Ju Si-gyeong


Ju Si-gyeong was one of the founders of modern Korean linguistics. He was born in Bongsan-gun, Hwanghae Province. He and his students helped standardize the Korean language, based spelling and grammar of the vernacular.

Biography

Ju Si-gyeong was born in Hwanghae-do, now North Korea. He studied Classical Chinese from his childhood. Ju moved to Seoul in 1887. He was interested in the Western learning methods and he studied Linguistics in one of these new schools.
After studying modern linguistics in Seoul, he found work in the first Hangeul-only newspaper Dongnip Sinmun in 1896, founded by the independence activist Soh Jaipil. In 1897, Seo was sent into the exile to the United States and Ju left the newspaper.
He served as a Korean instructor for the American missionary W.B. Scranton, founder of today's Ewha Womans University.

Standardizing Korean Language

In 1886, Ju realized the need of a standardized alphabet. With some colleagues, he established the Korean Language System Society. He hosted several seminars in the National Language Discussion Centre of the Sangdong Youth Academy of the Korean language.
He proposed that the Korean parts of speech include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, unconjugated adjectives, auxiliaries, conjunctions, s, and sentence-final particles.
In his 1914 publication, Sounds of the Language, he promotes writing Hangul linearly rather than syllabically. This is one of his few proposals not to have been implemented, although there have been experiments with linear hangul, most notably in Primorsky Krai.

Publications

Ju Si-gyeong coined the name Hangul between 1910 and 1913 to identify the Korean writing system, which had existed under several other names such as onmun since the 15th century.
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.