239 Kitchen Latin 103, 105, 107 Koguryŏ 高句麗 50, 78–79, 117, 123, 388, 394, 436 koine 20, 188, 194–196, 205, 209–211 kokubunmyaku-no kanbun 国文脈の漢文  111 kokugaku 国学 (national learning) 61–62 kokuji 国字 112 komun 古文 (ancient style) 270, 490

602 Korea, also Tongbang, Tongguk, Ch’ŏnggu, Haedong, Taedong 11–12, 27, 28–30, 33–34, 36–38, 51–52, 56–58, 60, 62, 64, 69–70, 72, 76–77, 79–80, 83–84, 87, 89–90, 101, 107, 110, 112, 117–119, 121, 122–123, 126–128, 188, 190–191, 193–194, 199, 201, 206, 208–210, 234–237, 246, 289, 291–295, 297–298, 304, 307, 312–313, 323–325, 327–339, 341, 343–346, 350–356, 367, 370, 372, 378–384, 388–389, 393–395, 397–398, 401, 404–405, 412–413, 416–421, 424, 426, 429–432, 435, 440–441, 443, 449, 451, 461, 464–465, 506–507, 514–529, 534, 539, 541–542, 544–554, 567–568, 574–576, 578–579, 581 Korean Chancery Sinitic 379 Korean Variant Sinitic 118, 123–124, 378, 389, 396–399, 415, 417, 465 Koryŏ 高麗 dynasty (918–1392) 57, 76, 79, 81–82, 83, 90–91, 120, 122, 124–126, 190–196, 199–200, 208, 328, 332, 382, 383–385, 395, 404, 416, 418–419, 436, 443, 451, 489, 508, 510–511, 513 Koryŏ Tripitaka 208 kosa 古事 456 kudu 句讀 493 kudaishi 句題詩 75 kugŏ 國語 (national language) 391, 572, 578 kugyŏl 口訣 72, 333–334, 339, 394, 444, 463, 571 kukhak 國學 493n60 kukhanmunch’e 國漢文體 542 kun 訓 152, 154–156 kundoku 訓讀 34–35, 53–54, 56, 59, 65, 72–73, 116–117, 138, 152, 154–156, 163–164, 166–167, 169–170, 172, 174–175, 177–178, 221–224, 232, 240–241, 392, 541, 572 kungmun 國文 (national writing) 324, 343, 507, 543, 553–554 Kungmun yŏn’guso 國文硏究所 (National Script Research Institute) 547–548 kunko 訓詁 (annotation) 150, 152 kunten 訓点 112, 115, 164 kusik 舊識 (old knowledge) 343 kwach’esi 科體詩 (examination-style poetry)  403, 425

Index of Terms kwagŏ 科擧 (civil service examinations)  424, 571 Kwanggaet’o stele 123 kwanmunsŏ 官文書 398 kwasi 科詩 403 kyesa 啓辭 399 kyōka 教化 294. See also jiaohua Kyonam (Yŏngnam) 420 Kyŏnghagwŏn 經學院 390n13 Kyŏngju 73, 419 Latin 6, 8–10, 18–19, 25–26, 33, 38, 49–50, 52–54, 61, 63–65, 75, 96–99, 101–109, 126–128, 159, 161, 210–211, 221–223, 251, 269, 281, 304, 308, 313, 379, 392–393, 398, 536, 542, 546, 548–551, 554, 568, 570, 576, 581 Lelang Commandery 327–328 lexical vernacularity 412–413, 417, 431, 434, 446, 461, 465 li 禮 291, 303 Liang 梁 (六朝) 150 lingua franca 9, 325 linguistic Darwinism 580, 582 linguistic ideology 23, 412, 540 linguistic imperialism 545 linguistic nationalism 356, 367, 374, 546–547 lishu 隷書 140, 160 literarization 18, 37, 55–56, 58–61, 64, 369, 374 literary collections (K. munjip 文集) 114, 121, 350, 359, 396, 399–400, 423 literary language 5–6, 30–31, 49, 70, 73, 96, 98, 100–101, 108–109, 126, 128, 160, 175, 181, 190, 210, 222, 395, 412, 461, 482, 495, 501, 520, 522, 540, 581 Literary Sinitic 2, 6, 9–10, 14, 19, 21, 23, 26, 30, 34–38, 52–53, 56–58, 60–62, 64–65, 69–73, 97, 107, 110, 117–119, 122–128, 137, 160–181, 187–191, 193–194, 196, 199–202, 204–213, 222–224, 226, 231–233, 239–241, 245–246, 248–249, 251, 283, 289, 291–292, 299–300, 308, 310, 312–313, 323, 349–360, 362–374, 378–379, 381–388, 390–396, 399, 401, 404, 413–424, 429, 431, 433–434, 436, 440–441, 443, 445–446, 450–451,

