How to Pronounce Korean Names or the Language Itself

MJK · #1

I post this thread, that it may help anyone to pronounce Korean pro names or anything else Korean, properly.

I'll do with the vowels, where most people seems to confuse. The IPA pronunciation keys are inside the brackets.

ri. = Romanized in
of. = officially (to indicate the official standard when there are multiple ways of Romanization)
pe. = (similarly) pronounced like the English ...
pr. = (almost exactly) pronounced like the Romance languages' (Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, etc.)

ㅏ[a] ri. "a"
pe. "a" in "father" pr. "a"

ㅐ[æ] ri. "ae, ai, ay" of. "ae"
This is pronounced exactly the same with "ㅔ[e]" in contemporary Korean, but many people think it should be distinguished from "ㅔ[e]", as it appears in romanization and the IPA symbol, although themselves even pronounce them the same.
pe. "a" in "hat" or also "ay" in "Blue Jay"

ㅓ[ʌ] ri. "eo, u, ou" of. "eo"
pe. "u" in "gut"

ㅔ[e] ri. "e"
pe. "e" in "send" pr. "e"

ㅗ[o] ri. "o"
pe. "aw" in "paw" pr. "o"

ㅚ[we] ri. "oe, oi, we" of. "oe"
The old pronunciation is [ø] like the O Umlaut in German.
pe. "we" in "Wendy"

ㅜ[u] ri. "u, oo" of. "u"
pe. "oo" in "moon" pr. "u"

ㅟ[wi] ri. "wi, ui, wee" of. "wi"
The old pronunciation is [y] like the U Umlaut in German or the French U.
pe. "we"

ㅡ[ɨ, ɯ] ri. "eu, u" of. "eu"
Really hard to explain how to pronounce this one, but it could be similar to between the French "e" and "eu", or the English "oo" in "book".

ㅣ[i] ri. "i, ee" of. "i"
same as "y" in "really"

Now... Try to pronounce "Choi Cheolhan"

billywoods · #2

MJK wrote:

pe. = (similarly) pronounced like the English ...

Which dialect of English? The biggest thing that distinguishes the various dialects of English is their large variation in vowels.

Bonobo · #3

MJK wrote:

Now... Try to pronounce "Choi Cheolhan"

Chö Chalhan?

Bill Spight · #4

Bonobo wrote:

MJK wrote:

Now... Try to pronounce "Choi Cheolhan"

Chö Chalhan?

Joey Callahan?

MJK · #5

billywoods wrote:

MJK wrote:

pe. = (similarly) pronounced like the English ...

Which dialect of English? The biggest thing that distinguishes the various dialects of English is their large variation in vowels.

Well, should be English from BBC and CNN. I've also written the IPA symbols to remove confusion.

Bonobo wrote:

MJK wrote:

Now... Try to pronounce "Choi Cheolhan"

Chö Chalhan?

Reading(ㅚ[we] ri. "oe, oi, we" of. "oe") like the "ö", I hear only from very old people, occasionally.
It should be pronounced like Chweh Chull-hahn But it's also okay to say it as Choi Chull-hahn, for the same reason why Lee Sedol isn't Yi Sedol.

DrStraw · #6

MJK wrote:

[
Well, should be English from BBC and CNN. I've also written the IPA symbols to remove confusion.

Well, BBC is British English and CNN is American English and ne'er the twain shall meet.

This reminds me that when I first tried to learn Japanese from the Teach Yourself book it said to pronounce O as in November. Well, I spoke a northern dialect of British and so pronounced it that way. Ten years later in Japanese class I had a lot of trouble changing it to the correct pronunciation because I had been saying it one way in my mind for so long. Depending on where you are from the O in November can be pronounced long, short, or as a schwa.

MJK · #7

DrStraw wrote:

MJK wrote:

[
Well, should be English from BBC and CNN. I've also written the IPA symbols to remove confusion.

Well, BBC is British English and CNN is American English and ne'er the twain shall meet.

