Extending Hangul for English
Let’s do something fun. I recently realized that my English pronunciation is bad because I’m basically imitating how it sounded rather than enunciating what I want to speak. It was my best bet because those pronunciations I’m particularly bad at don’t exist in my mother tongue (i.e., Korean). Korean has a unique writing system called Hangul, and it’s tightly coupled with Korean, speech-wise, meaning that if some phonemes are non-existent in Korean, it doesn’t exist in Hangul, either (and vice versa). Speaking such phonemes out loud is like imagining them solely with the position of my tongue and whatnot. I haven’t practiced those phonemes such that they become muscle memories, nor have I lived in any English-speaking country, so I had to resort to these imagining-with-mouth things every time. The result was — bad pronunciation.
Then I realized that Hangul has a great property: no matter how or where it’s used, each letter has a fixed, pre-defined phonetic value. It’s almost like a phonetic alphabet, such as IPA. Hangul is more than good enough for Korean because it has all the phonemes it uses, but this tight-fitting is not good for other languages because there are missing phonemes for those languages oftentimes (unless that language is phonetically very simple, like Japanese).
So, what did I think? Maybe, just maybe, if I could extend Hangul to describe those missing phonemes, I may not need to imagine those foreign phonemes solely with my mouth. If some words are difficult to pronounce, I can simply write them down in my own version of the extended Hangul and try to read them. That would work way better than looking at English words and trying to speak correctly. For some people who may think, “That’s what IPA phonetic alphabets are for,” Hangul is already in my arsenal, and I can always pick it up whenever necessary. Oftentimes, Hangul works quicker and better than IPA, which I’m still not very familiar with — is there any non-expert fluent in IPA, by the way?
Disclaimer: I’m not a linguist. I believe most of them below are linguistically incorrect or awkward. Again, it’s for my own purpose.
For this, I noticed two things that are poorly translated into Hangul from English.
- Missing phonemes.
- Vowel-less consonants.
I think the first one is quite obvious for Koreans: things like /f/, /v/, and /th/. I’m gonna have to “invent” some letters for them, but I don’t want to “make up” some random symbols from scratch because that way, only “I” can understand what it means. Koreans have already used some letters that sound “decently similar” to those missing phonemes. I think maybe I can annotate those alternative letters to denote missing phonemes. That way, not only can I remember what they were supposed to be, but also other people (if they happen to read my writing) can understand “even if they have zero clue what those annotations are.”
The second one is a little more subtle because one must understand first that there is no consonant without a vowel in Hangul. In fact, to my knowledge, the consonants in Hangul officially do not have phonetic values on their own. They only have phonetic values when they are combined with vowels. But English (or other languages in general) frequently uses vowel-less consonants. It’s even quite necessary to describe constant clusters, which by the way is non-existent in Korean. So, I may need to devise some way to denote vowel-less consonants, too.
Missing Phonemes
I briefly looked up which phonemes are exactly missing in Hangul (among those that exist in English, of course), and I found a handy PDF online that organizes which phonemes don’t exist in Korean. I grouped them as follows:
- /ʃ/, /t̠ʃ/, /w/
- /f/, /v/
- /ɹ/, /θ/, /ð/
- /z/, /ʒ/, /d̠ʒ/
Here is why I grouped them like this. The first group is quite decently describable with a combination of other vowels. The second group is the phonemes, where the upper teeth should mildly bite the lower lip. The third group is the phonemes with unique tongue positions. The fourth group all sound approximately similar to /j/.
Now, consider whether I need to invent new letters. For the first group, actually, I don’t have to because, as I said, they’re quite well-describable with a combination of vowels: /슈/, /츄/, and /워/, respectively.
For the second group, the phonemes commonly involve “upper teeth biting the lower lip.” In my opinion, the lip-biting part is important because no Hangul letter requires lip-biting. Those two phonemes have frequently been delegated with /ㅍ/ and /ㅂ/ because they sound similar except for lip-biting, so I can add a small dash below those letters to denote that “you’re supposed to bite your lip.”
One interesting bit. Hangul actually had /f/ in ancient times, written as ㆄ (a little circle below the modern day ㅍ). I didn’t mean to imitate this ancient letter to make my own annotated version, but it’s still interesting how I got to a similar shape.
For the third group, they all need some manoeuver in the tongue, not in the way ordinary Hangul letters dictate. The actual pronunciation needs some practice, but again, they sound similar to their usual alternatives: /ㄹ/, /ㄸ/, and /ㄷ/. Let’s just add a little vertical bar at the bottom left so that I can recognize my tongue needs to do something more.
