| New Korean Orthography | |
| Chosŏn'gŭl | 조선어신철자법 |
|---|---|
| Hancha | 朝鮮語新綴字法 |
| Revised Romanization | Joseoneo sincheoljabeop |
| McCune–Reischauer | Chosŏnŏsinch’ŏlchapŏp |
 |
| Korean writing systems |
|---|
| Hangul |
|
| Hanja |
| Mixed script |
| Braille |
| Transcription |
| Transliteration |
The New Korean Orthography was a spelling reform used in North Korea from 1948 to 1954. It added five consonants and one vowel letter to the Hangul alphabet, supposedly making it a more morphophonologically "clear" approach to the Korean language.
After the establishment of the North Korean government in 1945, the North Korean Provisional People's Committee began a language planning campaign on the Soviet model. [1] Originally, both North Korean and South Korean Hangul script was based on the Unified Plan promulgated in 1933 under the Japanese. [2] The goals of the independent North Korean campaign were to increase literacy, re-standardize Hangul to form a "New Korean" that could be used as a cultural weapon of revolution, and eliminate the use of Hanja (Chinese characters). [1] The study of Russian was also made compulsory from middle school onward, [1] and communist terminology—such as Workers' Party, People's Army, and Fatherland Liberation War—were rapidly assimilated into Korean. [2] The ban on Hanja in 1949 (excepting parenthetical references in scientific and technical publications) was part of a language purification movement which sought to replace Sino-Korean vocabulary and loanwords from Japanese with native neologisms on the grounds that they were "reactionary" and separated the literary intelligentsia from the masses. [1] [2] New dictionaries, monolingual and bilingual Russian-Korean, were to be based on the concept of "self-reliance" ( juche ); place names and personal names modeled after Chinese naming practices were also purged and replaced with socialist concepts. [2]
In 1948, the New Korean Orthography was promulgated, along with the Standard Language Orthography Dictionary. [1] The Communist Party of Korea claimed that this New Orthography was the first in Korean history to represent the language of the proletariat. [2] The only publications to use the New Korean Orthography were the linguistics journal Korean Language Research and the 1949 Korean Grammar. [3] The language standardization efforts were interrupted by the Korean War and hampered by Kim Il Sung's disapproval of the new orthography. [1] In March 1958, the new orthography's creator, Kim Tu Bong, was purged from the Party, and linguistics journals began publishing attacks on him and his system. [3] From then on, proposals for script reform were restricted to the idea of writing Hangul horizontally, rather than in syllable blocks. Linguistic journals also continued to attack "foreignisms" from Chinese and English (e.g., pai pai/bai bai바이 바이, "bye bye"). [3] In the 1960s, Kim Il Sung issued a directive that would bind all future language planning to Korean ethnic nationalism, saying that "people of the same racial make-up, the same culture, living in the same territory ... [have a] need for a nationalistic, pure standard". Thus, Pyongan dialect was chosen as the standard dialect for North Korean, purely for the reason that it was considered less "contaminated" by foreign cultures and capitalists. [2] The legacy of the New Korean Orthography lies in North Korea's modern use of Hangul, which reflects morphology more than pronunciation as it does in the South. [4]
The reason for the reform is that some Korean roots change form and therefore cannot be written with a consistent spelling using standard hangul. The additional letters introduced in the New Orthography do not represent new sounds, but these situations where a sound changes, say from a /p/ to a /w/. Three were created de novo by modifying existing letters, two (ㅿ and ㆆ) were obsolete letters, and one ( 
) is a numeral.
For example, the root of the verb "to walk" has the form 걷kŏt- before a consonant, as in the inflection 걷다kŏtta, but the form 걸kŏl- before a vowel, as in 걸어kŏrŏ and 걸으니kŏrŭni. In New Orthography, the root is an invariable 거ᇫ, spelled with the new letter ㅿ in place of both the ㄷ in 걷 and the ㄹ in 걸: 거ᇫ다kŏtta,거ᇫ어kŏrŏ.
