http://www.koreansentry.com/ is that infamous bastion of Korean hypernationalists on the internet who use English (strangely enough) to communicate. These are R5s for a few comments from that forum (that should be solely from May 2015, hence the title) just to skim the surface of the endless pit of nationalist bullshit they have there. It's a bit long, so don't feel obliged to read to the end.
I'll focus only on English-language content directly on the forum, directly relating to history, and posted only on May 2015. No bad history in the Korean language, nor links to youtube or other blogs, nor bad science or bad lingustics.
I'll also consistently use the term "Manchuria", which I've heard may be offensive to some people because of connotations with Manchukuo. It is also definitely anachronistic. But the other options are "Northeast China" which is even more anachronistic and needlessly confusing in a historic context (i.e. Hebei, not Manchuria, would be northeast China during the Song) or something overly wordy like "Amur-Liao Drainage Area" (which I've never heard anyone use anyways).
Qin never built Greatwall [sic] it was built during North Song Dynasty to stop the nomadic incursion into Yellow river
Well, not quite. I quote from The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth by Arthur Waldron:
It should be clear, first of all, that no "Great Wall" anything like our modern conception of it existed in ancient times. Before the sixteenth century, walls in China were of a modest scale, and eroded easily. Furthermore, they followed no single route, but rather a series of different ones, according to the defense needs of the dynasties that built them. One makes sense of them by looking at each against the background of the strategic and political challenges of the dynasty that built it, not by linking them all together into [one] single mystical structure.
See also this map of fortifications in northern China and the steppes further north.
It's not quite accurate to say that Qin Shi Huang built the Great Wall, since its current form in the popular imagination is almost entirely a product of Ming effort. Qin fortifications would have been much less grand, being largely earthen fortifications easy to build, and the Qin built on top of a basis of previously existing networks. But it's simply ridiculous to claim that the Northern Song Dynasty built it; the northern fortifications built by the Northern Song were not nearly as comparable to the Ming Great Wall and in fact similar to previous fortifications in the region.
Ancient Chinese records indicates ancient Chaoxian (Korean) was made up by Mo [Maek] tribes as well and even Samguk Sagi have passage where Baekje, Gaya and Silla being Mo tribe descendants but some Korean scholars claimed this Mo tribe as Hmong but it wasn't it was the related to Murong Xianbei tribe.
Some background information for those not acquainted with Korean history. The History of Korea by Djun Kil Kim is an awfully short (IMO) but decent English introduction as our book list says so it's worth a read.
"Chaoxian" here refers to Gojoseon, generally considered the first Korean state. Gojoseon's original center of power appears to have been in southwestern Manchuria until they were pushed into northern Korea as a result of Chinese aggression. It was finally conquered by Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty in 108 BC, and Chinese commanderies were established over it.
The next stage in Korean history is the Proto-Three Kingdoms era when most of the peninsula was dotted by states or alliances between chiefdoms; we know a lot about most of them thanks to Chinese sources.
From the third century onwards Korean polities gradually centralized with Chinese influence. Goguryeo expanded into most of southern Manchuria and northern Korea, while the confederations of chiefdoms in southern Korea morphed into full-fledged states, Baekje in the west and Silla in the east. The chiefdoms in the lower Nakdong River Valley remained a comparatively loose confederacy of statelets - known as Gaya - which was eventually completely annexed by Silla in the sixth century. In the seventh century there was generally a balance of power in Korea between the Three Kingdoms - Goguryeo, Baekje and Silla - while the former was involved in grueling wars with Chinese dynasties. Eventually Silla and the Tang Dynasty allied to defeat Goguryeo and Baekje for once and for all, and when Silla thwarted Tang ambitions to directly rule over all of the peninsula and succeeded in retaining its sovereignity as a tributary state of China ruling the southern two-thirds of Korea, the Three Kingdoms Period of Korean history is considered to have come to an end.
"Mo" here refers to 貊 or Maek, an ethnic group/ethnic groups inhabiting Manchuria and northern Korea simultaneously with the Han Dynasty and before. We know little for sure about the Maek, and contradictions in Chinese sources don't help. Although there is a general consensus that the Maek were one of the ancestral cultures tp modern Koreans along with other peoples such as the Ye or the Han, the assuredness displayed here that Gojoseon, Baekje, Silla and Gaya were definitely all completely Maek is a horribly arrogant position to take especially when much of it is arrogantly...wrong.
