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씨발 allophones (lemm.ee)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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살 and 쌀 are the same word

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I think you understand what I mean but something about how I wrote it confused you. Would it make more sense if instead of "language" I said "native language"?

Yes, both ㅅ and ㅆ occur in English, that's why some English words are represented by one consonant or the other when written in Hangul. Yes, they are allophones in English. Yes, they are NOT allophones in Korean. And, yep! This meme is about how an L1 English speaker struggles to distinguish the two consonants when speaking Korean.

Does that make sense? I'm not sure which part suggested that they would be allophones in Korean - I guess I assumed too much context >_< The reason it's so damn hard to learn the difference is partially because the 살/쌀 dichotomy isn't as well-known to non-natives, I guess.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I think that the big key here is to highlight that allophones are language-dependent, like you're doing in this comment already. And yes, the meme does make sense now!