Index of Terms Literary Sinitic (cont.) 453–457, 461, 463–465, 474, 477–478, 506–514, 518–524, 529, 535–539, 541–543, 545, 549–550, 552, 566–568, 571, 573–577, 581, 582. See also Vernacular Sinitic; Korean Vernacular Sinitic; regionalized Literary Sinitic; non-orthodox Literary Sinitic literary style (K. munch’e 文體) 120, 543. See also buntai literati 6, 10–12, 27, 114, 119, 121, 198–199, 308, 327, 339, 395–396, 403, 418–419, 422–423, 433–434, 444, 450, 473, 475, 485, 494–495, 501, 507, 512–513, 519, 522 literization 18, 37, 52, 55, 63, 142, 222, 369, 374 liushu 六書 140, 263 liwen 吏文 (clerical writing) 34, 188, 190, 192–193, 197–200, 206, 214–216. See also imun local language 6, 33–34, 52–56, 58, 60, 65, 92, 96, 99, 120, 141, 151–154, 221, 223, 382, 421, 489, 491, 495, 540 logographic inscription 56, 72, 176, 441 logographic style 53, 57, 174, 177 logographic writing 53, 58, 66, 162, 176 Lu 魯 147 macaronic texts 104 made-in-Korea sinographs 121–123, 378–379, 401, 440–441 mana 真字 (“genuine characters”, sinographs) 224n6 man’yōgana 万葉仮名 59, 382 manabon 真字本 115 Manchu 104, 292, 328, 330–331, 432–433, 435, 478–480, 485–488, 494, 524, 528 Manchuria 187 maṇipravāḷa 99–101, 107–109 manuscript 24, 36, 55, 59, 164, 249, 297, 328, 356–357, 359, 362, 364–365, 369, 383, 395–397, 401–402, 447, 449, 497 March First Movement 567 Medieval Latin 18, 101–105, 108–109, 127 Meiji Ishin 明治維新 297 Middle Ages 19, 101, 103, 105 Middle Chinese 259, 261, 263, 294 mijuku kanbun 未熟漢文 111

603 Ming dynasty 192, 201, 363, 373, 419, 528 missionaries 251, 296, 301, 303–304, 308, 325, 342–345, 545, 547–550, 552, 574, 581 mokkan 木簡 114, 117, 123, 151, 164 Mongolian 190–192, 197, 435–436, 478, 480 Mongols 190, 328, 336, 478 Mon-Khmer languages 267, 294 morphography 108, 113 morphosyllabic script/writing 1–2, 245, 256, 264 movable type 368, 370 mulboryu 物譜類 518 munch’e panjŏng 文體反正 (literary rectification) 429, 475 munjip 文集 (collected writings) 114, 121, 350, 359, 396, 399–400, 423 munkwa 文科 (higher examination)  425n20 munmyŏng kaehwa 文明開化 (civilization and enlightenment) 298, 343. See also wenming kaihua, bunmei kaika, văn minh khai hoá myojimyŏng 墓誌銘 124 mythology 165, 412 Nam Định 南丁 251 national language (K. kugŏ 國語) 391, 572, 578 national learning (J. kokugaku 国学) 61–62 national writing (K. kungmun 國文) 324, 343, 507, 543, 553–554 Neo-Confucian 65, 128, 188–189, 192, 197, 200, 210, 226, 247, 274, 279, 285 Nguyễn Dynasty (1802–1945) 249, 310 Nihongi kōsho 日本紀講書 154 (nikki) kiroku-bun (日記)記録文 111 nikki-tai 日記体 111 norito 祝辞宜 382 Noron 471 North Korea 118, 123, 398, 400, 440, 525, 582 Okurigana 383, 392 ŏnhae 諺解 198, 294, 339, 341, 351, 359, 361–364, 444, 514, 517, 548, 572 ŏnja 諺字 474 ŏnmun 諺文 121, 400, 471–472, 474, 495, 500, 520, 526, 536, 543–544, 554, 571

604 ŏnmun ilch’i 言文一致 506, 567, 71 ŏnmun panjŏl 諺文反切 340 ŏnŏ 諺語 121 ŏnt’o 諺吐 485, 493 Opium Wars 297 oracle bone 138–139, 142, 159 ōraimono 往来物 111 ōrai-tai 往来体 111 oral transmission 300, 413, 456 ŏrok 語録 188, 450–451 ŏrokhae 語錄解 197, 199, 201, 434, 436, 450–453 Paekche 百濟 50, 78, 88, 117, 149–150, 187, 436 Pali 209–210 Pangmun’guk 博文局 (Ministry of Presswork and Communication) 544 pangŏn 方言 119–121, 125, 206, 208, 382, 472, 517, 519–520 pangŏn iŏ 方言俚語 120 panjŏl 反切 (C. fanqie) 252, 262–264, 266, 269–279, 281, 352, 526 p’ansori 390, 455 parallel-prose style (pianliti 駢儷體) 155 parallelism 143, 145, 148 phản thiết 反切 (C. fanqie) 262. See also fanqie; panjŏl phonetic loan (C. jiajie 假借) 140–141 phonogram 113, 151, 332, 419, 441, 550 phonographic 52–53, 55–59, 65–66, 71–72, 97, 106, 109, 114–115, 119, 122, 128, 172–174, 176, 178, 180, 247, 252, 255–256, 263–265, 268, 279–280, 282–283, 385, 404, 423 phonography 52, 61, 65–66, 113 pianliti 駢儷體 (Chinese parallel-prose style) 155 p’iltam 筆談 (brush talk) 28, 72, 478, 483, 487 pinghua 評話 192 poetry anthologies 74, 77, 93 poetry exchanges 78, 90, 329 polyglossia 490 Practical Learning (K. sirhak 實學) 474, 501–502, 515, 525, 528–529 Prakrit 13–14, 17–18, 35, 73, 92, 97, 99, 101, 103, 108, 206, 210

