18ㆍ19세기 교체기 왕실 한글편지의 국어학적 특징: 수원화성박물관 소장 흥은위가 한글편지를 대상으로

Abstract

This study aims to investigate linguistic characteristics of royal Hangeul letters in the late-18th- and early-19th-century, with special reference to Hangeul letters of the Heung-eunwi (興恩尉) family, a new collection of documents in Suwon Hwaseong Museum. This personal correspondence consists of letters that Jeong Ui (鄭漪), a son of Heung-eunwi Jeong Jaehwa (鄭在和) and princess Cheongseon (淸璿公主), and his maternal grandmother Hyegyeong-gung Hong (惠慶宮洪氏) exchanged with each other, as well as the ones from King Jeongjo (正祖), Queen Hyoui (孝懿王后), etc. These letters, therefore, can be evaluated as valuable documents for observing linguistic characteristics of royal and noblemen families in their daily life at that time. The present authors describe a brief bibliography of the correspondence (Ch. 2); examine its orthographic, phonological, morphological and syntactic characteristics (Ch. 3-4); and finally introduce some unique words found in the letters (Ch. 5). The findings from the research show that (1) in general, royal Korean in the period is very conservative since various kinds of linguistic innovation in Late Early-Modern Korean hardly appear in the letters; but (2) on the other hand, the documents faithfully reflect some general characteristics of LEMK and, at the same time, boldly expose an unusual phenomenon at the time.