i never really wondered why certain vowels were yin and some were yang. it just intuitively made sense to me, probably because the yin yang is pretty apparent from the hangul shape alone. realizing that not only i had no idea why a was yang and oo was yin but also that scholars apparently dont have a consensus either just blew a hole in my head
To me it is mostly frontness like oe vs a is quite clear in that regard. With eu being almost neutral, it seems like a cousin of i after all (so they should be both neutral) but in verbs i behaves if I remember correctly (I haven't really done Korean for five years now) like a yang and eu like a dark vowel.
I'd say given the areal context of Tungusic and the nearest Mongolic varieties I'd say the ATR harmony hypothesis is the most likely, but not gonna bet on it
It's quite possible the harmony in Korean is over some quite unusual distinction yes. Early Middle Chinese had very unusual phonation distinctions in vowels... The back vowels likely had some sort of RTR (retracted tongue root) or Pharyngealization or Uvularization or Velarization. The front vowels had some sort of extremely weird split between some sort of rhoticized or centralized or velarized palatalization, vs fully front palatalization...
I wouldn't say so, /u/~/o/ and /ǝ/~/a/ are not characteristic of ATR harmony, but of height harmony. Korean's closest Tungusic neighbor geographically was Manchu, which had a similar height system.
@@joshuasims5421 I think it's likely that the vowels have moved around over time...: - Middle Korean o ㅗ is often used for what is /o, u/ in other languages (Mongolian o u and Middle Chinese u... it's possible that some of them have been /oˤ uˤ/)... - Likewise, Middle Korean u ㅜ yu ㅠ seems to be used for loaning /y/ /jy/ (Mongolian ü, Middle Chinese yu) - Also u ㅜ for /əw/ (Middle Chinese, possibly /əˤw/) - weo ㅝ yeo ㅕ for /ø/ /jø/ (Mongolian ö, Middle Chinese yo) - eu ㅡ for what must have been something like /ə~ɨ(ˤ)/ (Middle Chinese endings with a high non-front non-rounded vowel) - eo ㅓ yeoㅕ for Mongolian /e/ and Middle Chinese /je/ in closed syllables (ye ㅖ for Middle Chinese /jei/) Unfortunately my reference lacks arae-a (ㆍ)...
If we reconstruct Mongolic languages back, then the evidence for an ATR system becomes murky, mainly based on turkic borrowings in mongolic suggesting the more typical vowel harmony systems u see in other languages based on height and roundedness
I can see why they turn to Mongolian rather than Middle Chinese for vowel comparisons for Middle Korean... Middle Chinese is an absolute mess phonetics-wise, it's basically a vertical vowel inventory where palatalization and labialization and diphthongs are better defined than the vowels themselves, and it has a couple of very rare distinctions (the back vowels had to have some sort of RTR/Pharyngealization/Uvularization, the palatalized front vowels have some split between rhoticized/centralized and fully front).
to be fair modern mandarin is a mess phonology-wise, i feel like you can ask anyone who knows a thing or two about it and they'll each give you a different analysis of its vowel inventory
@@myaobyclepiej 5 vowel system seems the most likely because it makes sense allophonically but I understand where the 6 vowel system w/ /e/ and /o/ being separate phonemes comes from
The phonetic mess of "Middle Chinese" is probably an artefact of the incompetence of its reconstruction. The document that allegedly, well, documents Middle Chinese is the Qieyun, a rhyme book that explicitly states that it is a compilation of previous rhyme books. Yet since the beginning of modern Sinitic linguistics, that book has been considered the basis of "the Middle Chinese language", and so it's no wonder the vowels are a mess, because it was never spoken.
@@vampyricon7026 After messing with this problem for some time, my views on this are as follows: - Middle Chinese was basically a "Vertical Vowel Inventory" language like Abkhaz. This means that vowels were more differentiated by semivowels like /j, w, ɥ/ and diphthongs than by the vowel's timbre itself - Middle Chinese had at least a couple of extremely rare distinctions that touched on the whole consonant-medial-vowel part of the syllable, and the 4 different rows of the Qieyun represent these distinctions - Row 1 must have been something along the lines of pharyngealization / retracted-tongue-root / uvularization / velarization along with vowel backness - Row 2 is particularly hard to reconstruct with plausible candidates being rhoticization / velarization / pharyngealization along with vowel frontness - Row 3 is simply palatalization, but it has a weird back/front split in its rhymes called "Chongniu" with the extra rhymes spilling into row 4, and speculation abounds on if they are divided by having a more centralized /j̈/ vs fully front /j/, or fully central /ɨ̯/ vs front /j/, or velarized /ɣj/ vs non-velarized /j/, or rhoticized /j˞ / vs plain /j/, or plain /j/ vs fricativized /j̝/, or palatalized /ʲ/ vs fully iotated /j/, or non-iotated // vs iotated /j/... - Row 4 is plain and eventually becomes /je/ and merges with row 3, the difficulty being figuring out how it was differentiated with both variants of row 3, the most popular reconstructions have this as originally being /e/ but you see other alternatives such as /ie̯/, or /je/ with row 3 being something different such as /jɛ/ - The way these distinctions were expressed varied with time and location - When borrowed into other languages such as Vietnamese, Korean or Japanese, these unusual distinctions are lost, making reconstruction extremely difficult - The reconstructions you see out there, such as Baxter's reconstruction, are fine with the phonemic structure of the differences, it's the phonetic realization of these differences that eludes us and where we see wide disagreements
@@2wugs Well What I heard most is that Mandarin has a 2~3 vowel system 🤣. I personally prefer the 2-vowel theory tho - a uo(wə) e(ə) i(j∅) u(w∅) ü(ɥ∅) ∅(∅) ie(jə) (∅ means no vowel) maybe because it's the funniest one while still makes sense lol. 3-vowel system makes ∅ a vowel (ɨ). By adding i u, adding /y/, adding o, adding /e/, removing ɨ, we get 4~8 vowel systems. To me it's more like a math game, the phonology system is quite clear, it just depends on how deep you want to split everything.
