earticle

영어

The research on Middle Korean phonology starts from the interpretation on the records of Hunminjeoneum and the written documents of Middle Korean. But the written documents do not give us accurate information on the sounds of Middle Korean phonemes. So we must keep in mind that the results of these methodology are always inconclusive. In this paper some problems of the arguments that have confirmed the phonological value of the vowel 'ㆍ' and the consonants 'ㅇ', 'ㅸ' and 'ㅅ'-compound consonants of Middle Korean are investigated. In this paper it is also argued that the tonal system of 15th century is morpheme-based tonal system and the morpheme tonal system had changed to the pitch accent system in 16th century.