Do Koreans even exist? part 2. Language

2. The Korean Language

As you may have noticed, I have very little tolerance for patriotism, flag-waving, national pride, and all the rest of that shit. I'm practically allergic to the stuff.

But if there is one thing worth being genuinely proud of, it is the Korean language, and in particular its writing system.

I think Hangul is one of the best writing systems in the world, if not the best. I'll fight you over this claim.

In fact, I have enough to say about it that the Korean language probably deserves a separate post of its own.

But I digress. The Korean language as a 'People' marker.

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Why use language as a 'People' marker?

When our ancestors died they left us bones, stuff and words.

Before DNA sequencing, bones were just stuff.

Stuff can't tell its own story.

Also, words are too often filled with lies, or if not lies, strenched truths and vivid imagination.

Take this famous book as an example:

Livre des Merveilles du Monde. Better known as The Travels of Marco Polo.

Some interesting things about this book:

• Marco Polo didn't actually write it. He dictated it to a person named Rustichello of Pisa while in a Genoese jail.
• The book covers some real things:
• Various regions in Central Asia and China.
• Specific commodities sold there.
• Paper money.
• Black stones that burn (coal).
• The book talks about some obviously fake things:
• People with heads of dogs.
• Griffins.
• Unicorns.
• What's even more interesting is what the book never mentions:
• The Great Wall.
• Tea drinking.
• Foot binding.
• The Chinese writing system.
• Not even chopsticks.

So which words should we believe?

Exactly.

But bones, stuff and words are not the only thing our ancestors left us.

There is one thing very much alive today.

The very language we speak.

Surprisingly, language has a lot to say.

A stone blade can tell you:

Someone made this blade, using this technique.

A sword can tell you:

Someone here knew how to work iron.

A text can tell you:

Someone claimed this happened, or this existed.

But language can tell you:

The people speaking here inherited their speech from people who spoke there.

or:

These two populations had prolonged contact.

or:

This population adopted another population's language.

or even:

These people probably knew agriculture before their language split, because all the daughter languages inherited the same ancestral word for millet.

That's vastly more powerful.

Stuff is mute.

Words can lie.

Patterns are harder to lie with.

Archaeology gives you behavior.

Texts give you testimony.

Language gives you relationship.

So,

Does the ancestry of a language tell us the ancestry of its speakers?

Sometimes.

But before DNA, language was the superpower for historians.

- ה -

What does language tell us about 'People'?

Before we proceed...

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A short note on some linguistic terms used here:

SOV order

This is the order in which a sentence is built. English is an SVO language: the action happens in the middle. Korean is an SOV language: the action is always the very last thing you say.

• English (SVO): "I (Subject) ate (Verb) the apple (Object)."
• Korean (SOV): "I (Subject) the apple (Object) ate (Verb)."; "나는 (S) 사과를 (O) 먹었다 (V)."

SOV makes up 41.0% of the languages (Korean, Japanese, Turkish etc.) in WALS (World Atlas of Language Structures; a large database used by linguists), SVO (English, Mandarin, French etc.) is 45.5%, VSO (Irish, Welsh, Classic Arabic etc.) is 6.9%, VOS (Malagasy) is 1.8% and the rest are a spattering of OVS, OSV and langauges without any dominant order.

Agglutination

This is the "Lego block" method of building words. Instead of having entirely different words for different tenses, you take a root word and literally glue unchangeable suffixes onto the end of it, one after another. Each block adds one highly specific layer of meaning.

• English: "Did you go?" (Three separate words, meaning spread across them).
• Korean: "가시었습니까?" (ga-si-eot-seum-ni-kka)
• Go (root) + Honorific (block) + Past tense (block) + Polite (block) + Question mark (block). All glued into one massive word.

Postpositions

In English, we use prepositions. They go before the noun to tell you where or how something is happening (e.g., in Seoul, to the store, with a friend). Korean uses postpositions. They are tiny grammatical sticky notes attached directly to the end of the noun.

• English: "In Seoul."
• Korean: "Seoul in." (서울에 / Seoul-e)

• English: "To my friend."
• Korean: "Friend to." (친구에게 / Chingu-ege)

Honorific Systems

In English, politeness is usually added with extra words: "Could you please pass the salt, sir?" In Korean, social hierarchy, age, and respect are literally baked into the mechanical grammar of the language. You must change your vocabulary and your verb endings based on exactly who you are talking to, and who you are talking about.

• to a Child: 밥 먹어라 (Bap meogeora)
• to a Friend: 밥 먹어 (Bap meogeo)
• to a Stranger: 밥 먹어요 (Bap meogeoyo)
• to a Boss: 식사 하십시오 (Siksa hasipsio)
• to a Grandfather: 진지 잡수십시오 (Jinji japsusipsio)
• to a King: 수라를 드시옵소서 (Sura-reul deusiopsoseo)

Noun (food): 밥 (rice) → 식사 (meal) → 진지 (elder's meal) → 수라 (king's meal)

Verb (eat): 먹다 (eat) → 하다 (do) → 잡수다 (elder-directed eat) → 드시다 (honorific take)

Politeness: -어 (plain) → -어요 (polite) → -오/-소 (formal) → -옵소서 (deferential)

So from :

"Eat your rice."

to:

"May Your Majesty please partake in this meal."

Six different ways to say essentially the same thing, and we haven't introduced swear words yet.

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(1) Language can preserve ancestry

Languages are transmitted.

A child learns a language from the people around them. Their children learn a slightly changed version. Their children inherit another changed version.

So you get something structurally similar to DNA:

Proto-language

↓

small changes

↓

dialects

↓

more changes

↓

daughter languages.

Historical linguists define linguistic descent precisely in terms of this continuous transmission from one generation of speakers to another.

The famous example:

Proto-Indo-European eventually branches into ancestors of:

     → Greek

     → Germanic

     → Indo-Iranian

     → Slavic

     → Celtic

     → Latin

         Then, Latin

             → French

             → Spanish

             → Italian

             → Portuguese

             → Romanian...

Nobody recorded Proto-Indo-European.

Linguists reconstructed it.

That's the astonishing part.

(2) How did they reconstruct a language nobody wrote down, or speak today?

Because sound changes are often regular.

Take something simple:

English: father

German: Vater

Latin: pater

Greek: patēr

Sanskrit: pitṛ

You could look at that and say:

Wow. Similar words.

But similarity alone proves almost nothing.

English has 'much' from French.

Japanese has 'pan' from Portuguese 'pão'.

Korean has thousands of Sino-Korean words.

Borrowing creates resemblance constantly.

Historical linguists instead look for systematic correspondences across hundreds of words.

If language A repeatedly has f where language B repeatedly has p, under the same historical conditions, that is much harder to explain by coincidence.

That is the comparative method.

Regular sound correspondences allow linguists to work backward and reconstruct earlier forms. This regularity is one of the foundations of historical linguistics.

So linguists don't establish:

Korean and Mongolian both have word X that sounds similar.

They want something like:

Korean sound A systematically corresponds to Mongolian sound B in this environment, across a large body of inherited vocabulary and morphology.

That's much harder.

And precisely why so many attractive language-family theories eventually fail.

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Is Korean and Tamil related?

In 1905, Homer Hulbert published A Comparative Grammar of the Korean Language and the Dravidian Languages of India (Morgan Clippinger revived the idea in 1984 with hundreds of proposed Korean–Dravidian lexical correspondences).

Korean and Tamil are both largely SOV, both are strongly agglutinative, both use postpositions, and people have pointed to striking-looking word pairs. Recent comparative work still highlights things like Korean 아빠 (appa) and Tamil appā, and 엄마 (eomma) versus Tamil ammā.

You can see immediately why somebody would think:

Holy shit. Korean and Tamil are related.

But that is exactly why the comparative-method section can spring the trap.

Because:

similarity is not enough.

아빠 / appā is a terrible piece of evidence for common ancestry. Mama/papa/amma/abba-type words arise independently all over the world because they are built from sounds babies produce easily.

And precisely why so many attractive language-family theories eventually fail.

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(3) Vocabulary is useful. Grammar can be even better.

Words travel easily.

English has: beef, government, justice, garage, piano, algebra, kimchi.

None of that means English descends from French, Italian, Arabic, or Korean.

So historical linguists particularly value things that are difficult to explain through casual borrowing, like basic vocabulary:

• mother
• water
• hand
• eye
• two
• die
• eat

and especially morphology:

• plural endings
• verb conjugations
• case markers
• pronouns
• irregular grammatical forms.

If two languages share a bizarre irregular grammatical system with regular sound correspondences, common descent becomes much more plausible than if they merely share words for “horse” and “sword.”

This is one reason debates over deep linguistic relationships can become ferocious: structural similarities can result from common ancestry, but they can also result from centuries of neighboring languages influencing one another.

Which brings us to Korea.

Korean, Japanese, Mongolic and Tungusic can all look tantalizingly similar structurally:

• SOV word order.
• Agglutination.
• Postpositions.
• Rich honorific systems in some cases.
• Various morphological similarities.

For a long time, scholars thought:

Altaic!

Maybe these are cousins.

Then other linguists said:

Or maybe they've spent thousands of years living next to each other and have copied structural features.

That's the distinction between genealogy and contact.

And it remains central to arguments about Korean linguistic origins. There are still competing hypotheses involving broader Transeurasian/Altaic relationships, a narrower Korean-Japanese relationship, and Koreanic as having no demonstrated external relatives.

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The Altaic Language Theory

For much of the 20th century, a serious linguistic theory grouped Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic into an Altaic language family. Scholars including G. J. Ramstedt and Nicholas Poppe also brought Korean into the picture, while later versions sometimes added Japanese as well.

And unlike Korean-Tamil, this one looks really convincing.

Korean, Mongolian, Turkish and the Tungusic languages are overwhelmingly SOV. They are heavily suffixing and agglutinative. They tend to use postpositions rather than prepositions. Several have forms of vowel harmony. Their verbs can accumulate long strings of grammatical endings. And they occupy one enormous, connected belt across northern Eurasia.

You can see immediately why somebody would think:

Holy shit. Korean, Mongolian and Turkish are related.

For a long time, plenty of linguists did.

But here again:

similarity is not enough.

Languages do not prove common ancestry by having the same grammatical architecture.

They prove it through systematic inherited correspondences that allow us to reconstruct a common ancestral language.

And that is where Altaic runs into trouble.

Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic and Japonic have been interacting with neighboring peoples for thousands of years. Languages can borrow words, grammatical constructions and even structural habits from one another. An alternative explanation therefore emerged: perhaps "Altaic" is not a family tree at all, but a linguistic area, languages that came to resemble one another through prolonged contact. A major 2023 review takes essentially this position.

The argument is not completely dead. A modern descendant called the Transeurasian hypothesis still argues that Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic and Japonic ultimately share an ancestor, and a major 2021 Nature study argued for precisely that.

But it remains deeply disputed.

Which gives us an even better lesson than Tamil:

Languages can look related for very good historical reasons without actually descending from the same language.

Linguists are still arguing about this today. Perhaps one day, some expert will discover something new and Altaic will come back. I'd love to know, because without it Korean (and Japanese) seem to have just appeared in Asia out of nowhere.

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(4) Loanwords are historical fossils

This is where language gets especially useful for archaeology.

Imagine Proto-A and Proto-B meet.

A borrows B's word for: horse

Later they borrow words for: wheel, chariot, iron

That can tell us something.

Those speakers probably interacted after those technologies existed.

And if linguists can determine which direction the borrowing went, they can sometimes infer who acquired the technology or concept from whom.

Historical linguists use regular sound correspondences and chronological evidence to distinguish inherited words from borrowings and sometimes determine borrowing direction.

Words associated with: rice, millet, horse, iron, bronze, agriculture, political titles, religion...

can potentially tell us about cultural contact between prehistoric speech communities.

Take the word tea.

Chinese 茶 is pronounced roughly chá in Mandarin, but tê in varieties spoken around Fujian.

• Tea / thé / thee / té spread largely through maritime trade from the southeast Chinese coast.
• Cha / chai / çay spread largely through overland trade across Central Asia.

So today:

• English: tea
• French: thé
• Russian: чай (chai)
• Persian: چای (chāy)
• Turkish: çay

The word itself preserves the route by which the commodity traveled.

So language isn't merely:

“What did these people call water?”

It can become:

“Who taught whom to farm?”

Sometimes.

With a lot of caveats.

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Beef-Cow, Pork-Pig

In 1066, when the French-speaking Normans conquered England, the Normans became the ruling lords, while the Anglo-Saxons remained the peasant farmers.

We can literally see who was doing the labor and who was doing the eating, purely from language.

The animals alive in the mud kept their Germanic names because the peasants raised them: Cow, Pig, Sheep. But once the meat was cooked and brought to the dining hall of the lords, it took on French loanwords: Beef (boeuf), Pork (porc), and Mutton (mouton). The language fossilized the power structure.

What about chicken and duck?

Cows, pigs, and sheep were massive investments of time, land, and feed. A peasant farmer raised them, but they were far too valuable for a peasant to actually eat. They were slaughtered and sent up the hill to the Norman lord's castle. Because the English peasants only interacted with the living animal, their words (cu, picg, sceap) survived for the animal. Because the French lords only interacted with the cooked meat, their words (boeuf, porc, mouton) became the English words for the meat.

Chickens, ducks, and geese were cheap, small, and easily kept in the yard on scraps. They were the primary source of protein for the lower classes. Because the English-speaking peasants were actually chopping the heads off their own chickens and cooking them for their own dinner tables, they never needed to adopt a French word to describe the meat on their plates.

The native Anglo-Saxon words: chicken (cīcen), duck (dūce), and goose (gōs), survived for both the living bird and the roasted meat.

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(5) Place names can outlive the people who named them

Populations can disappear. Languages can disappear.

