부산대학교 도서관

Of the Hun-min-jeong-eum unused 14 letters, 11 letters are dental consonants. Dental consonants are exactly the letters which in both Chinese and Korean are unclear and both are found in a vague and different positions. The creation of the Korean letters has a very strong connection to the way Chinese sounded like. Whether explained by the theory of Chinese phonetics or by corresponding pronunciation, Chinese serves as a very important basis and reference point with regards to initial Korean letters and Middle Korean. The main characteristic of this article is identifying the phonemes of both Korean and Chinese and organizing them according to their IPA equivalents, then facing them with Chinese equivalents, Mongolian and Japanese, thereby checking the issues concerning the sound value, palatalization, voicing etc. of these letters. The article examines dental fricatives, including dental head sounds ᅎ ᅔ ᅏ ᄼ ᄽ, and main dental sounds ᅐ ᅕ ᅑ ᄾ ᄿ Korean dental sounds ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅉ, ㅅ, ㅆ and semi-dental sound ㅿ, altogether four groups. In the research method this article adopts an original approach assuming a pair of semi dental sounds: using the semi-dental-head-sound and the semi-main-dental-sound in order to speculate the position of the semi dental sound. Also, this article proposes the concept of semi-palatalization to explain the different stages of the Korean palatalization process and to explain ㅿ not only as a symbol of existence, but also of sound change. In the conclusion, the article assumes that sound value of ㅿ is not /z/, but is between /z/ and /ʑ、ʐ/, namely /ʒ/.