Index of Terms Praśasti 14, 97, 210 printing 363, 370–371, 400, 416, 447 pukpŏl 北伐 431–433 pyŏnch’e hanmun 變體漢文 118–119 pyŏnch’ik hanmun 變則漢文 118 pyŏnkyŏk hanmun 變格漢文 118–119, 388, 401 Qi 齊 149 Qin 秦 Empire 34, 140–142, 371 Qin scribal script (qinli 秦隷) 140 Qin seal script (qinzhuan 秦篆) 140 qinli 秦隷 (Qin scribal script) 140 qinzhuan 秦篆 (Qin seal script) 140 Qing dynasty 292, 330, 432, 524, 528 Quốc Ngữ 245–251, 269, 280–281, 284–286, 300, 308–309, 311, 313–314 rangaku 蘭學 (Dutch learning) 297 regional language 101, 137, 142, 150, 223, 472, 579 regional written languages 141 register 6, 19, 27, 33–35, 37, 52, 57, 65, 96–97, 101, 107–109, 118, 126, 152, 154, 173, 188–191, 193, 200–201, 205, 210, 222–224, 232–233, 240–242, 333, 379, 395, 403–404, 414, 457, 459–460 rhyme/rime 14, 99, 149, 161, 252–263, 265–269, 278–279, 281, 285, 353, 362, 401, 403, 491, 526 rhyme/rime books/dictionaries (韻書) 252, 254, 259, 338, 516–517, 534–535 rhyme/rime studies 254 rhyme/rime tables (韻圖) 252, 254 Romanization 50, 578 Royal lectures (kyŏngyŏn 經筵) 450 Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) 343, 571 Ryukyu Kingdom 29, 290, 292 sa 詞 394n22 sadae 事大 443n35, 537n8, 538n9 sadae kyorin 事大交隣 537 sages 270–273, 277–278, 280, 282, 284–285, 292, 326, 337, 471, 507, 509, 521, 535, 566 samun 斯文 (“This Culture of Ours”) 6–7, 9, 10, 12, 187, 204, 208, 325, 327, 329, 331, 341

Index of Terms samurai 227, 297 sangmin 常民 536n6 sanoega 詞腦歌 509 Sanskrit 1, 5, 6, 8, 10–15, 17, 18, 21–23, 25–26, 32–34, 36, 49–50, 52–54, 60–61, 63–65, 69–71, 73–75, 84, 92, 96–103, 107–109, 126–128, 152, 161, 166–167, 172, 201, 205–206, 210–211, 221–223, 290–291, 294–295, 300–302, 312–313, 351–355, 359, 435, 509, 516, 536, 540, 542 scholar-officials (shi 士) 142, 144–145 script apartheid 36–37, 66, 349–351, 357, 359, 363, 365, 368–369, 371–374 Self-Strengthening Literary Group (Tự lực văn đoàn) 248, 311 semantogram 332, 419, 441 sessions of textual explication (kōdoku 講讀) 154 shakuji 借字 166 shakujibun 借字文 383 Shang dynasty (ca. 1600–ca. 1046 bce) 138, 326 shi 士 (scholar-officials) 142, 144–145 shi 詩 70, 181 shigin 詩吟 (recitation of Chinese poems in kundoku) 155 shokan buntai 書簡文體 383 sihwa 詩話 482 sijo 時調 58, 372, 473, 520, 522, 529 Silla 新羅 50, 72–73, 76, 78–79, 84–86, 88–90, 92, 117–120, 123–124, 126, 174, 193–194, 196, 332–333, 387–389, 416, 418–419, 436, 508–509 Sillasik hanmun 新羅式漢文 118 Sinicization 71, 221, 394, 534, 537–539, 553 sinographs, sinography 2–3, 9, 11, 30, 36–38, 59, 72, 74, 80, 110, 112–113, 118, 121–123, 125–127, 138, 143, 151–152, 154, 160, 163–164, 167–168, 174, 179, 204, 207–208, 223, 233, 252, 263, 290, 297, 308, 326, 328, 332–335, 337–339, 341, 350, 352– 355, 357, 360–363, 365–366, 368–374, 378–383, 392–393, 396, 401, 403–405, 412, 419, 423, 431, 434, 440–441, 443, 447, 456, 462, 471–473, 489, 491–493, 506–511, 513–518, 521, 526–529, 534–537, 542, 544–545, 550–554, 567, 569–572, 575–579, 581–582

