Korean has the best writing system in the world, Hangeul, and it has been an inspiration for Musa. However, it suffers from two major flaws:

• The language has changed quite a bit since it was invented five centuries ago, and the script has not kept pace. Numerous letters have become obsolete, and the government of North Korea briefly introduced six new letters in 1948.

• "Hangul spelling does not reflect these assimilatory pronunciation rules, but rather maintains the underlying, partly historical morphology. Given this, it is sometimes hard to tell which actual phonemes are present in a certain word." [from Wikipedia's article on Korean]

Hangeul was originally phonemic - each letter represented a phoneme (what we think we're saying). It has subsequently become morphophonemic, representing the underlying root forms of words. But Musa is phonetic - spelled as it is pronounced - so that people, especially children and foreigners, can read and write even if they don't know the phonological rules by which phonemes become phones. And Korean has many such rules!

For example, the plosive letters can be pronounced three different ways, depending on whether they occur initially (at the beginning of a word or accentual phrase), medially (after a vowel or a sonorant like n or l), or finally (at the end of a word or before an obstruent like t or k). But in Musa, we show those changes in pronunciation, just as we do when English life becomes lives. People who are used to writing Hangeul will have to learn to write Musa as Korean is pronounced ... but after all, that's how they speak it!

Tense Consonants

Korean is famous among phoneticists for featuring tense consonants with hollow (or faucalized) voice. Hollow voice and its opposite, harsh voice, are rare among the world's languages, and occur mostly with vowels, not consonants. However, the actual situation may not be so exotic : a recent study (CB Chang, 2006) showed that Koreans cannot distinguish the tense consonants of Korean from normal unaspirated voiceless consonants of Chinese, English or Spanish.

The explanation is found in another study (Kim & Duanmu, 2004) : Korean used to have three series of plosives: voiced, unvoiced and aspirated, as do many other languages (Thai, Ancient Greek). However, over time the first series lost its voicing in initial position, making them devoiced. In order to distinguish them from the second series, Koreans now pronounce both series with exaggerated phonations : the first series, now called plain or lax, is pronounced with light aspiration, a relaxed vocal tract and a depressor effect, lowering the tone of subsequent vowels, while the second series, now called tense, is pronounced with opposing parameters.

To represent this, Musa writes the plain consonants with voiced letters, and the tense consonants with unvoiced letters. The aspirated series is written with aspirated letters, and all three series with glottalic letters in final position, where they're unreleased. When the plain consonants are devoiced in initial position, they are written with unvoiced letters, but the following vowel is low; I've shown this depressor effect as a down arrow (⬇) in the chart below. Initial nasals m n or yh (the ieung, or null initial) also trigger a low vowel. All other vowels are written high.

The s is an exception: the aspirated s has combined with the plain s: it doesn't lower the tone of the following vowel when initial, and it's not regularly voiced between vowels. So Musa writes it as aspirated s when initial (using the same letter as used for ejective s ), and as voiced z when voiced between vowels.

Consonants

Here are the consonants, shown in all three positions :

Hangeul	ᄆ	ᄇ	ᄈ	ᄑ	ᄂ	ᄃ	ᄄ	ᄐ	ᄉ	ᄊ	ᄌ	ᄍ	ᄎ	ᄋ	ᄀ	ᄁ	ᄏ	ᄒ	ᄅ
Romanization	m	b	pp	p	n	d	tt	t	s	ss	j	jj	ch	-/ng	g	kk	k	h	r/l
Initial	⬇	⬇			⬇	⬇					⬇			⬇	⬇				
Medial														×					
Final																			

ᄋ -/ng never occurs medially: it's always pronounced ng when it's the final of a syllable, and pronounced yh at the beginning of a syllable.

ᄅ r/l does not occur initially in native Korean words. When it occurs at the beginning of a subsequent syllable or in a foreign word, it's usually pronounced n (but I'll still refer to it as initial r).

Vowels

A very complete inventory of Korean vowels would list ten of them, each of which occurs in both long and short forms. However, two of the vowels (yellow below) have been replaced by diphthongs, and the distinction between lengths has also disappeared. If you want to show length, add a Long mark to any of the following vowels :

Hangeul	ᅵ	ᅦ	ᅢ	ᅱ	ᅬ	ᅳ	ᅥ	ᅡ	ᅮ	ᅩ
Romanization	i	e	ae	wi	oe	eu (ŭ)	eo (ŏ)	a	u	o
IPA	i	e	ɛ	y	ø	ɯ	ʌ	ɐ	u	o
Musa										

Diphthongs

Korean has four semivowels which correspond to the four high vowels above :

High vowel				
Semivowel				

These semivowels are used between the initial consonant and the vowel to form numerous rising diphthongs :

Hangeul	ᅨ	ᅤ	ᅧ	ᅣ	ᅲ	ᅭ	ᅱ	ᅰ	ᅫ	ᅯ	ᅪ	ᅴ
Romanization	ye	yae	yeo	ya	yu	yo	wi	we	wae	wo	wa	ui
IPA	je	jɛ	jʌ	jɐ	ju	jo	ɥi	we	wɛ	wʌ	wɐ	ɰi
Musa												

Note that ᅱ wi appears as both a vowel and a diphthong - write it as you pronounce it.

Assimilation

However, that's not the end of it. Consonants also assimilate to adjacent letters, both vowels and consonants. Here are a few rules for adjacent consonants:

Any of	become	after	before
   	   	   
   	   	  
  	  		  
  			
			
   	   	
Any consonant	geminate (doubled)		
	



For example,  becomes .

And here are some common assimilations to following vowels, which may apply after the assimilations above. The original consonants in the first column assimilate to the consonants in the other columns, before the vowels at the head of the column :

	Before:	 		  
 	become	 
 	become	 
	becomes		
	becomes			
	becomes			

You probably noticed that this chart includes some new consonant letters that didn't appear in the first chart above. Here's a chart of all the consonant letters that Musa uses to spell Korean, along with their IPA (in green):

Consonants		Bilabial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal		 m	 n		 ŋ
Stops & Affricates	Plain	 b	 d	 ʣ	 g
	Tense	 p	 t	 ʦ	 k
	Aspirated	 pʰ	 tʰ	 ʦʰ	 kʰ
	Final	 p̚	 t̚	 ʦ	 k̚
Fricatives	Plain	 β	 z	 ʑ	 ɣ	 ɦ
	Tense	 ɸ	 s	 ɕ	 x
	Aspirated		 sʰ	 ɕʰ		 h
Lateral			 l
Rhotic			 r
Semivowel		 w	 ɥ	 j	 ɰ

Some morphemes end in two consonants, but one of them disappears unless another morpheme follows it, and there are rules for which disappears and what happens to the initial of the following morpheme, but we won't cover them here.

The sections above covering positional allophones and assimilation seems complicated, but remember that Korean children now have to learn it in order to be able to write! For example, a word with -ll- in the middle might be spelled three different ways: as -nr-, as -ln-, or as -lr-. But in Musa, they're all spelled as they're pronounced. Koreans may still want to know how to split it into two syllables, but at least they won't need to know that in order to write it : Musa is easier to learn.

Gait

Korean is written in Alphabet gait, even though Hangeul looks like a character gait. Many Korean words are polysyllabic, and the internal consonants assimilate to each other and the surrounding vowels. This assimilation is not written in Hangeul, but it is in Musa, so it makes sense to regroup the contexts into an alphabetic word instead of syllabic characters. Nor is Korean tonal.

Sample

Now that you've learned the letters, why don't you try reading a sentence?



원숭이도 나무에서 떨어진다