Organizer: Ross P. King, University of British Columbia

Chair: John B. Whitman, Cornell University

Discussants: Ross P. King, University of British Columbia, John B. Whitman, Cornell University

The interplay of cosmopolitan and vernacular language and writing in Korea and Japan is intimately tied with the histories in each country of textual ‘pointing’: the annotation, whether by stylus-induced, Braille-type markings or by brush and ink, of texts in Literary Sinitic.

The Japanese methods of text pointing, collectively referred to as kunten, are relatively well attested and well studied, if underappreciated outside of Japan itself. Less well-known and completely unappreciated outside of Korea is the fact that Korea, too, had a long history of textual pointing, called kugyol. Recent discoveries of kugyol- marked texts from the Koryo dynasty (918-1392) have forced a complete rethinking of the history of writing in both Korea and Japan, and have also led to unprecedented collaborative research between scholars in Korea and Japan.

This panel will introduce for the first time to a North American audience the main features of Japanese kunten and Korean kugyol. The panel centers around presentations by the two foremost and most senior scholars of these two traditions: Nam P’ung-hyon, Professor Emeritus of Dan’gook University in Seoul and Kobayashi Yoshinori, Professor Emeritus of Hiroshima University. Each will speak for 40 minutes in Korean and Japanese, respectively, with the Korean/Japanese and English versions of their papers projected simultaneously onto two different screens via LCD projectors. Ross King (University of British Columbia) and John Whitman (Cornell University) will serve as Chair and Discussant, respectively, and each speak for 10 minutes, leaving 20 minutes for questions and discussion.

Pung-hyun Nam, Dankook University

Professor Nam discovered and deciphered in the mid-1970s the first example of a Koryo-dynasty kugyol-marked text—a fragment of the Kuyok Inwanggyong (Benevolent King sutra). For some two decades, this fragment remained the only known example of pre-Choson (and hence, pre-alphabetic, the Korean vernacular script being invented in early Choson) kugyol, until four other Buddhist texts with ink markings surfaced in the 1990s. The newly discovered texts vindicated much of Nam’s earlier work, and opened up new vistas on many fronts—especially Korean historical linguistics and Buddhist textual interpretation.

Professor Nam will start by introducing and illustrating an overall typology of Korean kugyol based on the word order observed (Korean vs. Chinese) and the writing utensils used (stylus vs. brush and ink). Buddhist texts with interpretive kugyol (which translates a hanmun text into Korean with Korean word order) exist from the 10th to 13th centuries, while texts with sequential kugyol (which adds markers to a text meant to be read while observing the original Chinese word order) are attested later, from the 13th century to the 20th.

Professor Nam will conclude by summarizing the arguments behind his important claim that Koryo-dynasty interpretive kugyol materials represent "Old Korean" – i.e., a language significantly different from the "Late Middle Korean" represented in the earliest texts in the new vernacular script from the 15th century.

Yoshinori Kobayashi, Hiroshima University

Professor Kobayashi is the author of numerous works on kunten studies, and is the foremost expert on kakuhitsu kunten, or text markings made with a stylus. After first discovering kambun texts in Japan with stylus annotations in 1961, Kobayashi claimed for decades that these markings were a uniquely Japanese invention that had led to the development of kana. But when, in 2000, Kobayashi’s long experience with stylus-pointed kunten texts in Japan that led him to suspect that texts with similar markings might exist in Korea, he discovered the first Koryo-era stylus-marked kugyol texts in Seoul’s Song’am Rare Book Museum.

Professor Kobayashi will outline the history of kunten studies in Japan and the importance of kunten studies for Japanese linguistics and cultural history; make comparative remarks on pointing in the Sinosphere in general, then discuss and illustrate his discovery that the earliest 9th century Japanese pointed texts use basically the same pointing system as 13th c. Korean stylus-marked kugyol texts, suggesting that the system was transmitted from Korea, probably by Hwaom-gyo clerics at Toudaiji.