# f/z sounds in Korean



## ryzvonusef

Hello, I am curious, how do Koreans represent the sound for "f" and "z", since there is no relevant hanguel jamo for it?


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## maghanish2

I think for F they use ㅍ which is a P sound and for Z they use ㅈwhich is more or less a J sound.

Hope this helps!


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## ryzvonusef

Thanks for answering!
So...they would write about, say, a drink called "fizzy" as "pijji"? Interesting


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## maghanish2

I am pretty sure they would write it like 피지 but am not sure.  No problem!


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## Mack&Mack

I would also write 피지 for "fizzy".

I do remember people used to use ㅎ, instead of ㅍ, though. I reckon they thought of the sound when native speakers pronounce a "f" sound. That's why we still call the drink "Fanta" 환타.

Having said that, I'd still say 피지 for "fizzy".

Hope this helps.


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## ryzvonusef

환타? Unless I am mistaken, isn't that "hwan-ta"? that doesn't sound anything like "fanta", though it may be a matter of accent. A native Korean speaker like you probably knows better.
Incidentally, couldn't you combine the "b/p/pp" jamo and the "h" jamo to make a "ph" that sounds somewhat similar to "f"?
*EDIT* I just realised that two consonants can't be put together without a vowel in them. No wonder there is no "ph" combination


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## 조금만

ryzvonusef said:


> 환타? Unless I am mistaken, isn't that "hwan-ta"? that doesn't sound anything like "fanta"



I think it's  important to remember that Hangeul was never meant to be a universal phonetic alphabet (although such was the genius of its inventors that it would be quite feasible to extend it to make it into one). The aim was to write -- efficiently and easily -- specifically the sounds of Korean as it was spoken in the first half of the 15C. The brilliance of its design and conception were such that adapting it to the considerable changes that have taken place in the language since then was not at all difficult (and have mainly involved dropping things no longer required in modern Korean.)

From that it follows, not only that Hangeul has no way of writing sounds not used by Korean, but that even elements which appear to be common to a number of languages do not necessarily represent the same sounds when read by Korean native speakers as they do when they occur in other languages. 

The sound represented by ㅎ  for instance is in most circumstances weaker  than the "h" sounds of many other languages, to the exent that in some environments it is inaudible. When the 'h' plus 'wa' combination is pronounced by a native speaker, the main role of the ㅎ component is to force a mild aspiration of air, which the 'wa' component, by bringing the lower lip close to the top teeth, converts into a sound which is actually reasonably like the sound of /f/ before a vowel produced by a native speaker of English .  

Perhaps the best example of this is the common spelling of the word  화이팅!  which is the Korean attempt to represent "Fighting!",  believed by  many Koreans to be a common English cheer (if anyone can shed any light on the origins of this rather bizarre belief, I've be very interested to know). The orthodox view that this word ought to be written 파이팅  (though not shared by the majority of Koreans who use the word, if a Google against Korean blogs is any guide) is, however, enforced by spell checkers, which try to convert 화이팅 to 파이팅 if you let them. 



ryzvonusef said:


> Incidentally, couldn't you combine the "b/p/pp" jamo and the "h" jamo to make a "ph" that sounds somewhat similar to "f"?
> *EDIT* I just realised that two consonants can't be put together without a vowel in them. No wonder there is no "ph" combination



Well, Hangeul does allow for certain two-consonant clusters, though in final position only. (The exclusion of consonant combinations in initial position is simply one more way the Hangeul fits Korean like a glove: since no such initial consonant clusters occur in Korean, Hangeul provides no way of writing them in that location). In many circumstances, however, only one of the  two consonants in a final pair is pronounced: which one is suppressed is not easy to predict from general principles. 

And the combination  "ph" is not really a signal to  English readers to combine the sounds of /p/ and /h/ as they read it.  It's just an orthographical convention, a case of two letters being used for historical reasons to represent a single sound where a single letter would do.  Hangeul is far too rigorous and logical a system ever to do that, hence even if it did allow consonant pairs in initial positions, it would not allow a pair that actually stood for one single consonant sound (the case of consonant pairs in final position where only one of the apparently represented sounds is actually _heard_ is quite different).