Chinese records do say that the Maek people were part of the Gojoseon/Chaoxian polity. But much of what's said here about the Samguk Sagi is just plain wrong. As for Silla the Sagi just says that people from Gojoseon lived in the Gyeongju Valley prior to the formation of Silla as a state; see here if you read Korean for the primary source. It never actually says that these Gojoseon inhabitants were Maek. I'll try my hand at a non-literal translation of the original source with some excerpting:
The progenitor [of the kingdom] was surnamed "Bak" and named "Hyeokgeose." He was crowned in the Bingchen day of April of the Jiazi year or the first year of Wufeng during the reign of the Emperor Xiaoxuan of the Early Han [BC 57] and was called the Geoseogan. His age was thirteen, and he took Seonabeol [cognate with modern Korean seoul "capital" and beol "field"] as the name of his country. Prior to this, emigrants from Joseon had formed six settlements in the valleys, and these were called the Six Towns of Jinhan; Yangsan on the Al River, Goheo on Mount Dol, Jinji on Mount Chwi, Daesu on Mount Mu, Gari on Mount Geum, and Goya on Mount Myeonghwal. Sobeol, chieftain of Goheo, looked at the slopes of Mount Yang and saw a horse kneeling and weeping in the bushes besides the Na Well, but when he went the horse was gone and there was a large egg. When he split open the egg there was a baby within. He raised the child and at the age of ten the child was wise and skillful. The people of the Six Towns who had venerated and respected the child for his miraculous birth so made him their king. The Jin[han] people called a squash bak and because the egg [he was born in] had been like a squash they gave him "Bak" as his surname.1 Geoseogan in the Jin language means king.
But what's even more ridiculous is the claim that the Sagi says that the Gaya chiefdom/statelet confederation was Maek. Besides the fact that the Sagi hardly discusses Gaya at all, our actual main source for Gaya myths, the Samguk Yusa, states the following (my translation to get the gist of it across rather than a literal translation, see the original Chinese and a Korean translation here):
Since the creation of the world this land had had no name for a country nor for kings and officials. There were only nine gan: the Ado Gan, the Yeodo Gan, the Pido Gan, the Odo Gan, the Yusu Gan, the Yucheon Gan, the Sincheon Gan, the Ocheon Gan and the Shingwi Gan. These chieftains ruled over a hundred towns and 75000 people. Most lived in the mountains and the plains, drinking in wells and tilling the fields. [In 42 AD] there was a strange sound like a call from the Guji Peak north of the land, and two or three hundred people gathered there. They heard a voice like that of a person but without a body. The voice asked, "Are there people here?" The nine gan replied, "There are us." The voice came again, "Where am I?" The nine gan replied, "You are on the Guji Peak." The voice said, "Heaven has made me descend here to found a new country and to be its king. If the next day you dig in the earth top of the peak while dancing and chanting 'Turtle, turtle, take out your head, if you do not take it out we will cook you and eat you' the great king shall come and you shall dance in joy."
The nine did as they said and all danced and chanted. Soon when they looked up on the sky violet ropes fell from the sky and touched the earth. At the end of the ropes there was a golden chest wrapped in crimson cloth. When they opened it there were six golden eggs round as the sun. [...] Twelve days later at dawn many people gathered again to open the chest again and saw that the six eggs had become fair children. [...] The fifteenth of that month they all became kings of Gaya.
We see from this myth that the Nakdong River Valley was inhabited and ruled by local chieftains or gan and that the first Gaya kings are never stated to be Maek individuals - or even humans, for that matter, since they hatched from golden eggs and one of the six supposedly lived to the age of 157. While the myth has been interpreted as symbolic of historic events, nowhere in any primary source does it ever say that the Gaya confederation was composed of "Maek tribe descendants".
The Maek were not Xianbei, Murong or otherwise. The Xianbei were probably a para-Mongolic people speaking a Mongolic language. The Maek spoke a language belonging to Koreanic or possibly Tungusic or other language groups existing northeast of China. They almost certainly did not speak a Mongolic language.
Baekje's Buyong vassal Tammora aka Taiwan
Tammora actually refers to Jeju island (see this) and is probably cognate with modern Korean seomnara "island country." There is no evidence that Baekje had any sort of influence whatsoever in ancient Austronesian Taiwan. As explained here Taiwan was undergoing a peaceful transition to the Iron Age at Baekje's epogee, and most Chinese trade goods discovered on the island date no further back than the Tang Dynasty. There is no evidence that Taiwanese chieftains were vassals to a kingdom far far away, particularly considering their isolation from China, just across the channel.
