Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that answer the question.
Query: Is Korean phonetic?
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.
Today, these words of Chinese origin may be written in the traditional Chinese characters (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean), simplified Chinese characters (Chinese, Japanese), a locally developed phonetic script (Korean hangul, Japanese kana), or a Latin alphabet (Vietnamese). The Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese languages are collectively referred to as CJKV, or just CJK, since modern Vietnamese is no longer written with Chinese characters at all.
Both Japanese and Korean formerly referred to Vietnam by their respective Sino-Xenic pronunciations of the Chinese characters for its names, but later switched to using direct phonetic transcriptions. In Japanese, following the independence of Vietnam the names "Annan" (安南) and "Etsunan" (越南) were largely replaced by the phonetic transcription "Betonamu" (ベトナム), written in katakana script; however, the old form is still seen in compound words (e.g. 訪越, "a visit to Vietnam"). Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs sometimes used an alternative spelling "Vietonamu" (ヴィエトナム). Similarly, in the Korean language, in line with the trend towards decreasing usage of hanja, the Sino-Korean-derived name "Wollam" (월남, the Korean reading of 越南) has been replaced by "Beteunam" (베트남) in South Korea and "Wetnam" (윁남) in North Korea.
Phonetic transcription (also known as phonetic script or phonetic notation) is the visual representation of speech sounds (or phones). The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Experimental phonetics is the branch of general phonetics that deals with the study of the sounds and other human speech units by applying the experimental method. This scientific field covers basic areas of phonetics - articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics and auditory phonetics. Moreover, experimental method used in study of the segmental phonetics and suprasegmental phonetics, in exploration of the typological phonetics.
Experimental phonetics is used to test theories or hypotheses in order to support or disprove them.
SKATS stands for Standard Korean Alphabet Transliteration System. It is also known as Korean Morse equivalents. Despite the name, SKATS is not a true transliteration system. SKATS maps the Hangul characters through Korean Morse code to the same codes in Morse code and back to their equivalents in the Latin script. Any phonetic correspondence between the Korean and Roman letters would be purely coincidental.
Some previous linguists have listed a tiny number of translations which may be perceived as phonetic parallels. This is exemplified in the following table: 
In addition to the above, there may be a relation between the words for morning (朝, asa; 아침, achim). A historical variant in Korean may have been pronounced "asa" (see: Asadal).
The issue of ambiguity is the main hurdle in any effort to "cleanse" the Korean language of Chinese characters. Characters convey meaning visually, while alphabets convey guidance to pronunciation, which in turn hints at meaning. As an example, in Korean dictionaries, the phonetic entry for "gisa" yields more than 30 different entries. In the past, this ambiguity had been efficiently resolved by parenthetically displaying the associated hanja. While hanja is sometimes used for Sino-Korean vocabulary, native Korean words are rarely, if ever, written in hanja.
Until the 20th century, no official orthography of the Korean alphabet had been established. Due to liaison, heavy consonant assimilation, dialectal variants and other reasons, a Korean word can potentially be spelled in multiple ways. Sejong seemed to prefer morphophonemic spelling (representing the underlying root forms) rather than a phonemic one (representing the actual sounds). However, early in its history the Korean alphabet was dominated by phonemic spelling. Over the centuries the orthography became partially morphophonemic, first in nouns and later in verbs. The modern Korean alphabet is as morphophonemic as is practical. The difference between phonetic Romanization, phonemic orthography and morpho-phonemic orthography can be illustrated with the phrase "motaneun sarami":
One way of adapting Hanja to write Korean in such systems (such as Gugyeol) was to represent native Korean grammatical particles and other words solely according to their pronunciation. For example, Gugyeol uses the characters to transcribe the Korean word "hăni", which in modern Korean means "does, and so". In Chinese, however, the same characters are read as the expression "wéi ní", meaning "becoming a nun". This is a typical example of Gugyeol words where the radical () is read in Korean for its meaning (hă—"to do"), whereas the suffix , ni (meaning "nun"), is used phonetically.
