I’ve been trying to think of a linguistic or formulaic reason why ㅂ is pronounced with a ‘m’ sound for a while and can’t think of any better reason than it’s easier to say. Like other languages, Koreans like to change and morph the language in order to make things easier to pronounce or simply because tastes change.
To answer your question more specifically, there are a few consonants that do this in addition to ㅂ. The consonants ㄱ,ㄷ,ㅇ, and ㅊ come to mind first. These consonants (with the exception of ㅇ) have a harder sound that wouldn’t really work at the end of a character. So to solve this, they are usually turned into plosives, changing their sounds a bit, depending on the consonant. ㅇ typically has no sound as the first consonant, but is pronounced with a ‘ng’ plosive sound as the second. All this turns into a sort of slurring or running words together, changing the sound almost entirely. For example, in 감사합니다, the ‘b’ sound is pronounced as an ‘m’ because it flows better. If you pronounce it slower, each sound is more emphasized, but if you start saying it faster and faster, your brain just kind of automatically starts making that change.
I’ve never really thought of about this phenomenon, so I don’t have a better answer. I can’t remember if this happens with any other consonants except these hard ones, so I think this might be it for special pronunciations. Let us know if we need to do a better job explaining it.
oh mang
Wowza. A+
Name/Online Handle?: lococo
omg. first of all, i LOVE what you are doing and am very grateful for your effort :) thankyou very much! but i wanted to request maybe you could add phonetics next to the korean vocabs >< im a new self-taught-korean learner too and have a hard time reading the vocabs :( just a suggestion which i think would be useful to alot of other people :) please consider!
again, thankyou so much!!!!!
- Coco
Hey Coco! I’m glad you’re enjoying the site and the lessons. And believe me, you’re not the first person to ask for these romanizations. So, I guess from now on, I’ll be providing them. Just… remind me when I don’t.
Name/Online Handle?: amyxii.tumblr.com
what does 없어 means? And why it is pronounce as 업서(eob-seo) rather than (eobt-eo)?
Hello amyxii! 없어 is kinda hard to define, only because it can be used in a lot of different ways. The actual word means “gone” or “absent”. The sentence “사과가 없습니다.” means “There are no apples”. That is usually how it is used. Most other ways it’s used are idioms. The reason why it’s pronounced eob-seo as opposed to eobt-eo is because it’s a double consonant. When this happens, the sound of the second consonant moves to the next character and pronounced with that character. This is why ㅇ(ng) follows most consonant ending characters, because it is silent when used as the first consonant of a character.
I should also add that double consonants that are different are mostly used as the last consonants in a character. I should probably diagram this out…
