Korean Language, English Spelling

[igillman]

Just for clarification...
Each Hangul "symbol" is composed of 2, 3 or 4 letters. To pronounce the symbol you pronounce the letters from top left to bottom right. It is an alphabetic language that is written in such a way that individual phonetics are drawn like a symbol. match the symbol to what you know and you can pronounce it without breaking it down. If you do not know the symbol then you can still pronounce it by breaking it down into its individual letters.

It is an amazing system as it allows the speed of chinese reading with the capability of an alphabetic language for unknown words. The double vowels are the worst to try and decipher for me.

 

[igillman]

Errant108 - The chinese symbols you give for SaBeom are pronounced "Shi Fan" in mandarin and they mean "Normal" as in a learning institution (difficult to explain). With a slight modification but still sounding the same it means teacher training.

 

[Errant108]

That would be the Mandarin Chinese interpretation, but is not the usage of the term in reference to the Japanese budo and as a result, the modern Korean martial arts.

As for "double vowels" in Hangeul, don't try to decipher them. Pronounce them as one sound.

 

[igillman]

The 30+ year occupation of Korea by Japan hes definitely left its mark on the country as a whole and on its martial arts in particular. You can see how they got some of their Chinese stuff "second hand" through Japan.

I wonder how close spoken Korean is to spoken Japanese?

 

[sekiryu]

I wonder how close spoken Korean is to spoken Japanese?

Grammatically, the sentence structure is practically the same. Subject, object, verb, with subject/topic/direct object particles. There are a lot of Korean words similar to Japanese words:

Yaksok 약속 = Yakusoku やくそく
Kabang 가방 = Kaban　かばん
Junbi 준비 = Junbi　じゅんび
Kutu 구두 = Kutsu　くつ

I hate how the Korean terms are romanized in my Dojang's handbook. I can't pronounce/attempt to pronounce Korean unless I see the Hangeul.

Here's what I've discovered so far:

Doe Jjng 도장 Do jang
Doe boak 도복 Do bok
Dee 띠 Ddi
Ki yap 기합 Gi hap
Gohm sa hahm nida 감사합니다 Gam sa ham ni da
Ahn yeong ha shim nika 안녕하심니까 An yeong ha shim ni kka
Sah bum nim 사범님 Sa beom nim
Charyot 차려 Cha ryeo
Kyung yae 경례 Gyeong Rye
Joon Bee 존비 Jun bi
Si chak 시작 Shi jak
Goo mahn 그만 Geu man
She uh 쇠어 Shwi eo
Hanna 하나 Ha na
Dool 둘 Dul
Set 셋 Set
Net 넷 Net
Da Sut 다섯 Da seot
Yo Sut 여섯 Yeo seot
Il Gop 일곱 Il gop
Yodul 여덞 Yeo deol(m)
Ah hop 아흡 A heup
Yol 열 Yeol
Jee Roogi 지르기 Ji reu gi

 

[GlassJaw]

Another perfect example. At our dojang, it's "kiop", and when I took my first aborted attempt at learning TKD, it was "kiyop".

Korea is a big place with several regional accents and pronunciation patterns. So, even if the calligraphed Korean representation of the word is the same everywhere (and I'm not saying it is), not all Koreans are going to say it the same.

Nor are all writers going to transliterate it into Roman the same way.

And not everyone who writes transliterations is necessarily familiar with others' conventions for it.

Twenty-some years ago, I briefly checked out a TKD class. The instructor, who was a Korean immigrant, wrote the English-language training handouts (basic rules and terminology) himself.

He came up with many unusual transliterations that I had not seen before nor have seen since.

For instance the term for a training uniform (which Kacey has informed me is much more appropriately be referred to as a "dobok", rather than a "dobak") he wrote as "toe-balk".

It's obviously the same word (and, it seemed to me, a pretty accurate spelling with regard to his pronunciation of it), but it serves to demonstrate how we can get such variation in romanized spelling.

Heck, we can't even agree on whether it's "tae kwon do" or "taekwondo".

I think part of it is that I took a Japanese course a few years ago, and romanized Japanese seems pretty standardized.

Well, getting back to "kiop", the same word (at least, I'm reasonably certain that it's etymologically the same word that made its way from the one language into the other) when transliterated from Japanese is often written as "kiyah" or "ki-ai".

(BTW, in our school we write it as "giyup".)

Dan

 

[GlassJaw]

I'm gonna add more confusion. The "k" in Korean often is a mixture of a "k" & a "g" sound.

Last fall when I had the pleasure sitting next to GM Hae Man Park at a dinner, that was one thing I noticed about his speech. When he would say "Chung Do Kwan" or "Kukkiwon", it sounded like "tshoong do gwahn" and "gookeewoan".

In English, the only real cue we use to differentiate between a hard G and a K is that the G is voiced and the K is not.

Granted, this was the only time that I've ever heard native speaker of Korean where I was also familiar with a few of the terms and could parse some of them out . . .However, it led me to theorize that (some? most? all?) Koreans might voice the K sound when it's in the initial position of an accented syllable.

It was only with very careful listening that I was able to pick out the slight crack (click?) that accompanied the consonant. As English speakers, we have it in our K but not in our G, but the combination of the click with the voiced palatal plosive (I probably termed that way wrong) does not exist for us. That could explain why the phoneme is variously transliterated as both a "K" and a "G".

Dan