북한의 어음연구

Abstract

Post-1945 North Korean phonological research can be divided into three periods. Period 1 (1945-1959) dealt chiefly with the phonological system and phenomena of Old and Middle Korean, Period Ⅱ (1960-1965) with that of Modern Korean, and Period Ⅲ (1986-present) with that of Middle and Modern Korean. The discussion of North Korean phonological system, which is the most studied single topic, shows a marked progression in background linguistic theory. lnitial research was carried out from the viewpoint of structural linguistics, focussing on articulatory phonetic qualities and taking the phoneme as the smallest unit; later research took the stance of structural linguistics, focussing on accoustical phonetic qualities and analyzing phonemes as bundles of distinctive features. One work (Han Young-Soon, 1964b), goes on to show generative phonetics involving distinctive features. Unfortunately, there is no concensus of opinion in the above viewpoints on the phonological system, and the distinctive features proposed serve only to differentiate the various phonemes that make up the system, and are not useful for explaining phonological phenomena