I was looking for a place to park my car. The first parking lot was full, so I went to the next-door building. It was an old building with just a couple of parking spots left.
Satisfied with my luck and parking skills, I was about to head toward the elevator when I saw this steel door. I had to stop and take a picture, because it said 휀룸.
휀 룸!
If you are a Korean learner, try reading it out loud and guess what it means.
I stared at this sign for a long time while slowly walking away, for one main reason: nostalgia. This is a very old-fashioned way of spelling... (Did you take a guess?) "fan room".
Growing up, I saw this kind of spelling everywhere, with the F sound written with the Korean letter ㅎ (which has the "H" sound).
- Family | 훼미리 or 훼밀리 (old) | 패밀리 (now)
- Fence | 휀스 (old) | 펜스 (now)
- Festival | 훼스티발 (old) | 페스티벌 (now)
So what is behind that door? Probably a "mechanical room" or an "air handling unit room" for ventilation of the building. But more importantly, why was "F" written with ㅎ when the sounds were clearly different?
This was the influence of Japanese spelling. In Japanese, the [f] sound in loanwords is written with the letter フ(fu/hu). This habit carried over to Korea, so people started writing syllables like 훼, 휀 and 환 in many loanwords.
1986: A New Rulebook
But with the introduction of the Official Korean Orthography of Loanwords(외래어 표기법) by the Korean government in 1986, the standard spelling of [f] changed from ㅎ to ㅍ, which sounds like [p].
From that point on, these words became the standard spellings.
- 패밀리 family
- 펜스 fence
- 페스티벌 festival
- 팬 fan
However, even though languages always change, it takes time for people to adjust to the new rules. So it took a couple of decades for Koreans to fully adapt to using ㅍ for [f]. So as you go around in Korea, you can still see many place names still using ㅎ instead of ㅍ, especially when it's a business name that's been used for a long time.
Speaking of business names, 훼미리마트(Family Mart), the biggest convenience store chain in Korea at the time with 7,200 stores, changed its name to CU(씨유) in 2012.
I think this big change happened right around the time when Korean people were almost completely moving away from using ㅎ for [f]. I find this timing really interesting from a language teacher's point of view.
One Step Further
This change didn't just stop at the spelling level, though. Around the same era (early 2010s), there was another service that Korean people had also started to use a lot: Facebook.
If Facebook had launched in the 1980s, Korean people would've called it 훼이스북, but according to the new rule and pronunciation habits, it launched as 페이스북 in Korea.
But in spoken day-to-day conversations, even while writing it as 페이스북, I noticed that many people were actually just pronouncing the [f] sound like in English, including myself.
So there were mainly three usage cases:
(1) pronouncing it as 페이스북
(2) saying Fㅔ이스북 with an [f] sound like in English
(3) using the shortened version 페북, with the [p] sound in front
Languages are always changing.
And that's part of what makes it fun to learn them! For today's Korean learners, stumbling upon words like 휀룸 or 훼미리 마트 is like discovering a little piece of linguistic history. Next time you see one, you'll know that it's a trace of older spelling practices before the current system took hold.
I was certainly happy to make the discovery in the old building's parking lot, and I will keep an eye out for more of these old spellings to share with you in a future post!
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