I always thought that these features were well known for native speakers. Do you notice it much when you speak, or do you not even make the distinction?
@@JayBergéWe usually notice it instinctively, which means that we may not notice this yin-yang harmony, but we can tell it apart. For example, the linguistic rules that are natural for you, may not be the case for foreigners. Even if you try to explain this, there is a high possibility that you will not be able to explain it by solving it skillfully. We're similar too.
@@JayBergé with endings and particles not really. I'd say it's the most noticeable in onomatopeoias and ideophones but even then many won't realize it has to do with vowel harmony
@@awelotta im not a huge fan of that solution myself but there's only 5-6 vowel letters, and modern korean has 7 monophthongs, so it's either digraphs or diacritics and i hate digraphs for short vowels especially in revised romanization (되어 is doeeo which is disgusting)
@@myaobyclepiej I guess arae-a complicates things. I would personally do ㅏaㅐ(ä)ㅓeㅔëㅗoㅜwㅡuㅣi, and then I guess I would represent ᅟᆞ with schwa. for ㅡ is pretty good too though I've always disliked that a little because the consonant and vowel being represented feel very different to me, but I'm guessing it has much less ambiguity with diphthongs compared to representing both ㅜ and /w/.
Interestingly, 8:12 things like this aren’t just seen in the north but rather I’d argue almost the majority of nonstandard dialects. There are tons of words like 덥다 돕다 etc that become 와 instead of 워 in regional speech but not in standard use
while learning korean i definitely noticed the vowel harmony in conjugation and how that aligned with diphthongs as well. then later i also found out about what was mentioned as "sound symbolism". while i guess there isn't much vowel harmony left, both these aspects were something i did notice
Not mentioned here but interesting as well is that the vowel harmony system is alive, well and PRODUCTIVE in ideophones. Also interesting is that it seems to be a different vowel harmony system than used elsewhere?
Wonderful to see your recognition of how the Democratic People's Republic of Korea preserves the authentic correctness of the true speech of the Fatherland uncorrupted by foreign imperialisms.
For Middle Korean, /u/~/o/, /ǝ/~/a/ /ɨ/~/ʌ/ is a pretty clear height harmony system to me; we can take the active features of hangul 'ㅡ' to be [+back][-round], effectively /ɯ/. Nearby Manchu had a similar height harmony system. See Lhasa Tibetan for a similar example. As for ATR, I've seen proposals that Middle Mongolian was actually an RTR harmony language similar to modern Khalkha. So, the 'ü' vowel would not have been /y/ but more like modern /u/, explaining its correspondence to /u/ in MK at 3:00; and MM 'u' would be RTR /ʊ/, explaining its match to the lower MM /o/, perhaps. As for the modern system, I couldn't say! It looks mostly fossilized to me at this point, but I suspect the orthography and standard language aren't a good guide to the modern phonetic reality; see modern Uzbek for a similar example.
There's also 이렇다·요렇다 그렇다·고렇다 저렇다·조렇다 The latter ones are more "light" or "cute-sy" Interesting video to watch as a native speaker of Finnish and Korean learner. I don't notice any significant meaning between back and front vowels in Finnish, it's purely to ease the pronounciation. However in Korean I can definitely feel the difference in nuance when it comes to vowel harmony. 한국어의 모음조화에 대해 이런 영상을 만들어 주셔서 감사하겠어욤 잘봤습니당 ^^
Backstory: Bill Burr is a MASSIVE hypocrite on a few particular issues, but he has the "correct" politics, so nobody in his industry calls him out on it.
I'll still never understand whyㆍis a light vowel, whileㅣis neutral. It would make so much more aesthetic/system sense for the opposite of ㅡ beㅣ. I don't think vowel harmony will disappear, it will just become an obscure part that native speakers have a sense for but don't really understand. Like English irregular tenses or plurals. The aesthetic of the video was very nice. And I share your hatred of Korean romanization, it's so English centric.
@zagle1772 yea, I've heard that. But it sounds like something someone makes up hundreds of years after something has been made to give it some symbolic meaning. No idea though.