Many modern Koreatowns will exhibit the usage of the Korean language and Hangul on storefront signs as sometimes on official highway signage. Officially sanctioned Koreatowns may also exhibit signs in the local language. In English, the word "Koreatown", "Little Korea", and "Korea Way" can sometimes be seen, as in the case with the Los Angeles Koreatown. As Korean is the official language of South Korea and North Korea as well as one of the two official languages in China's Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, there are approximately 80 million people who speak Korean worldwide. For over a millennium, Korean was written with adapted Chinese characters called hanja, complemented by phonetic systems like "hyangchal, gugyeol," and "idu". In the 15th century, a national writing system called hangul was commissioned by Sejong the Great, but it only came into widespread use in the 20th century, because of the "yangban" aristocracy's preference for hanja.
The Phonetic Symbol Guide is a book by Geoffrey Pullum and William Ladusaw that explains the histories and uses of symbols used in various phonetic transcription conventions. It was published in 1986, with a second edition in 1996, by the University of Chicago Press. Symbols include letters and diacritics of the International Phonetic Alphabet and Americanist phonetic notation, though not of the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet. The "Guide" was consulted by the International Phonetic Association when they established names and numerical codes for the International Phonetic Alphabet and was the basis for the characters of the TIPA set of phonetic fonts.
The most important text for the study of early Korean is the Hyangga, a collection of 25 poems, of which some go back to the Three Kingdoms period (57 BC–668 AD), but are preserved in an orthography that only goes back to the 9th century AD. Korean is copiously attested from the mid-15th century on in the phonetically precise Hangul system of writing.
The Soviet Union kept the participation of their aircrews in the Korean War secret for many years, though it was widely suspected by UN forces. Soviet aircraft were adorned with North Korean or Chinese markings and pilots wore either North Korean uniforms or civilian clothes, to disguise their origins. For radio communication, they were given cards with common Korean words for various flying terms spelled out phonetically in Cyrillic characters. These subterfuges did not long survive the fury of air-to-air combat, however, and pilots were soon heard communicating in Russian.
King Sejong the Great profoundly affected Korean history with his personal creation and introduction of hangul, the native phonetic writing system for the Korean language.
Although Koreans had to learn Classical Chinese to be properly literate for the most part, some additional systems were developed which used simplified forms of Chinese characters that phonetically transcribe Korean, including hyangchal (), gugyeol (), and idu ().
Because many different Hanja—and thus, many different words written using Hanja—often share the same sounds, two distinct Hanja words ("Hanjaeo") may be spelled identically in the phonetic Hangul alphabet. Hanja's language of origin, Chinese, has many homophones, and Hanja words became even more homophonic when they came into Korean, since Korean lacks a tonal system, which is how Chinese distinguishes many words that would otherwise be homophonic. For example, while 道, 刀, and 島 are all phonetically distinct in Mandarin (pronounced "dào", "dāo", and "dǎo" respectively), they are all pronounced "do" (도) in Korean. For this reason, Hanja are often used to clarify meaning, either on their own without the equivalent Hangul spelling or in parentheses after the Hangul spelling as a kind of gloss. Hanja are often also used as a form of shorthand in newspaper headlines, advertisements, and on signs, for example the banner at the funeral for the sailors lost in the sinking of ROKS Cheonan (PCC-772).
It is often hypothesized that Asadal may be a compound noun composed of two elements, "asa" and "dal". This hypothesis appears to be motivated by an assumption of equivalence between the Chinese phonetic transcription , which is read in Modern Korean as "Asadal" (but in Mandarin Chinese as and in Modern Japanese as "Ashitatsu" or "Ashidachi"), and the word ( or , Korean "Joseon", Japanese "Chōsen") "Joseon, another name for Korea." However, the etymology of Joseon is unknown; it is not even clear whether it has been created as a phonetic transcription of a foreign name or rather as a semantic calque of a foreign name, and the "Cháo" reading of the first syllable of the Mandarin Chinese form is identical with the reading of this character when used to mean "dynasty," not with the reading of this character when used to mean "morning" (which would be *"Zhāo" instead).
