1928년 고루 이극로 녹음 발화의 단순모음 포먼트 고찰
정인기 (서강대학교)
Abstract
This article presents a formant analysis of monophthongs in Kolu Li’s speech
recordings made at the Archives de la Parole of the University of Paris, commonly
known as la Sorbonne, in 1928. Kolu Li was a linguist and national independence
fighter (or national liberation fighter), and was actively engaged in language
standardization, dictionary compilation, spelling establishment and other related
movements and activities in the 1920s and thereafter. The recordings are now posted
on the web at the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in digital
format. They contain his oral descriptions of sounds and letters of the Korean
language of the early twentieth century and an excerpt from the doctrine of
Cheondoism or Chondogyo. The analysis shows that the eight monophthongs have
clearly identifiable and separable F1 and F2 values. No mergers of ㅔ and ㅐ, of ㅡ
and ㅓ, or of ㅜ and ㅗ are found. The mid vowel ㅔ is closer to the high vowel ㅣ
than to the low vowel ㅐ, which is the reverse of the situation in the late twentieth
century and onward. The formant values of ㅔ and ㅐ vary depending on the syllabic
position within a word: their F1 values are lower and the F2 values are higher in
word-initial syllables than in the other syllables of a word. Kolu Li’s recorded speech
material could further help us identify and understand other aspects of vowels, the
phonetic values of consonants, and the phonological system of early twentieth-
century Korean.
Keywords
Kolu Li, early twentieth-century Korean, monophthong, front vowel, forman