But toponyms can survive.

England is full of place-name layers left by Celtic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Norman history.

A later population may preserve the ancient name of: a river, mountain, village, region...

without understanding what the word originally meant.

So old place names can act like linguistic fossils.

This becomes important when scholars examine old Korean place-name records and ask whether certain parts of the peninsula once contained languages related to:

• Koreanic,
• Japonic,
• Tungusic,
• or something no longer surviving.

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Mul-Midu-Mizu (水)

<today: Bangsan-myeon; Silla: 三嶺縣 Samnyeong-hyeon; original: 密波兮 Milpahae>

When historical linguists look closely at the oldest recorded place names on the Korean peninsula, they don't find ancient Korean. They find the ghosts of a completely different language family.

The most famous collection of these fossils comes from Chapter 37 of the Samguk Sagi (History of the Three Kingdoms), compiled in 1145 CE. It lists the ancient, original names of towns and counties that existed in the central and southern peninsula before King Gyeongdeok of Silla ordered them all changed to standardized, Chinese-style names in the 8th century.

When linguists looked at the old names for "water" or "river" in these central regions, they found the phonetic root maets (매츠) / michi (미치): recorded as 買.

• This looks absolutely nothing like the native Old Korean word for water: mul (물).
• But it looks almost exactly like the Old Japanese word for water: midu (modern mizu / 水).

Similarly, they looked at the old place names that meant "valley." The phonetic root recorded was tan (탄) / tani (타니): recorded as 頓 / 呑 / 旦.

• The native Korean word for valley is gol (골).
• The Old Japanese word for valley is tani (谷).

In ancient times, a town might simply be named "Three Valleys" or "Five Trees." When the Samguk Sagi recorded the phonetic pronunciations of these ancient town names, linguists found numbers fossilized inside them:

• Three (密): Recorded as mit (밀/밑). Old Japanese is mi-tu. Korean is set (셋).
• Five (于次): Recorded as uts (우츠). Old Japanese is itu. Korean is daseot (다섯).
• Seven (難隱): Recorded as nanen (나넨). Old Japanese is nana. Korean is ilgop (일곱).
• Ten (德): Recorded as teok (덕). Old Japanese is töwo. Korean is yeol (열).

The people of Silla, Baekje, and Goguryeo spoke Koreanic languages. But the geography they ruled over was littered with names that sounded remarkably like Japanese.

This is the linguistic smoking gun that aligns remarkably well with the DNA and the archaeology. It strongly suggests that Japonic-speaking agricultural populations lived across the southern and central Korean peninsula during the Mumun period, and that descendants of these populations carried Japonic into Yayoi Japan.

This perhaps are the Haplogroup O1b2 that Korean soil ate.

When Koreanic-speaking populations expanded southward from the north, they eventually conquered and assimilated the locals. The Japonic languages disappeared from the peninsula, but the conquerors kept many of the old names for the rivers and valleys.

Those names survived in the royal records for centuries, sitting quietly like fossils, waiting for modern linguists to dig them up.

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(6) Language can preserve a vanished population

Suppose population A conquers population B.

There are several possible outcomes.

A conquers B and imposes A's language

• Population genetics may remain largely B.
• Language becomes A.
• Arab armies conquered Egypt in the 7th century CE. Arabic became the lingua franca and overwritten the linguistic software, but modern Egyptians remain genetically descended from the people who built the pyramids.

A conquers B but adopts B's language

• Genes may reflect substantial A ancestry.
• Language remains B-derived.
• The Manchu Qing Dynasty conquered China in 1644, taking complete control as the ruling class. Yet over time, the Qing emperors became fluent in Mandarin while their native Manchu language went virtually extinct. The conquerors were conquered by the dictionary.

They merge and create a contact language

Now both signals become messy.

• Genes are mixed.
• Language is mixed.
• Picts and Celts → Angles and Saxons → Vikings → Normans. Each layer smashed into the island, leaving behind a chaotic, hybrid language called English, Germanic grammar holding together a stolen global vocabulary.

Elite dominance

Perhaps only 5% of the population enters.

But they're kings, administrators and soldiers.

Their language spreads to 95%.

Two thousand years later:

language says A.

DNA says mostly B.

Both are correct.

They're just answering different questions.

This is why genetics and linguistics are so powerful together.

Genes trace reproduction.

Languages trace cultural transmission.

Those histories frequently overlap.

But they don't have to.

• Turkey: In 1071 CE, nomadic Seljuk Turks shattered the Byzantines at Manzikert and opened the Anatolian peninsula to migration. The result today? A language born near Mongolia spoken by a population whose DNA has been rooted in the Anatolian soil for millennia.

(7) Sometimes language and genes travel together beautifully

There are some spectacular broad correlations.

The expansion of Austronesian languages across Taiwan, Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific has genetic and archaeological counterparts. That they even reached Madagascar completely blew my mind. 5,000 years ago, a bunch of Taiwanese got on a boat and made it all the way across 9,100 kilometers of ocean, and another group went the other way and ultimately reached Rapa Nui (15,700 kilometers away) completely broke my brain.

Beginning between 3000 and 1500 BCE near the modern border of Nigeria and Cameroon, the Bantu expansion carried languages, people, agriculture and technologies across enormous parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Today Bantu-speaking peoples make up approximately 25%-30% of Africa's total population.

Beginning around 3000 BCE near the Pontic-Caspian steppe of modern-day Ukraine and southern Russia, the Indo-European expansion carried languages, people, pastoral agriculture, and wheeled technologies across enormous parts of Eurasia. Today, Indo-European-speaking peoples make up approximately 40% to 45% of the world's total population.

This history also serves as a stark warning about the weaponization of scholarship. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the linguistic discovery of a shared ancestral language was fatally distorted into the pseudo-scientific myth of a biological "Aryan" master race. By twisting a theoretical linguistic grouping into a rigid, racialized concept of "us," the Nazis fabricated an ideological justification that ultimately fueled the systematic murder of millions.

Globally, genes and languages often show parallel histories because both can be transmitted through populations across generations. But researchers explicitly caution that the two systems can separate through language shift, migration and cultural replacement.

Those cases are probably why academics instinctively reach for language when reconstructing ancient peoples.

When all three agree:

• genetics
• archaeology
• linguistics

you start getting a much stronger reconstruction.

(8) But language can lie spectacularly about ancestry

Hungarians.

Hungarian is Uralic.

Its closest linguistic relatives lie ultimately toward populations of northern Eurasia.

But genetically, modern Hungarians largely resemble their Central European neighbors.

Language: Uralic.

Genes: Central European.

Duck?

English.

English is Germanic.

But modern English vocabulary is saturated with French and Latin, while Britain's population history includes pre-Roman populations, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans and others.

Madagascar.

Malagasy is Austronesian, closely related to languages thousands of kilometers away in Island Southeast Asia. The distance from Madagascar to Rapa Nui (also speaks Austronesian) is roughly 25,483 kilometers, which is amazing since the Earth's circumference is about 40,075 kilometers (if you calculate distance from the other direction it's only 14,592 kilometers...though the Austronesians would have had to carry a canoe over the Andes mountains, across the Amazon, and over the Atlantic Ocean).

Language preserved one migration that geography alone would make almost unbelievable.

These are exactly the kinds of cases that demonstrate why language is powerful without being identical to biological ancestry.

(9) Language families are themselves another Duck Test

This is where the Duck test introduced in the first post comes crashing back in.

A language family is a genealogy of languages, not a genealogy of Peoples.

The mistake is to assume that linguistic relatedness should mirror genetic relatedness.

It doesn't.

Languages reproduce differently from genes.

A population can adopt somebody else's language without replacing its ancestry. A language can spread through conquest, trade, prestige, religion, or administration. Entire language families can disappear while most of the people who once spoke them remain exactly where they were.

• English is not genetically Anglo-Saxon.
• Spanish did not turn the inhabitants of Mexico into Iberians.
• Hungarians are not genetically closest to the Khanty and Mansi simply because Hungarian is Uralic.

And Korea gives us an especially nice example.

Modern Koreans are genetically connected to populations across Northeast Asia. Their ancestors came from multiple populations moving through Manchuria, Liaodong, the Yellow River world, the Korean peninsula, and probably elsewhere.

Yet almost all of those genetic connections have disappeared from the language.

• Korean does not sit comfortably beside Chinese.
• It does not sit comfortably beside Mongolian.
• It does not sit comfortably beside Tungusic.
• And despite some extremely suggestive similarities, nobody has demonstrated that it sits beside Japanese either.

It sits mostly by itself.

That does not mean the ancestors of Koreans sat by themselves.

Quite the opposite.

The place-name evidence we just looked at suggests that languages themselves were being replaced on the peninsula. If Japonic languages were once spoken across parts of Korea before Koreanic expanded southward, then modern Korean linguistic isolation may actually be the end product of enormous prehistoric linguistic change.

Genetics asks: Who reproduced with whom?

Linguistics asks: Who learned to speak like whom?

They are related questions.

They are not the same question.

Therefore,

Germanic is real. Indo-European is real. Koreanic is real.

But none of them is a People.

A language passes the Duck Test because its descendants retain inherited structures, sounds, vocabulary, and grammar from an ancestral language.

The speakers do not have to descend from the speakers.

- ה -

Where does Korean (the language; 한국어) come from?

Let's trace our steps back, a method we'll be doing quite a lot in the next archaeology/history section.

Korean (한국어) is a language very much alive today.

We know Korean as a language exists today and is used by millions of people, including quite a few non-Koreans.

This is similar to the story so far.

Koreans as a 'People' exist today.

Korean as a 'Language' exists today.

We know we can trace Korean (한국어) back to the language spoken in the past, up to a point

(1) Early Modern Korean (c. 1600 – 1900) → Contemporary Korean (c. 1900 – present)

<윤동주, 서시, 1941>

<혜경궁 홍씨, 한중록, 1795>

100% certain about this lineage.

By this point we are dealing with directly documented stages of the same language. There are differences in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar, but the closer we get to the present, the more recognizably Korean it becomes.

But before this, things get quite a bit murkier, and there's an alarming twist that frankly blew my mind.

(2) Middle Korean (c. 918 – 1600) → Early Modern Korean

<정철, 사미인곡, 1588>

<균여, 보현십원가, c. 963-967>

Middle Korean becomes extraordinarily well documented after the invention of Hangul in the fifteenth century.

It was recognizably Korean.

The basic machinery was already there: S-O-V word order, particles after nouns, verbs built from strings of endings, honorifics, and much of the basic vocabulary we still use today.

But if someone from fifteenth-century Joseon started talking to us, they would sound very strange.

The biggest differences from Contemporary Korean were:

• More sounds, and therefore more letters. The original 훈민정음 contained 28 basic letters, compared with 24 today. Lost letters include ㆍ (아래아), ㅿ (반치음), ㆁ (옛이응), and ㆆ (여린히읗). These were not merely decorative old spellings. Several represented distinctions that actually existed in Middle Korean and later disappeared.
• Pitch could distinguish words. Fifteenth-century Hangul texts marked syllables with 방점, small dots indicating different pitch patterns. Traditionally these are described as low, high, and rising. Modern Seoul Korean lost this system, although related pitch-accent systems survive in some Korean dialects.
• Vowel harmony was much stronger. Middle Korean divided vowels into harmonic groups, and vowels in particles and verb endings often changed depending on the vowels in the word they attached to. Modern Korean preserves remnants of this, but the system was once far more pervasive.
• Some familiar vowels sounded different. Modern ㅐ and ㅔ, for example, were still diphthongs rather than the simple vowels most Korean speakers pronounce today.
• The grammar was familiar, but many of the pieces were different. The overall structure was recognizably Korean, but numerous particles, verb endings, honorific forms, and connective endings have disappeared or changed form since the fifteenth century.

And then there is Hangul (한글; literally writing of the Han (韓) people) itself.

For the first time, Korean writers had a system specifically designed to record the sounds of Korean.

So we can open a book printed in the fifteenth century, look directly at the Korean they wrote, recognize a surprising amount of it...

and still not pronounce it the way they did.

But before Hangul, things were quite different. Koreans had a distinct language, but no way to write it down without borrowing someone else's writing system. Chinese characters had to do the double duty as meaning and sound, Old Korean becomes something we have to decipher rather than simply read.

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훈민정음: an alphabet with an instruction manual

Most writing systems are ancient enough that nobody knows exactly who invented them, much less why each letter has its shape.

Hangul is different.

In 1443, King Sejong completed a new writing system for Korean. In 1446, it was formally promulgated as 훈민정음 (訓民正音), “The Correct Sounds for the Instruction of the People.” Better still, the original explanatory text survives.

나랏말ᄊᆞ미 듕귁에 달아

문자와로 서르 사맛디 아니할쎄

이런 젼차로 어린 백셩이 니르고져 홇 배 이셔도

마참내 제 뜨들 시러 펴디 몯할 노미 하니라.

내 이랄 위하야 어엿비 너겨

새로 스믈여듧 자랄 맹가노니

사람마다 해여 수비 니겨

날로 쑤메 뼌한킈 하고져 할 따라미니라.

(Because the speech of our country differs from that of China, 

it does not correspond properly with Chinese writing.

For this reason, there are many among the common people who, 

though they have something they wish to say, are ultimately unable to express what they mean.
Feeling compassion for this, I have newly created twenty-eight letters, 

so that everyone may learn them easily and use them conveniently in daily life.)

And it goes on and actually tells us how the alphabet was designed.

The basic consonants were modeled on the shape or position of the speech organs used to produce them.

• ㄱ ('g') represents the tongue blocking the throat/soft-palate area.
• ㄴ ('n') represents the tongue touching the upper gums.
• ㅁ ('m') represents the shape of the mouth.
• ㅅ ('s') represents the teeth.
• ㅇ ('ng') represents the throat.