Maek is another name for Balk not Mo
No. I don't know what the "Balk" even are, and they do not seem to exist based on my google searches. But 貊 is pronounced mo in Mandarin and maek in Korean, and the Maek are the only people with a name remotely similar to mo that played a major role in ancient Korean history. Maybe "Consoleman" realized he knew shit about ancient Korea and tried to save face with this.
Let's summarize the Gojoseon's location:
1. Shang period - Gojoseon was divided into nine Dongyi nations and stretched far as Shandong
2. Zhou Dynasty period - Gojoseon was at Hebei-Liaoxi-Inner Mongolia
3. Revolt at Hebei region made Gojoseon to relocate to the East, Hebei became control by Xiongnu
4. Yan attacked Donghu and Gojoseon and taken Liaoxi from Gojoseon
5. Han attacked Gojoseon again and re-take control over Liaoxi
1) There's no evidence for a polity identifiable as Gojoseon that existed in the Shandong peninsula during the Shang period. Now, there is evidence that Shandong was inhabited by people their western neighbors saw as Dongyi or "Eastern Barbarians". From The Archaeology of China: From the Late Paleolithic to the Early Bronze Age, emphases mine
In the late Shang oracle-bone inscriptions the name "Renfang" was used to refer to the region, in south Shandong and north Jiangsu, of alien people whom the Shang kings waged wars. It is also commonly believed that the characters "Ren" in the late Shang inscriptions and "Yi" [the second character in the compound Dongyi] in Zhou and Han documents refer to the same people, who resided to the east. Accordingly, peoples identified by the Zhou as residing to the east were also commonly called Dongyi ("Eastern Barbarian"). Many Chinese archaeologists often use the term Dongyi to refer to the Yueshi culture. Apparently, these Yi peoples did not belong to a single ethnic group.
But KoreaSentry here committed the horrible sin of thinking that "Dongyi" was a singular ethnic group that was the ancestor of one modern ethnic group. Dongyi were not Japanese. Dongyi were not Koreans. Dongyi was simply a catch-all term for eastern peoples alien to China, a term that had little regard for cultural, linguistic, or political differences within the Dongyi. For example, a good third of one of the volumes of Records of the Three Kingdoms (not to be confused with a later novel of a similar title) is solely about the Dongyi. But these "Dongyi" include Tungusic speakers, Koreanic speakers, and Japonic speakers; they include hunter-gatherers, millet farmers, and rice farmers; they include full-fledged kingdoms and loose organizations of chiefdoms. The people who resided in Shandong during Shang days and the people who resided in Korea during Han days were both called Dongyi, but all that tells us is that they lived east of "China" and that they were considered barbaric, both of which we knew.
2) and 3) There's no archaeological or historical evidence for this. Archaeologically, Gojoseon sites are distinguished by characteristic "northern"2 dolmen tombs and by distinct bronze daggers. This map of their distribution doesn't seem to be completely accurate, but it should suffice. Here the blue leaf-like shapes represent sites with a large number of bronze daggers, and the grey stone-like shapes are major dolmen complexes. Clearly you should notice that most dolmen complexes are in Korea or southern Manchuria, and that the significant majority of bronze daggers were also found east of the Liao River. And besides, the Hai Basin which is essentially most of Hebei is packed with Shang sites, not Gojoseon sites. Archaeology is completely inconsistent with the claim that Gojoseon was centered west of the Liao.
4) and 5) all derive from 2). But I also want to make a general point about a claim circulating nowadays among nationalist Koreans that in the 7th century BC, the "Liao River" referred to the Luan River. This is used to "prove" that Liaodong in ancient Chinese texts was not this but this. This is fallacious in many ways. First, the two sources usually given are an anthology of anecdotes and tales and an obscure volume on geography. As aforementioned, archaeology does not support the existence of a significant non-Chinese polity west of the Liao during the Warring States period, while it does support the existence of one east of the Liao. And even if we do assume the Luan was called the Liao in the 7th century, Liao simply means "faraway" and Liaohe is literally "the river faraway." Therefore it's only natural that even had the Luan been the Liao of the 7th century BC, 400 years later when the Luan region had adjoined the center of a major Warring State it makes sense that the river called "the river faraway" by that point would have gone further east.