605 Sinographic Cosmopolis 1, 4–12, 15, 20–30, 32–36, 38, 54, 56, 65, 92–94, 101, 246, 282, 289–291, 293–295, 300, 312–313, 328, 368–369, 507, 534, 536, 539, 541–542, 545, 548–549, 551, 553–554, 567–571, 575–579, 581–582 Sinographic Mediapolis 534, 549, 554, 567, 570, 576, 581 Sinographic Sphere 3–4, 11, 28, 34, 71, 73–75, 79, 83, 89, 137, 140–142, 151–152, 156, 162, 544 Sinographic Translational Network 36, 290–291, 295, 300, 302, 307–311, 313 Sino-French War (1884–1885) 298 Sino-Japanese 76, 116, 294, 298, 300, 307, 310–313, 342, 545, 554, 571, 578–579 Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) 298, 342, 545, 554, 571, 578–579 Sino-Korean 76, 121–122, 294, 298, 304, 307, 332, 339, 360, 362, 387, 388, 393–394, 397, 399, 416, 434, 441, 445, 455, 462, 472, 511, 513–517, 527, 534–535, 542–543, 545, 550–551, 569, 572–573 Sino-Korean Mixed Script (K. kukhanmunch’e 國漢文體) 542–543, 545, 550, 572–573 Sino-Vietnamese 76, 252, 282, 294, 298, 300, 305, 307, 309, 311–313 Sino-xenic 332, 394 sinsik 新式 (new knowledge) 343 sinsosŏl 572 sirhak 實學 (Practical Learning) 474, 501–502, 515, 525, 528–529 siwen 斯文 (“This Culture of Ours”) 6–7, 9, 10, 12, 187, 204, 208, 325, 327, 329, 331, 341 six categories of characters (liushu 六書)  140, 263 Six Dynasties period (220–589) 74, 160 Social Darwinism 296, 305, 582 sodoku 素讀 155 sogŏ 俗語 542 sogŏn 俗言 119, 366 sŏk 釋 339 sokhanmun 俗漢文 118–119, 394–395, 382 sŏktok 釋讀 394 Sŏn monks 192, 196, 199–200 Song dynasty 160, 189–190

606 sŏri 胥吏 (petty clerks, scribes) 379, 382–384, 396, 434 sōrōbun 候文 64 Spring and Autumn period 春秋 (722–481/463 bce) 2, 26–27, 142, 326 Stuffed Latin 33, 105, 107–108, 126 Sŭngmunwŏn 承文院 443 sup’il 隨筆 477 syllabogram 254, 265–266, 268, 472–473 tadpole scripts 蝌蚪文 270–271, 273 taeŏn 代言 425 tân thư (new books) 298–299, 307 Tang dynasty (618–907) 70, 190, 275, 306, 455 Tanguts 29, 328, 336 tanka 短歌 78, 173, 177–178, 181 textbooks 60, 148, 188, 191–193, 197, 299, 343–345, 393, 436, 547 Three Kingdoms (ca. 57 bce–668 ce) 76, 78–79, 82, 88, 91, 120, 122, 124, 332, 382–383, 385, 387–388, 394–395, 404, 429, 436 tianxia 天下 (All-Under-Heaven) 291–296, 300, 306, 312–313 t’o 吐 332, 383–384, 444 t’ochagŏ 土着語 550 Tokugawa 35, 112, 225–228, 242, 297, 349 Tongguk 東國 420 tongmun 同文 526 tongwen 同文 327, 334 tortoise shells 138, 142 Tokugawa bakufu 226–227 tōwa 唐話 206 transcription 65, 120, 153, 204, 252, 257–258, 261–263, 266, 332–334, 353, 360–365, 368, 370–372, 419, 423, 429, 443, 506, 509 translator(s) 193, 198–200, 210, 241, 312, 360, 369, 510, 529, 536, 577 tribute system 291, 300, 312 Tsushima 119, 400 Tự lực văn đoàn (Self-Strengthening Literary Group) 248, 311 ŭm 音 339, 569 ŭmdok 音讀 394 ŭmka 音價 492

Index of Terms Unified Silla (668–935 ce) 76, 83, 124, 333, 507, 511 uta 173, 180–181 văn minh 289, 299, 304, 307–309, 313 văn minh khai hoá (civilizaton and enlightenment) 299 Variant Literary Sinitic 107, 124, 168, 172–173, 415–417 vernacular glossing 151, 353 vernacular literature 37, 89, 208, 350, 374, 413, 464, 512–513, 522–523 vernacular poetry 80–81, 84, 86–87, 89, 173, 178–181, 372–373 vernacular reading 29, 35, 55, 73, 80, 115–117, 152, 155–156, 163, 166, 169–172, 178, 223, 394, 444, 446, 491, 569 vernacular song (K. sanoe-ga 詞腦歌) 79– 80, 85–86, 418, 421–422, 509, 513 vernacular translation 333, 360, 362–364, 370–371, 534 Vietnam 11–12, 27–29, 33–35, 50–52, 56–58, 60–62, 64–65, 69–70, 72, 76, 101, 187– 188, 206, 241, 245–249, 251–252, 254, 256–259, 261–262, 267, 269, 274, 278, 280–286, 289–290, 292–300, 304–305, 307–315, 328, 351–353, 351–353, 435, 578 vocalization 142–144, 147, 149, 154, 173–174, 176, 178–179, 334, 338–339, 394, 514–515, 527 voice 34, 72–73, 88, 137, 142, 146–148, 150, 152–156, 177–179, 457, 491–492, 500, 512, 578 wadoku 和讀 381n6 wafū kanbun 和風漢文 111 waka 倭歌 34, 53, 59, 61, 78, 85–87, 160, 181 waka kanbun 和化漢文 111 wakan konkō-bun 和漢混淆文 111 Warring States 戦国 period (481/403–221 bce) 2, 26–27, 34, 140–143, 147–148, 159, 326 washū 和臭 111, 385 washū kanbun 和臭漢文/和習漢文 111 wayō kanbun-tai 和様漢文体 111 Weixin Reform Movement 303. See also Duy Tân Reform Movement; ishin

