Talk:Yale romanization of Korean

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Vowel table[edit]

@Kanguole: Hi there, sorry I don't quite understand the underlying logic of your edit (it looks a bit inconsistent to me). You just said that as "Yale is a transcription of Hangul", (modern) Jeju pronunciations "are off-topic". But now you say that as "wo and wu are digraphs representing plain vowels" (in reconstructed Middle Korean, I persume) they deserve separate lines (rather than being placed under the logical labial onglide colomn).

Since Yale is a transliteration of the Korean gulqca system, whether woy, wuy, ay, ey, wo and wu are simple vowels in Modern or in Middle Korean is irrelevant (and the exact phonetic of Middle Korean can only be roughly reconstructed). And since there is already a statement "Although Hangul treats the rounded back vowels (ㅜ, ㅗ) of Middle Korean as simple vowels, Yale writes them as a basic vowel (ㅡ, ㆍ), combined with a medial -w-." (I think this line was there before), it should be appropriate follow the logic of Yale arrangement on the complementary distributed gulqcas, which would help readers understanding the system quicker. --173.68.165.114 (talk) 22:41, 1 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It was incorrect to say that Yale treats ㅜ as ㅡ combined with a medial -w- (and similarly ㅗ). Rather Yale considers ㅜ and ㅗ as basic letters, just like ㅏ, ㅓ, ㆍ, ㅡ, ㅣ, but represents them with digraphs wu and wo, because the Latin alphabet has only 5 vowel letters and Martin didn't want to resort to diacritics like MR. The w in those digraphs is not to be considered a separate segment, any more than the individual letters of the digraph ng are. The logic of the Yale system is to faithfully represent Hangul, including its seven basic vowel letters. Hangul's suffixing of ㅣ is represented by suffixing -y, its doubling by prefixing y- and its prefixing of ㅗ or ㅜ by prefixing w-. That latter prefix is completely different from the w that is an intrinsic part of the digraphs representing the letters ㅗ and ㅜ. One shouldn't apply complementary distribution at the level of the latin letters, but rather to the letters and digraphs, which are in one-to-one correspondence with the Hangul letters. Kanguole 23:08, 1 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]