한국고대한자 유기음성모의 존재여부

Abstract

This article attempts to resolve a controversial issue on the presence or absence of aspirated obstruents in Old Sino-Korean. Lee Ki-moon(1998) claims that aspirated obstruent initials existed in Old Korean. If it is so, one can surmise that there should have existed aspirated obstruents as Old Sino-Korean phonemes. However, some place names of Koguryo, Paekche and Silla enlisted in the Samguk sagi, the oldest extinct historical documents in Korea, demonstrate that the characters with aspirated obstruent initials in Old Chinese were alternated or changed with the characters with unaspirated initials or vice versa, as are presented in (1)-(6) in this article. Accordingly, this article concludes that aspirated obstruents were not phonemic in Old Sino-Korean at earliest by 757AD, when King Kyongdok replaced the indigenous place names with Chinese style names.