Page:History of Corea, ancient and modern; with description of manners and customs, language and geography (1879).djvu/406

n 876 THE COBBAN LANGUAGE. I audible sound The Corean keeps his lips closed on every final consonant, permitting no breath to escape; neither audible like the Cihinese, nor inaudible as in English. This renders some finals very indistinct'^ Euphony plays curious tricks with these finals, especially with the final a, which remains an s only before another 8. It is assimilated by the succeeding consonant, becoming English t before d or t; k before g and h; n before n, and sometimes even r;b final is usually English p, but becomes m before n; and initial b becomes v before i, sometimes before a; g occasionally becomes ng. If initial n succeeds after final r, both are pronounced { ; and an initial r after final n is reversed, for it becomes Tk A final and initial r coming together are, as oftoi as not, pronounced by a double t "To indicate a very acute accent, the initial consonant is repeated, or the sign of the lett^ 3 prefixed. Hard g between two vowels, becomes mollified into a gh But ogai is as readily understood as oghaL" The Corean alphabet, though always written in syllables, is from top to bottom, and right to left, like Chinese ; and the current hand in English is no more unlike the printed letter than it is in Corean." Neither the alphabet nor the language of Corea contains the letter /; nor are there letters for the sounds I, v, w, which are spoken. The Corean cannot, however, pronounce r at the beginning of a word, any more than the Chinaman ; and he much prefers the sound I at the end. But, unlike the Chinaman, he almost prefers the sound r in the middle of a word, whether beginning or closing a syllable. The three sounds, {, ^, and r, are, however, interchangeable. One strange feature of the spoken language is, that the man who invariably translates the Chinese initial I by 7^, as ni for Chinese liy turns the tables ; and for ni (you), also says li. The Corean often softens the 6 betwe^i two vowels into v, as does Celtic with 6 and ttl This h moUiena, if I may be allowed to call it so (t;=6A), is extremely common in the spoken language, but unnoted in the written language ; for though pronounced gaghasaum, gaghatda, these words are written gagaaawm, gagatda.