For records, denoting /ð/ with anything using ㄷ is potentially wrong because ㄷ (/d/) is voided while /ð/ is voiceless. It just happens that usually /ð/ is followed by another vowel, and all vowels are voiced. So emulating /ð/ as ㄷ with a slight tongue maneuver doesn’t sound totally wrong in my ear.
For the fourth group, they all sound similar to /j/ in my ear. I know that native English speakers clearly distinguish /z/ from /j/, but I haven’t seen one guy who confuses my /z/ or /j/ pronunciations with each other. Funnily enough, there is an ancient letter that exactly sounds like /z/: ㅿ. But I’d like to opt against using ㅿ for several reasons.
- ㅿ can’t go well with modern Hangul typography, because Koreans casually stylize ㅅ, ㅇ, or even ㅁ with ㅿ sometimes.
- In my personal opinion, ㅿ would look very awkward in some fonts such as 바탕체 (Korean Serif font).
- I doubt people (including me) can easily recognize that ㅿ sounds like /z/ when they have no clue about it. Although it’s phonologically closer to ㅅ for sure, it still “sounds” closer to ㅈ.
For these reasons, I’d like to just settle with the existing letter ㅈ.
In summary, the missing phonemes can be denoted as follows in my own extended system.
Vowel-less Consonants
It may not be a very well-known fact outside of Koreans, but as I mentioned before, you can’t use consonants without any vowel. I think I was taught in my middle school that Hangul consonants don’t have phonetic values on their own until they are combined with vowels, but I’m not sure it’s actually true because you can easily find the phonetic value of each consonant online like nothing (e.g., here). But to be fair, at least officially, Hangul consonants are not supposed to be used without vowels. (By the way, this is often not the case in a casual online setting because people use only consonants to describe laughter— like ㅋㅋㅋ or ㅎㅎㅎ)
This situation was slightly different in ancient times when Hangul was created by Jiphyeonjeon scholars (commonly represented by King Sejong, like “et al.” in “King Sejong et al.”). They (or King Sejong himself) originally conceived a placeholder vowel ㆍ(Arae-a, 아래아) for the purpose of putting it in the usual vowel position of each letter (e.g., ᄉᆞ) if there is no “vowel” and the consonant is supposed to sound itself. I thought it was kind of an equivalent of “no vowel, only consonant,” but historically, the phonetic value of ㆍ is /ʌ/, not /Ø/. I think there is a misunderstanding about this from my side, but the point is that there was at least an attempt to free consonants from vowels at their inception.
That’s a little history class. Now let’s talk about how modern-day Koreans usually think of vowel-less consonants. It actually depends on people because Hangle never defines how vowel-less consonants are supposed to be pronounced in a sentence, but “usually” people tend to combine the consonants with ㅡ (/ɯ/, which sounds like “eu”). If weakly pronounced, actually /ɯ/ is almost /Ø/, which only leaves the phonetic value of consonants as a result. In a different angle, Koreans usually use ㅡ to denote vowel-less consonants in English because it’s fairly close to /Ø/. Remember that Hangul doesn’t have a vowel with /Ø/ BUT dictates every consonant to be associated with vowels. So ㅡ is the best bet.
So, how do you denote a true vowel-less consonant in English with Hangul? I remember an elementary English word book used a dashed ㅡ to denote that ㅡ is very weak there, but it just didn’t pan out very well because who the hell wants to draw dashes every time they are writing stuff? My idea is just to accept the implicit social agreement; let’s drop vowels altogether. Just write consonants if they are vowel-less. Everybody will intuitively “know” how it’s supposed to be pronounced.
Let me give an example. Suppose writing the pronunciation of the English word “stroke” in this extended system. The pronunciation of “stroke” is /strəʊk/, where we have three vowel-less consonants: /s/, /t/, and /k/. Hangul already has letters for each consonant, so we can simply write the corresponding letters without vowels.
I think every Hangul user can read this immediately without any knowledge of how it was extended.
When I thought about extending Hangul, actually, it wasn’t just about writing down English pronunciations more correctly. I actually had more trouble with other European languages (especially French), and I finally reached the point where “I need to write it down so that I can read it off directly.” I was extending Hangul to denote French originally, but sooner or later, I realized it also goes well with denoting English, too. In this regard, I think this style of extension may apply to general European languages (because they belong to the same language family). To conclude, I’ll just attach the translation table I composed earlier from the phonemes in English to the extended Hangul below.
