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Comment by memming | Hacker News Reader

Korean has so many vowels it's not even funny.

Hmm? Modern Seoul dialect only has seven simple vowel sounds (ㅏ/ㅓ/ㅗ/ㅜ/ㅡ/ㅣ/(ㅐ=ㅔ)), not counting semivowel combinations. Even the (largely unrealistic) "standard pronunciation" only has ten vowel sounds (ㅐ and ㅔ are considered different sounds, and ㅚ is considered a simple vowel instead of a diphthong).

So it actually has less vowels than English.

By the way, any scholar who still claims that modern "standard" Korean has vowel length distinction hasn't been paying attention for the last 50 years or so.

cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#Vowels

If you think Korean's bad, you should try English! It has fourteen or fifteen vowels!

But how many letters for vowels does it have? German has A, Ä, E, I, O, Ö, U, Ü, Y. I think english has mainly diphthongs.

English only has six vowel letters (the same ones as German without the umlauts), but it has lots of vowels (monophthongs). Wikipedia's article on lexical sets lists the following words as having distinct vowels in General American (the exact number varies between dialects): trap, lot, face, dress, nurse, fleece, kit, goat, cloth, goose, foot, strut. That's twelve, and doesn't include vowels which only appear in unstressed syllables (there's at least one: for example, the second syllable in comma).

The situation with English is similar to the situation with Korean being written with hanja, although not as severe. We're using the Latin alphabet, which was designed for a language with many fewer phonemes, and we're using it in a quasi-ideographic way in which spellings reflect etymology as much as they do pronunciation. So even though we have between thirteen and twenty vowels, depending on how you count, we attempt to represent them all with only six graphemes — and irregularly at that.

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