Talk:ㆇ

Triphthong or tetraphthong?

Is this letter a triphthong or tetrapthong? It seems that initially @Tibidibi had put this down as a tetraphthong but another anonymous editor has changed it and labeled it as as triphthong. Based on the orthography alone it would imply it is indeed a tetraphthong similar to /jwia/, being a digraph of ㅛ and ㅑ (iotized vowels), but given that letters like ㆊ transcribe diphthongs like [iuᴇ] with no intermedial -i-/-j-, could it actually be a triphthong? Of course this is a purely hypothetical sound as it has no Middle Chinese equivalent nor does it have usage in Middle Korean, but just given the orthography alone it seems like it would correspond to /jwia/ instead of /jwa/. LittleWhole (talk | ^{中文维基词典用户页}) 08:27, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

@LittleWhole Honestly I don't know much about Sejong's orthography for Middle Chinese transcription. I just inferred from the orthography as given. Doing some more research, I found this Korean-language paper, in p. 213 it says (in my loose translation):

Meanwhile in the Hunmin jeong'eum, there appear the sequences ㆇ, ㆊ, ㆈ, ㆋ. Analyzed on a surface level, ㆇ, ㆊ are compounds of two letters representing diphthongs and would be tetraphthongs; ㆈ, ㆋ, where the semivowel /j/ has been appended, would then be pentaphthongs. But ㆇ, ㆊ were created on the orthographic principle that iotized vowel letters are combined together, which prevents the phonological analysis that this is a sequence of two dipththongs. From a cross-linguistic perspective, sequences of more than four vowels are uncommon; in the context of Middle Korean also, vowel sequences such as ㆇ, ㆊ, ㆈ, ㆋ are not admissible. Hence these clusters should be seen as existing only in the principles of the script and not in the phonology.

So the IP's triphthong/tetraphthong analysis is the correct one because it's an orthographic principle that the iotized vowels have to go together. Clusters like ᅟힲ, ᅟힵ don't exist in the script as envisioned by Sejong.

But it's not really relevant anyways because these are just illustrations of the script's principles, as you say.--Tibidibi (talk) 09:01, 9 July 2021 (UTC)

@Tibidibi Thanks for the definitive and comprehensive answer! LittleWhole (talk | ^{中文维基词典用户页}) 15:36, 9 July 2021 (UTC)