Korean nationalists love using obscure and often contradictory Chinese texts while hardly mentioning archaeological evidence. I'm never sure exactly why.
These are enough for this one thread, I think. Let's move on to another one...
1 Although bak does indeed mean "squash" in modern Korean and presumably Old Korean as well, this etymology is probably wrong. The surname Bak, more familar to most people as "Park", probably derives from the word for "bright" which in early modern Korean was balgda with the -da being a verbal suffix.
2 "Northern" dolmen tombs have been found on the southernmost parts of the Korean peninsula, vice versa for "southern" dolmen tombs.
OMG THE CHINESE ARE "BASTARDIZING" CHINESE HISTORY
He was claiming that Kublai Khan attacked China and taken control over Beijing and northern states and I was little confused as when Kublai Khan seized control over Beijing, this city was already occupied by Jurchen Jin Dynasty not Chinese dynasty and Chinese Song Dynasty was at far south when this happened.
Alright. Both the drama and "Consoleman" are egregiously wrong because Genghis Khan had already conquered the city of Zhongdu (what would later be Beijing) decades before Kublai Khan was already born. When the Jin emperor moved south to the city of Kaifeng, defended by the Yellow River, the former Jin capital of Zhongdu was quickly besieged by Genghis. After several failed attempts to breach the defensive walls of the city the Mongols decided to let Zhongdu starve to defeat. The commander of the Jin forces fled to join his emperor in Kaifeng in June 1215, and soon after it fell to the Mongols. This is a basic event of Genghis's conquests and it's incredible that the moderator of a forum supposedly about East Asian history doesn't know about this.
It seems Chinese are trying to paint Liao, Jin and Yuan Dynasty as Chinese dynasties.
For those not versed in Chinese history, the Liao Dynasty was founded by the initially nomadic Khitan people and ruled much of the steppes north of China as well as parts of northern China. The Jin Dynasty was founded by Jurchens who were Tungusic and lived in Manchuria; after taking over most of the Liao the Jurchens invaded the Song Dynasty to the south and conquered most of northern China. The Yuan Dynasty was founded by the Mongols after their conquest of all of China, including the Song Dynasty which had relocated south after the Jurchens. I recommend the fantastic Imperial China 900-1800 by Frederick W. Mote.
First, History of Liao, History of Jin and History of Yuan all belong to the classic Twenty-Four Histories. So the Chinese clearly thought of them as part of Chinese history centuries before Korean nationalism even identifiably existed.
Let's begin with the patrons and founders of Liao temples. They include names such as Li Yanchao (possible patron of the Geyuan Temple), Jiao Xiyun (founder of the Fengguo Temple) or Wang Wenxi (helped build the Guangji Temple). These are all rather typical Chinese names, rather than Mongolic Khitan names. On the celebrated Liao-era architecture Dieter Kuhn has this to say:
Theoretically, the imperial Qidan [Khitan] may have emerged as "geniuses in the making of their own architectural tradition"; but practically they most probably had to rely on their Chinese architects and builders, who were able to translate their religious conceptions and political aspirations into three-dimensional architectural structures of great complexity.
source
The Khitan themselves, especially in the southern Liao territories, were adopting more of the trappings of Chinese civilization. The following are all quotes from History of Liao with Mote's translation
This was the system of Liao: during [937 - 945] the emperor and the officials of the Southern Region dressed according to Chinese style [while those in the Northern Region did not]
[In 941] On the day bingzhen ... it was decreed that Khitan individuals who held Chinese offices [i.e. offices in the Southern Chancellory] were to follow Chinese customs and might intermarry with Chinese.
After [983] at big ceremonies even officials of the third rank and above in the Northern Region also wore Chinese clothes. After [1032] at big ceremonies all dressed in the Chinese style.
In [994] it was decreed that Khitans who had committed one of the ten grave crimes should also be sentenced according to [Chinese] law.
These quotes might give the impression that the Khitan were wholesale Sinicized. The Liao empire and the Khitan civilization were distinctly multicultural and hybrid, and the Khitan themselves tried and preserved their old steppe traditions particularly towards the north. But the Liao Dynasty was a society with a large Chinese population that had embraced a number of Chinese traditions, their emperors called themselves huangdi and took on imperial language such as the throne name or the temple name, and their legacy - artistic, political, and otherwise - would linger on in the region and continues in China today. It perfectly deserves to be called a Chinese dynasty.
