Hyangchal

"Hyangchal" (literally "vernacular letters" or "local letters") is an archaic writing system of Korea and was used to transcribe the Korean language in hanja. Under the "hyangchal" system, Chinese characters were given a Korean reading based on the syllable associated with the character. cite book | title=Writing Systems: An Introduction to Their Linguistic Analysis| url=http://books.google.com/books?id=kmKLxzTnL9IC&vq=hyangchal&dq=hyangchal| last=Coulmas| first=Florian| coauthors=S. R. Anderson, J. Bresnan, B. Comrie, W. Dressler, C. J. Ewen| date=2003| pages=67| publisher=Cambridge University Press] The "hyangchal" writing system is often classified as a subgroup of Idu. cite book | title=The Korean Language| url=http://books.google.com/books?id=Sx6gdJIOcoQC&vq=hyangchal&dq=hyangchal| last=Sohn| first=Ho-Min| coauthors=S. R. Anderson, J. Bresnan, B. Comrie, W. Dressler, C. Ewen, R. Lass| date=2001| pages=125, 128| publisher=Cambridge University Press] The first mention of "hyangchal" is the monk Kyun Ye's biography during the Goryeo period. "Hyangchal" is best known as the method Koreans used to write vernacular poetry. Today, twenty-five such poems still exist and shows that vernacular poetry used native Korean words, Korean word order, and each syllable was "transcribed with a single graph". The writing system covered nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, particles, suffixes, and auxiliary verbs. The practice of "hyanchal" continued during the Goryeo Dynasty where it was used to record native poetry as well. [ Sohn (2001) p. 125 ]

ee also

*Idu

References