Related sounds were then produced by adding strokes to these basic forms.

So 

• ㄱ ('g') → ㅋ ('k').
• ㄴ ('n') → ㄷ ('d') → ㅌ ('t').
• ㅁ ('m') → ㅂ ('b') → ㅍ ('p').

The letters are not merely symbols for sounds.

Their shapes encode information about how those sounds are made.

The vowels were designed completely differently.

They began with just three basic elements:

• ㆍ = Heaven (天)
• ㅡ = Earth (地)
• ㅣ = Human (人)

From these three symbols, the rest of the vowel system was constructed.

The dot was placed beside the vertical line to produce ㅏ and ㅓ, or above and below the horizontal line to produce ㅗ and ㅜ.

Adding another stroke produced the corresponding y-sounds:

• ㅏ → ㅑ
• ㅓ → ㅕ
• ㅗ → ㅛ
• ㅜ → ㅠ

And ㆍ was not merely a philosophical symbol.

It was an actual vowel.

Today we call it 아래아, and its sound eventually disappeared from standard Korean.

So one of the fundamental vowels Sejong designed his alphabet to represent no longer exists in the language most Koreans speak today.

This matters enormously for historical linguistics because Sejong did not invent the Korean language.

He invented a writing system precise enough to take a snapshot of 15th-century Korean pronunciation.

And Korean did not stop changing afterward.

Which means the 훈민정음 is not merely Korea's alphabet.

It is a phonetic fossil of Middle Korean.

///

Korean before 1443 is a little more difficult to know.

But it is not completely invisible.

Linguists generally call the Korean of the Goryeo period (918–1392) Early Middle Korean, with the language of early Joseon belonging to Late Middle Korean. The boundary is partly historical convenience. Languages, of course, do not change when somebody changes the name of the dynasty.

And five hundred years is a long time.

<Later Goguryeo (901) → Goryo (1392)>

The Korean spoken when Wang Geon (왕건) founded Goryeo in 918 was certainly not identical to the Korean Sejong heard in the 1440s.

One important change was geographical. Silla had ruled from Gyeongju. Goryeo moved the political center north to Gaeseong, and the prestige language shifted with it. The language remained descended from the Korean of the preceding period, but northern and central dialects now participated in creating what eventually became Middle Korean.

The problem is that nobody had yet invented Hangul.

So instead of a clear recording, we get occasional snapshots.

In 1103, a Song Chinese envoy named Sun Mu (孫穆) visited Goryeo and compiled the Jilin leishi (鷄林類事). Among other things, he wrote down roughly 360 Goryeo Korean words and expressions, using Chinese characters to approximate how Koreans pronounced them.

For example:

天曰漢捺

(“Sky/heaven is called hannal”)

The form is immediately recognizable beside later Korean 하ᄂᆞᆯ and modern 하늘.

He records “wind” as 孛纜, approximately param, recognizable as modern 바람.

Then, in the 13th century, the Hyangyak gugeupbang (鄕藥救急方), a medical manual, recorded Korean names for plants and medicines using Chinese characters. These spellings are precise enough that linguists can actually see sound changes taking place. Some consonants preserved there had changed by the 15th century, while others were already moving toward the forms later recorded in Hangul.

So Early Middle Korean is not a five-hundred-year black box.

It is more like trying to watch a movie when only a handful of frames survive.

Then suddenly, in the 15th century:

훈민정음.

 

(3) Old Korean (c. 4th Century – 918 CE) → Middle Korean

<author unknown, 헌화가, c. 702–737 CE>

We are in the Shilla / Unified Shilla period. 

This is where the trail gets fragmentary. 

We are reasonably confident that the language of Silla became the principal ancestor of Middle Korean and ultimately Contemporary Korean. Silla's military conquest and political consolidation spread its language across much of the peninsula, gradually turning Sillan into the linguistic foundation of the Korea that followed.

The problem is that Silla Koreans left us almost no straightforward record of what their language actually sounded like.

Hangul would not be invented until 1443.

So Old Korean had to squeeze itself through Chinese characters.

• Sometimes a character represented its Chinese meaning.
• Sometimes it represented a Korean sound.
• Sometimes Korean writers rearranged Chinese characters, borrowed them phonetically, or attached them to Chinese texts to represent Korean grammar.

From this mess we get systems such as 이두 (Idu), 향찰 (Hyangchal) and 구결 (Gukyeol), along with Korean names, place names, fragments quoted in Chinese and Japanese records, and a small surviving collection of poems.

• That is enough for linguists to recognize Old Korean.
• Enough to identify particles and verb endings.
• Enough to connect many Silla words with later Middle Korean.

But not enough to reconstruct the language cleanly.

So how did pre-Hangul Koreans write Korean?

• Hanmun (한문; 漢文): 
  Write Chinese as Chinese. A Korean reader reads a Chinese text.
• Idu (이두; 吏讀): 
  Use Chinese characters in unconventional ways to represent Korean words and Korean grammatical endings, particularly in administrative writing.
• Hyanchal (향찰; 鄕札): 
  A more extensive system for writing actual Korean, famously used for 향가. Characters could represent either meaning or sound.
• Gukyeol (구결; 口訣): 
  Annotations attached to Classical Chinese texts to help Korean readers parse and read them in Korean order, adding Korean grammatical information.

Some examples:

     In Chinese, 春 means “spring.”

     A Silla reader could use 春 to represent the native Korean word meaning spring.

     That tells us, meaning = spring

     But the character does not tell us exactly how that native Korean word was pronounced.

     We assume it sounded a little like "Bom", or 봄, the current Korean way of saying "spring."

     One famous line from the Wonwangsaengga (원왕생가; 願往生歌) is written: 
     月下伊低赤

     If you mechanically read those as Chinese meanings, you get something resembling:

     moon / below / this / low / red

     Which is nonsense.

     But scholars reconstruct the Korean as roughly: 

     ᄃᆞᆯ하 이뎨

     or in modern Korean: 

     달이여, 이제...

     (“O Moon, now...”)

And then there are:

• Korean names transcribed with Chinese characters
• place names
• Korean words quoted in Chinese or Japanese documents
• Sino-Korean pronunciations
• loanwords into neighboring languages

///

Kanji (漢字)???

All over Asia, People without their own writing system used the writing systems of others to capture their language into words. Good for them. Bad for historians. Interesting for linguists.

Japan faced the same problem. Japanese grammar did not fit Chinese writing particularly well either, so Japanese scribes also began using Chinese characters for their sounds rather than meanings, a system called Man’yōgana (万葉仮名). Over time, frequently used characters were simplified into phonetic symbols. The flowing cursive forms became Hiragana (ひらがな), while abbreviated character fragments became Katakana (カタカナ).

But Japan never abandoned Chinese characters. Modern Japanese is written using all three systems simultaneously: Kanji (Chinese) for much of the core vocabulary, Hiragana for grammatical endings and many native words, and Katakana largely for foreign words and emphasis. Technically, Japanese can be written entirely in kana, but in practice it quickly becomes difficult to read. Japanese has enormous numbers of homophones, normally does not separate every word with spaces, and Kanji gives the reader immediate clues to both meaning and word boundaries.

So Japan's solution was not to replace Chinese writing. It domesticated it.

Both Korea and Japan spent centuries trying to force their languages through Chinese characters. Japan eventually simplified some of those characters into native phonetic scripts while keeping Kanji at the center of written Japanese. Korea later took the much more radical step of inventing an entirely new alphabet.

田兒之浦從 打出而見者 眞白衣 不盡能高嶺尓 雪波零家留

(original in Man’yōgana)

Modern Japanese: 田子の浦から出て見渡すと、真っ白に富士の高嶺に雪が降り積もっている。

English: Setting out from Tago Bay, I look up to see: pure white on the high peak of Fuji, the snow has fallen.

The Manchus took yet another route. Their Jurchen ancestors had once possessed their own writing systems, but these had largely disappeared. When Nurhaci began building the state that would eventually become the Qing dynasty, Manchu still lacked a practical script. So in 1599 he ordered scholars to adapt the Mongolian alphabet to the Manchu language. Instead of forcing Manchu through Chinese characters, they borrowed somebody else's alphabet and modified it. That alphabet itself descended through Old Uyghur and Sogdian from Aramaic. Apparently even writing systems have spaghetti ancestry.

ᡤᡝᠨᡨᡝᡳ ᡥᠠᠨ ᠠᠯᡳᠨ ᡳ ᡩᡝᡵᡤᡳ ᡝᡵᡤᡳ ᠴᡳ ᡝᠶᡝᠮᡝ ᡨᡠᠴᡳᡴᡝ ᠪᡳᡵᠠ ᠪᡝ ᡥᡝᡵᡠᠯᡠᠨ ᠰᡝᠮᠪᡳ᠉

(original in Manchu script, 1723)

Möllendorff transliteration: gentei han alin-i dergi ergi ci eyeme tucike bira be herulun sembi.

English: “The river that flows eastward from the Khentii Mountains is called Kherlen.”

///

So we can reconstruct Old Korean.

But we cannot simply read it aloud.

In that sense, this problem is not completely unique. Nobody alive heard Julius Caesar speak Latin. Nobody recorded Shakespeare's voice. Historical linguists reconstruct how those languages probably sounded from spelling, rhyme, contemporary descriptions, later languages, and patterns of sound change.

Old Korean is the same basic problem.

Except harder.

(4) Proto-Koreanic (c. 300 BCE – 4th Century CE) → Old Korean

This is where there are more arguments than facts.

What I'm writing below is not absolute truth. These are well-reasoned and thoroughly researched theories. Unless someone invents a time machine, we will probably never know exactly what happened.

So take everything with a grain of salt.

To save the baby, I intend to preserve the bath water.

Let's start with a short historical background. We'll discuss the history itself in much greater detail in the next section.

Silla unified most of the Korean Peninsula in the seventh century, marking the end of the Three Kingdoms period. Allied with the Tang Dynasty, it first defeated Baekje in 660 CE, then Goguryeo in 668 CE. Silla subsequently fought its former Tang allies and, by 676 CE, had secured control over most of the peninsula south of the northern frontier.

From a linguistic perspective, most scholars believe that the language spoken by Silla, Sillan, became the principal ancestor of the Korean spoken today.

So:

Unified Shilla Sillan / Old Korean → Middle Korean

is reasonably clear.

The difficulty begins when we go farther back.

And this is where the theories and arguments start.

There are a few major questions:

1. What language did Silla originally speak?
2. What did Goguryeo, Baekje, Gaya, Balhae, etc. speak?
3. What languages existed on the peninsula before them?
4. Where did those languages go?
5. What evidence are these experts basing their theories on?

We'll deal with each of these questions one by one.

What language did Silla originally speak?

Silla started out as a small state, or chiefdom, called Saro-guk (사로국; 斯盧國). Saro was one of the twelve small states that Chinese sources grouped together as Jinhan (진한; 辰韓) in the southeastern part of the Korean Peninsula.

Eventually Saro swallowed its neighbors.

Saro became Silla.

Silla swallowed most of the peninsula.

And the language spoken by Silla eventually became the principal ancestor of Korean today.

So the obvious question is:

What did the people of Saro speak before there was a Silla?

We don't know.

But we have some tantalizing scraps.

The oldest substantial description of Jinhan comes from the Chinese Records of the Three Kingdoms (三國志), compiled in the third century CE.

It says:

其言語不與馬韓同

(Their language was not the same as Mahan's)

///

A short note on the Samhan Confederacy:

Mahan (마한; 馬韓) was another tribal confederacy located in the southwestern part of the Korean Peninsula. Together with Jinhan (진한; 辰韓) and Byeonhan (변한; 弁韓), it made up the Samhan (삼한; 三韓), the loose collection of states and chiefdoms that dominated southern Korea before the rise of the Three Kingdoms. Later on it would become Baekje (백제).

The Han (한; 韓) in Samhan is the same Han that King Gojong later invoked when, as discussed in the first post, he proclaimed the Daehan Empire (대한제국; 大韓帝國) and declared Korea an independent empire.

///

That's already interesting.

Mahan occupied much of southwestern and central Korea.

Jinhan occupied the southeast.

And according to one of our earliest written descriptions:

they did not speak the same language.

The same passage then gets much stranger.

自言古之亡人避秦役來適韓國...

...馬韓割其東界地與之...

...其言語不與馬韓同...

According to the Jinhan elders, their ancestors were refugees who had fled the Qin Empire (the first dynasty to unify China; 221–206 BCE) and settled among the Han (韓) peoples of southern Korea. Mahan supposedly gave them land along its eastern frontier.

The Chinese author then adds something even more interesting: their language was not the same as Mahan's. He records several Jinhan words that reminded him of Qin speech and notes that Jinhan was sometimes called 秦韓, “Qin-Han.”

Does that mean the people of Jinhan were literally Chinese refugees from Qin?

Probably not that simply.

But it tells us something important.

By the third century, Jinhan itself preserved a story that at least some of its ancestors had come from somewhere else.

And then, almost nine hundred years later, the Korean Samguk Sagi (삼국사기; 三國史記) preserves another origin story.

Before Bak Hyeokgeose (박혁거세) became king, it says:

朝鮮遺民 分居山谷之間 爲六村

(Remnants of Joseon lived scattered among the valleys and formed six villages)

Those six villages became the six divisions of Jinhan, surrounding the future Saro-guk.

So now we have two traditions.

The Chinese source says:

refugees from Qin came east.

The later Korean source says:

remnants of Joseon came south.

Those are not the same story.

But both contain the same strange idea:

the population that produced early Silla was not remembered as having simply been there forever.

People moved.

And Silla's own founding mythology keeps repeating the theme.