I would say “when will it disappear” is a more reasonable question than “will it disappear”, it would be quite bizarre if Korean evolved for a million years and it was still there (though it’d be bizarre for it to be spoken that long)
@terdragontra8900 Lol yea, would it even be Korean then. I also don't really think languages are going to evolve anymore. Before languages were spread from parent to child, now we have video and millions of speakers. It's a lot harder for languages to function change.
@ It’s true that videos exist, but young people form their dialect mostly from their communication with fellow young people. If anything I feel like language is changing faster today, because the cultural difference between generations is huge today (because of the rate of technological growth)
I think at some point "eo" ㅓ (modern [ʌ]) and arae-a ㆍ (pre-modern [ə]) switched places yes (and then arae-a ㆍ merged into "a" and "eu"). "Yeo" ㅕ is used for chinese words that used to have /je/ in closed syllables, as well as some that could have had other vowels such as /jø~jo/.
@@TYMCCK What was area-a then? It shows up in interesting places in borrowings (such as words that are now si/zi/ci in Mandarin and some of the words that are shi/zhi/chi, and what must have been [ʌj] but merged into ai).
Dude I don't know HOW do you ONLY have 2.5k subs when you pump out high quality and very unique content. Keep going without stopping, all the love and support 🎉❤
1:34 the plural suffix +lAr is only twofold, which is why it only gets a and e, but even otherwise, o and ö can only appear in the first vowel* anyway, due to the _roundness_ (only unrounded open or rounded close vowels after rounded vowels) + _flatness_ (only unrounded vowels after unrounded vowels) rule, which is called minor harmony in native textbooks :P It has minor exceptions around some "u" words and "i" suffixes but "o/ö" never comes at second nevertheless, in native words :3 *With the isolated exception of -(i)yor due to it (formerly) being a compounding verb (still the first vowel) before melting into a suffix, which is isolated to Turkish anyway, other Turkic languages don't break this xP A rather off-topic insight but lol, just to clarify 🙃
I looked through the whole video for some new studies to look through, but I have already seen then all 😂 Anyways, great video, and completely underrated. edit: btw your discord link is expired
As a native korean speaker, it is sure interesting to look at a silly foreigner organize what we learn in high school grammar class. It works to show how important and unique Korean is in terms of linguistics. Nice work on the design as well. However, it’s hard to imagine that vowel harmony will die further from this.
i'm a modicum surprised none of the snapshot research includes research in done, more precisely written, in Korean or Chinese. I would hypothesize that bringing in human anatomy specifically of the vocal system may explain some of the mappings. Even then phonology may not map directly to muscle usage, and even then, the symbology may not map cleanly to the phonology, though it seems they usually do. Which side is light or dark may be arbitrary but most like representation push or pull. Opposites would then be defined by muscle contraction relaxation differences. I suppose
I saw a neat theory that said Middle Korean vowel harmony was based on tongue position, so we have vowel pairs ɨ-ʌ ə-a u-o, with latters featuring retracted tongue root.
The ㅂ to ㅜ I heard is because the 'b' used to be some sort of a 'v' or probably a bilabial fricative, and so it arises as b syllable finally and as a w syllable initially. So it does destroy the harmony but ㅜ may not suppose to be a 'u' but a 'w'.
As an amateur linguism fanatic, having created a conlang, fallen in love with a similarly linguism-obsessed bloke and done a presentation on the history of the German dialects and dutch in college, this is honestly the first time I've ever heard of vowel harmony and it's absolutely terrifying, idk half of what's going on and I'm scared. ;-;
Really didn’t expect to solve my long hung question on 작은말 and 큰말 when I first spotted this video but it did. Also didn’t expect knowing Korean’s vowel harmony would help me understand Korean’s volatile to me (a nonnative speaker) affixes system. Big thanks hmm
Trying to give constructive criticism, the video is so incredibly high quality and informative but the music is so annoying 😂. I think no music or less video game type music would be better but that‘s just my opinion. Keep up the good work!
@@kimeiga an asterisk in linguistics marks something as incorrect, so *gözlör and *yollor are not grammatical, but they would be if hypothetically low vowel suffixes had a 4 way split (e/ö/a/e) like high vowels do (i/ü/ı/u)
My father says Turkish has a ton of different dialects, the ones in the east being more similar to the Ottoman Turkish with which we Iraqis are more familiar.
@@kagomekirari25 because they do, they're not diphthongs in the modern language
11 วันที่ผ่านมา
The Korean language just sounds... fade (As in ''insipid'', ''Dull'', ''Colorless''), just like their ''Forests'' which are bunches of very small trees near cities. Everyting just seems artificial and bleak there.
@@myaobyclepiej no no, something about your voice just reminds me of him =P I don't think you're going to make an hour long video on the original Mario Bros. so you're probably in the clear hahaha
I have to add that in your transcription you don't reflect the h+t combinations as resulting in an aspirated consonant, neither you properly distinguish between different diphtongs. Also you reflect some assimilations but not others. For example you write kilda>kiro but chatda>chaja (in this case there is no d pronounced, ch+t = tt, intensified t) Small mistakes, but it really made me stop the video to check.