This reminds me that when I first tried to learn Japanese from the Teach Yourself book it said to pronounce O as in November. Well, I spoke a northern dialect of British and so pronounced it that way. Ten years later in Japanese class I had a lot of trouble changing it to the correct pronunciation because I had been saying it one way in my mind for so long. Depending on where you are from the O in November can be pronounced long, short, or as a schwa.

IPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internati ... c_Alphabet

billywoods · #8

MJK wrote:

IPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internati ... c_Alphabet

The meaning of an IPA symbol also varies depending on the dialect. Take a look at the vowel chart here. English vowels are a mess.

There is a more precise version too, but most people write the diaphoneme (which you have written), whose meaning varies a lot between dialects and languages.

DrStraw · #9

MJK wrote:

DrStraw wrote:

MJK wrote:

[
Well, should be English from BBC and CNN. I've also written the IPA symbols to remove confusion.

Well, BBC is British English and CNN is American English and ne'er the twain shall meet.

This reminds me that when I first tried to learn Japanese from the Teach Yourself book it said to pronounce O as in November. Well, I spoke a northern dialect of British and so pronounced it that way. Ten years later in Japanese class I had a lot of trouble changing it to the correct pronunciation because I had been saying it one way in my mind for so long. Depending on where you are from the O in November can be pronounced long, short, or as a schwa.

IPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internati ... c_Alphabet

I know the IPA alphabet. I was just pointing out the futility of saying "BBC or CNN". Don't misunderstand me: I appreciate your efforts.

jts · **#10**

billywoods wrote:

MJK wrote:

IPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internati ... c_Alphabet

The meaning of an IPA symbol also varies depending on the dialect. Take a look at the vowel chart here. English vowels are a mess.

There is a more precise version too, but most people write the diaphoneme (which you have written), whose meaning varies a lot between dialects and languages.

IPA represents the same word differently for different dialects of English, but it always uses the same symbol for the same sound. Regardless of how recondite your accent is, you should be able to figure out the meaning of the vowel system.

I am curious to know, though, in which dialect "hat" and "blue jay" share the [æ] pronunciation... Australian, maybe?

MJK · **#11**

jts wrote:

billywoods wrote:

MJK wrote:

IPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internati ... c_Alphabet

The meaning of an IPA symbol also varies depending on the dialect. Take a look at the vowel chart here. English vowels are a mess.

There is a more precise version too, but most people write the diaphoneme (which you have written), whose meaning varies a lot between dialects and languages.

IPA represents the same word differently for different dialects of English, but it always uses the same symbol for the same sound. Regardless of how recondite your accent is, you should be able to figure out the meaning of the vowel system.

I am curious to know, though, in which dialect "hat" and "blue jay" share the [æ] pronunciation... Australian, maybe?

Well, I wanted to say that most English speakers can't pronounce [æ] in the end of the word. For example, in "Hyundai" where it should be [hjʌn dæ] I've always heard it as [hjʌn dei] in English. The same goes to [e]

MJK · **#12**

DrStraw wrote:

I was just pointing out the futility of saying "BBC or CNN".

The vowels listed with "pe." should be pronounced the same in BBC and CNN, which I meant to refer to Recieved Pronunciation and General American, according to my English dictionaries. But perhaps it doesn't go well for the practice.

billywoods · **#13**

jts wrote:

IPA represents the same word differently for different dialects of English, but it always uses the same symbol for the same sound.

The IPA is just a set of characters. People use these characters in very different ways.

The "tl;dr" version of what I'm about to say is: in most IPA usage, my /ɔː/ is not your /ɔː/, even though they are written with the same symbols.

The issue is basically one of broad vs. narrow transcription.

A "narrow" transcription is a highly precise transcription of the individual phones that make up an individual utterance of a word, so accounts for dialect (allophones and so on). This can be done in the IPA, of course. The downside is that it involves many thousands of symbols adorned with squiggles and dots and diacritics, and if a British English speaker transcribed a sentence narrowly, it may be very hard to read for an American speaker, for instance. So it's very rare to see this done. You will sometimes find this in linguistics texts that discuss or compare the phonologies of particular, individual dialects of a language, but otherwise it sees very little usage.