Continuing on to the Jurchen Jin Dynasty. Like the Liao that they had defeated, after their conquest of northern China the Jurchens began to adopt Chinese customs. Just from a political/legal viewpoint, the Jin government in Zhongdu was largely Chinese by the late 12th century, complete with the Six Ministries system and the Nine-rank system, although the functioning and classification of a number of governmental posts differed (and the Jin court had some offices that lacked prior precedent in China). From 1123 onward the Jurchens had civil service examinations and by the 1180s they were using them on a massive scale. The Jin law code in 1202 copied half of its ordinances from the Chinese code of the Tang Dynasty. Or culturally, too - by 1150 traditionally Jurchen literary forms were dying out while Chinese styles were flourishing among the Jurchen elite of Zhongdu. The Jin Emperor Xizong was taught by Confucian scholars, and he became a classical Chinese scholar-gentleman, trained in Chinese poetry, Chinese calligraphy, and Chinese (Confucian) rites. After his coronation "he was served by Confucian ministers" and was apparently rather contemptuous of the old and conservative Jurchen individuals of the court. Prince Hailing inherited and continued the Sinicization policies. While Hailing's successor, Emperor Shizong, campaigned to bring back the old Jurchen ways, Shizong's Crown Prince did not even properly know the language! While Shizong's grandson and successor, Emperor Zhangzong, knew Jurchen, Shizong notes that "I have ordered all the princes to learn the language of the dynasty; only Prince Yuan [Zhangzong] has studied it to any great extent."
Again, you shouldn't make the mistake of thinking the Jurchen were completely Sinicized; after all, the Jin empire existed for less than a dozen decades. For an example, the Jin code I mentioned allowed the practice of levirate marriage (marrying the brother's widow) which was considered barbaric and almost incestual by the Chinese while it was a long-standing tradition in the steppe, practiced since the days of the Xiongnu or earlier. But there was a general trend of adopting more of Chinese culture among the Jurchens. And of course the Jurchens, like the Liao, used imperial language. (a great anthology of essays and essays on Jurchen Jin history is China Under Jurchen Rule: Essays on Chin Intellectual and Cultural History)
As for Yuan I know a lot less, but I do know that the Mongol emperors used imperial language and at least the basic outline of Chinese government formats, and, obviously, they ruled all of China. Not to mention that their Ming successors recognized them as having been a legitimate dynasty.
There is a general misconception about the nature of "conquest dynasties" from Korean nationalists, probably abetted by the fact that a thing remotely similar to a conquest dynasty has never existed in the past millennium of Korean history. Many Koreans seem to view the Jurchen-Han relationship in the Jin Dynasty or the Manchu-Han relationship in the Qing as some sort of colonial relationship. This could not be further detached from reality. The Khitans or the Xianbei or the Manchus or the Jurchens adopted Chinese government, traditions, even language. Their societies were often hybrid, but they really have full right to be called a Chinese dynasty.
Chinese sino-centric view of their neighbors stopped after Qin Dynasty.
If this was the case I want an explanation as to why Wang Fuzhi thought it was okay to deceive "barbarians" while doing the same thing to the Chinese was obviously not. While I don't have the full quote at hand, in one of his works Wang says something to the point of
It is not against ren for China to decimate the barbarians; it is not against xin for China to deceive the barbarians; it is not against yi for China to take and farm the land of the barbarians. It is ren that China decimate them to protect her people; it is xin that China deceive them and see them as malign; it is yi that China take their land to strengthen her people.
Read that and tell me that Sinocentristic outlooks on the world died after the 3rd century BC. Besides I also want an explanation as to some of the wording of this letter. I want an explanation as to why the Korean1 court agreed that barbarians have no concept of li or ritual. In other words, I want an explanation to a lot of things I know to be true about East Asian history.
Chinese also need to remember that notion of "China" did not existed prior to 1912.
I'll just quote from Wang Fuzhi, who I introduced earlier as a 17th-century scholar vehemently against the Manchu and other barbarians (source is The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China, but I'm tweaking a few words2):
There are two great barriers in the empire: [the first is the barrier between] Chinese and barbarians, [and the second is that between junzi and xiaoren] [.....] the barbarians, with respect to the Chinese, are born in alien lands. As their lands are alien, their customs are alien, so their behavior is entirely alien.