@@TheoEvian i mean ㅚ ㅞ ㅙ are all pronounced the same. i romanize ㅎㄷ as t because that's how i transcribe aspirates in general. my philosophy with a transcription is it's supposed to be an approximation of a pronunciation for the target audience, and i don't really think romanizing 찾다 as chattta or whatever to reflect the unreleased stop + tense stop would really accomplish anything for an average english speaker (i do tt for stop + aspirate and td for stop + tense). i don't even distinguish between aspirates and non-aspirates word-initially, although word-initial non-aspirates are mostly aspirated nowadays and distinguished from aspirates with pitch more than anything but that's a whole nother story. if i wanted to be actually thorough i would just use a transliteration of phonetic hangul or something but that's gay
@@myaobyclepiej Thank you for your reply, I guess my philosophy would be different, either way you are right that all of those oe eu etc. are stupid :D
I hate your romanization of Korean. To be fair, I hat all romanization of Korean. The Latin alphabet isn't even adequate for English, it really has no chance with Korean. One thing I might suggest is forming romanized words into syllable blocks. In a comment you used 되어 as an example. I would (if you forced me to) write this as doee-eo, rather than just doeeeo. It still looks stupid, but slightly less so.
Contrary to what most people might think, Korean as a culture and especially the language is very recent, as recent as Goryeo. It's a recent product of intermixing and assimilating cultures around it, barely resembling what they consider as the ancestral culture (Gojoseon). Go as far back as the Samhan Era and you probably won't be able to differentiate them from the surrounding Chinese and Tungustic cultures in the Manchurian and Liaodong region. Even the Gaya confederacy is highly believed to be Japonic at its core, and that same region together with Jeju and Tsushima were once under the Yamatai rule way before. There was also a close-tied relationship of Baekje and Yamato up until the former's fall upon being conquered by Shilla (Shiragi). Thanks to the Unified Shilla, the peninsula started to integrate all these different cultures and from then on, unified imperial Korean rule kept them together until a brand new culture was born.
for some reason, everything in south korea is in the process of dying.
Even the country itself
America moment
nothing is eternal
Western puppets stay the same, facades and masks slip but SK has always been rightist dictatorship.
lets just hope... uhm... Up north dosnt go "Hippity Hoppety, your Country is now my Propety"
i never really wondered why certain vowels were yin and some were yang. it just intuitively made sense to me, probably because the yin yang is pretty apparent from the hangul shape alone. realizing that not only i had no idea why a was yang and oo was yin but also that scholars apparently dont have a consensus either just blew a hole in my head
To me it is mostly frontness like oe vs a is quite clear in that regard. With eu being almost neutral, it seems like a cousin of i after all (so they should be both neutral) but in verbs i behaves if I remember correctly (I haven't really done Korean for five years now) like a yang and eu like a dark vowel.
I'd say given the areal context of Tungusic and the nearest Mongolic varieties I'd say the ATR harmony hypothesis is the most likely, but not gonna bet on it
Even modern Kazakh has ATR vowel harmony since mid vowels are classified dark or light by tongue root position
It's quite possible the harmony in Korean is over some quite unusual distinction yes. Early Middle Chinese had very unusual phonation distinctions in vowels... The back vowels likely had some sort of RTR (retracted tongue root) or Pharyngealization or Uvularization or Velarization. The front vowels had some sort of extremely weird split between some sort of rhoticized or centralized or velarized palatalization, vs fully front palatalization...
I wouldn't say so, /u/~/o/ and /ǝ/~/a/ are not characteristic of ATR harmony, but of height harmony. Korean's closest Tungusic neighbor geographically was Manchu, which had a similar height system.
@@joshuasims5421 I think it's likely that the vowels have moved around over time...:
- Middle Korean o ㅗ is often used for what is /o, u/ in other languages (Mongolian o u and Middle Chinese u... it's possible that some of them have been /oˤ uˤ/)...
- Likewise, Middle Korean u ㅜ yu ㅠ seems to be used for loaning /y/ /jy/ (Mongolian ü, Middle Chinese yu)
- Also u ㅜ for /əw/ (Middle Chinese, possibly /əˤw/)
- weo ㅝ yeo ㅕ for /ø/ /jø/ (Mongolian ö, Middle Chinese yo)
- eu ㅡ for what must have been something like /ə~ɨ(ˤ)/ (Middle Chinese endings with a high non-front non-rounded vowel)
- eo ㅓ yeoㅕ for Mongolian /e/ and Middle Chinese /je/ in closed syllables (ye ㅖ for Middle Chinese /jei/)
Unfortunately my reference lacks arae-a (ㆍ)...
If we reconstruct Mongolic languages back, then the evidence for an ATR system becomes murky, mainly based on turkic borrowings in mongolic suggesting the more typical vowel harmony systems u see in other languages based on height and roundedness
Really cool to see an explanation of vowel harmony!
