Listen first.
This is Gustixa & Rhianne’s cover of Keane’s “Somewhere Only We Know.” Rhianne’s pronunciation is close to RP — the “BBC English” of southern England. Below, every line of the song is written twice: on the left in English spelling, and on the right in 正音, sound by sound, as she actually sings it.
正音 (“correct sounds”) is the original form of the Korean alphabet, created by King Sejong in 1443. Modern Korean writing, Hangul, still uses most of its letters. But the original set was designed as a phonetic system: each consonant letter is a small picture of the mouth making that sound. That design is what lets 正音 spell sounds that the Korean language itself does not use.
‘Somewhere Only We Know’ 영어 가사(왼쪽)와 正音 표기(오른쪽) — 1면.
‘Somewhere Only We Know’ 영어 가사(왼쪽)와 正音 표기(오른쪽) — 2면.
(In the brackets, 英 marks a British pronunciation and 美 an American one. Some letters here — ㅿ, ㆆ, ㅸ, ㆄ — are 15th-century letters that modern Korean no longer uses.)
How to read the letters
You don’t need to know Korean to follow the logic. Here is the whole consonant set at a glance, with its sound values:
正音 자음표 — 조음 위치별 자음 가족과 각 글자의 음가.
Each column is one family of sounds made at the same place in the mouth; the names on top — wind, tree, fire, earth, metal, water — are the book’s element labels for those families. Read a column downward: the top row is the soft base shape (ng, n, m…), the next row adds a stroke and the air stops (g, d, b…), and the bottom row adds one more stroke for a puff of air (kʰ, tʰ, pʰ…). In the wind column — the s-family — the extra letter is written small underneath the ㅅ instead.
A few shapes carry most of this song.
ㄴ is a side view of the tongue, its tip touching the ridge behind the upper teeth. Add a horizontal stroke on top — and the stroke touches — and you get ㄷ, then ㅌ. The shape is now sealed. Sealed shape, stopped air: these are the plosives [t, d], sounds made by blocking the airflow and releasing it.
ㅅ is a picture of a tooth. ㅅ and ㅿ wear no hat, so nothing blocks the path: the air keeps flowing through a narrow gap. These are the fricatives [s, z].
ㅈ and ㅊ are the tooth shape ㅅ wearing a gat — the black horsehair hat of old Korea, the one you may recognize from Korean period dramas. Here the gat sits touching the tooth. The air is blocked first, then squeezed out through the narrow gap. Stop plus friction: these are the affricates — like the ch in branches.
ㅎ follows the same rule from the other side: its strokes float above the circle without touching it, so the air is never blocked — a fricative, [h].
One rule of thumb covers it all: a stroke that touches means the air is stopped; an open shape means the air keeps flowing.
파열음·마찰음·파찰음의 IPA 기호와 그에 대응하는 正音 글자.
- In 正音, ㅅ and ㅿ picture the teeth — and the affricates ㅊ and ㅈ contain the same tooth shape inside them.
- In the plosives ㅌ ㄷ and the affricates ㅊ ㅈ, the added stroke sits closed: it touches.
- In the fricatives — ㅅ ㅿ, and
below — nothing touches the tooth shape. It stays open.
The two “th” sounds
English has two sounds that most alphabets can’t spell cleanly: [θ] as in thing and [ð] as in the. Korean has neither. Yet 正音 writes them: and — a t or d block with the tooth letter ㅿ tucked underneath. The horizontal stroke never touches ㅿ, so by the system’s own logic the block reads as a fricative — which is exactly what [θ] and [ð] are.
Now scroll back up and find the, pathway, something, this in the lyrics. You’ll see the small triangle ㅿ sitting under those blocks, every time.
The transcription above is one page from 《正音으로 듣고쓰다》 (Hearing and Writing in 正音), the book behind this site.
Read more:
- Hangul, Upside Down — how each consonant letter pictures the speech organs, with a 3D model.
- A Compass Made of Vowels — the twelve vowels arranged as a compass.