• Bak Hyeokgeose (박혁거세) appears miraculously from an egg.
• Seok Talhae (석탈해) explicitly arrives from somewhere across the sea.
• Hogong (호공), one of the earliest important figures in Silla tradition, is described as a man from Wa who crossed the sea.
• Kim Alji (김알지) appears mysteriously in a golden chest and becomes the ancestor of the Kim royal house.

None of this tells us where Proto-Koreanic came from.

(It's also where two of the most prominent Korean names come from: Kim (김; 金),  and Park (박, 朴).)

Founding myths are not immigration records.

But they are certainly not the mythology of an isolated population that remembered itself as having occupied Gyeongju unchanged since the beginning of time.

Early Saro looks much more like what everything else in this story has looked like:

a meeting point.

• Existing southeastern communities.
• Migrants from farther north.
• People moving through the former Gojoseon and commandery world.
• Maritime connections with Byeonhan, Gaya and the Japanese archipelago.

And probably more than one speech community.

Somewhere inside that mess was the language that eventually became Sillan.

And by the time we can identify Sillan clearly, it is Koreanic.

So we can reasonably write:

Jinhan / Saro speech

↓

Sillan / Old Korean

↓

Middle Korean

↓

Modern Korean

But the first arrow is doing an enormous amount of work.

• Did Koreanic already dominate Jinhan?
• Did it arrive with migrants from farther north?
• Did Saro contain both Koreanic and Japonic speakers?
• Did one language gradually replace another as Saro expanded?

We don't know.

At least we know, early Silla does not look like a pristine ancestral Korean population sitting in Gyeongju speaking pristine Proto-Korean.

So far, we have traced modern Korean backward to a point where we can reasonably claim linguistic lineage.

But obviously Jinhan or Saro speech was not the first language ever spoken on the Korean Peninsula.

Hominins had been living there for hundreds of thousands of years.

Homo sapiens had been there for tens of thousands.

They spoke something.

Probably many somethings.

Those languages disappeared without leaving us a dictionary, a poem, or even a name.

So Sillan cannot be the beginning.

It is simply the earliest part of one linguistic thread that we can follow with any confidence.

If we want to go farther back, we have to look elsewhere.

So let's see what everybody else was speaking.

What languages did the other Korean kingdoms speak?

Let's start from the south, and the remaining states of the Samhan.

(1) The people of Samhan (the southern inhabitants)

We've established,

Jinhan (진한; 辰韓): Some unknown language + Koreanic Shillan brought by immigrants.

Next door to Jinhan was,

Mahan (마한; 馬韓)

Mahan was much larger than Jinhan or Byeonhan. Chinese sources describe more than fifty separate Mahan statelets spread across much of central and southwestern Korea, roughly covering parts of modern Gyeonggi, Chungcheong and Jeolla.

• Some were tiny.
• Some supposedly contained more than 10,000 households.

And one of them was Baekje-guk (백제국; 伯濟國).

The little state that would eventually become the Kingdom of Baekje.

But before we get to Baekje, what did the people of Mahan actually speak?

We don't know.

We get one tantalizing clue from the Records of the Three Kingdoms.

When describing neighboring Jinhan, the Chinese author says:

其言語不與馬韓同

(“Their language was not the same as Mahan's”)

That's not much.

But it tells us something important.

Whatever the people of Mahan were speaking in the third century, at least one Chinese observer thought it was noticeably different from the language of Jinhan.

So already:

Mahan speech ≠ Jinhan speech

Or at least:

different enough that somebody noticed.

And then Baekje makes everything complicated.

Baekje-guk began as one of the Mahan states in the Han River region. Over the following centuries it grew, absorbed neighboring states, and eventually came to dominate most of the former Mahan world.

Except Baekje's own origin traditions say that the people who founded its ruling dynasty were not originally from Mahan.

The Samguk Sagi says that Onjo (온조) and Biryu (비류) came south from the northern Buyeo/Goguryeo world with followers and established themselves around the Han River.

It then says:

其世系與高句麗同出扶餘，故以扶餘爲氏

(Their lineage, like Goguryeo's, came from Buyeo, and therefore they took Buyeo (부여; 扶餘) as their surname.)

Another Chinese history, the Zhoushu, somehow manages to summarize the entire problem in one sentence:

百濟者，其先蓋馬韓之屬國，夫餘之別種

(Baekje was originally a state belonging to Mahan, but its ancestry was described as a separate branch of Buyeo.)

That's wonderfully inconvenient.

• Mahan land.
• Mahan population.
• Northern Buyeo-associated ruling tradition.

And Baekje itself certainly embraced the northern connection. Its royal house used the surname Buyeo, and in 538 CE King Seong went so far as to rename the kingdom, Nam-Buyeo (남부여; 南扶餘), Southern Buyeo.

So what happened linguistically?

Here we get another tiny Chinese sentence carrying an enormous amount of weight.

The Liangshu says of Baekje:

今言語服章略與高麗同

(Its language and clothing were roughly similar to Goguryeo's)

Remember what earlier Chinese sources said about Goguryeo:

Goguryeo ≈ Buyeo linguistically.

So now we have:

Buyeo

↓

Goguryeo

↓

Baekje

all being described as linguistically similar.

But the people already living in Mahan apparently spoke something that the same tradition distinguished from Jinhan.

So one plausible reconstruction is:

original Mahan language + northern Buyeo / Goguryeo-related migrants

↓

Baekje

↓

Baekje language eventually becomes Koreanic

But there may be a trace of the older language still hiding inside Baekje.

The Zhoushu records two different Baekje words for king:

王姓夫餘氏，號於羅瑕，民呼爲鞬吉支

(The king belonged to the Buyeo clan and was called 於羅瑕 (어라하; Eoraha), while the common people called him 鞬吉支 (건길지; Geongilji). Both terms meant “king”)

That one line has generated an entire theory.

• 어라하; Eoraha is Koreanic.
• 건; Geon appears Koreanic, perhaps related to the modern Korean word; 큰 or 'great'..
• 길지; gilji is the strange part. The Nihon Shoki preserves an extraordinarily similar title, kisi, for rulers and elites from the Korean peninsula. Whether this represents Japonic vocabulary, a Baekje word borrowed into Japanese, or something more complicated has been argued about ever since.

Some Korean linguists have argued that Baekje may originally have contained two linguistic layers:

• A northern Buyeo/Goguryeo-related language associated with the ruling population (proto-Koreanic?,
• An older Mahan language spoken by much of the population they ruled (proto-Japonic?).

Maybe.

The evidence is painfully thin.

But it would explain something otherwise strange:

why one kingdom apparently had two different native words for its king.

And over time, one of those languages disappeared.

We don't know exactly when.

We don't know exactly how.

We don't even know what the original Mahan language was called.

But by the time Baekje becomes historically visible as a major kingdom, Chinese observers describe its speech as resembling Goguryeo.

So, just like Silla:

the language of the kingdom that survived was not necessarily the language everyone in that territory had always spoken.

Mahan disappeared politically.

Its language may have disappeared with it.

Or perhaps pieces of it survived inside Baekje Korean without leaving us enough evidence to recognize them.

Either way:

Mahan is another linguistic dead end.

So let's move east again.

Byeonhan (변한; 弁韓)

If Mahan was the sprawling agricultural giant of the Samhan, Byeonhan was the industrial and economic powerhouse.

Located in the deep south of the Korean peninsula, primarily around the lower Nakdong River basin and the southern coast (modern-day South Gyeongsang Province), Byeonhan's entire identity and geopolitical power revolved around one critical resource: Iron.

If you controlled Byeonhan, you controlled the supply chain of ancient East Asia. The region sat on massive, easily accessible iron ore deposits. Iron was so abundant and valuable that it was literally used as currency. They forged iron into flat, axe-head-shaped ingots called deong-i-soe (덩이쇠). You could use these ingots to buy goods, pay debts, or melt them down to forge weapons and tools.

Byeonhan did not keep its iron to itself. It was a massive export hub. Historical Chinese records explicitly state that Byeonhan supplied iron to the Chinese commanderies to the north (like Lelang and Daifang) and across the sea to Wa (the ancient Japanese archipelago).

Like its eastern neighbor Jinhan, Byeonhan was a smaller confederacy compared to Mahan. It was composed of 12 distinct walled-town statelets (국 - guk). Guya-guk (구야국 / 狗邪國) was the most prominent and wealthy of the 12 statelets, located in modern-day Gimhae. Because it sat right on the coast and at the mouth of the Nakdong River, it controlled the maritime trade routes, acting as the primary broker for the iron trade.

Byeonhan did not collapse or get conquered early on, it evolved.

As the 12 statelets grew wealthier from the iron trade, they began to centralize and form a more structured alliance. Byeonhan eventually transitioned directly into the Gaya Confederacy (가야).

The wealthy, iron-trading capital of Guya-guk simply rebranded and became Geumgwan Gaya (금관가야), which served as the leading state of the early Gaya confederacy. While Baekje absorbed Mahan, and Silla absorbed Jinhan, Gaya (born from Byeonhan) stood between them for centuries, maintaining its independence through its immense wealth and advanced iron-clad cavalry.

As to which language they spoke, there are three prevailing theories:

Theory 1. The Traditional Koreanic Theory

This is the orthodox view held by the majority of domestic Korean historians and linguists. The premise is that Byeonhan spoke a dialect of Old Korean (specifically, the Samhan branch of the Han-language family).

• According to this theory, the ancient Koreanic language family was split into northern branches (Buyeo, Goguryeo) and southern branches (the Samhan).
• The Byeonhan language naturally evolved into the Gaya language. Because Byeonhan and Jinhan spoke essentially the same language, when Jinhan evolved into Silla, and Byeonhan evolved into Gaya, their languages remained highly mutually intelligible.
• When Silla finally conquered Gaya in the 6th century, there was almost no linguistic friction. The Silla language (which became Middle Korean) easily absorbed the Gaya language because they were just sister dialects of the same Old Korean mother tongue.

Theory 2. The Peninsular Japonic Theory

Pioneered by linguists like Alexander Vovin and Christopher Beckwith, this theory argues that the traditional view is entirely backward. Their premise is that Byeonhan spoke an early form of Japonic.

• This theory posits that the entire central and southern Korean peninsula was originally populated by Japonic speakers (associated with the Mumun agricultural culture).
• While Koreanic speakers (the Buyeo/Goguryeo peoples) invaded from the north and slowly replaced Japonic in the Mahan region, Byeonhan and Jinhan remained Japonic strongholds for much longer.
• Supporters also point to Byeonhan's extraordinarily close economic and cultural connections with Wa (왜; 倭) across the sea.
• The Gaya word for "Gate": The only surviving word of the Gaya language (recorded as 梁 in the Samguk Sagi), alignins perfectly with Old Japanese for "gate/door" rather than Old Korean.

Theory 3. The Substratum (Bilingual) Theory

This theory attempts to reconcile the Chinese historical records with the Japonic place names found on the peninsula. The premise is that Byeonhan was a society in the middle of a massive linguistic transition, featuring a Koreanic superstratum and a Japonic substratum.

• As mounted, iron-wielding Koreanic speakers migrated south into the peninsula, they conquered the indigenous Japonic-speaking farmers.
• By the time the Byeonhan confederacy was trading heavily, the ruling elite likely spoke Old Korean (to communicate with the northern commanderies and Mahan leaders), while the commoners and rural farmers still spoke Peninsular Japonic.
• Over the centuries, the prestige language (Koreanic) pushed the indigenous language (Japonic) out completely. This explains why the Samguk Sagi records so many Japonic-sounding place names in the south, the names of the rivers and mountains were coined by the original Japonic commoners, even though the state eventually became entirely Korean-speaking.

///

Rewriting history to tell the story you want to tell

A bit of an aside to the Korean language story, but I felt this is as good of a place as any to tell it.

You may wonder why the prevailing orthodox view of most Korean historians and linguists argue that Byeonhan spoke Koreanic, not Japonic. It's quite simple actually. Two reasons:

1. They wanted to tell a "single bloodline, single language" story of Korea. A version of pure race bullshit repeated by countless others around the world, and throughout history. Korea immediately after independence needed all of the Samhan (Mahan, Jinhan, Byeonhan) to be the undisputed, monolithic ancestors of the modern Korean ethnos. The scholars obliged.
   
   
2. It was a direct counter to the Mimana Nihonfu theory, which claimed that ancient Japan (Yamato) maintained a military and political outpost in Gaya (Mimana) during the 4th to 6th centuries. This was explicitly used as historical justification for the 1910 annexation of Korea, framing it not as a conquest, but as a "return" to an ancient status quo.
   
   When Korea gained independence, the immediate priority for the first generation of modern Korean historians was dismantling this colonial narrative. Suggesting that the people of the southern peninsula spoke a Japonic language would have felt dangerously close to validating the imperial Japanese claim that they had an ancestral right to the territory.

This is where modern DNA analysis is actually helpful.

A landmark 2024 study mapping the complete genome of Yayoi individuals confirmed that the vast majority of immigration to the Japanese archipelago during the Yayoi period originated directly from the Korean Peninsula.  

For linguists, this is the smoking gun. Almost all scholars agree that the Yayoi migrants brought wet-rice agriculture and the ancestral Japonic language to Japan. Because their DNA traces directly back to ancient Korea, it provides powerful biological evidence that the agricultural societies living on the peninsula at that time (the Mumun culture) were the ones speaking Japonic.

The most profound impact on the linguistic debate comes from a 2021 archaeogenetic breakthrough that proposed a "tripartite" (three-part) origin for modern Japanese populations. The DNA revealed that Japan's continental ancestry did not arrive in a single event. After the initial Yayoi wave, there was a second major pulse of continental genetics entering Japan centuries later during the Kofun period (c. 300–700 CE).

