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This article aimes at general survey of the ancient Korean phonology. There are several aspects in the ancient Korean phonology. Namely there are the phonemic system and phonological phenomena. Until these days there are so many unsolved problems in ancient Korean phonology. In this article I tried to present various unsolved problems in the ancient Korean phonology. In the phonemic system, we are not sure whether it is distintive or not distintive of feature of aspiration. And in vowel system it is difficult to point what is the controversial problem, because of so many unsolved problem. About the phonological phenomena, I could explain some historical views in the aspect of phonological change. On this point, the most important thing is the unplosive phenomenon in Korean historical phonology.

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.

There are many unsolved issues in the phonological study of modern Korean period(from 17th century through 19th century). Some of them have not even been discussed yet. Thus, this paper aims to examine and even solve the problems we face in the studies on periodization, the characteristics of Korean historical materials, the correlation between phonological changes and writing, sound changes and phonological changes, the process and pattern of phonological changes, and restructuring of morphemes etc.. The study of phonological history of modern Korean inevitably has some limits in its achievements, because it tries to rebuild the spoken Korean through the written materials. However, the documents written in modern Korean, Hangeul, the Korean writing system, provide us with good materials for the study of phonological history of Modern Korean. It is because the writing in these documents not only keeps stable correspondence between letters and sounds, with various forms, but also it is free from artificial rules of orthography. The study of phonology of Modern Korean, however, has not produced satisfactory achievements. The reason is because their study of phonological changes, based on neo-grammarians' 'hypothesis of regularity with no exception,' has focused mainly on the beginning and ending periods of those changes, and as a result it has paid little attention to the real process of the changes. As Wang(1960)'s 'lexical diffusion' and Kiparsky(1995)'s 'lexical analogy' suggest, the written documents clearly prove that the factors of time and process are important.' In study of phonological changes, therefore, we should pay much more consideration to the process of the changes and the characteristics of each stage. To clarify the process of the phonological changes, we need to use the method of quantitative study which focuses on the frequency of each example, as well as the existing method which focuses on the relations of phonemes and their qualitative changes. It will give us an objective picture of the process of phonological changes in Modern Korean, through assorting the patterns of change. If we can explain the mechanism of change in each pattern which reflects the process of various changes, we will be able to contribute to illuminating the generality and particularity of phonological changes in Modern Korean.

In general it is said that the starting point of present-day Korean is the threshold of 20th century. It seems that there are many criteria drawing a line between the modern Korean and present-day Korean. But as to the phonological area, features distinguishing present-day Korean from modern Korean have not been presented sufficiently. The monophthongization of ‘oy, uy’ is the most characteristic change, but less important. The method for the historical phonology of present-day Korean is different from that of the earlier period of Korean. For example, the records of documents is the most important in the study of middle Korean or modern Korean. But it is no longer valid for the present-day Korean. In contrast with earlier Korean, the field work of dialects are the core in the present-day Korean. In addition, language norm affects phonological changes more vigorously.

The early modern Korean times is one of the most greatest change of Korean language. Data of this time is marked by the diversity of critical apparatus. We have to take care of handling of documents, especially classical novels, newspapers, buddhist scriptures, and Confucian classics. Our fellow humans from the early modern period of Korean have a notion of 5 parts of speech, a substantive(noun, pronoun, numeral), an inflected word(verbs, adjectives), a modifier(adverb), a relatives(particle), and absolute(an interjection). This speech recognition is ultramodern recognition. Change from tone language to non-tone language can happen for the historical reason. The descendants of tone language speaker assimilated into the non tone language, Seoul speech

It is worth keeping an eye on EonhaeTaesanjibyo(諺解胎産集要) edited by a famous royal doctor, Heo-Jun(許浚) in the beginning of the 17th century in that this book shows nicely the linguistic aspects of the initial stage of Modern Korean and once in a blue moon it belongs to the medical texts relevant to obstetrics and gynecology in Joseon dynasty. In this paper I treat with mainly four kinds of contents about EonhaeTaesanjibyo(諺解胎産集要) as follows: ⅰ)orthographic features, ⅱ) phonological features, ⅲ)grammatical features, ⅳ)lexical features. On the whole these linguistic features of this book are thought of reflecting the aspects of the initial stage of Modern Korean. Further studies of EonhaeTaesanjibyo(諺解胎産集要) enable us to come to know how the linguistic features in Middle Korean changed into that of Modern Korean and to lighten the aspects of new change in Modern Korean. I hope that the serious and active studies about individual historical documents of Korean language will go on.

Middle Korean verb ‘urɨda’ has many meanings which we didn’t find for a long time. These meanings are as follows; 1) roar 2) neigh or bellow 3) spout 4) shout 5) warble loudly. It seems that they don’t have relation each other. So it is difficult to catch their meaning’s similarity. But this problem has been origned from very long differentiation process. ‘Urɨda’ has vanished before current century. And it has been changed to 'ulda' which means weep or chirp for some usage. The reason of this change is the similar sound of inflection of ‘urɨda’ and ‘ulda’. To put it concretely, the similar of ‘uleo’ and ‘ureo’. We can find the traces of ‘urɨda’ among some modern Koeran words. They are as follows; ‘ure’(thunder), 'urɨrɨ'(clattering or all in a group), 'urɨrɨng'(booming), 'ɨrɨreong'(growling) and 'ɨrɨrda'(scare). ‘Ule’(modern Korean 'ure') has been regarded as derivative combining of 'ul-'(verb stem) and ‘-ke’(suffix). But from a semantic point of view, there is every possibility that ‘ule’ has been origined form not ‘ulda’ but ‘urɨda’.

The purpose of this thesis is to find out an editor and the time for InEoDaeBang(隣語大方) stored in Kyujanggak, about which we have not known its editor and the time at which the book was edited. Hyeon, Gyegeun(玄啓根), a Japanese interpretor was an editor of Inoedaebang according to SeoGoSeoMok(書庫書目) which is Korean book list of Kyujanggak. This thesis summed up his life and estimated the time at which he edited InEoDaeBang. As a result, we came to conclusion that the time traced back to 1781-1789 shall be corrected to around 1774-1776 and his draft was printed by Choi, Kiryeong(崔麒齡), a Japanese interpretor in 1790 and it is InEoDaeBang currently stored in Kyujanggak. And also, we noted that Cheonnyeong Hyeon's Family(川寧玄氏家) matters are described in detail in JoSeonEoYeok(朝鮮語譯) stored in Japan's Waseda University and found out JoSeonEoYeok was deeply related to InEoDaeBang.