What ㆍ means
An old Korean vowel letter.
Arae-a appears in the creation of Hunminjeongeum in 1443. The 1446 Hunminjeongeum Haerye, an explanation of the new script, presents it as one of the vowels in a 28-letter system.
Its role was both phonetic and structural. It represented the “Heaven” form in a set with ㅡ and ㅣ; combining these basic vowel forms produced other vowels. Hunminjeongeum was designed to make Korean easier to write, since Chinese writing did not fit Korean speech well.
why does arae-a appear in Jeju writing?
Jeju writing retains this historical vowel.
In Middle Korean, arae-a belonged to a vowel-harmony system, in which vowels in a word followed patterns together. Later sound changes disrupted that system, and the vowel fell out of common use in modern Hangul. Jeju writing retains it.
A 2014 reference describes younger Jeju speakers as mostly pronouncing it like 오, and sometimes like 아. Its presence points to Jeju writing, but it does not prescribe one uniform modern pronunciation.
In present-day writing, ㆍ points toward Old Hangul study or Jeju writing.
In Old Hangul or Jeju text, read ㆍ as a vowel, not punctuation.
Who writes ㆍ
Loading…
Don't confuse it with
1
More like this
9
Collections with ㆍ
2
How to type or find ㆍ
- Also called
- 아래아 · alae-a
- Search it as
- araea · old Hangul vowel · old Hangul · Jeju vowel · jamo
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
ㆍ\318DCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.