1. Jōmon Ancestry: The indigenous Paleolithic hunter-gatherer-fishers who lived in the archipelago for thousands of years.  
2. Yayoi Period Influx: A wave of migration characterized by Northeast Asian ancestry that brought rice farming.  
3. Kofun Period Influx: A later, massive influx of East Asian ancestry coinciding with the Kofun period (approx. 300–710 CE), an era of state formation and cultural exchange,.  

I fucking hate fascist fucks, whether they're on my side or not.

///

This leaves us in a strange place again, where we still don't know exactly what languages people spoke on the peninsula before Korean became the only language. However, now we know that at least some of them seem to have been connected to Japonic, or Proto-Japonic.

But if Korean doesn't come from Japonic, we need to finally leave the south and move north. 

It gets interesting very fast.

If the conversation about Samhan and their descendant kingdoms become an argument with the Japanese (vs. Mimana Nihonfu theory), the northern conversation becomes a massive one with the Chinese (vs. 东北工程; Dōngběi Gōngchéng).

(2) The people of Liao (immigrants from the north)

As we've already seen many, many times, if you study anything about Korean history, one place keeps reappearing again and again. And that place is not in Korea, at least modern Korea. That place is Liaoning (요녕; 遼寧) and Liaodong (요동; 遼東), west and east of the Liao river.

Whether you're from:

     the west: North China Plan and the Yellow River world,

     the northwest: Mongolia and the eastern steppe,

     the north: Machuria and the Amur basin,

     the southeast: the Korean Peninsula, the Yellow Sea, and the routes toward western Japan,

Liaoning sits right in the middle.

And running straight through it is the Liao (遼) River system, with the Liaodong Peninsula sticking out toward Korea like a bridge.

So whenever populations moved between northern China, Manchuria, Korea, and the steppe, 

Liaoning was very hard to avoid.

The DNA story kept pointing there.

We'll soon find out Archaeology points there.

And of course, Language points there as well.

So let's begin at the very beginning:

2333 BCE

which is almost certainly wrong.

Old Joseon / Gojoseon (고조선; 古朝鮮)

We've already encountered Old Joseon once, when we were talking about Silla and Jinhan.

///

On the Word Go (고; 古)

Go simply means “old” or “ancient.” The people who lived there did not call their country “Gojoseon.” They called it Joseon (조선; 朝鮮). Much later, another Korean dynasty also called itself Joseon. So we now call the earlier one Gojoseon, “Old Joseon,” to keep the two apart.

///

And this is where something we encountered earlier suddenly becomes important.

When the Samguk Sagi describes the six villages from which Silla would emerge, it says:

先是朝鮮遺民分居東海濱山谷爲六村

(“Before this, remnants of Joseon lived scattered among the valleys along the eastern coast and formed six villages.”)

Joseon remnants.

In the founding story of Silla.

So if we followed Silla backward and found people claiming to have come from somewhere else, the obvious next question is:

What the hell was Joseon?

And, more importantly for us:

What language did they speak?

Let's start start with the easy one.

Gojoseon appears to have occupied a world stretching across Liaoning and toward the northwestern Korean Peninsula.

Exactly where its center was, how far its power extended, and when that center moved east are all still argued about.

Unfortunately, Gojoseon left us no surviving books explaining any of this.

Almost everything we know comes from Chinese texts written about it and from archaeological remains that historians associate with it.

Myth says Gojoseon was founded in 2333 BCE by Dangun Wanggeom (단군왕검; 檀君王儉).

Which is almost certainly not when a state called Gojoseon suddenly appeared.

2333 BCE is deep in the Neolithic world of Korea and Manchuria. The distinctive Bronze Age archaeological cultures normally associated with Gojoseon do not appear until more than a thousand years later, and Gojoseon itself does not enter securely dated written history until the 4th century BCE.

One of the earliest surviving Chinese references appears in the Guanzi, traditionally associated with the 7th century BCE, which mentions Joseon (朝鮮) as a place from which the state of Qi (齊國) could obtain prized patterned animal skins.

And around the same broad period, archaeology begins giving us something much more substantial.

Across Liaoning and eventually into northwestern Korea appears a distinctive material world:

• lute-shaped bronze daggers (비파형 동검),
• northern-style dolmens (탁자식 고인돌),
• bronze mirrors (청동 거울),
• and characteristic pottery (미송리식 토기) and burial traditions.

The pottery (미송리식 토기) is particularly interesting for our story, since it is this exact pottery that is associated with the Yayoi and the Peninsula Japonic hypothesis.

By roughly the 6th to 4th centuries BCE, archaeologists can see increasingly large and organized political centers developing inside this cultural zone.

Was every person who owned one of these daggers a citizen of Gojoseon?

Obviously not.

But wherever Gojoseon was, this is the archaeological world in which it appears.

And Chinese writers had their own word for many of the peoples living east of them:

Dongyi (동이; 東夷), “Eastern Yi.”

This was not the name of one People. It was a Chinese bucket. Depending on the century and the writer, various peoples east of the Chinese states could be thrown into it. Dong means "east", Yi was an old Chinese term for eastern peoples that increasingly carried the sense of “barbarian” or “outsider.” Dongyi were barbarians to the east, Xirong (西戎) the west, Nanman (南蠻) the south, and Beidi (北狄) the north.

So when we encounter Dongyi, we should not read:

Korean.

We should read:

Those people over there to the east.

Which is not enormously helpful when you're trying to work out what language anybody spoke.

By the 4th century BCE, however, Joseon was clearly more than some obscure collection of villages. The surviving tradition says that when Yan (연; 燕) began calling its ruler a king, the ruler of Joseon did the same.

Joseon and Yan were now behaving like rival states.

Then Yan hit back.

Sometime during the reign of King Zhao of Yan, probably in the 3rd century BCE, the Yan general Qin Kai (秦開) attacked Gojoseon from the west.

The later Weilüe claims:

燕乃遣將秦開攻其西方，取地二千餘里

(Yan sent Qin Kai to attack its western territory and seized more than 2,000 li of land)

Whatever “2,000 li” really meant on the ground, the important part is simple:

Gojoseon lost badly.

Its western territory was stripped away, and its political center appears to have shifted farther east in the generations that followed.

And then we get another immigrant.

Around the beginning of the 2nd century BCE, a man named Wiman (위만; 衛滿) fled from the Yan region with followers and entered Joseon. Eventually, he overthrew King Jun and took the throne himself. And yet he did not create some new state called Wimanland.

He kept the name, Joseon.

So now the supposed first Korean kingdom had a ruling dynasty founded by a refugee from the Yan world.

Again.

Apparently ancient Korea was very bad at respecting the neat ethnic boxes people would draw around it two thousand years later.

Under Wiman and his successors, Joseon grew powerful enough to become a serious problem for the Han Empire.

Eventually Emperor Wu had enough. In 109 BCE, Han invaded. 

After roughly a year of fighting, Joseon fell in 108 BCE.

Han then established four commanderies in former Gojoseon territory, the most famous being Lelang (낙랑군; 樂浪郡) around the Pyongyang region.

And after the collapse, people moved.

Some went north.

Some went east.

Some went south.

Chinese and later Korean traditions explicitly connect refugees from the old Joseon world with the societies developing farther south.

Which brings us right back to where we started:

Jinhan.

Silla.

The six villages.

Joseon remnants.

So historically, we have managed to draw something resembling a line:

Gojoseon

↓

collapse, conquest and migration

↓

northern states + Samhan

↓

Goguryeo / Baekje / Silla

That's useful.

But this is the language section.

And after all of that, we still haven't answered the question:

What language did Gojoseon speak?

We have no fucking idea.

At least not directly.

• Gojoseon left us no sentences.
• No dictionary.
• No poem.
• Not even enough surviving words to tell us what language family it belonged to.

So we cannot simply write:

Gojoseon = Koreanic.

But the trail does not completely disappear.

Because scattered through the Chinese records are two other names that keep appearing in and around the same northern world:

Ye (예; 濊) and Maek (맥; 貊).

Sometimes separately.

Sometimes together as: Yemaek (예맥; 濊貊).

Exactly what these names meant is another argument.

• Were Ye and Maek two different Peoples?
• Two branches of the same People?
• Regional names?
• Chinese labels that changed meaning over time?
• Probably some combination of the above.

For us, it doesn't really matter yet.

What matters is where they appear.

They show up across the same broad world we have just been looking at:

• Liaoning.
• Manchuria.
• Northern Korea.
• Gojoseon.

And after Gojoseon disappears, these names don't disappear with it.

They lead us directly into the next group of northern states.

• Ye.
• Okjeo.
• Buyeo.
• Goguryeo.

And for the first time, Chinese writers begin telling us what these people actually sounded like.

The Sanguozhi says of the Ye:

其耆老舊自謂與句麗同種……言語法俗大抵與句麗同

(Their elders said that they were of the same stock as Goguryeo, and that their language, laws and customs were generally the same as Goguryeo's)

Then it says of Okjeo:

其言語與句麗大同，時時小異

(Their language was largely the same as Goguryeo's, with occasional small differences)

And then, describing Goguryeo itself:

東夷舊語以爲夫餘別種，言語諸事，多與夫餘同

(Old traditions among the Eastern peoples considered Goguryeo a separate branch of Buyeo, and its language and many other things were largely the same as Buyeo's)

Suddenly we have a pattern:

Buyeo ≈ Goguryeo ≈ Okjeo ≈ Ye

The exact relationships are still murky.

But these are no longer completely silent archaeological cultures.

A Chinese observer is actually telling us:

these people sounded like each other.

And Buyeo itself preserves another strange clue.

The Sanguozhi records that the Buyeo royal treasury contained a seal reading:

濊王之印

(“Seal of the King of Ye.”)

It also says there was an old city called Ye-seong (濊城) and remarks that the territory had originally been Yemaek land.

So the names keep bleeding into one another.

Ye.

Maek.

Yemaek.

Buyeo.

Goguryeo.

Different names.

Different states.

Different periods.

But increasingly, one connected northern world.

Maek is harder to isolate linguistically. We don't get the same wonderful sentence saying:

“The Maek language sounded like X.”

Instead, Chinese sources increasingly associate Maek with Goguryeo itself, and later historians have spent a great deal of time arguing over whether Ye and Maek were distinct groups, related branches, or simply shifting names within a larger northern population.

Which brings us back to Gojoseon.

Can we prove that Gojoseon spoke Koreanic?

No.

But neither are we staring into complete darkness.

Gojoseon occupied the same northern world in which we later find Ye, Maek, Buyeo, Okjeo and Goguryeo.

And when those peoples finally become linguistically visible, the Chinese repeatedly tell us:

they sounded like one another.

So perhaps the best we can draw is:

Gojoseon / Yemaek world

↓

Ye / Maek / Buyeo / Okjeo

↓

Goguryeo

↓

Koreanic

That first arrow is still doing an enormous amount of work.

Again.

But unlike the south, where everything kept dissolving into Mahan, Jinhan, Byeonhan and possible Japonic layers, the farther north we go, the more the linguistic evidence starts converging.

And now we finally have somewhere to look for Proto-Koreanic.

Buyeo and Goguryeo.

Buyeo, Goguryo, Okjeo, Ye, Dongye (and Baekjae, Shilla)

We already covered Baekjae and Shilla, so let's jump straight into Buyeo.

By the time Gojoseon finally collapsed in 108 BCE, northeast Asia was already a patchwork of different peoples and polities.

• In the south were the Samhan: Mahan, Jinhan and Byeonhan.
• To the north, across Manchuria, was Buyeo.
• Along the northeastern Korean Peninsula were Okjeo and Dongye.
• And after destroying Gojoseon, the Han Empire planted Chinese commanderies directly into the middle of this world, most importantly Lelang (낙랑군; 樂浪郡) around Pyongyang.

Then, somewhere among all of this, Goguryeo began to rise.

Which gives us a wonderfully messy map:

• Buyeo
• Goguryeo
• Okjeo
• Ye / Dongye
• Mahan
• Jinhan
• Byeonhan
• Chinese commanderies

all sitting beside, fighting, trading with, absorbing, and migrating through one another.

Fortunately for us, the Chinese did something extremely useful.

They told us which of these people sounded alike.

The best source is the Sanguozhi (三國志), compiled in the late 3rd century CE. Its Account of the Eastern Peoples drew on information gathered by Chinese officials who were actually operating in this region, particularly after Wei armies invaded Goguryeo in 244 CE.

And its descriptions are remarkably explicit.

About Goguryeo, it says:

高句麗...夫餘別種，言語諸事，多與夫餘同

(Goguryeo was regarded as a separate branch of Buyeo, and its language and many customs were largely the same as Buyeo's)

Then it moves east to Okjeo:

其言語與句麗大同，時時小異

(Their language was largely the same as Goguryeo's, with occasional small differences)

Then south to the people called Ye (濊), generally called Dongye (東濊) today to distinguish these eastern Ye communities from the broader use of the name:

言語法俗大抵與句麗同

(Their language, laws, and customs were generally the same as Goguryeo's. Their elders even claimed that they and the Goguryeo people were of the same stock)

So the Chinese heard something like:

Buyeo ≈ Goguryeo ≈ Okjeo ≈ Ye / Dongye

Not identical.

But recognizably related.

And this wasn't simply the Chinese looking at every strange northerner and deciding that they all sounded the same.

Immediately northeast of Buyeo lived another people called the Yilou (挹婁), probably connected in some way to the later Sushen and other peoples of the Amur-Manchurian world.

The same Chinese source specifically says:

言語不與夫餘、句麗同

(Their language was not the same as Buyeo or Goguryeo)

So whoever was writing these reports was actually listening for differences.

Which gives us something surprisingly close to an ancient linguistic survey.

The north was not one homogeneous blob.

The Chinese could hear a Buyeo-Goguryeo-Okjeo-Ye linguistic cluster, and they could distinguish that cluster from at least some of its neighbors.

