A Comparative Study of Sino-Korean and Chinese: the Reconstruction of the Middle Korean Consonants

Recent research on Cantonese has shown that Cantonese, a major dialect group Yue spoken in the Southern regions of China, retains phonological features that are close to Old Chinese rather than that of Middle Chinese. Consequently, its role in the study of historical development of Chinese and reconstruction of the sounds becomes crucial, and its relations to Korean and Japanese draws attention to the reconstruction of the sounds in Chinese, Korean and Japanese. The present study has identified some crucial phonological features in the Middle Korean on the basis of Cantonese resources and would propose to reconstruct the original sounds in the Korean alphabet, promulgated in 1446, using the Cantonese and other Chinese resources to achieve a better understanding of the sound change in both Korean and Chinese. Thus, the present study will provide an important etymological and phonological link between Chinese and Korean with the Cantonese resources that have been neglected in the previous studies, and contribute to the reconstruction of Korean and Chinese with new Cantonese sources.