A Phonetic Study On The Korean Ancient Book Nokeoltae Eonhae

Nokeoltae Eonhae is a famous Korean ancient Chinese text book. Using three different versions of the book, this paper examines the Korean phonological system during 16-18 century. Appling historical linguistics and phonological methods, the paper analyzes the written records, phonemics and sound change, and also reconstructed the phonological system at that time with a focus on giving out a phonetic explanation on the vanishing of the vowel "?"[?] and the sound change environment of the tongue stops'palatalization.This article maintains that the monosyllabic spelling and the characteristics of the mount language caused a number of spelling confusions in the ancient Korean records. After people had gained a clear understanding of grammar components, this issue was resolved.Through the inspection on the disappearance of the vowel "?" [?]and the sound change of back vowels, the paper points out that Korean language's first syllable vowel was very stable. Ramstedt's thought that Korean did not meet this law overlooked that impact of adjacent consonants on the assimilation of vowels. According to this feature, we can further confirm that the Korean belongs to the Altay Language Family.In addition, the article pointed out that in the 16-18 century Korean fricatives were generally followed by vowel [i]. This feature should be noticed in the ancient Chinese phonetic study.Besides phonology and phonemics, this article introduced and adopted a new literature research method called "Spellings Comparing ".By comparing different spellings of a word, it can test the results of reconstruction.