Modern linguists have sometimes called this the:

Buyeo (Puyŏ) language group.

That name needs a giant asterisk. For two reasons.

One, if this language group exists, then this is may be the smoking gun. 

We may have found where Korean came from.

But no sane person can prove this.

Second, we cannot reconstruct a "Proto-Buyeo" the way we can reconstruct Proto-Germanic or Proto-Indo-European. Almost none of these languages left texts. What survives consists largely of Chinese descriptions, names, titles, place names, and a tiny handful of words.

So:

Indo-European → German  → Germanic

is a demonstrated linguistic family tree.

But:

??? → Buyeo languages → Goguryeo  

is much fuzzier.

• We know that the Chinese thought these languages sounded alike.
• We have fragments suggesting relationships.
• We do not have enough surviving language to reconstruct their common ancestor with anything approaching the confidence we have for Indo-European.

Still, the pattern is difficult to ignore.

And politically, it makes perfect sense.

Buyeo occupied the great plains around the upper Songhua River in Manchuria. It was an agricultural kingdom with a king, an aristocracy, horses, cattle, grain, fortified settlements, and a political system already well developed by the time it enters Chinese records.

South of it, around the Yalu and Hun river systems, Goguryeo emerged.

The Goguryeo themselves remembered a connection to Buyeo. Their royal foundation traditions traced their founder Jumong northward to Buyeo, and Chinese observers independently described Goguryeo as a "separate branch of Buyeo."

That does not mean we should imagine a Buyeo "race" splitting neatly in two.

It tells us that people at the time perceived a relationship.

• Language.
• Customs.
• Political traditions.
• Origin stories.
• Probably movement of actual people.

Then Goguryeo began doing what successful states do.

It expanded.

To its east was:

Okjeo

Okjeo never seems to have developed a centralized kingdom on the scale of Buyeo or Goguryeo. It consisted of local communities stretched along the northeastern Korean coast and into the Tumen region.

Unfortunately for Okjeo, it sat directly beside a rapidly expanding Goguryeo.

The Sanguozhi describes Okjeo as subordinate to Goguryeo, forced to send cloth, fish, salt, seafood, and even women as tribute.

Eventually, Okjeo disappears.

But of course, the people did not disappear.

The political name disappears.

The communities were absorbed into Goguryeo.

South of Okjeo were the: 

Ye

"Ye" is another one of those maddening ancient names that seems to have been used at different times for somewhat different populations. The eastern communities described by the Chinese are therefore commonly called Dongye, "Eastern Ye."

• They too lacked a single powerful centralized state.
• They too spoke something the Chinese thought sounded like Goguryeo.
• They too were eventually swallowed by larger states around them.

And then something even more interesting happens.

Buyeo itself disappears.

It suffered repeated attacks and fragmentation, particularly from Xianbei powers to its west. Eventually, in 494 CE, the remnants of Buyeo submitted to Goguryeo.

So the map:

Buyeo

Goguryeo

Okjeo

Ye

slowly becomes:

GOGURYEO

But again, that does not mean Goguryeo replaced everybody.

It means Goguryeo absorbed them.

• The borders disappear.
• The names disappear.
• The people remain.

And some of that northern world appears to have travelled south as well.

Remember Baekje.

Its own foundation tradition connects its ruling house to Goguryeo and Buyeo. Its kings eventually used Buyeo (扶餘) as their royal surname. And centuries after the Sanguozhi, the Chinese Book of Liang independently reported that the language and clothing of Baekje were roughly the same as those of Goguryeo.

So now our linguistic map looks something like:

Buyeo

↓

Goguryeo ≈ Okjeo ≈ Ye

↓

Baekje also sounds broadly similar to Goguryeo

That looks suspiciously like the beginnings of a Koreanic-speaking northern continuum spreading south.

But there is a problem.

The south was already full of people.

The Samhan were not linguistically uniform either.

The Sanguozhi explicitly says that Jinhan did not speak the same language as Mahan. It then says that Byeonhan and Jinhan lived intermixed and that their languages and customs were similar.

Even the Chinese records disagree slightly among themselves about exactly how similar some of these southern languages were.

Which is exactly what we should expect.

There was no "Korean language" covering the Korean peninsula in 200 BCE.

There wasn't even one neat northern language and one neat southern language.

There were overlapping speech communities.

• Dialect continua.
• Migrants.
• Conquerors.
• Substrates.
• Local languages that disappeared without leaving a written sentence behind.

And this suddenly helps make sense of the linguistic fossils we found earlier.

• A Goguryeo king could rule a territory whose old rivers and valleys still carried Japonic names without Goguryeo itself necessarily being Japonic.
• A Koreanic-speaking population could conquer a Japonic-speaking population and inherit its geography.

Later generations would speak the conqueror's language while continuing to call the river by the name given to it by people who had lived there centuries earlier.

This happens everywhere.

• England still contains Celtic place names despite speaking English.
• The United States is covered in Algonquian, Iroquoian, Siouan, and other Indigenous place names despite overwhelmingly speaking English.

And Korea appears to contain the same kind of buried linguistic strata.

So if we return to the Duck Test, the answer gets wonderfully messy.

Were the Buyeo, Goguryeo, Okjeo, and Ye one People?

Probably not in any meaningful political sense.

• They had different rulers.
• Different territories.
• Different local identities.
• They fought one another.
• One conquered the others.

But did they speak closely related languages?

The people who actually heard them seem to have thought so.

And that may be one of the earliest moments in recorded history where we can begin to see something recognizably Koreanic taking shape.

Not as a nation.

Not as a bloodline.

Not yet as "Koreans."

Just a family of people who, when they opened their mouths, 

apparently sounded strangely familiar to one another.

Where did those languages go?

So of the myriad of unkown languages spoken in and around the Korean Peninsula, we are primariliy interested in two: Japonic and Koreanic. Or to be true to the time period, Proto-Japonic and Proto-Koreanic, for neither language existed in its final form, nor did the Peoples exist.

But we do need to mention some languages that were there, but definitely are not Koreanic or Japonic. We won't go through them in detail but here are some:

• Sinitic (the language of the Han; 漢): Old and later Middle Chinese varieties were spoken immediately to the west, and Chinese-speaking populations were physically present on the peninsula and in Liaodong through places such as the Lelang and Daifang commanderies. Obviously neither Koreanic nor Japonic.
• Tungusic: later represented unmistakably by Jurchen (여진; 女真) and Manchu (만주어; 滿洲語) across Manchuria. Mohe (말갈; 靺鞨) is also generally connected with the ancestry of the Jurchens and thus the Tungusic world, although exactly what every Mohe group spoke is harder to establish. They would later become intrinsicly interconnected to Korea, then form their own two dynasties: The Jin (금; 金) and the Qing (청; 淸), the final Dynasty of China.
• Khitan (거란; 契丹): the language of the Khitan who eventually founded the Liao dynasty (요; 遼). Khitan is extinct, but enough survives in the Khitan scripts to show that it belonged to the broader Mongolic/Para-Mongolic world, not Koreanic or Japonic.
• Mongolic: farther north and west were languages ancestral or related to later Mongolian. This becomes much clearer historically with peoples such as the Mongols themselves. Obviously the Mongols go on and conquer half of the known world and become the Won dynasty (원; 元).

History mentions other Peoples; the Sushen (숙신; 肅愼), Yilou (읍루; 挹婁), Xianbei (선비; 鮮卑), and Xiongnu (흉노; 匈奴), but we know very little about their language. Some historians put them broadly into the later Tungusic or Mongolic group, but no one knows for sure. The Xianbei are particularly interesting because northern and steppe ancestry keeps appearing around the origin traditions of southern Korean ruling houses. The Silla Kim dynasty even claimed descent from a Xiongnu prince, while modern scholars have proposed links between Silla and Gaya elites and the Murong Xianbei. None of this proves that the kings of Silla or Gaya were Xianbei, but it is another reminder that “north” and “south” were never sealed worlds.

We mention these languages here because the peoples who spoke them did not simply disappear from the Korean story. They traded with Koreans, fought them, married them, ruled them, were ruled by them, migrated among them, and were sometimes absorbed by them.

They left traces in Korean DNA, language and culture.

• Sinitic: loanwords and the formal language of the courts, government and scholars.
• Tungusic: centuries of contact, intermarriage and population movement across the northern frontier. Mohe, Jurchen and Koreanic populations repeatedly lived beside, among, and inside one another, leaving traces in northeastern Korean dialects and in both directions of linguistic borrowing. Jurchen-Manchu even preserves words apparently borrowed from Goguryeo/Balhae-era Koreanic.
• Khitan: surprisingly little obvious linguistic residue, but enormous political and demographic contact. Goryeo fought three major wars with the Khitan Liao, while Khitan refugees, captives and artisans also entered and settled in Goryeo. Tens of thousands are mentioned in contemporary accounts.
• Mongolic: this one left fingerprints everywhere during the century of Goryeo-Yuan entanglement. Mongolian words entered Korean particularly around horses, falconry and the military, including words behind Middle Korean horse terms and 보라매, while the Goryeo royal family itself repeatedly married into the Yuan imperial house.

- ה -

How Maguages Moved

Now back to Japonic and Koreanic.

What we can say with some confidence.

• Both Japonic and Koreanic appear to have been spoken on the Korean Peninsula.
• Japonic appears to have existed in parts of the peninsula before our written records begin. Koreanic may have expanded into the peninsula from the north.
• For whatever reason, Japonic disappeared from Korea, while Koreanic eventually became the only surviving indigenous language family of the peninsula.

But when this happened, which direction people moved, who moved, and who was already there is very much up for debate.

I'll introduce some of the theories here.

Some things to consider:

1. Humans spoke languages. People living in Korea and Japan must have spoken one too.
2. Humans didn't magically appear in Korea and Japan, they must have come from some other place. Geography must have played a role.
3. If there is a Proto-Koreanic and a Proto-Japonic, then there must be a Proto-Proto-Koreanic, and a Proto-Proto-Japonic (and more 'Proto's before them).

But simply saying "we don't know", or poking holes in someone else's theories, does not free us from these questions.

So the theories. Let me apologize beforehand. There are many, ranging from "huh, makes sense." to "what the fuck is wrong with these people?" I'll categorize them into two groups.

Group 1. asks, "What happened?"

Group 2. asks, "What do I need to have happened?"

- ה -

Group 1. "What happened?"

These theories can be right, wrong, brilliant, stupid, outdated, or impossible to prove.

That's fine.

They are at least trying to answer the question.

Let's start with my favorite.

a. Peninsular Japonic first, Koreanic comes south later
    (Peninsular-Japonic Theory)

This is probably the theory we have encountered most often so far.

Proto-Japonic-speaking agricultural populations entered or developed on the Korean Peninsula, perhaps associated with the Mumun culture and the spread of wet-rice agriculture. Some of them crossed into Japan during the Yayoi migration.

Koreanic speakers then expanded southward from Manchuria or northern Korea, eventually assimilating the remaining Japonic-speaking populations on the peninsula.

John Whitman's version puts Japonic on the peninsula around 1500 BCE, followed by Koreanic expansion much later, around 300 BCE. (springer.com)

It explains something we actually need explained:

Why Japonic appears to have once existed in Korea, but doesn't anymore.

It doesn't explain where Proto-Koreanic, or Proto-Japonic comes from.

///

A short anecdote from a ancient Japanese poem:

The Man’yōshū poem 9 (万葉集 第9歌), traditionally attributed to Princess Nukata (額田王) around 658 CE. The Man’yōshū is Japan's oldest surviving major poetry anthology, compiled in the eighth century.

The poem begins:

莫囂圓隣之大相七兄爪湯氣

Which makes absolutely no sense.

Nobody could satisfactorily read those opening characters as Old Japanese.

Then historical linguist Alexander Vovin tried something different.

He asked:

"What if those characters aren't encoding Japanese?"

In a 2002 paper wonderfully titled “An Old Korean Text in the Man’yōshū,” Vovin analyzed the characters using the same general principles we just encountered in 향찰: some characters representing meaning, others representing sound. He argued that the mysterious opening can be parsed as Old Korean, or a language extremely close to it.

His reconstruction was approximately:

nacokʌ-s tʌrari thi-ta-po-n-[i]-isy-a=ca mut-ke

Which he interpreted roughly as:

“After I looked up at the evening moon, I asked...”

And here's the really strange part.

A medieval Japanese scholar named Sengaku (仙覚), centuries before modern historical linguistics existed, had already transmitted essentially the same meaning for the otherwise unreadable passage:

夕月の 仰ぎて問ひし

“Looking up at the evening moon, I asked...”

Vovin's argument was therefore not simply:

“Hey, I can make these characters sound Korean.”

It was:

If I read the characters using an Old-Korean / hyangchal-like system, I independently recover approximately the meaning preserved by the old Japanese commentary.

///

So Japonic was a language spoken on the Korean peninsula that became Japanese, while Japonic in the Korean peninsula dissapeared, except for a few place names here and there.

• c. 1500 BCE: Japonic in Korea
  Japonic-speaking agricultural populations spread through parts of the Korean Peninsula, in Whitman's model associated with the Mumun agricultural transition and wet-rice farming.
• c. 950 BCE: Japonic crosses Korea → Japan.
  Japonic-speaking populations cross from Korea into northern Kyushu during the beginning of the Yayoi expansion.
• following centuries: 
  Japonic spreads through much of the Japanese archipelago as Yayoi culture expands.
• c. 300 BCE onward: Peninsular Japonic disappears, Koreanic becomes Korean.
  Koreanic expands through the Korean peninsula and progressively displaces the older Japonic languages there.
• first millennium CE:
  the remaining Peninsular Japonic varieties disappear; Silla's expansion ultimately makes a Koreanic language dominant across the peninsula.
• 1910: Japan colonizes Korea and forces Koreans to speak Japanese.

