Chapter 7 deals with a longstanding controversy from both historical and theoretical linguistic perspectives. The chapter provides a description of Korean vowel harmony beginning with an overview of its historical and theoretical linguistic background. Middle Korean displays relatively rigorous patterns of vowel harmony; contemporary varieties show reduced but still complicated patterns that are confined to certain morphological contexts, as a result of historical changes. The description of Korean vowel harmony in this chapter is divided mainly into two parts: the relatively complete vowel harmony system in Middle Korean, and vowel harmony in contemporary (chiefly Seoul) Korean. The former provides an historical and typological overview of the productive MK patterns, while the latter focuses on the exceptions and variations of the remnant harmony patterns in ideophones and verbal inflections. The remainder of the chapter introduces a number of theoretical approaches, from early generative treatments to more recent Optimality Theoretic analyses.

Chapter 2 outlines the history of the Korean language, starting from the internal reconstruction of proto-Korean through Old Korean, Middle Korean, Modern Korean and Contemporary Korean. Old Korean designates the language of Silla up until the end of the Unified Silla period in the tenth century. Middle Korean covers the Koryo (Early Middle Korean) and Choson (Late Middle Korean) periods up until the end of the sixteenth century. This relatively brief period has also seen events of great linguistic importance: the Japanese colonial period (1909 to 1945), which saw the importation of Japanese loans and loans from Western languages through Japanese; the Korean War, resulting in the division of the two Koreas; and finally the turbulent postwar period, which has seen the final disappearance of Chinese characters in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the near complete disappearance of them in the Republic of Korea, and the ever greater impact of neologisms and loans from electronic media and the internet.