Heteronyms in modern Korean and their transcription in the IPA and the Roman alphabet

우리말 동철이음어(同綴異音語) IPA.로마자 표기 (사~섬)

The Purpose of this paper is to gather pairs of heteronyms in modern Korean and transcribe them in the IPA and the Roman alphabet in order to propose that all of them should be differentiated in Hanngul orthography. More than a quarter of the whole Korean vocabulary consists of words with a long vowel and the number of minimal pairs distinguished only by the chroneme reaches nearly ten thousand (i.e. twenty thousand words). The letter h syllable-finally is used here to represent the long vowel in Romanization except the vowel '으‘[?:] which is transcribed by doubling the letter u (i.e. uu). Another factor bringing forth lots of heteronyms in Korean is the lack of full indication as to the non-automatic reinforcement in the initial consonant of a word (or a morpheme) when preceded by another within a phrase (or a word). These reinforced word-initial consonants are written with the letter c and an apostrophe (like c'g- , c'd- , c'b-, c's-, c'j-) in Romanization here. The reinforced morpheme-initial consonant within a word is written with the letters k t, p, ss and cz for ㄲ, ㄸ, ㅃ, ㅆ and ㅉ sounds respectively. The contrasted pronunciations of pairs of heteronyms beginning with ㅅ /s/sup h// and ㅆ /s/ sounds are transcribed here for exemplification.