Yeorinhieut

Yeorinhieut (letter: ㆆ; name: 여린히읗; lit. 'soft hieut') is an archaic consonant letter of the Korean alphabet, Hangul. In Unicode, its name is spelled yeorinhieuh, following the ISO/TR 11941 romanization system. It was historically widely called doenieung (된이응; lit. 'hard ieung'), but the South Korean National Institute of Korean Language decided in 1991 to officially name it yeorinhieut because it was felt that contemporary South Koreans would more visually associate the graph with hieut over ieung. It was associated with a glottal stop [ʔ].

It has a stroke added from ㅇ; the Hunminjeongeum Haerye, the text that introduced Hangul, introduces the two characters as having similar sounds, and when transcribing Korean it says they can be used interchangeably. Various scholars argue that ㆆ was relatively artificial and mostly used as an initial consonants for Sino-Korean words in Chinese dictionaries that begin with a glottal stop and was otherwise not used much. For Korean, it could be used to indicate preglottalization before a tensed consonant. It largely fell out of use for that role by the end of the 15th century, after which it was replaced by ㅅ.

Computing codes

Sources

• 홍윤표 (2019-12-13). [Hangul] (in Korean) (Ebook ed.). 세창출판사. ISBN 978-89-8411-924-6.
• Kim-Renaud, Young-Key, ed. (1997). . University of Hawai'i Press. ISBN 978-0-8248-1989-7. Kim-Renaud, Young-Key (1997b). "The Phonological Analysis Reflected in the Korean Writing System". In Kim-Renaud (1997).
• Ledyard, Gari Keith (1998) [1966]. . 신구문화사.

External links

• The dictionary definition of ㆆ at Wiktionary