Ju Si-gyeong (December 22, 1876 - July 27, 1914) was one of the founders of modern Korean linguistics. His courtesy name was Sangho (상호 ; 相鎬). He was born in Bongsan Prefecture (봉산군 ; 鳳山郡), Hwanghae Province. He and his students helped standarize Korean, based on the vernacular spelling and grammar.

He studied the Chinese language from his childhood. After studying modern linguistics in Seoul, he established the Korean Language System Society (조선문동식회; 朝鮮文同式會) in 1896. He hosted several seminars in the National Language Discussion Centre of the Sangdong Youth Academy (상동청년학원국어강습소; 尚洞青年學院國語講習所).

He proposed that the Korean parts of speech include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, unconjugation adjectives (관형사 ; 冠形詞), auxiliaries (조사 ; 助詞), conjunction, exclamations, and stop word (?) (종지사 ; 終止詞).

In his 1914 publication, Sounds of the Language, he promotes writing Hangul horizontally rather than syllabically. This is one of his few proposals not to have been implemented.

Publications

• The National Language Classical Phonetics (국어문전음학 ; 國語文典音學) (1908): based on his lecture notes
• An Introduction to the National Language (국문초학 ; 國文初學) (1910)
• An Introduction to the Chinese Language (한문초습 ; 漢文初習) ()
• Sounds of the Language (말의 소리) (1914)
• The Grammar of the National Language (국어문법 ; 國語文法) ()
• The History of the Downfall of Vietnam (월남망국사 ; 越南亡國史) (1907)

Miscellaneous

Ju Si-gyeong coined the name "Hangul" to identify the unique Korean writing system, which had existed for many centuries under several other names until then.

His name is sometimes written without the disambiguity hyphen: Ju Sigyeong and Chu Sigyong. In this case, they are often mispronounced as Sig-yeong and Sig-yong respectively.

See also

• List of Korea-related topics

External links

• 주시경 (Ju Si-kyeong) (in Korean) a biography with a photo