The visuals of this video is so clean
I can see why they turn to Mongolian rather than Middle Chinese for vowel comparisons for Middle Korean... Middle Chinese is an absolute mess phonetics-wise, it's basically a vertical vowel inventory where palatalization and labialization and diphthongs are better defined than the vowels themselves, and it has a couple of very rare distinctions (the back vowels had to have some sort of RTR/Pharyngealization/Uvularization, the palatalized front vowels have some split between rhoticized/centralized and fully front).
to be fair modern mandarin is a mess phonology-wise, i feel like you can ask anyone who knows a thing or two about it and they'll each give you a different analysis of its vowel inventory
@@myaobyclepiej 5 vowel system seems the most likely because it makes sense allophonically but I understand where the 6 vowel system w/ /e/ and /o/ being separate phonemes comes from
The phonetic mess of "Middle Chinese" is probably an artefact of the incompetence of its reconstruction. The document that allegedly, well, documents Middle Chinese is the Qieyun, a rhyme book that explicitly states that it is a compilation of previous rhyme books. Yet since the beginning of modern Sinitic linguistics, that book has been considered the basis of "the Middle Chinese language", and so it's no wonder the vowels are a mess, because it was never spoken.
@@vampyricon7026 After messing with this problem for some time, my views on this are as follows:
- Middle Chinese was basically a "Vertical Vowel Inventory" language like Abkhaz. This means that vowels were more differentiated by semivowels like /j, w, ɥ/ and diphthongs than by the vowel's timbre itself
- Middle Chinese had at least a couple of extremely rare distinctions that touched on the whole consonant-medial-vowel part of the syllable, and the 4 different rows of the Qieyun represent these distinctions
- Row 1 must have been something along the lines of pharyngealization / retracted-tongue-root / uvularization / velarization along with vowel backness
- Row 2 is particularly hard to reconstruct with plausible candidates being rhoticization / velarization / pharyngealization along with vowel frontness
- Row 3 is simply palatalization, but it has a weird back/front split in its rhymes called "Chongniu" with the extra rhymes spilling into row 4, and speculation abounds on if they are divided by having a more centralized /j̈/ vs fully front /j/, or fully central /ɨ̯/ vs front /j/, or velarized /ɣj/ vs non-velarized /j/, or rhoticized /j˞ / vs plain /j/, or plain /j/ vs fricativized /j̝/, or palatalized /ʲ/ vs fully iotated /j/, or non-iotated // vs iotated /j/...
- Row 4 is plain and eventually becomes /je/ and merges with row 3, the difficulty being figuring out how it was differentiated with both variants of row 3, the most popular reconstructions have this as originally being /e/ but you see other alternatives such as /ie̯/, or /je/ with row 3 being something different such as /jɛ/
- The way these distinctions were expressed varied with time and location
- When borrowed into other languages such as Vietnamese, Korean or Japanese, these unusual distinctions are lost, making reconstruction extremely difficult
- The reconstructions you see out there, such as Baxter's reconstruction, are fine with the phonemic structure of the differences, it's the phonetic realization of these differences that eludes us and where we see wide disagreements
@@2wugs Well What I heard most is that Mandarin has a 2~3 vowel system 🤣. I personally prefer the 2-vowel theory tho - a uo(wə) e(ə) i(j∅) u(w∅) ü(ɥ∅) ∅(∅) ie(jə) (∅ means no vowel) maybe because it's the funniest one while still makes sense lol. 3-vowel system makes ∅ a vowel (ɨ). By adding i u, adding /y/, adding o, adding /e/, removing ɨ, we get 4~8 vowel systems. To me it's more like a math game, the phonology system is quite clear, it just depends on how deep you want to split everything.
지나가던 한국인으로서 사실 별로 현대 한국어의 모음조화의 존재를 거의 느끼지 못하고 있었지만 좋은 설명 덕분에 확실하게 알고 가네요 ㅇㅅㅇ
I always thought that these features were well known for native speakers. Do you notice it much when you speak, or do you not even make the distinction?
@@JayBergéWe usually notice it instinctively, which means that we may not notice this yin-yang harmony, but we can tell it apart.
For example, the linguistic rules that are natural for you, may not be the case for foreigners.
Even if you try to explain this, there is a high possibility that you will not be able to explain it by solving it skillfully.
We're similar too.
솔직히 중세국어 할 때 빼고는 생각을 안 함.
@@JayBergé with endings and particles not really. I'd say it's the most noticeable in onomatopeoias and ideophones but even then many won't realize it has to do with vowel harmony
ó being the only vowel with a diacritic in your romanization is kinda funky. esp since there was tone in middle Korean
cool video overall
@@awelotta im not a huge fan of that solution myself but there's only 5-6 vowel letters, and modern korean has 7 monophthongs, so it's either digraphs or diacritics and i hate digraphs for short vowels especially in revised romanization (되어 is doeeo which is disgusting)
@@myaobyclepiej Corresponding each of the six latin vowel letters to each of the vowel jamo seems like an intuitive answer to that problem.