Wang Fuzhi clearly distinguishes "China" (Huaxia) from "barbarians" (Yidi). In fact, concepts such as 中華 zhonghua 中國 zhongguo or 華夏 Huaxia, all translated in English as "China," as a entity differentiated from her foreign neighbors is a virtually ancient one, mentioned in texts such as The Records of the Grand Historian.
There's no historical proof of that bullshit claim [that 'Phags-pa is related to Hangul]
Well, no. There's a number of misconceptions about Hangul often found in the general Korean public. These include more reasonable ones such as "Sejong independently invented the concept of an alphabet", to more hardcore idiotic ones such as "Hangul is the only script with a known creator," to completely inane ones like "Hangul is actually the oldest script in the world!" I don't think public education about Hangul in Korea is helping.
I'm not a linguist and I haven't bothered to read up much on the origin of the Hangul alphabet, but the connection between a number of Hangul elements and a number of 'Phags-pa elements, as well as other alphabets, is well-established at this point. I quote from Rethinking East Asian Languages, Vernaculars, and Literacies, 1000–1919
Elements of the new Korean script not only drew from Chinese rhyme tables, dictionaries, and phonological scholarship but also demonstrated awareness of alphabetic scripts used in the Mongol Empire, such as the Mongol-Uighur script, 'Phags-pa, and the Tibetan script.
While the innovative spirit represented in Hangul is worthy of applause, it's historically dishonest to claim that Hangul is an independent invention.
Khitan left China long ago and established another nation and their descendants are called Kazakhstan. There's even Yuchi's descendants called Uyghurs
As mentioned above, the Para-Mongolic-ness of Khitan is widely accepted. Meanwhile we know that the Kazakh language is a Turkic language belonging to the Kipchak subfamily. Despite the Altaic hypothesis, no verifiable genetic connection between the Turkic and Mongolic languages have been confirmed. Kazakhs speak a fundamentally different language from the old Khitans. Sure, there are probably a few things that the Turkic peoples of the central steppes learned from Khitans or Kara-Khitans (I wouldn't know) but that's like saying that the English are
The Uyghurs cannot be the descendants of the Yuchi, because the Yuchi are an indigenous people of the Eastern Woodlands originally living in what is now Tennessee. Assuming this person meant Yuezhi, not Yuchi, the Yuezhi are believed to be Indo-European speakers while the Uyghurs are a Turkic people. Again the Yuezhi language during Han times had nothing to do with what Uyghurs in Xinjiang speak now.
1 Yes, Korean, but the Joseon court increasingly became more Neo-Confucian than the Chinese themselves, and the philosophical tenets of the particularly later Joseon court is reflective of orthodox Neo-Confucianism in China as well. There was actually a sentiment that Korea had inherited civilization from the Ming after the orangkae (rather antiquated word for "barbarians" in Korean, here it refers to the Manchu) conquered China; this is reflected really well in one manifestation in 1881, more than two centuries after the Manchus had taken Beijing, as a response to the government's failure to persecute Christianity. My translation of excerpts:
What makes people different from mere beasts or birds? It is the nature to respect the five fundamental principles and five moral disciplines, the nature to reject barbarity and follow [Chinese] civilization [.....] For three hundred years [Beijing had fallen to the Manchus 257 years before] China has been underwater, the four seas have yellowed and dirtied. But one remnant of the spring lingers on alone in the east, like a great fruit high in the air that shows that the force of life still remains on the tip of the branches in a world subsumed by death. The world adores it; the people depend it on it dearly. Shall you take even this away and leave a world of only darkness and no light?
2 They translated 君子 junzi as "superior people." Like many Chinese concepts junzi is a tricky word to translate, but it has no connotations of inherent superiority that the English term "superior people" brings with it, and is really a direct antonym to 小人 xiaoren meaning "petty-minded person, narrow-minded person". For consistency I changed the translation of xiaoren back into Chinese too.
