Gugyeol

Gugyeol is a system for rendering texts written in Classical Chinese into understandable Korean. It was chiefly used during the Joseon Dynasty, when readings of the Chinese classics were of paramount social importance. Unlike the idu and hyangchal systems which preceded it, gugyeol used specialized markings, together with a subset of hanja, to represent Korean morphological markers. Also, the idu and hyangchal systems appear to have been used primarily to render the Korean language into hanja; on the other hand, gugyeol sought to render Chinese texts into Korean with a minimum of distortion. Thus, in gugyeol, the original classical text was not modified, and the additional markers were simply inserted between phrases.