The descendant of the language that had once left the peninsula comes back under the authority of an empire and is imposed upon speakers of the language that had replaced its continental relatives there.

• An ancient language of Korea went to Japan.
• Korean replaced it in Korea.
• It became Japanese in Japan.
• Then Japanese came back and tried to replace Korean.

That is fucking wierd.

b. Koreanic was already there, Japonic came later

Martine Robbeets essentially flips part of that chronology.

In this model, an ancestral Koreanic population entered the peninsula much earlier, perhaps with millet agriculture from the Liaoning/West Liao region around 3500 BCE.

Japonic-speaking rice farmers arrived later, around the beginning of the Mumun period. Some remained on the peninsula, while others eventually crossed into Japan.

Same pieces.

Different order.

⇒

Do I buy it? 

Nope.

c. Koreanic and Japonic were once the same language

Instead of asking which one came first, perhaps we are starting too late.

Maybe Proto-Koreanic and Proto-Japonic themselves descended from an earlier Proto-Koreo-Japonic language.

At some point, its speakers separated.

One branch eventually became Koreanic.

Another became Japonic.

If true, Korean and Japanese really are distant cousins, even though thousands of years of change have made proving that relationship extremely difficult.

This theory directly answers our Proto-Proto problem.

⇒

Do I buy it? 

I do. But what is it? Do we have to go back to Africa?

d. Koreanic and Japonic are completely unrelated

Or maybe they aren't cousins at all.

Their similarities could result from thousands of years of contact.

SOV word order, agglutination, postpositions, similar grammatical structures and borrowed vocabulary can spread between neighboring languages without common ancestry.

Under this model there never was a Proto-Koreo-Japonic.

Both languages still came from somewhere.

Just not from each other.

⇒

Do I buy it? 

I want to, but nope. Because how the hell did the Japanese get to Japan? Air Japan?

e. Transeurasian

Take the family tree and zoom out even farther.

The Transeurasian hypothesis proposes that Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic ultimately descend from one much older ancestral language.

Robbeets and others place its early homeland around the West Liao River region and connect its expansion with prehistoric agriculture.

If true, Korean would not be an isolate at all.

It would be one tiny surviving branch of an enormous prehistoric Eurasian language family.

⇒

Do I buy it? 

This one I do. It also provides an answer to c. But the question I have is whether Transeurasian theory is not just a version of the now debunked f. Altaic? I really want this one to be real, since then I can call my Turkish friends "brothers" again.

f. Altaic

This is the older version we already encountered.

Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic were grouped into an Altaic family, with Korean and sometimes Japanese later added.

Most linguists today reject Classical Altaic, particularly because many of its supposed family characteristics can be explained by prolonged contact.

But it belongs here.

For more than a century, it was one of the principal attempts to answer:

Where the hell did Korean come from?

⇒

Do I buy it? 

I used to. I was brought up sucking the teat of the Altaic theory. It's what I learned in high school. Until much later, someone told me it was bullshit. Now with e. Transeurasian, it seems its lost some of its 'bull', or "shit"...not sure which.

g. Goguryeo was closer to Japonic than Koreanic

Christopher Beckwith takes some of the strange Goguryeo place-name evidence very seriously.

Very seriously.

(so much so I had to bold "Very seriously")

He argues that the language represented by much of that material was closely related to Japanese, creating a proposed Japanese-Koguryoic family.

That completely rearranges our map.

Instead of Japonic being confined mostly to the south, something Japonic-like would have existed deep into Goguryeo territory.

Highly controversial.

But definitely a theory about what happened.

⇒

Do I buy it? 

I don't even understand it. If you need to contort this much, it probably isn't true, unless it is.

h. The Three Kingdoms were Koreanic, but conquered people who weren't

Another possibility is considerably simpler.

Goguryeo, Baekje and Silla may all have spoken languages belonging broadly to the Koreanic family.

But the territories they eventually controlled had previously contained people speaking Japonic and probably other languages.

The strange place names would therefore not necessarily record the language of Goguryeo's kings.

They might record the languages of the people Goguryeo conquered.

Same evidence.

Very different conclusion.

⇒

Do I buy it? 

Yes???...?... But how is this different from any other thing that was proposed? "People existed, people from the north came and conquered" is different how?

i. Something else was here first

This one seems almost unavoidable.

Before Proto-Koreanic.

Before Proto-Japonic.

Before Mumun.

Before rice farmers.

Before millet farmers.

There were already human beings living in Korea.

They spoke something.

Some theories have tried to connect these vanished languages to Nivkh or other surviving languages of the Amur region. Others simply leave them unidentified.

Maybe every trace disappeared.

Maybe traces survive inside Korean or Japanese and we simply don't recognize them yet.

⇒

Do I buy it? 

Another...Yes???...?... followed by a who the fuck (what the fuck?) was a Nivkh?

j. Japonic has an Austronesian connection

Japanese has also repeatedly been compared with the Austronesian languages of Taiwan, Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

Different versions propose common ancestry, ancient contact, or an Austronesian substrate later combined with a northern language.

None has been demonstrated.

But geographically it asks an interesting question that northern-origin theories sometimes forget:

Japan has an ocean to its south too.

⇒

Do I buy it? 

I do. Those Taiwanese dudes ended up sailing all the way to Madagascar, Japan is a short commute. I don't know anything about Japanese lingistics, but I'm sure they would have some massive questions here. And it doesn't answer where the rest of Japonic came from. The Portuguese word pão crossed into Japanese, then entered Korean as 빵, where it has now entered the Korean vocabulary and soul. Nobody therefore proposes a Proto-Portuguese-Koreo-Japonic language.

k. Korean-Dravidian

And yes.

Tamil.

We already covered this one.

Maybe Korean somehow shares a deeper ancestry with Dravidian languages of India.

The evidence has not convinced historical linguists.

But however unlikely it may be, Homer Hulbert and the scholars who followed him were still asking:

"What happened?"

They weren't trying to annex Chennai.

⇒

Do I buy it? 

I want to so much (but not as much as I want Turkish to be Korean).

- ה -

Group 2. "What do I need to have happened?"

Now the scumbag ideas from scumbag people spouting scumbag ideology. 

Unfortunately, there are a lot of them.

The distinction is important.

These aren't theories that happen to be wrong.

They begin with the answer.

• Japan must have ruled Korea.
• Korea must always have been Korean.
• Goguryeo must belong to China.

Our ancestors must have been greater than your ancestors.

Then they go looking for evidence.

Let's start with the ones from Japan.

a. Mimana Nihonfu (任那日本府; 임나일본부설): Japan once ruled southern Korea

We already met this one.

Ancient Yamato supposedly maintained a colonial administration called the Mimana Nihonfu (任那日本府) in Gaya and southern Korea.

Therefore Japan had ruled Korea before.

Therefore the 1910 annexation wasn't really Japan conquering Korea.

It was, conveniently, Japan coming back.

Versions of ancient Japanese domination of southern Korea became embedded in Japanese colonial historiography and were explicitly connected to imperial expansion.

Funny how history always seems to give fascists exactly the borders they wanted anyway.

⇒

Do I buy it? 

Fuck you and your fucking flag.

b. Empress Jingū conquered Korea

Why stop with Gaya?

The Nihon Shoki tells the story of Empress Jingū (神功皇后) crossing the sea and subjugating the Three Han.

Later imperial historians treated variations of this mythical conquest as actual history, turning Baekje, Silla and Goguryeo into ancient tributaries or subjects of Japan. The story was subsequently incorporated into ideological justifications for Japanese expansion into Korea.

Myth.

↓

History.

↓

Property deed.

Very convenient.

⇒

Do I buy it? 

Of course not. That's like thinking Mad magazine is a history book (or thinking the Bible is literal fact). But it does introduce two books we should look at. the Kojiki (古事記), and the Nihon Shoki (日本書紀).

• Kojiki: 
  Compiled in 712 CE using Chinese characters adapted phonetically for Old Japanese, the Kojiki ("Record of Ancient Matters") is Japan’s oldest surviving text. It was designed primarily as internal political propaganda to legitimize Yamato rule by tracing the imperial bloodline directly to the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. Because it seamlessly blends human events with the literal actions of gods and the magical creation of the islands, it functions as foundational mythology rather than objective history.
• Nihon Shoki:
  Completed in 720 CE in orthodox Classical Chinese, the Nihon Shoki ("Chronicles of Japan") was outward-facing propaganda meant to prove Japan’s civilized antiquity to Tang China and the Korean kingdoms. To match China's deep history, the authors artificially stretched their timeline back to 660 BCE, filling the gaps with mythological emperors who supposedly lived up to 140 years. However, this ahistorical mythology abruptly drops away around the late 6th century, at which point the text transforms into a highly accurate, datable chronicle of court politics and regional diplomacy.

Both read like the Torah and Hegel had a baby. It's Goebbels with a smattering of God.

c. 日鮮同祖論: Koreans and Japanese were always one people

Then somebody noticed a problem.

If Koreans really were a completely separate people, conquering them looked suspiciously like...

conquering them.

Enter Nissen dōsoron (日鮮同祖論), the theory that Japanese and Koreans descended from common ancestors.

Which sounds surprisingly similar to some perfectly legitimate linguistic and genetic questions we've just spent pages discussing.

Except the conclusion was rather different:

We were one people all along, therefore annexation merely reunites us.

This became part of the ideological machinery behind colonial assimilation and eventually 內鮮一體 (naisen ittai), “Japan and Korea as one body.”

Same ancestry question.

Slightly more sinister research objective.

⇒

Do I buy it? 

Fuck no. Of the three Japanese crazy theories, this one is the most insidious. It combines a., b., and c. and says: "We ruled you before. Therefore being ruled by us is like coming home."

Next, the Chinese. Chinese crazy is a little strange. Nationalism and fascism have deep roots in China. Survive as a civilization for over 5,000 years (3,500 according to some folks), and there's a lot to be proud of.

They invented:

• Papermaking (c. 105)
• Printing (c. 600 and 1040 CE)
• Fiat Currency (paper money; 11th Century)
• Gunpowder (9th Century)
• The Magnetic Compass (c. 200 BCE)
• The Seismoscope (earthquake detetector; 132 CE)
• Cast Iron (5th Century BCE)
• The Crossbow (c. 6th Century BCE)
• Landmines and Naval Mines, Watertight Bulkheads, The Stern-Mounted Rudder, The Repeating Crossbow and so much more.

But except for a few cases, excluding the non-Han (漢) dynasties (like the Mongols), Chinese fascism was generally always pointed inwards. It binded. It wasn't designed to project outwards. It converted a lot of who it touched, but they've always maintained a strict separation. Enter China from the outside...you become Chinese. Remain on the outside...you remain non-Chinese. And the Chinese have been generally fine with that.

I am the Center.

You revolve around me.

But the one example I'll introduce below is a little different. It pushes beyond the historical Chinese definition of 'Us'. It's expansionary.  It's State-sponsored. It's pointed at Korea. And surprisingly, I don't fundamentally disagree with it.

d. Goguryeo was Chinese

China's Northeast Project (东北工程; Dōngběi Gōngchéng) placed Goguryeo within the historical development of the Chinese state, with some scholarship describing it as a local ethnic regime within ancient China.

The problem is immediately recognizable.

Modern China exists here.

Goguryeo once existed partly here.

Therefore:

Goguryeo was Chinese.

Oh yeah,

also Gojoseon (古朝鮮), Buyeo (扶餘), and Balhae (渤海). 

You can keep Samhan (which the Japanese crazies claim as theirs).

And so are the myriad of other people that lived, or passed by, the territory of modern day China; the Sushen (肅愼) and Yilou (挹婁), the Mohe (靺鞨), Jurchen (女真) and Manchu (滿洲), Donghu (東胡) and Wuhuan (烏桓), the Xianbei (鮮卑), the Khitan (契丹), and the Xiongnu (匈奴) and countless others.

That projects the modern multiethnic PRC backward into a world where neither the PRC nor anything resembling modern Chinese nationality existed. The resulting Korea-China fight over who “owns” Goguryeo has become one of East Asia's clearest examples of ancient history being mobilized for modern nationalism.

But why did China suddenly care so much about Goguryeo in 2002?

Because this wasn't really about Goguryeo.

It was about the border.

China shares a 1,400-kilometer border with North Korea. On the Chinese side sits Yanbian, home to a large ethnic Korean population. On the other side sits a country that has spent much of the last thirty years periodically looking like it might collapse.

What happens if it does?

• Millions of refugees could move north.
• South Korea could suddenly inherit the entire border.
• A unified Korea could begin looking north at Gando, Manchuria, Goguryeo and Balhae and asking uncomfortable historical questions.
• And millions of ethnic Koreans already living inside China might start asking uncomfortable identity questions of their own.

Suddenly whether Goguryeo was a "foreign Korean kingdom" or a "local kingdom within ancient China" isn't merely an argument between historians.

It potentially says something about:

who belongs where.

So the Northeast Project also served a very modern purpose.

• Lock the northeastern frontier firmly into Chinese history.
• Lock the people living there firmly into the Chinese People.

And make very clear that whatever happens to North Korea:
the border does not move.

⇒

Do I buy it? 

I mostly do. Surprising isn't it? Let me explain.

If you remove Liaoning and the Mongol steppes, and the surrounding people who lived there from Chinese history, you are left with huge gaps.

No Won (元). No North Wei (北魏:), No Qing (清).

You probably won't even have Sui (隋), or Tang (唐).

So of course China absolutely has the right to claim Liaoning and it's people as theirs. But that doesn't mean Korean can't claim Goguryeo, Buyeo, Gojoseon, or Balhae.

I have a daughter who lives in Worchester, MA.

I can't tell my story without her.

