Abstract
King Sejong the Great, his students in Jip-hyeun-jeon school and Choe Sejin, their successor of the sixteenth century, indicated Middle Korean had three distinctive pitches, low, high, and rising (phyeong-, geo-, sang-sheong). Thanks to $Hun-min-jeng-{\emptyset}eum$ as well as its Annotation and side-dots literatures in fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, we can compare Middle Korean with Hamgyeong dialect, Gyeongsang dialect, and extant tone dialects with joint preservers of what was probably the tonal system of unitary mother Korean language. What is most remarkable about middle Korean phonetic work is its manifest superiority in conception and execution as anything produced in the present day linguistic scholarship. But at this stage in linguistics, prior to the technology and equipment needed for the scientific analysis of sound waves, auditory description was the only possible frame for an accurate and systematic classification. And auditory phonetics still remains fundamental in pitch description, even though modern acoustic categories may supplement and supersede auditory ones in tonological analysis. Auditory phonetics, however, has serious shortcoming that its theory and practice are too subject to be developed into the present century science. With joint researchers, I am developping a new pitch scale. It is a semiautomatic auditory grade pitch analysis program. The result of our labor will give a significant breakthrough to upgrade our component in linguistics.