Two Characters, ‘悠悠’: What 370,000 Classical Poems Reveal About a Turbulent Millennium

The most frequently used expression in a thousand years of Korean classical Chinese poetry is ‘悠悠,’ pronounced “yuyu.” The finding emerged from an analysis of 367,913 poems written during the Goryeo and Joseon eras.

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‘悠悠’ is the key vocabulary detected most often in our classical Chinese poetry, and it was used particularly heavily in the late Goryeo and early Joseon periods.

Song Jun-tae, an emeritus professor of electronic engineering at Sungkyunkwan University, built a big-data collection from 1,195 volumes in the Korean Literary Collections in Classical Chinese database. His paper, “An Analysis of Period-Specific Vocabulary Characteristics in Goryeo and Joseon Classical Chinese Poetry Using Big Data,” appeared in the journal Minjok Munhwa.

‘悠悠’ carries several meanings. It can describe a leisurely state, something far away, an endless flow, a mind lost in thought, a slow and extended sound, or a swaying movement. Its use was especially concentrated in the late Goryeo period, with 832 instances, and the early Joseon period, with 626. Writers who used it often included Yi Saek, Won Cheon-seok and Jeong Do-jeon in late Goryeo, and Seo Geo-jeong, Sin Suk-ju and Kim Si-seup in early Joseon.

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The late Goryeo and early Joseon period was one of the greatest political upheavals in the history of the Korean Peninsula. Life’s foundations were deeply shaken by continuous wars and a change of dynasties, so it is astonishing that ‘悠悠’ was widely used precisely then.

Song was struck by the timing. The late Goryeo and early Joseon period brought repeated wars and a change of dynasties, shaking the foundations of life on the Korean Peninsula. In Yi Saek’s poem ‘Again Composed,’ the phrase first appears in a depiction of secluded leisure, but the poem ends with an unending bugle by the river and beacon smoke that has yet to clear from the world. Song says the poem combines the writer’s political and personal circumstances with the broader crisis of the era.

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In a life that is difficult and painful, ‘悠悠’ makes us think of an attitude that does not lose composure and room in the mind.

To identify recurring expressions, Song wrote code to analyze n-gram frequency distributions and tested its statistical fit. Because classical Chinese characters carry individual meanings and poems generally lack spaces, identifying word units is difficult. Two-character sequences were therefore tracked across overlapping positions. Song says this method can make patterns visible that individual authors or works may not reveal, but interpretation still depends on reading poems and establishing their context. He was trained as an electronic engineer and began studying classical Chinese and Chinese only seriously later in life. This was his first humanities research paper.

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Big-data analysis can statistically capture recurring patterns and period-specific trends that are difficult to find by examining individual works or a particular author’s literary world alone.