I claim her as a party of my 'Us'.

But there are many other who claim her as 'Us'.

Her husband.

Her friends.

Her medical school, her college, her high school.

The city of Worchester.

The state of Massachusetts.

The country of the United States.

Even the Republic of Korea claims her,

along with the millions of Koreans around the world.

Someone else claiming her as 'Us' does not negate my claim of 'Us'.

And this is where I find historians and nationalists weird.

Why do their 'us' have to be exclusionary?

Why can't Goguryeo, Buyeo, Gojoseon, Balhae, Baekje, Shilla, Samhan, Wa, Yamato all be 'Us'?

And finally, the Korean ones.

I put the Korean ones last, not because they are less crazy, they are still a bunch of whackjob theories made by whackjobs, but because as you'll soon see, most of them come into existence as responses to crazy. 

It's reactionary crazy.

e. Korea has always been one People, with one blood, speaking one language

Modern Korean nationalist historiography developed partly in direct response to Japanese attempts to deny Korean national continuity.

Understandable.

But the answer eventually became its own mythology:

One People.

Gojoseon was Korean.

The Samhan were Korean.

Goguryeo was Korean.

Baekje was Korean.

Silla was Korean.

Everybody in the peninsula was Korean.

Everybody spoke some form of Korean.

And eventually we arrive at:

단일민족.

(One People)

One continuous Korean People extending backward into prehistory.

This framework emerged from modern nationalist attempts to establish an ancient, continuous Korean 민족 in opposition to Japanese colonial historiography.

Which creates an obvious problem when archaeology and linguistics begin whispering:

“Ummm...some of those people may have spoken Japonic.”

⇒

Do I buy it? 

Yes. But with a crucial caveat. 

As we've covered many times before, identity is a construct, a belief. It requires only two things.

"I believe I am."

and,

"Yes, I believe you are."

So if someone thinks they are Korean, so be it.

If someone thinks they are not Korean, so be it.

If someone thinks they are a zebra, as long as they find one other person that agrees, so be it.

But identity is a dangerous thing, especially national identity.

One People. One Blood. One Language. None of this is new. It's the nationalistic trifecta introduced in the first post.

Add One Soil, and you get justification.

Add One Destiny, and you get motivation.

Combine Blood, Soil and Destiny and you might get Nazis and Putin. All you need is a bit of Wagner to listen to.

e. Dangun really founded Korea in 2333 BCE (檀君王儉)

///

The Dangunwanggeom (단군왕검) Myth:

According to Korean mythology, the foundation of the first Korean kingdom, Gojoseon, began when Hwanung, the son of the Lord of Heaven, descended to earth with 3,000 followers to bring laws and agriculture to humanity.

While on earth, a bear and a tiger prayed to him to become human, so Hwanung gave them sacred mugwort and garlic and instructed them to remain in a dark cave for 100 days.

The impatient tiger quickly gave up.

The bear persevered and was transformed into a woman named Ungnyeo.

Desiring a child, she prayed beneath a sacred tree. Hwanung took human form and married her, and together they had a son named Dangun Wanggeom, who went on to establish Gojoseon in 2333 BCE and became the legendary founding father of the Korean people.

///

The Dangun story is...wonderful.

It may preserve extraordinary memories of ancient religion, political amalgamation, migration, clans, animals, agriculture, or absolutely none of those things.

We don't know.

But nationalist history sometimes does something much less interesting with it:

2333 BCE happened.

Dangun becomes a literal historical king.

Gojoseon becomes a literal state founded on that date.

And suddenly a medieval foundation myth becomes a timestamp proving the antiquity of the Korean nation.

The archaeology doesn't cooperate.

So the archaeology must obviously be wrong.

2333 BCE would place Gojoseon deep in the Neolithic Age. No China as we would recognize it. No writing in Korea or Manchuria. No bronze swords, fortified Gojoseon capitals, or anything else we normally associate with Gojoseon. Just farming, fishing, and hunter-gatherer communities scattered across the Liao River basin and surrounding plains.

The archaeological world normally associated with Gojoseon appears much later, with Bronze Age societies, chiefdoms, distinctive bronze weapons and eventually something we can plausibly begin calling a state. Korean historical scholarship itself recognizes the enormous chronological problem with treating 2333 BCE as an archaeological foundation date.

⇒

Do I buy it? 

Nope. 

But there is nothing inherently unique, or even wrong, about the Dangun story.

The Jews have Abraham (who apparently also lived for 175 years).

Rome had Romulus and Remus.

Japan had Emperor Jimmu, descended from the gods.

China had the Yellow Emperor.

We all have stories explaining where we came from.

And as long as they point inward, giving people a shared story, a symbol, something ancient to ground themselves in, I don't see anything wrong with that.

Founding myths are not history.

They don't need to be.

Turning one into a literal archaeological date, and then demanding that history conform to it?

Well, that's crazy. 

But we all have the right to be a little crazy in private.

f. 환단고기 (桓檀古記): Korea used to be fucking enormous

<Korea according to the 환단고기>

This is where harmless crazy, becomes uncomfortable.

Why settle for Korea?

According to the nationalist pseudohistorical world surrounding the Hwandan Gogi (환단고기; 桓檀古記), ancient Korean civilization stretches back thousands upon thousands of years and encompasses enormous territories across northern Asia.

Mainstream historians regard the work as a modern pseudograph, pointing among other things to vocabulary and concepts that could not have existed in the periods its supposed ancient texts claim to describe.

But it solves a difficult emotional problem wonderfully:

Why is Korea relatively small today?

Easy.

We used to own everything.

Someone stole it.

Problem solved.

This book, or at least the thoughts behind this book, are unfortunately the center-stone of two active religions in Korea today, with over 100,000 followers. 

The number of Koreans who believe at least some version of the story?

Much larger.

⇒

Do I buy it? 

Hell no. But I do admire the balls.

g. Actually, Japan was the Korean colony (분국설; 分國說)

<분국설 map according historian Kim Seok-hyung>

This is one of my favorites because it is basically Japanese Mimana Nihonfu (任那日本府) reflected in a mirror.

There is overwhelming evidence that people from the Korean Peninsula migrated into ancient Japan.

• Baekje refugees entered Japan in enormous numbers.
• Korean craftsmen, monks, scholars, aristocrats and technologies profoundly influenced the emerging Japanese state.

All fascinating.

Then someone takes one additional step:

Therefore Japan was actually ruled by Koreans.

Sometimes Baekje.

Sometimes Goguryeo.

Sometimes Gaya.

Sometimes apparently whoever happens to be most convenient that afternoon.

Japanese nationalists:

“We ruled you.”

Korean nationalists:

“No, we ruled YOU.”

⇒

Do I buy it? 

I mostly do. But this has more to do with the concept of identity than anything else.

Some uncomfortable truths hiding inside this theory.

1. A Yayoi-period male from Shomura on Iki Island, dated roughly 506–184 BCE, carried:
   Y-DNA O1b2a1a1a
   The 'Korean' and 'Yayoi' paternal gene. His mtDNA marker (the maternal gene: D4) was also continental.
   → Uncomfortable as it sounds, DNA evidence seems to support the crazy.

2. A 2024 whole-genome study of a Yayoi individual from Doigahama found that, among non-Japanese populations, modern Koreans were genetically closest to that individual.
   → The modeling supports a Jomon-related + Korean-related ancestry, and the authors concluded that the majority of continental immigration into Japan from Yayoi through Kofun times probably came primarily from the Korean Peninsula.

3. Archaeological evidence shows that these newly arrived Yayoi people kept going back to Korea.  And then more Koreans came to Japan, for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Historical records show that Baekjae royalty married into the Japanese Imperial family...and probably vice-versa.
   → This means something. It not just "we want to import some shit". It indicates ties beyond stuff. Relationships. Responsibilities. Memories.

4. If we dated the places Yayoi culture appeared using DNA and archaeological evidence, the map increasingly looks like this:
   
   

   
   
   → Uncomfortably similar to the map proposed by Kim Suk-hyung.
   

So, the first Yayoi chiefs/kings were most likely southern Koreans, who had connections and memories back to communities and people back across the strait.

You don't cross the strait alone. You come with your retainers, your followers, your slaves, your tools, your technology, your rice, your pottery...but also your lineage, your responsibilities, and your memories.

Those first people were not 'Koreans', Korea won't exist for a thousand years after, but they also sure weren't 'Japanese', that didn't exist either.

They didn't think:

"I crossed the strait, I'm Japanese now."

They probably thought:

'[Whoever I was in the Korean peninsula], I moved to this island'.

Sort of like; "I'm a Korean-American."

Not quite Korean, not quite American.

A Korean living in America, becoming Americanized, yet retaining something Korean.

So, "Japan was a Korean colony."

⇒

No.

"Early Japanese kings remembered they came from the Korean Peninsula, were part of whatever clan/tribe they were in Korea, spoke a language they spoke where they were in Korea."

⇒

I think this is very possible. If I just think (and feel) like a human being.

So bringing back my Korean-American example,

"If I become the president of the USA, does the US become a Korean colony?"

⇒

Fuck no. That's just crazy.

h. NO. Goguryeo was Korean. And apparently so was half of Manchuria.

Now Korean crazy faces Chinese crazy.

Except the Korean version didn't arise in response to the Northeast Project.

It was already waiting for it.

Decades earlier, Shin Chae-ho (단재 신채호; 1880–1936) had stepped up to the plate.

He saw history fundamentally as a battle between 'I (我) and 'not-I (非我)'. He aggressively dismantled traditional Confucian historical views, shifting the focus away from royal courts and Chinese subservience, and placed the independent Korean nation (Minjok) at the absolute center of the historical narrative. He completely rejected the peninsula-bound view of Korean history. 

He held a profound contempt for Kim Bu-sik, the Goryeo official who authored the Samguk Sagi (삼국사기; History of the Three Kingdoms), viewing him as the architect of Korea's ideological downfall. Unfortunately, the Samguk Sagi is one of Korea's oldest written record of history.

Shin argued that the true historical domain of the Korean people included the vast expanses of Manchuria, tracing a continuous, proud lineage from Gojoseon and Buyeo directly through to Goguryeo and Balhae.

For Shin, Goguryeo was the true, unbroken defender of the Korean People, 민족.

It's power reached as far as the Alashan Mountains (阿拉善山) in Gansu of inner Mongolia.

If he was right, Goguryeo's reach extended some 2,200 kilometers westward.

Goguryeo becomes not merely an important ancestor of later Korean history.

• It becomes a Korean nation-state.
• Its territory becomes Korean territory.
• Its expansion into Manchuria becomes evidence that vast pieces of northeastern China were somehow historically ours.

Chinese nationalists draw modern China backward.

Korean nationalists draw modern Korea outward.

Same marker.

Different map.

Scholars studying the dispute have explicitly described it as a collision of competing nationalisms, not merely an argument over ancient facts.

Later, North Korea decided everyone was thinking too small. They liked Shin Chae-ho's geography, they just didn't like the timeline.

Official North Korean historiography has pushed Goguryeo's founding back from the traditional 37 BCE to 277 BCE, placed a supposed predecessor state (Guryeo) thousands of years earlier, argued that the Han commanderies were always outside the peninsula, and even claimed Goguryeo controlled territory around modern Beijing.

Because apparently the correct amount of Goguryeo is:

more Goguryeo.

⇒

Do I buy it? 

Some of it. Just not most of the history.

Shin was one the first people in Korea to ask:

What is the history of the Korean people themselves?

Not the history of kings, or dynasties, or Chinese dynasties with Korea added on as a side-note. 

The Korean People. That I respect the fuck out of.

And if you think about it, if you're some poor serf living somewhere in the middle of who-knows-where Korea, why would you care who the Emporer of China was?

That's it. All the theories that I could find about where Korean and Japanese language comes from.

And we still don't know where the Korean language came from.

- ה -

A short summary of where we are.

Post 1. Where do Koreans come from? says:

• People” is a constructed identity, not a biological fact.
• Traditional markers of identity constantly contradict one another.
• The dangerous version of identity begins when “Us” requires a “Not-Us.”
• The same machinery can operate in nations, political movements, religions, and even companies.

Post 2. DNA says:

• If I zoom out and look at you as a whole, modern Koreans form a recognizable genetic cluster that can be distinguished from neighboring populations.
• But if I take apart the individual markers that make up that cluster, none of them belongs exclusively to Koreans.
• And when I look at the tiny amount of ancient DNA Korean soil did not eat, I find different combinations of those same ancient lineages appearing, disappearing, moving around, and mixing long before anyone called themselves Korean.
• Even O1b2, one of the paternal lineages most characteristic of modern Koreans, does not show up in the published Korean ancient-DNA record until centuries after people had already been living on the peninsula for thousands of years.

DNA leaves a recognizable modern pattern. But no Korean gene.

Language says:

• Korean belongs to the Koreanic family, but beyond Korean and its close relatives such as Jejuan, I cannot confidently connect it to another surviving language family.
• I can trace modern Korean backward through Middle Korean and, less clearly, into the language of Silla.
• Before that, the trail becomes increasingly uncertain.
• Before Korean became dominant, parts of Korea seem to have spoken Japonic. That language disappeared from Korea, but survived across the sea in Japan.

Language gives us a recognizable modern lineage.

But no clean beginning.

Which leave us with one more place to look.

The ground.

If DNA tells us who had children with whom, and language tells us who learned to speak from whom, archaeology tells us what people actually did.

They built houses.

Buried their dead.

Made pottery.

Farmed millet and rice.

Forged bronze.

Raised fortifications.

Traded with their neighbors.

Killed one another.

And occasionally left enough behind that, thousands of years later, we can still find it.

Then history arrives and lies eloquently about all of it

Finally.

Actual Peoples?

Maybe.

Let's dig.

- ה -