0.5 Final Consonants (받침) — Epoché
What you will be able to do Say where a 받침 (bat-chim) sits in a block and what job it does. Explain how twenty-seven possible spellings at the bottom of a block produce only seven sounds. Read the eleven double 받침 spellings and say which of the two letters is heard. Read aloud a syllable block you have never seen before, following a fixed procedure. Say why the spelling keeps letters that are not heard, and where they come back. Prerequisites : 0.4, which completes the alphabet with the compound vowels and the doubled consonants; every letter used at the bottom of a block below has already appeared at the top of one. If the doubled letters are not yet firm, look again at 0.4 Hangul . A syllable block can carry a third position. Under the onset and the vowel there is room for one more consonant letter, or occasionally two, and Korean has a name for whatever goes there: 받침 , a word that means a support or a prop. Everything in this lesson follows from one fact about that position. A consonant at the bottom of a block is not released. It is formed and held, and then the block ends. Because it is never released, most of the distinctions that the letters carry at the top of a block simply cannot be heard at the bottom, and the twenty-seven spellings collapse into seven sounds. The letters Sixteen single letters may stand as a 받침 , and eleven pairs of letters may stand there together, which is twenty-seven spellings in all. Every one of them is pronounced as one of seven sounds. Here is the whole correspondence; it is the most useful table in the volume, and worth coming back to. Sound Spellings that give it Example ㄱ ㄱ ㄲ ㅋ ㄳ ㄺ 밖 said as [ 박 ], 닭 as [ 닥 ] ㄴ ㄴ ㄵ ㄶ 문 , and 앉 said as [ 안 ] ㄷ ㄷ ㅅ ㅆ ㅈ ㅊ ㅌ ㅎ 옷 said as [ 옫 ], 꽃 as [ 꼳 ] ㄹ ㄹ ㄽ ㄾ ㄿ ㅀ 물 , and 싫 said as [ 실 ] ㅁ ㅁ ㄻ 봄 , and 젊 said as [ 점 ] ㅂ ㅂ ㅍ ㄼ ㅄ 앞 said as [ 압 ], 값 as [ 갑 ] ㅇ ㅇ 강 , the sound at the end of English sing Read the second column carefully, because it is the point of the lesson. Seven of the ten spellings in the third row are heard as one sound: at the bottom of a block, the hiss letters, the tense hiss, the two affricates, the aspirated tongue letter and the throat letter all come out as an unreleased stop made with the tongue tip. Nothing distinguishes them, and a listener cannot tell which one was written. The ㅇ row is the one to look at twice. At the top of a block that letter is silent, as lesson 0.2 explained; at the bottom it is a real consonant, the nasal at the end of English sing . One shape, two jobs, and the position in the square decides which. The double spellings Eleven pairs of letters may share the bottom position. Only one of the two is ever heard, and which one is a property of the pair rather than something you can work out from first principles. Pair Letter heard Example ㄳ ㄱ 몫 a share, said as [ 목 ] ㄵ ㄴ 앉다 to sit ㄶ ㄴ 많다 to be many ㄺ ㄱ 닭 a chicken ㄻ ㅁ 젊다 (jeom-tta) to be young ㄼ ㄽ ㄾ ㄿ ㅀ ㄹ 넓다 to be wide ㅄ ㅂ 없다 (eop-tta) to not exist A rough generalisation covers most of it: when one of the two letters is ㄹ , the ㄹ is usually the one that survives, and otherwise the first letter of the pair is heard. There are well-known exceptions, and a handful of these clusters behave differently depending on what follows them, which is why lesson 1.8 comes back to the whole set once the sound rules are in place. For now, learn the seven lines above and treat the exceptions as things to be told about later rather than guessed at now. Reading a block you have never seen You now have everything needed to read any Korean syllable, and the procedure is short enough to hold in your head. Take the block apart in the order the parts are written, reduce the bottom to one of the seven sounds, and do not release it. Block Letters, in reading order Said as 밖 ㅂ , ㅏ , ㄲ [ 박 ] — the tense letter gives a plain unreleased stop 닭 ㄷ , ㅏ , ㄹ and ㄱ [ 닥 ] — of the pair, only the second is heard 값 ㄱ , ㅏ , ㅂ and ㅅ [ 갑 ] — the first of the pair is heard 꽃 ㄲ , ㅗ , ㅊ [ 꼳 ] — the affricate becomes a tongue-tip stop The last step matters more than it looks. An English speaker asked to say a word ending in a stop will usually release it, letting a small puff of air out at the end: the final consonant of cup or back is audible as a separate event. A Korean 받침 is not. The mouth closes for it and stays closed, and the syllable simply stops. If you release it you will sound as though you have added a vowel, and in some cases you will be heard as saying a different word. Read these corpus sentences aloud, then go through them again and mark every 받침 you can find, giving the sound each one produces. Korean English 밥 먹었어요? [1] Have you eaten? 집 있어요? [2] Do you have a house? 돈이 없어요. [3] I have no money. 책상 위에 책이 있어요. [4] The book is on the desk. 감기에 걸렸어요? [5] Did you catch a cold? Between them those five sentences use six of the seven final sounds, and the third and fifth contain double 받침 spellings. They also show something the rules above do not cover: when a block with a 받침 is followed by a block that begins with the silent circle, the bottom consonant moves across and is released after all. That is why the third sentence is not said as it is written. The rule has a name and a lesson of its own, 1.3, and until then you may read such words a syllable at a time. How This Differs from English English allows a queue of consonants at the end of a syllable; Korean allows one sound. English is comfortable with texts and worlds , where three or four consonants are pronounced in a row with nothing between them. Korean has no such syllables. Where the writing shows two letters at the bottom of a block, one of them is silent; where a borrowed word has a real cluster, Korean breaks it up with vowels, which is why strike becomes five blocks in lesson 2.2. If you carry English habits over you will produce clusters that Korean ears hear as extra syllables. The spelling records the letter, not the sound. This is the deepest difference and the one that makes the rest of