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The purpose of this paper is to study the language of Goguryeo, which was established around A.D. 0, dominated the northern part of Korean Peninsula as well as the Manchuria, stood against Chinese dynasties such as Sui and Tang, and was finally overthrown by Silla-Tang alliance. This paper tries to be faithful to the actual data, and to seek a comparative study based on linguistic theory.
The data of this study are the place names in Goguryeo from Samguk Sagi, Samguk Yusa, Goryeosa as well as Chinese history book. Based on the data, this paper reconstructs the language of Goguryeo and interprets the meaning of the language.
Among many theories on the origin of Japanese language, one of the most plausible one is that Japanese language is branched from Korean language.
Where Japanese language originated and what language family it belongs to are still highly controversial issues. Up to now, many studies have tried to figure out the origin of Japanese language. As the idea of Goguryeo language becomes more and more concrete, more studies purpose to find out cognitive words from Goguryeo and Japanese language. As a result, the hypothetical Japanese-Goguryeo family of languages is gaining its power.
The corpus of Goguryeo language from the ancient history books of Korea and neighboring nations consists of words and grammatical morphemes with clear annotations. There are total 139 entries, which can be proven to be the language of Goguryeo including some of known borrowed words. Most of the entries have the same etymological origin as Japanese words. However, the data of Goguryeo language are mostly composed of fragmentary vocabulary, which
makes it difficult to reconstruct the Japanese-Goguryeo family of languages.
Unless more supplementary data are discovered in the future, the reconstruction of the Japanese-Goguryeo family of languages will never be as simple as that of Germanic family of languages.
This study criticizes the previous studies which interprets the Chinese characters that transcribed Goguryeo language based on the reconstructed ancient Chinese. Instead, this study concludes that the interpretation of Chinese transcription of Goguryeo’s place names in Samguk Sagi, the Geography Book, and Chinese ancient history books should be based on the ancient and medieval Chinese, especially the northern-eastern accent of Chinese of Tang. This accent
is proven to be connected with the language of Silla, as well as the ancient Japanese language. This calls for further research, since it is necessary to find out whether the similarity between the languages of Silla and Goguryeo is due to etymology or convergence, or the language contact.