Difference between revisions of "Talk:자모"

Revision as of 03:23, 7 July 2010

NOTES - PLEASE READ: The alphabetic order needs to be checked. Descriptions and proper names need to be added. I have no idea if I'm going to keep the current tables at all, though I do like the idea of providing names for jamo, their page links, and their compositions as well as notes on their arbitrary compositions. Also, I will likely be condensing the Sound Exceptions with their appropriate headers. Please provide any thoughts on the page's current layout here. I am open to taking much of this page's contents and placing it on another page as well.

The Korean alphabet is composed of letters called Jamo, or 자모. The word 자모 (hanja needed, with links) is composed of two syllable blocks. One, 자 (), means "character" or "letter." The second syllable, 모 (), means "mother." These two meanings imply that the jamo are the parents of the syllable blocks they build. Indeed, these pieces are all that is needed to form both more complex letters from themselves and a large amount of possible syllabic combinations.

In Hangeul, each jamo corresponds to a particular sound, unlike in English where the sounds often vary greatly. As in every alphabetic language, its letters fall into two groups: vowels and consonants. All of the modern jamo are listed in the tables below by category:

Basic Vowels

moo

Diphthongs

Diphthongs are combinations of no more than two vowels. Whereas multiple vowels are normally voiced in separate syllables, each vowel composing a diphthong is voiced together within one syllable. As with consonants, these combinations are restricted to a select few cases. Complying with the rules of vowel harmony, combinations like ㅗ and ㅓ will never appear. Valid combinations include all of the letters featured in the below table:

Basic Consonants

rawr

Complex Consonants

shoe

Aspirated Consonants

wait up

Double Consonants

Double consonants are pairs of two consonants written together, seen when stressing a basic consonant's sound (such as the stressed form of ㅅ: ㅆ). Note that double consonants are a type of consonant cluster and can appear, unlike other consonant clusters, in either the beginning or end of a syllable. All valid stressed consonants are displayed below:

Consonant Clusters

Only one consonant can appear at the beginning of any syllable, logically leaving the clusters only to be written at the end. For all valid consonant clusters, see below:

Sound Exceptions

Combinations of multiple jamo can result in a change of the above listed sounds. For example, the jamo ㅗ and ㅣ each have their own sounds, but when combined as ㅚ they take on the same sound as ㅙ, losing their originals. This exists as a sort of exception to the rule of each letter having only one sound. Thus, the vowels forming diphthongs should be viewed arbitrarily and largely ignored.