A History of the Korean Language

Publication of A History of the Korean Language, a collaboration of two eminent linguists, is a notable event in the field of Korean linguistics. This book, as acknowledged in the postscript, is in large part based on the first author's canonical book entitled Kugŏ-sa kaesŏl [Introduction to the history of the Korean language], first published in 1961 and seeing its seventeenth edition in 2007. It is no exaggeration to assert that over the past half century, linguists working on any historical aspect of the Korean language have resorted to the authority of his book, particularly for the reliable data carefully chosen from a multitude of original Middle Korean sources as well as for its cogent analysis of Middle Korean phonology/morphology and subsequent linguistic changes. Even as one of the major East Asian languages, the history of Korean is severely underrepresented in the West, and I feel that translation of...