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## 조금만

I just encountered in my reading the Konglish term 트레이드 마크, and that prompts me to add a little more to the thread on the matter, already raised, of initial consonant clusters and words of Western origin.

Loanwords like 'trademark' do indeed require an initial consonant cluster to be written in Hangeul somehow or other, and this example shows how the job gets done. Again, it shows the deep affinity between the writing system and the Korean language: as a general rule, if it's hard to write a foreign sound sequence in Hangeul, that sound will prove to be one that native speakers find it difficult to produce without effort and practice. 

Korean native speakers help themselves get the two adjacent consonant sounds out by interposing the vowel 'ㅡ' between them. This is the least "characterful" and assertive of all the vowels in the language. In (near) 'standalone' form, e.g. in the (highly colloquial/familiar) affirmative '응', it furnishes a sort of muffled and truncated grunt. So its semi-anonymous character makes it the vowel of choice for providing the minimal vowel-insertion required by the Korean without too much distortion of the original foreign sound. That's the role it plays here after the intial 'ㄷ', allowing the 'ㄹ' to be pronounced and written in as close a proximity to the 'ㄷ' as Korean speech allows.

Later on in the same loanword, we see the other common role of 'ㅡ' in loanword transcription, again dictated by a distinctive feature of Korean. Many consonants in final position in Korean words are not released and hence aren't heard in the same way as the apparently corresponding word in the foreign language from which the word is being borrowed. (They still are heard by native speakers, because the presence of the unreleased final consonant colours the vowel the precedes it, but we foreigners have to listen hard to pick up that colouring.) To force the release of such final consonants, they have to be made non-final by adding a vowel to the loanword, and again the "minimalist" vowel 'ㅡ' is deployed in both writing and speech to do this job. Hence the 'ㅡ' after both the second 'ㄷ' and the terminal 'ㅋ'

Finally, just as Hangeul never notates two letters when in reality only one letter is present (as in the 'ph' example), so also if a loanword encapsulates two sounds within a single letter in its native written form, Hangeul makes the presence of those sounds explicit. Most English speakers would say, unless they thought about it first, that the 'a' in 'trade' represents a single vowel sound. And in some dialects, e.g. Northwest England, it indeed does. But in most varieties of spoken English, that 'a' in fact represents a diphthong, and Hangeul duly represents it as such, writing it as a sequence of 'ㅔ' and 'ㅣ'. So whereas in the case of consonant clusters and released final consonants, the Hangeul transcription has to undertake a slight distortion of the original sounds in order to adapt them to a Korean environment, in the case of vowels, the Hangeul spelling is sometimes truer to the original language's sounds than the English way of writing them.


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## ryzvonusef

Thanks for the informative posts, 조금만 , that settles it for the "f" sound, I guess 

But I am curious , could we use the "s" or "ss" jamo to make a "z" sound?
In English we often see "s" mutate into the "z" sound, like the "1337" wording of "kills" becoming "killz" etc.

I was wondering if we could could invert that, and try to use the "s" or "ss" jamo to represent a sound close to "z". Although the "j" sound sort of works, its weird. Try using it on my name "ryzvonusef" and its sounds bizzare.


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## 조금만

"...try to use the "s" or "ss" jamo to represent a sound close to "z""


This takes us back to the symbiotic relationship of Hangeul and the phonetic system of Korean. Anything we write, or try to write, in Hangeul, has to pass through the brain and the speech organs of a native speaker to be converted into sound. And in that process rules which are not explicit (or even implicit) in the writing system but are known to all natives are applied when interpreting the notation. (Most dramatically from the point of view of comparative writing systems, though not directly relevant here: one major consequence is that Hangeul is not, strictly speaking, a pure syllabary. True: each and every Hangeul in isolation represents a specific syllable, but once written and spoken in sequences, the syllable boundaries do not always correspond to the Hangeul boundaries, at least not in Korean as written since the spelling reform of the 1930s. After that reform, each Hangeul character represents a discrete morpheme always, but a discrete syllable only sometimes. Similar processes apply also to certain sequences of Chinese characters when given Korean readings)

