Speech Representations in Literary Sinitic Writings of Chosŏn Literati : Some examples from Records of Travel to Beijing (Yŏnhaengnok 燕行錄)

Yŏnhaengnok (燕行錄) refers to a voluminous body of records written by members of Chosŏn embassies and other Chosŏn travellers to Ming and Qing China. Mostly written in Literary Sinitic (hanmun 漢文), these records recount various aspects of the journey, including instances of communication between Chosŏn Koreans and different Ming or Qing subjects. Communication was predominantly carried out through interpreters, brush-talks (pil'tam 筆談) in Literary Sinitic, or some other indirect means as, barring a few exceptions, Chosŏn literati were no more familiar with varieties of spoken Chinese than their counterparts in China were knowledgeable in spoken Korean. Representations of such instances of communication are already intriguing in themselves, but even more so when we consider the gap between Literary Sinitic and not only spoken Korean, but also spoken Chinese, which makes portraying various aspects of speaking, even if through above-mentioned mediation, rather challenging. Therefore, in this paper I will examine, on the example of several yŏnhaengnok, how their Chosŏn authors deal with representations of communication, particularly direct speech, in hanmun texts. Or more specifically, how colloquial Chinese and Korean are marked in an otherwise rather formal, literary register on the one hand, and how aspects such as ethnicity and linguistic background, as well as the status of interlocutors, can be hinted at through representations of their speech, even in cases when such representations are rather sparse or hardly distinguishable from the surrounding narrative.