Consonant Clusters

[dmclean6354604]

Hi guys,

I am not sure if this has been covered before (I did check), but I am often confused by words like 많이. The first syllable has two consonants at the bottom: ㄴ and ㅎ, but the second syllable has an empty consonant.

Can someone help me understand why Korean is sometimes written like this, and what it means? If there's a KClass lesson about it, please let me know. Thanks!

[jaehwi]

Hello,

This is Jaehwi from Koreanclass101.com

Words have the historical origin. In the past, there were some theories saying people in the past read 많이 in the different way, not exactly like the pronunciation of those days. I think they read the second bottom consonant ㅎ in the past. That's why you can see double consonants for some Korean words. They had the pronunciation in the past.

But as more people communicate and try to find the easier way to pronunce words, now you can see some words have the almost same pronunciation.

There were a movement trying to make this spelling only following the pronunciation. But Korean people still use the spelling with the empty consonant to understand the meaning easily.

For the spoken language, the same pronunciation doesn't make a big problem because you can understand the meaning by the context. Or at least, you can communicate with the other to see the right meaning of the word.

But for the written language, you should get the meaning by yourself. If the words stands alone without any context, it can make problems if many words have the same spelling. That's why Korean people keep the original spelling, which is not the same as the other words although it has same pronunciation.

I understand that will be not easy for learning Korean, but you'll be easily find the meaning on the written text as you learn more on the spelling.

Thanks for asking us the question. I hope this helps.

감사합니다.

- Jaehwi / Koreanclass101.com

[dmclean6354604]

Words have the historical origin. In the past, there were some theories saying people in the past read 많이 in the different way, not exactly like the pronunciation of those days. I think they read the second bottom consonant ㅎ in the past. That's why you can see double consonants for some Korean words. They had the pronunciation in the past.

...

But for the written language, you should get the meaning by yourself. If the words stands alone without any context, it can make problems if many words have the same spelling. That's why Korean people keep the original spelling, which is not the same as the other words although it has same pronunciation.

Hi Jaehwi,

Thanks for the information. That clarifies a lot. Yes, I agree that the old spellings are useful to avoid homonyms (words that are spelled the same). Hanja is sometimes used to disambiguate words too, but that isn't used very often, right?

[jaehwi]

Hello, Thanks for the reply.

I'm glad to hear that it helped you understand about the spelling issue.

Right. Around 1990s, there was a big movement about not using Hanja and now it's not easy to see any Chinese characters even on newspapers. Since then, schools also stopped teaching Korean to the students. : )

- Jaehwi/ Koreanclass101.com

[dmclean6354604]

Right. Around 1990s, there was a big movement about not using Hanja and now it's not easy to see any Chinese characters even on newspapers. Since then, schools also stopped teaching Korean to the students. : )

Interesting. Why do you think they stopped teaching Hanja?

[trutherous]

I understand perhaps thousands of Hanja root words in the Korean language, yet without being able to read but a few of the Chinese characters. Of course I think it's extremely valuable to know these Hanja roots; however, I became familiar with the roots by the relationships of words in the course of study. For example, I see a word like 남편 (husband), and at first I learned it simply as a vocabulary word, but later in the course of study I noticed relationships such as 남 (male) in 남자 (man) and 편 (side) as in 오른편 /왼편 (right side/ left side) so it occurred to me that 남편 meant not only "husband" but also "male side/half" and that made perfect sense to me.

So why is the teaching of Hanja being abandoned? Well, it's not really - it's just taking a back seat. In any case, Hangul is such a strong phonetic system that it seems like it can adequately handle all the needs of the language. Additionally, Korean Hanja has become, from what I hear, somewhat different than modern Chinese, and with even the Chinese are transitioning to a simplified standard Hanja begins to appear somewhat antiquated. Finally, considering all the other subjects young Koreans must master these days it may just be that there is just not enough time left over for Hanja.

[dmclean6354604]

Hi trutherous, some interesting points raised.

You're right about the Sino-Korean or "Hanja" roots in words. In the past I studied Vietnamese in college, and later Japanese and you can see the same kind of phenomenon there. Japanese still uses "hanja", but Vietnamese switched to Romanization in the early 20th century. Either way though, you can still see the Chinese roots of many words. As you pointed out, they are obvious in Korean as well, regardless of whether you use Hanja or Hangeul.

I was curious more specifically why Hanja was de-emphasized in the 1990's, whether that was a conscious change by the Korean government, or just a change in attitudes.

P.S. Great point about the divergence of Chinese characters. This happens to Taiwan and Japan too which are both in various stages of "traditional" vs. "revised" character usage.