The upshot is that we as foreigners can group jamo into any Hangeul we like, provided it follows the rules of the system (which, if we write at a computer, our IME conveniently imposes for us): but we can't make Korean speakers pronounce that Hangeul as we foreigners (wrongly) might. To get something that Koreans will pronounce more or less as we intend, we have to work in the reverse direction. Start with the closest sound in the Korean phonetic repertoire that corresponds to the English sound we have in mind, then ask ourselves what (legitimate) combination of jamo would cause a Korean native speaker to produce that sound. Thus we work further backwards to arrive at the closest possible Hangeul notation for that sound and write that. 

That's basically how Koreans themselves decide how to write foreign sounds that aren't in their native arsenal. And it's why the "ㅈ" approach to getting a voiced sibilant is the closest in practical terms that Korean can come to a /z/ in English, though it sounds odd to English-attuned ears. Not many uninitiated English speakers would recognize either the sound Koreans make when asking for their favourite accompaniment to Western dishes, or the way they write it in Hangeul. But if you, too, want to order 사우즌 아일랜드 드레싱 in a Korean 레스토랑, it's the way you have to go. (And yes, initial English 'th' and French final nasals are a big problem, too, as that example shows)


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## ryzvonusef

조금만 said:


> but we can't make Korean speakers pronounce that Hangeul as we foreigners (wrongly) might.


That, I think answers all my queries. on this topic. Try as I might, if the Koreans aren't used to it, they won't pronounce the word the way I want them to, when I wrote the word.

Thanks, *조금만*, for all your help


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## Anais Ninn

When _hangul_ was invented, it included a consonant ㅿ which pronounces just like 'Z'. The consonant was dropped as 'Z' disappeared from the spoken language. Another consonant that was dropped since the invention of _hangul_ was ㅸ which sounds similar to 'V'

Anais


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## Anais Ninn

ryzvonusef said:


> That, I think answers all my queries. on this topic. Try as I might, if the Koreans aren't used to it, they won't pronounce the word the way I want them to, when I wrote the word.



That is not a phenomenon exclusive to the Koreans, though. 
Listen to English speakers pronounce Juan or paella and Spanish speakers pronounce pit or kiss or girl or French speakers say music or world. I am sure you noticed that Pakistanis pronounce English words differently from the way a native English speaker would. 

Anais


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## Innocence27

ㅍ aspirated P  , can sound like a F, is the closest they have, so will always be the way they transcript F 
아프가니스탄 Afghanistan
에펠탑 Eiffel Tower 
팬 a fan
프랑스 France

환타 yes sometimes the ㅎ sound is close too.

as 조금만 said,
you can see 'fighting' (the english word) transcripted both as 화이팅 and 파이팅 (화이팅 is more used though, for some reason)

I think they would still try to be the closest possible when you use doubles in english they usually use doubles in the transcription, so I think Fizzy would most likely be

피찌

조금만
"And it's why the "ㅈ" approach to getting a voiced sibilant is the closest in practical terms that Korean can come to a /z/ in English, though it sounds odd to English-attuned ears."

Yes it would sound like a "j" but, the odd thing is when a korean will try to pronounce J in european languages, he/she will most likely made a z instead, I find it funny.

And yea , the closest thing korean has to a z is ㅈ . .


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## Anais Ninn

Several decades ago, Koreans transcribed as ㅎ rather than ㅍ. 환타 came to Korea during that period. Other brand names created suring the same era show this. Example: 훼미리(family) 주스, 맥스웰 화인 (Fine), etc.

I am not sure what exactly caused the change from ㅎ to ㅍ, but I suspect it could have something to do with the effort to break away from any Japanese colonial influence. (Japanese treats F as フォ which is equivalent to ㅎ) But this is only my suspicion and there is no evidence to prove it.

Regarding "Fizzy", Koreans would write it as "피지" (not 피찌, mind you. ) and I have run into 피지 드링크 several times websurfing.

And I don't know what "J in European Languages" is. J in English, J in French, J in Spanish, J in German, etc are all *very* different. So, Koreans would treat all those sounds differently.

Hope it helps.

Anais


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