A "broad" transcription is one that deliberately doesn't take dialect into account: it involves a much smaller number of placeholder symbols, which confusingly are also written in the IPA. These placeholder symbols represent diaphonemes: collections of phones/phonemes that are, at least hopefully and for 'standard' dialects, the same modulo allophones. (That is, if every English speaker agrees that "got" and "hot" share the same vowel, then even if that vowel varies dramatically across dialects, we might as well write it with a generic "o" symbol, and let individual speakers understand what it means. This means that how I transcribe a word will be basically the same as how you transcribe a word, but the symbols mean different sounds to us both.) These are the phonetic transcriptions you see in dictionaries, for instance, so that they can be used by speakers of different dialects.

Have a look at the vowel chart I linked to. The diaphonemes on the left are the characters that broad transcriptions (including the OP's transcriptions) are written in, and these are the characters that many dictionaries use. Notice that the actual phonemes they correspond to - the rest of the table - vary hugely. (What on earth is ø̞̈? I've no idea. Edit: it seems it's such an esoteric character that it doesn't even render on L19.

) Of course, there are probably comparable charts for Korean too, but who knows how much they overlap?

jts · **#14**

Assuming all dialects of English used the same vowel in "got" that they use in "hot" doesn't imply that all dialects of English should use one IPA symbol for that vowel, it implies that each dialect should use the same symbol for got that it uses for hot.

For example, perhaps I will use [ɑ] and the Welsh will use [ɒ] but [ɑ] and [ɒ] should be vowel-sounds that we can compare across dialects and indeed across languages.

(The main purpose of IPA is to represent foreign pronunciations in a way that doesn't depend on orthography/romanization, so I can't imagine what use IPA would have if the symbols were meant to be different for everyone. The use of extended symbol sets to represent speech defects and the smallest measurable differences in phonetic value are only of technical interest to linguists and speech pathologists...)

billywoods · **#15**

jts wrote:

Assuming all dialects of English used the same vowel in "got" that they use in "hot" doesn't imply that all dialects of English should use one IPA symbol for that vowel

"Should"? No. But they do.

jts wrote:

I can't imagine what use IPA would have if the symbols were meant to be different for everyone

I gave you one. Pronunciation guides in dictionaries. It is no use whatsoever if you publish a dictionary in east London and people in south London, or Liverpool, or New York, can't use its pronunciation guide. But they can, because pronunciation in dictionaries is transcribed phonemically, not phonetically. Did you read what I said? :-?

Boidhre · **#16**

MJK wrote:

Well, I wanted to say that most English speakers can't pronounce [æ] in the end of the word. For example, in "Hyundai" where it should be [hjʌn dæ] I've always heard it as [hjʌn dei] in English. The same goes to [e]

Worse, when you try to explain [æ] as the a in "cat" for example that only works for some dialects because other dialects don't pronounce that a as [æ] but another usually fairly similar sound.

You could write out a precise pronunciation guide for certain words used here in Ireland spoken with an Irish accent from say the south. Most Americans and British speakers would find it very difficult to reproduce the sounds because the words will include some sounds borrowed from Irish. Again, as above, you could use a particular part of a word to explain the meaning of an IPA symbol but if you're thinking of BBC English then it's rather likely that there's a different vowel or consonant cluster sound used here in many common words which will end up messing things up.

Like above, I see [æ] as the a in "cat." I then need to figure out if my particular southern Irish accent pronounces cat in the way that's being referred to here (most of us don't), and I need to figure out if the writer was thinking of Received Pronunciation (BBC) or some Eastern or Western Coast American accent (it's almost never central US or Southern, nor Northern England, Scotland or Wales that people use for their reference point). This is fine for me, I married a language scholar who is useful for these kinds of questions, but for most people it's not going to be easy figuring out what symbols apply to their variety of English pronunciation (and honestly it's very complicated, there are around five main distinct "pronunciation dialects" in my city alone and I speak like none of them).

