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The Irop'a is a Korean textbook of the Japanese language published in 1492. It is a source on the phonology of Late Middle Japanese.

The Irop'a is named in official Korean lists of textbooks for Japanese dated 1430, 1469 and 1707. It was presumably revised after the introduction of the Hangul alphabet in 1446. Only one copy of the Irop'a is known today, an edition printed in 1492. This copy was in the collection of Kanbara Jinzō, president of Kagawa University, and first publicized in 1959. It is now held by the university library.

The work begins with four forms of the Japanese syllabary, each in the order of the Iroha poem: hiragana, two forms of mana (cursive Chinese characters), and katakana. Each hiragana syllable is accompanied by a transcription of its sound using Hangul.

The hiragana syllabary is followed by Hangul transcriptions of 16 Japanese words, represented by Chinese characters: 京 'capital', 上 'above' and the numerals 1 to 10, 100, 1000, 10,000 and 100,000,000. The reasons for including the first two characters are unclear. Following the syllabaries is a brief summary of the Japanese writing system, written in Chinese. The bulk of the text is in Japanese without translation or annotation, consisting of model sentences and descriptions of Japanese people and customs.

Notes

1. ^ These syllables were written using modified Hangul letters (with a circle below), which were introduced to represent the Chinese "light labial" initials.
2. ^ In the original poem, the syllables se and su occur together as one word, in which the middle consonant is pronounced voiced. In the transcription, a final /n/ is added to the first syllable and the initial of the second is rendered as /z/ to show that the middle consonant of the word was voiced, and possibly pre-nasalized.

References

1. Frellesvig (2010), p. 299.
2. Song (2001), p. 130.
3. ^ Song (2001), p. 131.
4. Lange (1969), p. 48.
5. ^ Unger (2009), p. 39.
6. Lee & Ramsey (2011), pp. 157–158.
7. Osterkamp (2011), pp. 87–98.
8. Lange (1969), p. 49.
9. Song (2001), pp. 131–132.
10. Song (2001), pp. 132–133.

Works cited

• Frellesvig, Bjarke (2010), A History of the Japanese Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-65320-6.
• Lange, Roland A. (1969), "Documentary Evidence for a Palatalized /e/ Series in Middle Japanese", The Journal-Newsletter of the Association of Teachers of Japanese, 6 (1): 47–50, JSTOR 488717.
• Lee, Ki-Moon; Ramsey, S. Robert (2011), A History of the Korean Language, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-1-139-49448-9.
• Osterkamp, Sven (2011), "Early Adaptations of the Korean Script to Render Foreign Languages. In: The Idea of Writing" (PDF), in de Voogt, Alex; Quack, Joachim Friedrich (eds.), The Idea of Writing: Writing Across Borders, Brill, pp. 83–102, doi:10.1163/9789004217003_006, ISBN 978-90-04-21545-0.
• Song, Ki-joong (2001), The Study of Foreign Languages in the Chosŏn Dynasty (1392–1910), Seoul: Jimoondang, ISBN 978-89-88095-40-9.
• Unger, J. Marshall (2009), "Some remarks on 'Hankul' transcriptions of Middle Japanese", Scripta, 1: 77–87.

• Joseon dynasty works
• Late Middle Japanese texts
• 15th-century books