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In this video/article let’s talk about an old book. The reason why I’m going to share this book. Because this is a very precious series book in Ancient Korea and the earliest version of this series might be more than 500 years old. Meanwhile it also is a book to study the language development of hundreds of years ago. But today I’m only a beginner in the Korean alphabet and honestly I still can’t know the grammar of Modern Korean. So this video/article also is a preliminary study. Ok now what is this book? And this is Nogeoldae (老乞大/노걸대) and Old Cathayan in English.

Why did this Book Have This Name?

When I first heard about this book, I just wondered why this book had such a name and even this name is a little bit weird. But after knowing the original source I finally can understand it more.

The term geoldae (乞大/걸대). It should be from Middle Chinese pronunciation: kʰi.tai. But compared with the Korean “geoldae” and the Middle Chinese kʰi.tai, it seems that both pronunciations are not really same. So maybe we should further study this point in the future about the original source of “geoldae”. Overall, basically this word “geoldae” probably was a transliteration of "Khitan", which was the rulers of northern China during the Liao dynasty so the Liao Dynasty also had another name, the Khitan State. At first, this term probably referred to the ancient people who lived in Northern China in the geography of nowaday. Gradually this term later became a general designation for China and the Chinese people. Thus, geoldae(乞大/걸대) refers to the Chinese, while no(老/노), since the Tang dynasty, has been used as a prefix to convey familiarity or affection.

History

The development of Nogeoldae closely followed the evolution of spoken Chinese and societal needs, undergoing multiple revisions and forming several versions.

The first edition should be from the Mid-14th Century. The first Nogeoldae was originally compiled in 1346 by a Goryeo merchant. It served as a key textbook for learning language in the Yuan dynasty so the Mongolian language version and probably the language version of the ancient northern Chinese during the Yuan Dynasty just appeared.

By the 15th century, Goryeo became Joseon and it became a required text for Joseon interpreters. The version closest to the original, dated to the early 15th century, was rediscovered in 1998 in Daegu by bibliographers.

In 1483, Nogeoldae continued changing. The feature of this revision was to reflect and align the Ming Mandarin Chinese language. It said that it was a Chinese scholar to do this revision project. https://book.douban.com/subject/1241787/

In the 16th Century, based on the last version, Choe Sejin(최세진/崔世珍), who was a Korean linguist, and a translator and interpreter of the Chinese language during the Joseon Dynasty, created the Translated Nogeoldae in the early 16th century. This version annotated Chinese pronunciation in Hangul and translated it into Korean colloquial language.

In 1670, the Bureau of Interpreters published the Hangul annotated version [《노걸대언해》(老乞大諺解)], which updated the pronunciations and translations to reflect the linguistic norms of the 17th century and also there were a Pyongyang version that was specially published in Pyongyang in 1745.

In 1761 and also in the Qing dynasty-era, Nogeoldae continued updating and revising because the Korean language and the Mandarin Chinese were still changing as well. In order to reflect the Mandarin Chinese in the Qing Dynasty there were seravel newer versions that came in published in the Qing dynasty-era and even also added a new language version and this is the Manchu language version.

The Languages of This Book

So during such many versions in more than 500 years, this series book also recorded many languages. First of all, there were Middle Korean and Early Modern Korean. Then the corresponding translated language had the Ming Dynasty Mandarin Chinese, the Qing Dynasty Mandarin Chinese and Mongolian, Manchu language. It said there was a Japanese version but this version might not be included in Nogeoldae series but it might be included into other korean translation books.

Here I want to share one of the versions of the books. This is the Manchu version. Because this book was published in the 18th century, this Korean was the Early Modern Korean. At least, based on the good results of google translate, I think Early Modern Korean may be really similar to Modern Korean, except for the modern vocabulary and some popular expressions.

Additionally, I have compared the Manchu version with the Chinese version. I found 2 interesting parts. One, the text dialogos was the same. In other words, This series book used the same Korean text and the people translated into different versions. Some later versions even had pronunciation marks that were marked by Hangul. Like in this Chinese version every Chinese character had a pronunciation mark and in the Manchu version the situation is the same, every Manchu word had a pronunciation mark as well. Then the other part is the reading direction. Because the Han Chinese and Korean reading directions are the same, from the up to down and from the right to left, this bilingual book still kept this reading direction. But the Manchu reading direction is the same as the Mongolian reading direction so it was read from up to down but from left to right. Therefore in the Manchu-Korean bilingual book all of the reading order was the Manchu order so not only the Korean text but also the Manchu text, both text was reading from up to down and from left to right.