A Rose By Any Other Name.....

    Shakespeare said, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" and let's hope he's right, because according to the Hangul alphabet, my name is impossible. What I mean is, it breaks the rules. There is no way, according to the laws of the Korean language, to spell or say my name. Allow me to explain.....
    In an attempt to brighten my thoughts and mind today, I've spent the afternoon trying to teach myself the Korean alphabet, or Hangul. I've found that it is pretty amazing (and simple!) once you sit down and really look at it. There are approximately the same number of letters/sounds as there are in the English alphabet, so I think the learning process should be fairly reasonable. The way that it is organized, though, (at least for the consonants) is what I find to be truly noteworthy. All of the consonant letters are set up so that similar articulation patterns correspond with similar-looking letter designs. This chart I found demonstrates it better than I can probably describe it.

    The top row is velars, which are sounds made at the back of the roof of your mouth. The first letter you see is "g" and the second one is "k". If you say these sounds out loud, you will notice that your mouth makes the same movement for both sounds, but one is voiced and the other is not. In other words, "g" will vibrate your vocal cords and "k" will not. 

{Raise your hand if you just "guh-ed" and "kuh-ed" at your computer screen... Haha! Caught ya.}
 

    Now, notice how both these letters have a similar shape? It's because they correspond with the fact that the sounds they make come from the same part of your mouth. All of the rest of the rows on the chart follow this same pattern to include sound pairs like "d" and "t", "b" and "p". At the bottom, it shows you how the basic shape of a letter and the particular oral position from which the sound is made are connected. It's super cool because once you learn one letter, you can almost immediately double your knowledge just by knowing it's voiced or non-voiced partner! So anyway, that's the letters.

    Korean words are written by syllable, and each syllable is made up of various letters put together. Depending on the shape of the letters that make up the syllable, sometimes they are side by side, sometimes they are stacked on top of one another, and sometimes it's a combination of both. This is why it looks like characters when it's written out. You read by pronouncing the sound of each letter in a clockwise direction. So "Ne" (pronounced Nay), or "Yes" in English, looks like this: 네. ㄴis the "n" sound, ㅓis the "a" sound, and ㅣis the "ee" sound. Because the words are arranged in syllables, there is a beginning sound and an ending sound to each syllable. Therefore, certain letters in Hangul can make more than one sound depending on where they're placed (at the beginning of the syllable or at the end).
    And now that we've gotten down, dirty, dry, and boring - allow me to get back to my original point. My name. The letter ㄹ at the beginning of a syllable (or first position) stands for a sound that is a cross between "r" and "l". The same letter will make the true "l" sound, but only if it comes at the end of a syllable (or second position). There is, however, no letter that represents just plain "l" or just plain "r" in the first position. Which means...... when your name starts with the "l" sound, and has an "r" sound at the syllable break, you're basically blown right off the maps. There is no way to do it. So! My name ends up looking like this: 로리. Which phonetically translates to "Rlo-rlee." HAHA! This means that while I am here my name is not kosher, so I'm hoping, as our friend Shakespeare suggests, that it is not what you are called, but rather what you are that truly matters!