MJK · **#17**

Okay. I must have made a hasty generalization that most English speakers pronounce like the recorders of the IELTS or TOEFL listening tests, which is a main source of hearing this language to me; also that, for the people who don't speak like the recorders, those who I erroneously thouht as a minority, they should know how to pronounce like the majority. And now I know this is a totally wrong thinking, maybe influenced by the social aspects of my native language that every non-Seoulers are actually required to know how to speak and understand the language of Seoul, so called the "standard language" officially defined as "the contemporary language of Seoul that people of refinement broadly use", while only 1/5 of the 50,000,000 South Korean population live in the capital. I will soon post this guide again when I can find out a better way than the IPA for explaining the pronunciation.

Boidhre · **#18**

MJK wrote:

Okay. I must have made a hasty generalization that most English speakers pronounce like the recorders of the IELTS or TOEFL listening tests, which is a main source of hearing this language to me; also that, for the people who don't speak like the recorders, those who I erroneously thouht as a minority, they should know how to pronounce like the majority. And now I know this is a totally wrong thinking, maybe influenced by the social aspects of my native language that every non-Seoulers are actually required to know how to speak and understand the language of Seoul, so called the "standard language" officially defined as "the contemporary language of Seoul that people of refinement broadly use", while only 1/5 of the 50,000,000 South Korean population live in the capital. I will soon post this guide again when I can find out a better way than the IPA for explaining the pronunciation.

French is like this, there is a dialect of it considered supreme and every French person is expected to be able to understand it at barest and speak it preferably. English isn't. I genuinely find it very hard to understand certain Irish accents and dialects, never mind the English of the Indian sub-continent or other more exotic locales for my rural Irish ear.

For pronunciations, there are some useful sound files on Wikipedia for each IPA symbol. This removes all ambiguity about this. But it's a bit abstract and going from hearing to producing a sound is non-trivial if it's not part of your home dialect.

John Fairbairn · **#19**

Quote:

Well, I wanted to say that most English speakers can't pronounce [æ] in the end of the word. For example, in "Hyundai" where it should be [hjʌn dæ] I've always heard it as [hjʌn dei] in English. The same goes to [e]

You've lived a sheltered life! Most people in the UK (including on tv adverts) seem to say it as in High-oon-die (rhyming with pie) and, to add insult to injury, putting a strong stress on the oon. Toshiba's another one that makes me cringe when it's mispronounced on the adverts, and of course Kye-oh-toe for Kyoto is another common indignity.

Quote:

I will soon post this guide again when I can find out a better way than the IPA for explaining the pronunciation.

Life's too short to try that on L19, I fear. Even if you got the individual sounds right, you would need to explain the myriad sound changes. Choo & O'Grady wrote a book of 250 pages on that, for beginners, and still haven't covered the topic fully.

Quote:

Assuming all dialects of English used the same vowel in "got" that they use in "hot" doesn't imply that all dialects of English should use one IPA symbol for that vowel, it implies that each dialect should use the same symbol for got that it uses for hot.

Another case where theories can't be trusted. Following the theory implied here, I would use the same IPA symbol for the 'a' in hand and dan (just to bring the thread back to go for a while) because I use the same vowel sound in both words. But lots of American make the 'a' in these two words very different: dan sounding like the way I pronounce darn.

But we have progressed. I'm sure English-speaking people of a certain age will recognise three infamous nuggets from their language-learning days:

1. "My postilion has been struck by lightning" (leading many poor souls to believe that they had a part of their anatomy called a postilion)
2. "a as in father, only shorter" (causing severe glottal trauma for 90% of the population)
3. "The vowels as in Italian" (Italian not being a language, of course, but a linguistic expression)

VincentCB · **#20**

Boidhre wrote:

French is like this, there is a dialect of it considered supreme

Obviously you're talking about Canadian French

Disclaimer : I'm French Canadian

Quote:

Hyundai

Here in Quebec most people pronounce it as on-day, which never made any sense to me.

How to Pronounce Korean Names or the Language Itself

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