Re: Hyundai (Was: Re: Graphemes defined)

It seems that your Korean professor tried to make it "easy for a foreign ear." "Hyundai" is pronounced in Korean as [hyOndA] (where "O" stands for a schwa-like vowel and "A" stands for either the vowel in the word "pan" or that in "pen" depending on the age of the speaker, as the vowel has been undergoing "raising" for some time, especially in the Seoul region. The "h" here is sometimes pronounced as a palatalized spirant [x] due to the following glide and also because of the strong nature of the word-initial position. So, by popular transcription "Shoon-deh" is not too far off from one of the variant pronunciations, but the first vowel, which I assume is something like [u], would be wrong. Even by popular transcription, something like "Hyundeh" (where the vowel "u" is like the one in the English word "judge" and "eh" would be like the last vowel in the French word "fiance") might be a little better. English speakers usually drop the [y] glide there because [hy] in a word
-initial position is a difficult cluster to pronounce, but otherwise people in TV commercials, etc. usually seem to pronounce the rest of the word correctly.

YK

----- Original Message -----
From: Nicholas Bodley <nbodley@...>
Date: Thursday, June 17, 2004 1:23 pm
Subject: Hyundai (Was: Re: Graphemes defined)
>
> A while ago, I had a chance to ask a Korean professor who was
> fluent in
> English how to pronounce it, and what I heard (not necessarily
> what he
> said!) was something like "Shoon-deh" (apologies for no ASCII
> IPA), with a
> strong accent on the first syllable.
>
> --
> Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
> Opera 7.5 (Build 3778), using M2
From Andrew Dunbar <hippietrail@...>
Sent Thursday, June 17, 2004 2:10 am
To qalam@yahoogroups.com

--- Nicholas Bodley <nbodley@...> wrote: >
{Long-delayed reply}
>
> > There's no phoneme /Ã§/. /hy/ --> [Ã§].
>
> This reminds me of "Hyundai", which in spoken
> advertising that I've heard
> rhymes with "Sunday", as if there were no "y" in the
> word.
> That *must* be wrong.

Here in Australia the original advertising used the
pronunciation /haI.Un.daI/ or /haI.yUn.daI/. Then
everything changed and the new advertising since has
used the pronunciation /hyVndaI/ or possible
/hyVndeI/. I guess /hyUnd{/ would be closer to the
Korean pronunciation in English phonemes.