@@myaobyclepiej I guess arae-a complicates things. I would personally do ㅏaㅐ(ä)ㅓeㅔëㅗoㅜwㅡuㅣi, and then I guess I would represent ᅟᆞ with schwa. for ㅡ is pretty good too though I've always disliked that a little because the consonant and vowel being represented feel very different to me, but I'm guessing it has much less ambiguity with diphthongs compared to representing both ㅜ and /w/.
Interestingly, 8:12 things like this aren’t just seen in the north but rather I’d argue almost the majority of nonstandard dialects. There are tons of words like 덥다 돕다 etc that become 와 instead of 워 in regional speech but not in standard use
If in past tense, vowel harmony is also broken such as 갔어 not 갔아.
That's only cuz that ㅆ어 is actually 있어 in disguise
가 있어 (to exist in the state of having gone)
갔어 (went)
@@flatbreadjk isn't that just the perfect and preterite tense
@@flatbreadjk like ‘is gone’ vs ‘went’ ?
I love how casual your videos are... its a really nice break from all the super prof sounding ones here
while learning korean i definitely noticed the vowel harmony in conjugation and how that aligned with diphthongs as well. then later i also found out about what was mentioned as "sound symbolism". while i guess there isn't much vowel harmony left, both these
aspects were something i did notice
Isn’t it interesting that nearly all the languages born in tangent to siberia have a similar vowel harmony system
Not mentioned here but interesting as well is that the vowel harmony system is alive, well and PRODUCTIVE in ideophones. Also interesting is that it seems to be a different vowel harmony system than used elsewhere?
The Estonian effect is real it seems.
You deserve 100x more subs holy... amazing stuff!
slowly dying？It has died, I would call the remaining traces defective only.
finding Labov randomly in there is kind of a great encapsulation of Korean linguistic literature in the west
Sweet, we get two random bonus memes along with the video 1:10
Wonderful to see your recognition of how the Democratic People's Republic of Korea preserves the authentic correctness of the true speech of the Fatherland uncorrupted by foreign imperialisms.
For Middle Korean, /u/~/o/, /ǝ/~/a/ /ɨ/~/ʌ/ is a pretty clear height harmony system to me; we can take the active features of hangul 'ㅡ' to be [+back][-round], effectively /ɯ/. Nearby Manchu had a similar height harmony system. See Lhasa Tibetan for a similar example.
As for ATR, I've seen proposals that Middle Mongolian was actually an RTR harmony language similar to modern Khalkha. So, the 'ü' vowel would not have been /y/ but more like modern /u/, explaining its correspondence to /u/ in MK at 3:00; and MM 'u' would be RTR /ʊ/, explaining its match to the lower MM /o/, perhaps.
As for the modern system, I couldn't say! It looks mostly fossilized to me at this point, but I suspect the orthography and standard language aren't a good guide to the modern phonetic reality; see modern Uzbek for a similar example.
1:10 What the hell are these pictures?
Lil algorithm boost, good luck!
There's also
이렇다·요렇다
그렇다·고렇다
저렇다·조렇다
The latter ones are more "light" or "cute-sy"
Interesting video to watch as a native speaker of Finnish and Korean learner. I don't notice any significant meaning between back and front vowels in Finnish, it's purely to ease the pronounciation. However in Korean I can definitely feel the difference in nuance when it comes to vowel harmony.
한국어의 모음조화에 대해 이런 영상을 만들어 주셔서 감사하겠어욤 잘봤습니당 ^^
I've never heard 고렇다 and 조렇다 before
Cool video. After reading some comments, I just wanted to say that I was not confused by the memes at 1:10. I think I got the references. Brave
The random anti-Bill Burr propaganda at 1:12 was a little puzzling.
i was very confused by what the reference was for both images
Seconded. Weird.
Jews are trying to get rid of vowel harmony
Backstory: Bill Burr is a MASSIVE hypocrite on a few particular issues, but he has the "correct" politics, so nobody in his industry calls him out on it.
Korean has vowel harmony?
I'll still never understand whyㆍis a light vowel, whileㅣis neutral. It would make so much more aesthetic/system sense for the opposite of ㅡ beㅣ.
I don't think vowel harmony will disappear, it will just become an obscure part that native speakers have a sense for but don't really understand. Like English irregular tenses or plurals.
The aesthetic of the video was very nice. And I share your hatred of Korean romanization, it's so English centric.
i remember hearing it's because ㆍ is meant to be a sun, ㅡ is meant to be a ground, and ㅣ is meant to be a person
@zagle1772 yea, I've heard that. But it sounds like something someone makes up hundreds of years after something has been made to give it some symbolic meaning. No idea though.
I would say “when will it disappear” is a more reasonable question than “will it disappear”, it would be quite bizarre if Korean evolved for a million years and it was still there (though it’d be bizarre for it to be spoken that long)
@terdragontra8900 Lol yea, would it even be Korean then. I also don't really think languages are going to evolve anymore. Before languages were spread from parent to child, now we have video and millions of speakers. It's a lot harder for languages to function change.