Index of Terms wen 文 7, 9, 74, 161, 206, 273, 327, 488 wenming kaihua 文明開化 (civilization and enlightenment) 295, 297–299, 343 wenyan 文言 2, 137, 162, 187 woodblock printing 363, 370 wooden strips (mokkan 木簡) 114, 117, 123, 151, 164 wooden tablets (jiandu 簡牘) 114, 117, 123, 147 Wu-Yue dynasties 189 xingshengzi 形聲字 138 yadam 野談 30, 37, 57, 396, 403, 413–415, 417, 427, 449, 463–464 yangban 197, 199, 201, 297–298, 341, 401–402, 424, 435, 437–438, 440, 444, 457, 481, 492–493, 506, 515, 521, 536 yayan 雅言 34, 119, 137, 145, 147, 155–156, 162, 291 Yin 殷 (Shang 商) 138 yomihon 226

607 Yŏngnam 嶺南 (Kyonam 嶠南) 419–420 yŏngsa akpu 詠史樂府 419–420 Yuan dynasty (1279–1368) 190–191, 338 yuanyang hudie 鴛鴦蝴蝶 (“Ducks and Butterflies” [romantic stories]) 299n4 yuefu 樂府 419–420, 522 yulu 語録 34, 188–189, 192–193, 196–197, 201, 209–210 Zen 28, 193, 205, 228–229 zhijie 直解 188, 191–193, 214–216 zhonghua 中華 (Central Efflorescence)  294, 330–331, 541, 581 zhongyuan 中原 496 Zhou 周 dynasty 139–140, 150, 159, 272, 277, 525 zhuanshu 篆書 140 zhuci 助詞 140 Zhuzi baijia 諸子百家 (Hundred Schools of Thought) 142 zokubun 俗文 382 zokukanbun 俗漢文 118–119, 382–383

Index of Texts Cited Ahŭi wŏllam 兒戱原覽 436 Aiqing zhuan 愛卿傳 (Tale of Aiqing)  454n44 Analects (Lunyu 論語) 6–7, 143–144, 146, 148–150, 160, 164, 178, 187, 327, 392, 486–488 Anwa yugo 安窩遺稿 428n27 Aŏn kakpi 雅言覺非 403, 423, 518 Azuma kagami 吾妻鏡 57, 111, 383 Baopuzi 抱朴子 456 Bibliographie Coréenne 548 Book of Changes (Yijing 易經) 35, 147, 273–281, 284, 297, 306, 473 Book of Documents (Shujing 書經 or Shang shu 尙書) 143, 147, 162, 544 Book of Odes (Shijing 詩經) 27, 79, 85, 145–147, 150, 160, 162, 354, 366, 373, 423, 482, 519, 544 Book of Rites (Liji 禮記) 147, 151 Bunkai 文戒 111 Bunmeiron no gairyaku 文明論之概略 297 Cangjie pian 蒼頡篇 149 Chaemulbo 才物譜 518 Chapki kodam 雜記古談 427 Chaun pyŏnhae 字韻辨解 516 Chengzhai xiaojing 誠齋孝經 191 Chewang un’gi 帝王韻紀 419 Chỉ Nam Ngọc Âm Giải Nghĩa 指南玉音解義  60 Ch’ilsŏ ŏnhae 七書諺解 536 Chit’ong ki 智通記 120 Chŏndŭng sinhwa kuhae 剪燈新話句解  369, 445 Ch’ŏngya tamsu 靑野談藪 396 Ch’ŏnjamun 千字文 148–150, 339–341 Chŏnun okp’yŏn 全韻玉篇 551 Ch’ŏnyerok 天倪錄 427 Chŏnyul t’ongbo 典律通補 398 Chōsengogakushi 朝鮮語學史 548 Chosŏn Pulgyo t’ongsa 朝鮮佛敎通史 187 Chosŏn wangjo sillok 朝鮮王朝實録 354, 399, 440 Chu Ci 楚辞 (Songs of Chu) 148, 366, 421

