Caveat: The Personalities of Various Squares in Jeolla Dialect

I was working with a student the other day on trying to clarify that the pronunciation of the words "square" and "scare" are different. This is not, normally, something Koreans seem to have difficulty with, but for whatever reason, perhaps sheer obstinacy, Giha was unable to make the distinction.

Actually, there is, in fact, a possible, plausible cause for this. In some dialects of contemporary Korean – notably, the southwest (Jeolla), where I lived in 2010-11, and where Giha's family is apparently from – there is a strong tendency to merge [w]-onset diphthongs with their corresponding simple vowels. That is, [wa] and [a] are the same, [wɛ] and [ɛ] are the same, etc. In layman's terms, you might call it "w-dropping." I first noticed this in Yeonggwang, where I lived, because the locals seemed to inevitably pronounce the name of their town "Yeonggang" (i.e. dropping the [w]), and the regional capital's name, Gwangju, became "Gangju." 

So if you think about the distinction, in English, between square and scare, the difference is simply the [w]-onset in the vowel of "square" which is missing in "scare": [skwɛɻ] vs [skɛɻ]. So, applying Gwangju dialectical phonotactics, you'd get the same pronunciation for both words.

I really wanted him to get the distinction, however. It was annoying me. For whatever reason, both words appeared in the same exercise we were doing. 

So I invented a tongue twister, for which I drew an accompanying illustration. The illustration is lost – I did not capture its ephermeral moment on the whiteboard, so you will have to imagine it. However, the tongue twister is memorable:

That scary square scares that scared square scarily.

[daily log: walking, 6.5km]

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