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Korean has 19 consonant phonemes. [1] For each plosive and affricate, there is a three-way contrast between unvoiced segments, which are distinguished as plain, tense, and aspirated. 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.
In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents.In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most South Asian languages and East Asian languages, the difference is contrastive.
They are divided into initials (leading consonants), vowels (middle), and finals tables (trailing consonants). The jamo shown below are individually romanized according to the Revised Romanization of Hangeul (RR Transliteration), which is a system of transliteration rules between the Korean and Roman alphabets, originating from South Korea.
Under the McCune–Reischauer system, aspirated consonants like k', t', p' and ch' are distinguished by apostrophes from unaspirated ones. The apostrophe is also used to distinguish ㄴㄱ from ㅇㅇ: 연구 is transcribed as yŏn'gu while 영어 is yŏngŏ. The breve is used to differentiate vowels in Korean: ㅜ is spelled u, ㅡ is ŭ, ㅗ ...
The aspirated consonants ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, and ㅊ are represented as k , t , p , ch . These letter pairs have a similar aspiration distinction in English at the beginning of a syllable (though they [clarification needed] also have a voicing distinction unlike Korean); this approach is also used by Hanyu Pinyin.
Many of the consonants in later forms of Korean are secondary developments: The reinforced consonants of modern Korean arose from clusters of consonants, becoming phonemically distinct after the Late Middle Korean period. [44] [45] The aspirated consonants of Middle and modern Korean also arose from clusters with * k or * h.
All Korean obstruents are voiceless in that the larynx does not vibrate when producing those sounds and are further distinguished by degree of aspiration and tenseness. The tensed consonants are produced by constricting the vocal cords while heavily aspirated consonants (such as the Korean ㅍ, /pʰ/) are produced by opening them. [55]
Tense consonants are transcribed as doubled letters, as in the Hangul spelling. Aspirated stops and affricates are written as digraphs formed by adding h. [5] Middle Korean voiced fricatives ㅸ, ㅿ (bansiot) and ㅇ are written as W, z and G respectively, but do not occur in modern Korean. [9]