The creation of idu

This paper aims to examine how idu, a writing system that represented the ancient Korean language by borrowing Chinese characters, was created. Through analysis of existing epigraphs and newly found wooden tablets, this paper critically scrutinizes the hypothesis that idu originated in Goguryeo or Baekje and highlights Silla's role in the culmination of idu's evolution. Silla's written materials attest to the tireless efforts made from the mid-sixth century to use Chinese characters to transcribe Korean sounds. While primitive idu stagnated or declined in Goguryeo and Baekje from the late sixth century, Silla developed the idu system which achieved a transition to an agglutinative language through the use of their own punctuation, case marker, sentence-final endings, and prefinal endings. Presumably this formed the basis of both the hyangchal transcription principle in which the stem of a word is read with its meaning and its ending is read phonetically and the gugyeol principle in which morphological affixes are inserted in between Chinese sentences in the interpretation of classical Chinese texts.