A comparative linguistic study of 17th-century royal and yangban Korean letters

Juhyeon Ahn

Daegu Haany University

Abstract

This study aims to construct a corpus of 17th-century Korean personal letters, classifying them into royal and aristocratic (yangban) correspondences, and to compare their linguistic features through quantitative analysis. Based on a total of 285 letters—including ｢현풍곽씨언간｣, ｢숙명신한첩｣, ｢숙휘신한첩｣—the 17th Century Eongan Corpus was developed with detailed morphological analysis and lemmatization. The findings reveal that yangban letters tend to utilize practical and colloquial expressions, whereas royal letters demonstrate a more written style with enhanced forms of greeting and ritual politeness. Distinct differences were observed in pronoun usage, speech levels, sentence endings, and adjectives. Furthermore, phonological changes and dialectal vocabulary appeared more frequently in yangban letters, whereas royal letters maintained linguistic conservatism. This study contributes a new methodological approach to the field of historical Korean linguistics by providing a structured corpus and employing corpus-based analysis to elucidate stratified stylistic features.

17세기 왕실 언간과 양반가 언간의 비교 연구

초록

Vol. 40 No. 4 (2022.12)

Journal Abbreviation j. Korea Saf. Manag. Sci.
Frequency Published four times annually in March, June, September, and December
Doi Prefix 10.14353/sjk.
Year of Launching 1993
Publisher The Sociolinguistic Society of Korea

Indexed/Tracked/Covered By