earticle

영어

The purpose of this study is to contrastively analyse mute graphemes in English and Korean. Graphemes both in English and Korean are phonemic grapheme. The one-to-one correspondence between the phoneme and the grapheme is expected but that is not the case. One factor causing this mismatch is the mute grapheme, which has no phonemic counterparts in the spoken form. Although the mute grapheme has no phonetic value, it has an important function in spelling, which is a logographic principle in it. The logographic principle is called as a morphemic principle. We investigated the mute graphemes. In English, simple grapheme are mute, which are never pronounced within a word. In compound grapheme, the mute grapheme is divided into ‘endocentric’ and ‘exocentric.’ In Korean, the significant mute grapheme is <ㅇ>. The phonetic value of grapheme <ㅇ> varies depending on its position within a character. This can be mute depending on its position as well. Also, the majority of digraphs in the final position of character have double clusters rather than double letters. Except for <ㄿ>, all double clusters are ‘endocentric.’ In conclusion, the mute grapheme is very important as a formative element of word although it does not have any phonetic value.