gugyeol

Gugyeol is a traditional Korean system for glossing Classical Chinese texts so that Korean readers could read them using Korean grammar. It emerged in medieval Korea and provides Korean inflectional endings, particles, and other grammatical functions alongside or between Chinese characters. The notation acts as a guide to reconstruct the Korean sentence order from a Chinese source, effectively bridging Chinese written culture and the Korean vernacular.

The gugyeol system uses a limited set of markers, sometimes written as small signs or syllables placed around Chinese characters. These markers indicate how Korean elements attach to the Chinese text, showing where particles, endings, or function words should be inserted to form a coherent Korean sentence. While the primary text remains Chinese, gugyeol supplies the necessary Korean grammatical framework to interpret it.

Gugyeol was widely used in educational, scholarly, and bureaucratic settings to study Chinese classics and literature. It existed alongside other traditional Korean notational practices such as idu and hyangchal, and there were regional and institutional variations in how the signs were written and interpreted. The practice flourished before the widespread adoption of Hangul, which later reduced the practical need for gugyeol.

With the invention of Hangul in the 15th century, gugyeol gradually declined as a everyday writing practice, though it continued in some scholarly and ecclesiastical contexts for centuries. Today, gugyeol is of interest to linguists and historians as a key source for understanding historical Korean syntax, Sino-Korean translation practices, and the way Korean readers engaged with Chinese literature in pre-modern Korea.