Another example is the root of the verb "to heal", which has the form 낫nas- before a consonant, as in 낫다natta, but the form 나 before a vowel, as in 나아naa. In some cases, there is an epenthetic ŭ vowel before a consonant suffix, as in 나을naŭl. In New Orthography, this variable root is written as an invariable 나ᇹ, and the epenthetic vowel is not written: 나ᇹ다NA’.TA for 낫다natta,나ᇹᄅNA’.L for 나을naŭl,나ᇹ아NA’.A for 나아naa.
| Letter | Pronunciation | |
|---|---|---|
| before a vowel | before a consonant | |
 | /l/ | — [note 1] |
 | /ll/ | /l/ |
| ㅿ | /l/ | /t/ |
| ㆆ | — [note 1] | /◌͈/ [note 2] |
 | /w/ [note 3] | /p/ |
| | /j/ [note 4] | /i/ |
As with all letters in North Korea, the names follow the formula CiŭC. For convenience they are also called 여린리을 (soft riŭl), 된리을 (strong riŭl), 반시읏 (semi-siŭt), 여린히읗 (soft hiŭt), 위읍 (wiŭp), and 여린이(soft i).
The New Orthography also added two new digraphs to the lexicon, ㅭ/lʔ/ and ᇬ/ŋk/.
There were other changes that made the orthography more morphemic, without requiring the addition of new letters. For example, in the word normally spelled 놉니다 (top example in image at right), the politeness morpheme ㅂ is separated out in its own block. Such spellings can be found in medieval documents, but were not normally seen in the 20th century.
The attributive ㄴn morpheme at the ends of adjectives is also placed in a separate block, and the occasional epenthetic ŭ that appears before it is not written, unlike standard 은ŭn. A morphemic h is retained before this ending: 하얗다HA.YAH.TAhayata "is white", 하얗ㄴHA.YAH.Nhayan "white" (standard 하얀HA.YAN). 좋다JOH.TAjota "is good", 좋ㄴJOH.Njohŭn "good" (standard 좋은JOH.ŬN).
Sandhi is any of a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on nearby sounds or the grammatical function of the adjacent words. Sandhi belongs to morphophonology.
Mohawk is an Iroquoian language currently spoken by around 3,500 people of the Mohawk nation, located primarily in current or former Haudenosaunee territories, predominately Canada, and to a lesser extent in the United States. The word "Mohawk" is an exonym. In the Mohawk language, the people say that they are from Kanien:ke and that they are Kanienʼkehá꞉ka "People of the Flint Stone Place" or "People of the Flint Nation".
Estonian orthography is the system used for writing the Estonian language and is based on the Latin alphabet. The Estonian orthography is generally guided by phonemic principles, with each grapheme corresponding to one phoneme.
McCune–Reischauer romanization is one of the two most widely used Korean-language romanization systems. It was created in 1937 and the ALA-LC variant based on it is currently used for standard romanization library catalogs in North America.
A phonemic orthography is an orthography in which the graphemes correspond consistently to the language's phonemes, or more generally to the language's diaphonemes. Natural languages rarely have perfectly phonemic orthographies; a high degree of grapheme–phoneme correspondence can be expected in orthographies based on alphabetic writing systems, but they differ in how complete this correspondence is. English orthography, for example, is alphabetic but highly nonphonemic; it was once mostly phonemic during the Middle English stage, when the modern spellings originated, but spoken English changed rapidly while the orthography was much more stable, resulting in the modern nonphonemic situation. On the contrary the Albanian, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin, Romanian, Italian, Turkish, Spanish, Finnish, Czech, Latvian, Lithuanian, Esperanto, Korean, Swahili and Georgian orthographic systems come much closer to being consistent phonemic representations.
Juǀʼhoan, also known as Southern or Southeastern ǃKung or ǃXun, is the southern variety of the ǃKung dialect continuum, spoken in northeastern Namibia and the Northwest District of Botswana by San Bushmen who largely identify themselves as Juǀʼhoansi. Several regional dialects are distinguished: Epukiro, Tsumǃkwe, Rundu, Omatako and ǂKxʼauǁʼein, with Tsumǃkwe being the best described and often taken as representative.
