남북 맞춤법의 통일화 방안

Suggestions on the Unification of Orthography between South Korea and North Korea

It is necessary that a compromise should be made between language-external requirements and language-internal theoretical requirements in order to set up a unified orthography between the two. The language-external requirements for the unification of orthography are twofold. First, efforts need to be made to create an atmosphere in which people at all levels become interested in the unification and take a part in the movement to achieve it. Second, realizing the great differences in the spelling system, the authorities of both South Korea and North Korea should endeavor to understand the ideological and institutional differences and minimize the gap. This attitude is of necessity in unifying the spelling system. The language-internal requirements are as follows. First, now that the unification of orthography requires the non-involvement of ideology, we should combine morphological and phonetic principles of transcription and arrive at the unified system, with the due consideration of linguistic characteristics of Korean and its actual pronunciation phenomena. Second, the South and North authorities had a different view on the use of the letter ㅅ medially (saisiot) and that of the letter ㄹ word-initially (dueumbubchik). However, both sides are now trying to reach an agreement on the basic principle. This is admirable in that it is an important step to lay the foundation for the unified spelling system. Moreover, it should be the case that the South and North authorities do their best to remove the barrier of ideology between them to accomodate and generate the trend in which the unification of the orthography is made feasible.