Ch’uan kŭp kugan 推案及鞫案 444, 446 Ch’unhyang chŏn 390, 393, 455 Chunqiu 春秋 (Spring and Autumn Annals)  147 Collected Explanations (He Yan jijie 何晏集 解) (of the Analects by He Yan) 150 Dai Nihonshi 大日本史 57 Daxue zhijie 大學直解 191 Diamond Sutra 金剛般若波羅蜜經  357–361, 363, 365, 369 Dictionnaire Coréen-Français 550 Du Lin Cangjie Xunzuan 杜林蒼頡訓纂  149 Du Lin Cangjie gu 杜林蒼頡故 149 Elements of International Law 309 Er tan 耳談 (An Earful of Conversations) 423 Fanyi mingyi ji 飜譯名義集 199 Fudoki 風土記 77 Genji monogatari 源氏物語 59, 61, 90 Genkai 言海 303, 306 Haeam yugo 海巖遺稿 428n28 Haedong akpu 海東樂府 419 Haedong cheguk ki 海東諸國紀 420n9 Han’gaek kŏnyŏn chip 韓客巾衍集 494 Hanshu 漢書 (History of Han; 82 ce)  149–150, 437 He Yan jijie 何晏集解 150 Heike monogatari 平家物語 224 Hoa lạ: đoản biên và ký ức 312 Hojil 虎叱 477 Hōjōki 方丈記 224 Honchō Shōgun fu 本朝将軍譜 226 Honchō tsūgan 本朝通鑑 57 Honglou meng 紅樓夢 60 Hongmu chŏngun yŏkhun 洪武正韻譯訓  534 Hongwu zhengyun 洪武正韻 514, 534, 537 Hujae sŏnsaeng chip 厚齋先生集 (Collected Works of Master Hujae) 426

609

Index of Texts Cited Hunmin chŏngŭm 訓民正音 339 Hunmin chŏngŭm unhae 訓民正音韻解  471 Hunmong chahoe 訓蒙字會 339 Hunse p’yŏnghwa 訓世評話 191 Hwaŏm kyŏng mundap 華嚴經問答 124 Hwaŏm kyŏng Sambo chang wŏnt’ong ki 華嚴 經三寶章圓通記 126 Hyŏl ŭi nu 572 Hyŏn Ŭnsan ilgi 398

Kyŏngsul yŏrha ki 502 Kyŏnmun chapki 見聞雜記 402

Lao Qida 老乞大 191, 193, 198, 201, 206, 436 Li Sao 離騷 (Encountering Sorrow) 421 Li Xuzhong mingshu 李虛中命書 275 Liangshi 梁史 259n17 Liji 禮記 (Book of Rites) 147, 151 Liwen zhinan 吏文指南 190 Lunyu 論語 (Analects) 6–7, 143–144, 146, 148–150, 160, 164, 178, 187, 327, 392, 486–488 Idam sokch’an 耳談續纂 (Sequel to “Er tan”)  Luzhai daxue 魯齋大學 191 423 Idu p’yŏllam 吏吐便覽 383 Makpuk haengjŏngnok 漠北行程錄  Ilbonnon 日本論 349 477n18, 491n52 Im Changgun chŏn 488 Man’yōshū 万葉集 34, 57, 59, 77–78, 81, 87, Iroha いろは 268 89–90, 113, 115, 173–174, 176–181, 222, Ise monogatari 伊勢物語 59 383 Miam ilgi 眉巖日記 398 Jehol Diary (Yŏrha ilgi 熱河日記) 37, 475, Monggyŏngdang ilsa 夢經堂日史 476n13 490, 495, 502 Mongŏ yuhae 蒙語類解 436 Jiandeng xinhua 剪燈新話 369, 445 Jijiu pian 急就篇 149 Mongsan hwasang pŏbŏ yangnok ŏnhae 蒙山 Jingang bore boluomi jing 金剛般若波羅 和尚法語略録諺解 198 蜜經 357–361, 363, 365, 369 Muncharyu chip 文字類集 436n32 Jingde chuandenglu 景徳傳燈録 189, Muo yŏnhaengnok 戊午燕行錄 502 192–193, 199, 203 Jingdian shiwen 經典釋文 338n31 Nam Phong 南風 300 Nansil manp’il 蘭室漫筆 427 Kaifūsō 懐風藻 74, 83–84, 89 Nigu yuefu 擬古樂府 419 Kattōgosen 葛藤語箋 209 Nihon gaishi 日本外史 294n3 Kogŭm sŏngnim 古今釋林 435–439, 452 Nihon kōki 日本後紀 173 Kojidan 古事談 57 Nihon shoki 日本書紀 57, 77, 83, 87, 90, 118, Kojiki 古事記 57, 77, 81, 83, 87, 148, 153–154, 150, 154–155, 164–167, 169–170, 172–173, 168–173, 222 387–388 Kojitsu sōsho 故実叢書 155 No Pak chimnam 老朴集覧 193, 198 Kokin wakashū 古今和歌集 59, 61, 77, 85 Nodong yahak tokpon 勞動夜學讀本 572 Nogŏltae 老乞大 191, 193, 198, 201, 206, Kokinshosekidairin 古今書籍題林 227 Konjaku monogatarishū 今昔物語集 59 436 Kuge honin 公卿補任 239 Kŭmgang panya paramil kyŏng 金剛般若波 “Odaesan Sangwŏnsa chungch’ang kwŏnsŏnmun” 吾臺山上院寺重創勸  羅蜜經 357–361, 363, 365, 369 善文 205 Kuunmong 九雲夢 36–37, 355–371, 373, 401 Oksŏnmong 玉仙夢 401, 449 Kwang chaemulbo 廣才物譜 518 Ŏnmun chi 諺文志 471–472, 501 Kyesŏ chamnok 溪西雜錄 427, 447, 449 Oudang yŏnhaengnok 五友堂燕行錄 497 Kyesŏ yadam 溪西野談 449 Oŭmjŏng 五音正 516 Kyŏngguk taejŏn 經國大典 398