Now this whole thread is a masterpiece of /r/badlinguistics. Korean absolutely has other dialects and one of the so-called dialects, spoken on an island off the south of Korea called Jeju, is really a separate language (unfortunately we're probably witnessing the final generation of the Jeju language). However there was one epic bad history/anthropology in it:
I believe Jeju and Ryukyu people are same people just that two were influenced by two different people
What? First, the Jeju dialect/language is distinctly Koreanic, with most words cognate with the mainland Korean. There are large numbers of Chinese loans and some Mongol loans, both to be expected (the Yuan Dynasty directly controlled Jeju for three generations and there were at least a few Mongols living there) but the basic vocabulary, the grammar, and the phonology are all Koreanic. There are some phonemes that do not have cognates in modern Korean such as the arae a (/ɒ/ afaik) but they all derive from Middle Korean. Not unlike the relationship between Scots and English, actually. By contrast, the Ryukyuan languages are all Japonic and show evident affinities to Japanese. A simple table with some oversimplifications (source for Okinawan is this and source for Jeju is 표준어로 찾아보는 제주어 사전)
| English |
Standard Japanese |
Okinawan |
Standard Korean |
Jeju |
| Mother |
Haha |
Ayaa |
Eomeoni |
Eomeong |
| Mountain |
Yama |
Mui |
San |
Oreum |
| Hand |
Te |
Tii |
Son |
Son |
| Today |
Kyo |
Kuu |
Oneul |
Oneol |
| To do |
Suru |
Sun |
Hada |
Heoda |
Or from a less linguistic and more ethnographic perspective, let's compare traditional religious practices in Jeju and the southern Ryukyus, in particular the island of Yonaguni. While there definitely are similarities between the religious practices of the two regions, the former at least (I don't know much in depth about Yonaguni religion) have much stronger similarities to the shamanism of the mainland than to anything on Yonaguni.
For example, consider the role of the shamans on the two islands. In Yonaguni there is a clear distinction made between female "priestesses" (the k'a and the bunai tidigang) and the shamans (of either gender) called the juta or munuci, and they serve different roles. But in Jeju, like in mainland Korea, there are no real equivalents to Yonaguni priestesses. (there is a role that can be filled only by women, that of the Samseung Halmang, but the Samseung Halmang is more of a shamanistic midwife/nurse) In Jeju no real supreme deity exists as a major focus of worship, while in Yonaguni the supreme god Tagasa'udi is worshipped. In Jeju the star Polaris is not more a focus of rites than any other star in Ursa Minor, whereas in Yonaguni Polaris is intricately linked to the goddess Ku'udin.
To anyone who actually read the whole thing, well thanks! I hope it was worth reading and not too tedious though it wasn't the best piece of writing you've ever read. Let's wrap this up with a liberally translated quote from a Korean historian of art (hope I don't butcher the translation). He's talking specifically about the exaggerated claims that Baekje was a naval empire, but I think it applies generally to a number of other things:
In television, novels, even in certain history books, I increasingly frequently encounter the far-fetched claim that Baekje was some sort of ancient maritime empire. I do not pretend not to know how and why these claims have emerged, but they are only hurdles to an accurate analysis of history, because a wrong theory is in the end nothing more than just that - a wrong theory.
In fact, it is worth a reminder that an important fact is too often forgotten while dealing with the tomb of Muryeong. The artifacts and structure of the tomb closely mimic the tomb style of the Chinese Liang Dynasty. The southward positioning of the bodies, the Chinese-style tomb guardians, the Chinese porcelain cups and vessels, the bronze mirrors based on Han styles, the Chinese Wu Zhu coins, the Liang-style bricks with lotus decorations...all this means that had the royal epitaphs not been found, many scholars would definitely have assumed the tomb to have belonged to some Liang émigré. The scale of this Sinophilia is evident in the very first word of the epitaph where the king is introduced as "the Great General who Tranquilizes the East," a title granted to him by the Liang emperor that may have been a mark of royal authority. Someone who had thought that Muryeong's tomb was a masterpiece of indigenous Korean culture would definitely be shocked and disappointed if he ever visited the Nanjing Museum.
These Sinophilic tendencies should be understood in a historic context. Throughout the history of Baekje, active cultural contact with Chinese civilization was limited until the reign of Muryeong. That was when the kingdom finally experienced a global stage and escaped the stagnation of isolation, and it matured through its efforts to follow the general trends of East Asian culture. Koreans should not feel shame at the cultural imitation of the Muryeong reign, but they should applaud Baekje's openness and readiness towards change. World history has many examples of collapse urged on by refusals to adopt new ways and traditions. [.....] Thus did Muryeong open up to the world, and with this cultural basis his son could bring about the full splendor of Baekje civilization.
ここには何もないようです