Marshallese, also known as Ebon, is a Micronesian language spoken in the Marshall Islands. The language of the Marshallese people, it is spoken by nearly all of the country's population of 59,000, making it the principal language. There are also roughly 27,000 Marshallese citizens residing in the United States, nearly all of whom speak Marshallese, as well as residents in other countries such as Nauru and Kiribati.
In phonetics and phonology, gemination, or consonant lengthening, is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from stress. Gemination is represented in many writing systems by a doubled letter and is often perceived as a doubling of the consonant. Some phonological theories use 'doubling' as a synonym for gemination, while others describe two distinct phenomena.
In phonology, epenthesis means the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially in the beginning syllable (prothesis) or in the ending syllable (paragoge) or in-between two syllabic sounds in a word. The opposite process, where one or more sounds are removed, is referred to as elision.
The writing system of the Korean language is a syllabic alphabet of character parts organized into character blocks representing syllables. The character parts cannot be written from left to right on the computer, as in many Western languages. Every possible syllable in Korean would have to be rendered as syllable blocks by a font, or each character part would have to be encoded separately. Unicode has both options; the character parts ㅎ (h) and ㅏ (a), and the combined syllable 하 (ha), are encoded.
In an alphabetic writing system, a silent letter is a letter that, in a particular word, does not correspond to any sound in the word's pronunciation. In linguistics, a silent letter is often symbolised with a null sign U+2205∅EMPTY SET. Null is an unpronounced or unwritten segment. The symbol resembles the Scandinavian letter Ø and other symbols.
Esperanto is a constructed international auxiliary language designed to have a simple phonology. The creator of Esperanto, L. L. Zamenhof, described Esperanto pronunciation by comparing the sounds of Esperanto with the sounds of several major European languages.
Jeju, often called Jejueo or Jejuan in English-language scholarship, is a Koreanic language originally from Jeju Island, South Korea. It is not mutually intelligible with mainland Korean dialects. While it was historically considered a divergent Jeju dialect of the Korean language, it is increasingly referred to as a separate language in its own right. It is declining in usage and was classified by UNESCO in 2010 as critically endangered, the highest level of language endangerment possible. Revitalization efforts are ongoing.
The Korean language has diverged between North and South Korea due to the length of time that the two states have been separated.
This article is a technical description of the phonetics and phonology of Korean. Unless otherwise noted, statements in this article refer to South Korean standard language based on the Seoul dialect.
Hangul (Korean: 한글) is the native script of Korea. It was created in the mid fifteenth century by King Sejong, as both a complement and an alternative to the logographic Sino-Korean Hanja. Initially denounced by the educated class as eonmun, it only became the primary Korean script following independence from Japan in the mid-20th century.
Scottish Gaelic orthography has evolved over many centuries and is heavily etymologizing in its modern form. This means the orthography tends to preserve historical components rather than operating on the principles of a phonemic orthography where the graphemes correspond directly to phonemes. This allows the same written form in Scottish Gaelic to result in a multitude of pronunciations, depending on the spoken variant of Scottish Gaelic. For example, the word coimhead ('watching') may result in, ,, or. Conversely, it allows the sometimes highly divergent phonetic forms to be covered by a single written form, rather than requiring multiple written forms.
The Yale romanization of Korean was developed by Samuel Elmo Martin and his colleagues at Yale University about half a decade after McCune–Reischauer. It is the standard romanization of the Korean language in linguistics.
The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Hangeul in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern writing system for the Korean language. The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs used to pronounce them. They are systematically modified to indicate phonetic features. The vowel letters are systematically modified for related sounds, making Hangul a featural writing system. It has been described as a syllabic alphabet as it combines the features of alphabetic and syllabic writing systems.
Initial sound rule is series of changes to hangul, the writing system for the Korean language, made in South Korea to better reflect modern Korean phonology. The changes affect syllable-initial ㄹ r and ㄴ n sounds in Sino-Korean vocabulary under certain conditions. North Korea orthography does not recognize this rule, making it one of a number of North–South differences in the Korean language.