The farmers, unwilling to abandon their homes, argued that because of the ambiguity in the naming of the Tumen river, they were actually already in Korean territory. The Yalu River boundary is of little dispute, but the interpretation of the Tumen River boundary 土門 (토문) causes problems. The name of the river itself originates from the Jurchen word "tumen", meaning "ten thousand". The official boundary agreement in 1712 identified the Tumen river using the characters 土門 (pinyin: Tǔmen) for the phonetic transcription. However, the modern Tumen River is written as 圖們 (pinyin: Túmen) in modern Chinese and as 豆滿 (두만) "Duman" in both modern Korean and Japanese. Some Koreans hence claim that the "Tumen" referred to in the treaty is actually a tributary of the Songhua River. Under this interpretation, Gando (where the Koreans settled) would be part of Korean territory.
Chinese and Koreans had long used Chinese characters to write non-Chinese terms and proper names phonetically, by selecting characters for Chinese words that sounded like each syllable.
Koreans also used the characters phonetically to write Korean particles and inflections added to Chinese texts as an aid to reading (Idu script).
In Japan, the practice was developed into "man'yōgana", a complete script for the Japanese language using Chinese characters phonetically, and the ancestor of modern kana syllabaries.
This system was already in use in the verse parts of the "Kojiki" (712) and the "Nihon Shoki" (720).
For example, the first line of the first poem in the "Kojiki" was written with five characters:
The "plain" segments, sometimes referred to as "lax" or "lenis," are considered to be the more "basic" or unmarked members of the Korean obstruent series. The "tense" segments, also referred to as "fortis," "hard," or "glottalized," have eluded precise description and have been the subject of considerable phonetic investigation. In the Korean alphabet as well as all widely used romanization systems for Korean, they are represented as doubled plain segments: ㅃ pp, ㄸ tt, ㅉ jj, ㄲ kk. As it was suggested from the Middle Korean spelling, the tense consonants came from the initial consonant clusters sC-, pC-, psC-.[2][3]:29, 38, 452 The aspirated segments are characterized by aspiration, a burst of air accompanied by the delayed onset of voicing. The "plain" segments are also distinguished from the tense and aspirated phonemes by changes in vowel quality, including a relatively lower pitch of the following vowel.[4]
This article is a description of the morphology, syntax, and semantics of Korean. For phonetics and phonology, see Korean phonology. See also Korean honorifics, which play a large role in the grammar.
Although a phonetic Korean alphabet, now known as Chosŏn'gŭl or Hangul, had been created by Sejong the Great, it did not come into widespread official use until the late 19th and early 20th century. Thus, until that time it was necessary to be fluent in reading and writing Hanja in order to be literate in Korean, as the vast majority of Korean literature and most other Korean documents were written in Literary Chinese, using Hanja as its primary script. Today, a good working knowledge of Chinese characters is still important for anyone who wishes to study older texts (up to about the 1990s), or anyone who wishes to read scholarly texts in the humanities. Learning a certain number of Hanja is very helpful for understanding the etymology of Sino-Korean words, and for enlarging one's Korean vocabulary. Today, Hanja are not used to write native Korean words, which are always rendered in Hangul, and even words of Chinese origin—"Hanja-eo" ()—are written with the Hangul alphabet most of the time, with the corresponding Chinese character often written next to it in order to prevent confusion with other characters or words with the same phonetics.
The Chinese name is a phonetic approximation of the German proper adjective. The Vietnamese name is based on the Chinese name. The Japanese name is a phonetic approximation of the Dutch proper adjective. The Korean name is based on the Japanese name. This is explained in detail below:
O also spelled Oh (Hangul: ) is the Korean form of the Chinese surname Wu (Hanja: ). The character 吳 is phonetically pronounced "Oh" in Korean, but "Wu" in Mandarin Chinese, however the historic origin of the surname is the same.