Combined vowels

The words for dog and crab are spelled with different vowels, gae and ge, yet most Seoul speakers today say them the same way.

The ten basic vowels are not the whole story. Korean spelling rules add eleven more vowel letters, each written by joining two basic vowels side by side. Some are simple vowels that just happen to be written with two parts, like ae and e. Most are glides, where the mouth moves from one position to another inside one beat, like wa and wo. The good news is that you already know every piece. If you can read o and a, you can read wa, because it is literally o followed by a, squeezed into one block.

ae and e

The vowels ae and e are made by adding a standing line to a and to eo. In the standard pronunciation rules they are two different simple vowels, ae a little more open, like the a in cat, and e like the e in bed. In practice most speakers in Seoul no longer keep them apart, and the National Institute of Korean Language itself notes, in its public question-and-answer service, that the difference tends not to be kept in speech today. The words for dog (gae) and crab (ge) sound the same in most conversations, and Koreans who need to be clear say something like the dog that barks. For a learner the advice is simple: say both like the e in bed, and learn the spelling word by word. The same goes for yae and ye.

The w glides

Five vowels begin with a w sound. Combine o with a and you get wa, as in the word for apple, sagwa. Combine u with eo and you get wo, as in the question word mwo, what. Add the standing line to these and you get wae, as in wae, why, and we, as in the loanword for sweater. The combination of u and i is wi, as in gwi, ear. There is a pattern that makes these easier to spell: o only ever pairs with a or ae, and u only ever pairs with eo or e. The bright vowels go together and the dark vowels go together, an old rule of Korean called vowel harmony.

One more vowel, written o plus i, is officially a simple vowel romanized oe, but the standard rules also allow it to be said as the glide we, and that is how most people say it. So the word for company, hoesa, usually sounds like hwesa. In speech the three vowels oe, wae and we end up very close. Spelling them correctly is a matter of learning the words.

The vowel ui

The last combined vowel, eu plus i, is romanized ui and has three sounds depending on where it appears. At the start of a word with no consonant before it, it is a true glide from eu to i, as in uisa, doctor, and uija, chair. After a consonant it is said simply as i: the word for hope, huimang, is said himang. And when it is the possessive marker, meaning of, it is usually said e. The official romanization keeps ui in every case, as in the Seoul gate Gwanghuimun.