@ It’s true that videos exist, but young people form their dialect mostly from their communication with fellow young people. If anything I feel like language is changing faster today, because the cultural difference between generations is huge today (because of the rate of technological growth)
As far as I know, it is assumed that in Old Korean ㅓ [ʌ] was closer to [e]. Maybe this can explain something?
중세국어만 해도 ㅓ 음가가 [ə]긴 하지
I think at some point "eo" ㅓ (modern [ʌ]) and arae-a ㆍ (pre-modern [ə]) switched places yes (and then arae-a ㆍ merged into "a" and "eu"). "Yeo" ㅕ is used for chinese words that used to have /je/ in closed syllables, as well as some that could have had other vowels such as /jø~jo/.
@@boptillyouflop arae-a was never [ə]
@@TYMCCK What was area-a then? It shows up in interesting places in borrowings (such as words that are now si/zi/ci in Mandarin and some of the words that are shi/zhi/chi, and what must have been [ʌj] but merged into ai).
@boptillyouflop arae-a was [ʌ], everyone agree with sound of LMK vowels while consonants can be bit controversial
Dude I don't know HOW do you ONLY have 2.5k subs when you pump out high quality and very unique content.
Keep going without stopping, all the love and support 🎉❤
1:34 the plural suffix +lAr is only twofold, which is why it only gets a and e, but even otherwise, o and ö can only appear in the first vowel* anyway, due to the _roundness_ (only unrounded open or rounded close vowels after rounded vowels) + _flatness_ (only unrounded vowels after unrounded vowels) rule, which is called minor harmony in native textbooks :P
It has minor exceptions around some "u" words and "i" suffixes but "o/ö" never comes at second nevertheless, in native words :3
*With the isolated exception of -(i)yor due to it (formerly) being a compounding verb (still the first vowel) before melting into a suffix, which is isolated to Turkish anyway, other Turkic languages don't break this xP
A rather off-topic insight but lol, just to clarify 🙃
I looked through the whole video for some new studies to look through, but I have already seen then all 😂 Anyways, great video, and completely underrated.
edit: btw your discord link is expired
it's not a link, it's just my handle
@myaobyclepiej I'm dumb
I love your username
@@amj.composer ty
As a native korean speaker, it is sure interesting to look at a silly foreigner organize what we learn in high school grammar class.
It works to show how important and unique Korean is in terms of linguistics.
Nice work on the design as well.
However, it’s hard to imagine that vowel harmony will die further from this.
i'm a modicum surprised none of the snapshot research includes research in done, more precisely written, in Korean or Chinese.
I would hypothesize that bringing in human anatomy specifically of the vocal system may explain some of the mappings. Even then phonology may not map directly to muscle usage, and even then, the symbology may not map cleanly to the phonology, though it seems they usually do. Which side is light or dark may be arbitrary but most like representation push or pull. Opposites would then be defined by muscle contraction relaxation differences. I suppose
Diabolically unhinged opening lines
I love vowel harmony!!!!
Cool. I mentioned this in a comment.
In the Seoul dialect, it is even further from being alive with forms like 알어, 받어, 찾어 spreading to colloquial language throughout the country.
I saw a neat theory that said Middle Korean vowel harmony was based on tongue position, so we have vowel pairs ɨ-ʌ ə-a u-o, with latters featuring retracted tongue root.
The ㅂ to ㅜ I heard is because the 'b' used to be some sort of a 'v' or probably a bilabial fricative, and so it arises as b syllable finally and as a w syllable initially. So it does destroy the harmony but ㅜ may not suppose to be a 'u' but a 'w'.
As an amateur linguism fanatic, having created a conlang, fallen in love with a similarly linguism-obsessed bloke and done a presentation on the history of the German dialects and dutch in college, this is honestly the first time I've ever heard of vowel harmony and it's absolutely terrifying, idk half of what's going on and I'm scared. ;-;
7:15 가다 means 'to go'
thanks must have missed it
Really didn’t expect to solve my long hung question on 작은말 and 큰말 when I first spotted this video but it did. Also didn’t expect knowing Korean’s vowel harmony would help me understand Korean’s volatile to me (a nonnative speaker) affixes system. Big thanks hmm
First the loss of pitch accent and /z/ & /ɦ/, now the vowel harmony. What’s next, the 3 way consonant will become 2 😭?
It's lowkey becoming that already
Amazing video’
Truly epic opening
No, vowel harmony, don’t die! Don’t die!
Great video! I think the background music is distracting tho
좋다~
I mean vowel harmony was just a Middle Korean invention anyway (did not exist in Old Korean), so I wouldn't actually miss it 😂
I learned that eu was neutral... cause it represented earth which is neither sun nor moon, please correct me if im wrong though
Trying to give constructive criticism, the video is so incredibly high quality and informative but the music is so annoying 😂. I think no music or less video game type music would be better but that‘s just my opinion. Keep up the good work!