610 Paek ŏn hae 白諺解 423 Pak T’ongsa 朴通使 191–193, 198–199, 201, 206, 436 Pan’gye surok 磻溪隨錄 513 Pibyŏnsa tŭngnok 備邊司謄錄 400, 444 Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, The 568 Platform Sutra 六祖壇經 199, 203 “Pŏn Sa miin kok pal” 飜思美人曲跋 (Postscript to Translating Songs for the Beloved One) 420n11 Principles of Sociology, The 310 Puk yŏn kihaeng 502 Pukhagŭi 北學議 525 Pukhŏn kŏsa chip 北軒居士集 423n14, 122n18 Qianzi wen 千字文 (Thousand Character Classic) 148–150, 339–341 Qieyun 切韻 259, 262 Quốc âm tân tự 國音新字 247, 252, 283 Quốc dân đọc bản 國民讀本 299 Quốc tế công pháp thường thức 310n22 Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji 史記) 80, 229, 271, 327, 438, 456 “Sa miin kok” 思美人曲 (Song for the Beloved One) 420, 512, 523 Saikyūki 西宮記 155 Samdaemok 三代目 81 Samguk sagi 三國史記 78–80, 82–84, 88–89, 92, 120, 395 Samguk yusa 三國遺事 78, 80, 81–84, 88, 91, 395 Sanguozhi yanyi 三國志演義 429, 436, 450 Sasŏng t’onghae 四聲通解 198 Sassi namjŏnggi 謝氏南征記 37, 355–356, 358, 365–374, 421 Sejong sillok 世宗實錄 337n25 Senjimon 千字文 (Thousand Character Classic) 148–150, 339–341 Shaku Nihongi 釈日本紀 155n15 Shang shu 尙書 143, 147, 162, 544 Shiji 史記 80, 229, 271, 327, 438, 456 Shijing 詩經 27, 79, 85, 145–147 150, 160, 162, 354, 366, 373, 423, 482, 519, 544

Index of Texts Cited Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 482n31, 483n34 Shōgunki 将軍記 227 Shoku Nihongi 続日本紀 77, 173 Shuihuzhuan 水滸傳 60, 193, 201, 428–429, 436, 450, 481 Shujing 書經 or Shangshu 尙書 143, 147, 162, 544 Shuowen jiezi 説文解字 74, 140, 263 Sipku chang wŏnt’ong ki 十句章圓通記 126 Sisheng qieyun 四聲切韻 259 Sishengpu 四聲譜 259 SNKBT (Shin Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei, New Anthology of Classical Japanese Literature) 237 So akpu 小樂府 419, 510 Sohak 小學 341 Sŏjŏng pyŏlgok 西征別曲 496 “Sok miin kok” 續美人曲 (Continued “Songs for the Beloved One”) 420, 523 Sŏkpo sangjŏl 釋譜詳節 334n21 Sŏlgye surok 雪溪隨錄 472n2 Sŏn’ga kwigam ŏnhae 禪家龜鑑諺解 202 Sŏngjong sillok 成宗實錄 330n12 Songnam chapchi 松南雜識 436–437, 439 Sŏp’o chip 西浦集 355 Sŏp’o manp’il 西浦漫筆 355 Sowip’o Ch’angŭi rok 少爲浦倡義錄 398 Sŏyu kyŏnmun 西遊見聞 542 Sŏyugi ŏrok Sŏsanggi ŏrok Samgukchi ŏrok Imun ŏrok 西游記語錄　西廂記語錄　 三國志語錄　吏文語錄 200 Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu 春秋)  147 Suishu 隋書 (History of Sui) 148 Sŭngjŏngwŏn ilgi 承政院日記 386, 400, 447 Sunoji 旬五志 (Records in Fifteen Days) 423 Taiheiki 太平記 59, 228 Taikō gunki 太閤軍記 225 Taikōki 太閤記 225–226, 228–231, 234, 236, 242 Tamhŏn yŏn’gi 湛軒燕記 495–496, 498 Tang sanzang xiyouji 唐三蔵西遊記 193 “Tengwang ge xu” 滕王閣序 (Preface to the Prince of Teng’s Pavilion) 455 Tenshōki 天正記 225

