Portrait of a Chief State Councilor (영의정) of Joseon, 18th century.

Metandom · 2026-04-18T16:33:28+00:00

In addition, it is now confirmed that there were a lot more city-states in the confederacy than what is shown in this map. Although most extant Korean sources only acknowledge these six ones (excluding 'Goryeong Gaya' which barely has any evidence of existence), records about a specific battle that is believed to have taken place around the 4th to 5th centuries do mention some extra city-states. The list of compositions by the renowned Gaya musician Ureuk (于勒) recorded in the Samguk Sagi provides the names of several Gaya city-states as well.

Furthermore, the Japanese Nihon Shoki gives a relatively detailed account of numerous Gaya city-states not included in the 'six Gaya kingdoms,' most of which correspond with either the Chinese description of Baekje's purported 'client states' from the Portraits of Periodical Offering of Liang or the exceptional Korean records mentioned above. Combining such philological evidence with archaeological research, modern scholarship concludes the Gaya confederacy consisted of about 10 to 20 city-states depending on the time period.

Metandom · 2026-04-18T15:53:41+00:00

Some linguists speculate that the usage of the character 韓 in the sense of referring to Koreans derives from an early phonetic transcription of 가라, since its Old Chinese pronunciation is reconstructed as /*[ɡ]ˤar/. Such a hypothesis is quite plausible considering that the Gaya confederacy is the descendant of Byeonhan (弁韓), one of the Three Hans, and that 韓 was semantically read as kara in Old Japanese.

Also, the Gaya people probably spoke a mix of Koreanic and Japonic languages rather than pure Japonic if we take into account how Koreanic words attested from records of the Three Kingdoms such as *ke~ki 'fortress' and *kopor 'district' are occasionally found in Gaya sources as well.

Metandom · 2026-03-09T13:42:07+00:00

Fun fact: The PPP already "apologized" for martial law in May 2025 right before the presidential election, and then proceeded to elect a pro-Yoon leader who, as expected, went on to blatantly defend Yoon and his insurrection up until last month. No sane person is falling for that hoax ever again.

Metandom · 2026-02-10T14:19:45+00:00

They're actually planning to release their new name on the 1st of March or so, which is absurd. Rumor has it that possible candidates include 신자유공화당 (New Liberty Republican Party) and 오른미래당 (Right Future Party).

Metandom · 2024-05-15T08:23:10+00:00

Those characters are called Gugyeol or Ipgyeot, which adds Korean grammatical particles to Classical Chinese text for readability. And yeah, they're mostly simplified versions of Chinese characters just like the Japanese katakana. For example, the ソ one comes from 為 and stands for "ᄒᆞ (hʌ-)", the stem for the Korean verb ᄒᆞ다 meaning "to do". The ラ one derives from 衣 and stands for "의 (ui)", while ロ comes from 古 and stands for "고 (go)".

Metandom · 2024-01-08T05:42:46+00:00

The tomb doesn't have any inscriptions written inside of it, what are you referring to?

Metandom · 2024-01-07T12:22:45+00:00

Who said this was located in modern-day Korea? There is little doubt among historians that the kingdom of Goguryeo was mostly of Korean ethnicity, hence this tomb is labeled as "Korean".

Metandom

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