Hangul syntactically distinguishes not only consonants and vowels, but
also each syllables.
For example, my name, "
", has three syllables, "
" and "
" and "
".
My name has only two consonants. One of them is "
" appearing in the middle of my Korean name, and it is sounded similar to
English "J".
The vowel "
" below "
" is sounded like "oo" of "zoo". As a result, "
" corresponds to "Joo" of my English name.
Another consonant appearing in my name is "
".
Actually, this letter is a half-consonant-half-nil; if it appears in the bottom of a
syllable as in the last syllable of my name, "
", it makes a consonant sound
similar to "ng" of "young", "Boeing" or "running";
otherwise, it makes no sound and only takes a role of syntactic sugar.
Doesn't "
" look more complete
than "
"?
Now let me finish this puzzle, completing the remaining parts.
The "
" of "
" is sounded like "yo" of
"Tokyo", and the "
" of "
" is sounded like "ea" of "eagle" or "east".
Hence "
" matches "yong", and "
" matches "Lee" (a bit of distortion
of "Yi" as explained in Note 2).
Notes:
1. In Korea, we usually put a family name before a given name.
It is very rare to see a Korean who has a middle name (I have never
seen it in my life).
My family name is "
" and my given
name is "
".
2. The actual pronunciation of my family name is closer to "Yi" than
"Lee".
However, a lot of people, including me, who have this family name
write it with "Lee" on their passports.
There could be two explanations for this difference.
First, two pronunciations were both used in the old days. As a matter
of fact, "Lee" is mostly used in North Korea nowadays.
The second and more plausible explanation would be that English has
been used in Korea as widely as now only for the last few decades so that
I "guess" we still keep an initial old habit to write names as close to English words.