611

Index of Texts Cited Thousand Character Classic 千字文  148–150, 339–341 Togangnok 渡江錄 479, 481, 484, 493, 500 Tongdo akpu 東都樂府 419 Tongguk chŏngun 東國正韻 534, 537 Tongguk munhŏn pigo 東國文獻備考 (Reference Materials of the Eastern Kingdom) 426 Tongguk t’onggam 東國通鑑 330n10 Tongp’ae naksong 東稗洛誦 413–418, 423, 426–427, 429–431, 434–435, 437–442, 445–447, 449, 451–457, 460–464 Tongsanggi 東廂記 (Story of the Eastern Chamber) 464 Tosa nikki 土佐日記 85 Toyotomi Hideyoshi den 豊臣秀吉伝 225, 227 Toyotomi Hideyoshi fu 豊臣秀吉譜  225–226 T’yŏllo ryŏkchyŏng (The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come) 568 Ŭijŏngbu tŭngnok 議政府謄錄 444 Ŭlbyŏng yŏnhaengnok 乙丙燕行錄  495–496 Ŭnggolbang 鷹鶻方 403n27 Văn minh tân học sách 文明新學策 299 Waeŏ yuhae 倭語類解 436 Wang o ch’ŏnch’ukkuk chŏn 往五天竺國傳  388 Wanguo gongfa 萬國公法 (Elements of International Law) 309 Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍 161, 273 Wenxuan 文選 74 Wŏn’gak kyŏng ŏnhae 圓覺經諺解 204 Wŏrin ch’ŏn’gang chi kok 月印千江之曲  334n21

Xin Tangshu 新唐書 190n9 Xixiangji 西廂記 (Romance of the Western Chamber) 200, 390, 428–429, 436, 450, 488 Xiyouji 西遊記 (Journey to the West) 190, 193, 200, 429, 436, 450 Xiyouji pinghua 西遊記評話 192 Yakubun sentei 訳文筌蹄 152, 156 Yixi cichuan 易係辭傳 277 Yidachuan 易大傳 277 Yijing 易經 35, 147, 273–281, 284, 297, 306, 473 Yŏgŏ yuhae 譯語類解 436 Yŏgŏ yuhae po 譯語類解補 436, 451, 453 Yŏji sŭngnam 輿地勝覽 383 Yŏnam chip 燕巖集 475nn9,11, 481n29, 491n54 Yongbi ŏch’ŏn ka 龍飛御天歌 204 Yŏngmoch’ŏp 永慕帖 397 Yŏnhaeng ilgi 燕行日記 497 Yŏnhaeng illok 燕行日錄 497 Yŏnhaeng pyŏlgok 燕行別曲 496–497 Yŏnhaengnok 499 Yoram 要覽 402, 449 Yŏrha ilgi 熱河日記 37, 475, 490, 495, 502 Yuefu shiji 樂府詩集 177 Yuejing 樂經 279n52 Yumong ch’ŏnja 牖蒙千字 342 Yusŏ p’ilchi 儒胥必知 383–384 Zenrinshōkisen 禪林象器箋 210 Zhijie xiaoxue 直解小學 191 Zhongyong 中庸 327 Zhuzi yulei 朱子語類 197, 434, 436, 450–451 Zuo Zhuan (春秋)左氏伝 145, 161 Zutangji 祖堂集 192, 196 Zuting shiyuan 祖庭事苑 189, 200, 209

45 mm

IN THE SINOGRAPHIC COSMOPOLIS 5

9 789004 437692

ISSN 2589-8787

brill.com/sinc

Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in the World of Wen 文

LANGUAGE, WRITING AND LITERARY CULTURE

SINC 5 Ross King (Ed.)

Ross King earned his PhD in Linguistics at Harvard University, and specializes in the history of language, reading, writing, and literary cultures in the Sinographic Cosmopolis, with a focus on Korea in the ��fteenth through twentieth centuries.

Language, Writing and Literary Culture in the Sinographic Cosmopolis

Contributors are Daehoe Ahn, Yufen Chang, Wiebke Denecke, Torquil Duthie, Marion Eggert, Greg Evon, Hoduk Hwang, John Jorgensen, Ross King, David Lurie, Alexey Lushchenko, Si Nae Park, John Phan, Mareshi Saito, and S. William Wells.

SINC Edited by Ross King, David Lurie and Marion Eggert

Sheldon Pollock’s work on the history of literary cultures in the ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’ broke new ground in the theorization of historical processes of vernacularization and served as a wakeup call for comparative approaches to such processes in other translocal cultural formations. But are his characterizations of vernacularization in the Sinographic Sphere accurate, and do his ideas and framework allow us to speak of a ‘Sinographic Cosmopolis’? How do the special typology of sinographic writing and associated technologies of vernacular reading complicate comparisons between the Sankrit and Latinate cosmopoleis? Such are the questions tackled in this volume.

L A N G UAG E , W R I T I N G A N D L I T E R A R Y C U LT U R E IN THE SINOGRAPHIC COSMOPOLIS

Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in the World of Wen 文 READING SHELDON POLLOCK FROM THE SINOGRAPHIC COSMOPOLIS

Edited by

Ross King