Shin Tae Il jumpscare
1:12 bro wtf
Wait I’m Turkish am i supposed to be saying gözlör or yollor LOL i have never heard of those. I’ve always said gözler and yollar
no you're not that's why they're marked with an asterisk
@ oh were you referring to how there’s e/a harmony in addition to ü/u/i/ı harmony?
@@kimeiga an asterisk in linguistics marks something as incorrect, so *gözlör and *yollor are not grammatical, but they would be if hypothetically low vowel suffixes had a 4 way split (e/ö/a/e) like high vowels do (i/ü/ı/u)
@@myaobyclepiej i see thanks for the clarification of the asterisk
My father says Turkish has a ton of different dialects, the ones in the east being more similar to the Ottoman Turkish with which we Iraqis are more familiar.
코로네 썸네일 보고 채널 들어왔는데 언어학 채널이었네
Good
eu is a neutral vowel.
ᄋᆃ케 갯, ᄒᅷ ᄋᆞᄇᅷᇀ ᅂᅵᆺ?
E and ae aren’t dipthongths
@@SK-zi3sr when did i say they were?
@@myaobyclepiej 1:41 "the ones I just obscured originate from dipthongs"
@@kagomekirari25 because they do, they're not diphthongs in the modern language
The Korean language just sounds... fade (As in ''insipid'', ''Dull'', ''Colorless''), just like their ''Forests'' which are bunches of very small trees near cities. Everyting just seems artificial and bleak there.
why does your voice remind me of jan Misali?
@@starleaf-luna oh no do i sound that autistic?
@@myaobyclepiej no no, something about your voice just reminds me of him =P
I don't think you're going to make an hour long video on the original Mario Bros. so you're probably in the clear hahaha
It's wokeness that's doing this
yep
I think it's the first time I watch a linguistics video and have no clue what you're talking about and what's going on
I think he assumes you've watched xidnaf's videos on vowel harmony and hangul
ding dongs :)
Lost?
1:12 lmfao
I have to add that in your transcription you don't reflect the h+t combinations as resulting in an aspirated consonant, neither you properly distinguish between different diphtongs. Also you reflect some assimilations but not others. For example you write kilda>kiro but chatda>chaja (in this case there is no d pronounced, ch+t = tt, intensified t)
Small mistakes, but it really made me stop the video to check.
@@TheoEvian i mean ㅚ ㅞ ㅙ are all pronounced the same. i romanize ㅎㄷ as t because that's how i transcribe aspirates in general. my philosophy with a transcription is it's supposed to be an approximation of a pronunciation for the target audience, and i don't really think romanizing 찾다 as chattta or whatever to reflect the unreleased stop + tense stop would really accomplish anything for an average english speaker (i do tt for stop + aspirate and td for stop + tense). i don't even distinguish between aspirates and non-aspirates word-initially, although word-initial non-aspirates are mostly aspirated nowadays and distinguished from aspirates with pitch more than anything but that's a whole nother story. if i wanted to be actually thorough i would just use a transliteration of phonetic hangul or something but that's gay
@@myaobyclepiej Thank you for your reply, I guess my philosophy would be different, either way you are right that all of those oe eu etc. are stupid :D
whats with the korean peninsula and having two countries that are decaying faster than flesh
could it be that their recent history was so horrible and traumatic that it's continued to affect people
i blame wokeness!!👱🏻♂️🇺🇸
turanic
vowel harmony is a cancer in agglutinative langs
in turkish, suffixes can only have 2 distinct vowel qualities: open (a/e) and close (ı/İ/u/ü)
Vowel harmony is still 1000 times easier than Chinese characters.
@@boptillyouflopokay? nobody brought up Chinese
@@psymar i think bro said it because OC is japanese
@@psymar Yeah that's fair. I guess it's just... I can think of dozens of grammatical systems that are more complex and messy than vowel harmony.
I hate your romanization of Korean. To be fair, I hat all romanization of Korean. The Latin alphabet isn't even adequate for English, it really has no chance with Korean. One thing I might suggest is forming romanized words into syllable blocks. In a comment you used 되어 as an example. I would (if you forced me to) write this as doee-eo, rather than just doeeeo. It still looks stupid, but slightly less so.
Very good video! Love how it’s both entertaining and informative.
Please don’t use the word sch*zo it’s a slur.
lmfao
lol
North Korea?
Was just reading about Jamaican patois and vowel harmony when I said this.
Contrary to what most people might think, Korean as a culture and especially the language is very recent, as recent as Goryeo. It's a recent product of intermixing and assimilating cultures around it, barely resembling what they consider as the ancestral culture (Gojoseon). Go as far back as the Samhan Era and you probably won't be able to differentiate them from the surrounding Chinese and Tungustic cultures in the Manchurian and Liaodong region. Even the Gaya confederacy is highly believed to be Japonic at its core, and that same region together with Jeju and Tsushima were once under the Yamatai rule way before. There was also a close-tied relationship of Baekje and Yamato up until the former's fall upon being conquered by Shilla (Shiragi). Thanks to the Unified Shilla, the peninsula started to integrate all these different cultures and from then on, unified imperial Korean rule kept them together until a brand new culture was born.