A Comparative Study on Korean Tense Consonants and Tamil Geminates : Focussing on Plosives

The purpose of this study was to examine the phonetic relationship between Korean tense consonants and Tamil geminate consonants based on Hulbert(1906)’s claim that Korean tensification is comparable to Tamil consonant gemination. While Korean has a distinct phonemic category of tense consonants, Tamil lacks tense or fortis consonants, and all Tamil plosives are voiceless unaspirated. This study investigates whether Tamil geminate consonants nonetheless exhibit phonetic properties similar to Korean tense consonants. Recordings of Korean tense consonants produced by a Korean female speakers and Tamil geminate consonants produced by a Tamil female speakers were analyzed acoustically. VOT (Voice Onset Time), closure duration, and the F0 (fundamental frequency) of the following vowel were measured and statistically compared. The results indicate that the Tamil geminates ‘த்த’ /t̪t̪/ and ‘ப்ப’ /pp/ show phonetic similarities to the Korean tense consonants ‘ㄸ’ and ‘ㅃ’, respectively. In contrast, the Tamil geminate ‘க்க’ /kk/ differs from the Korean ‘ㄲ’, due to its longer VOT and the presence of aspiration within the VOT. Closure duration was significantly longer in Tamil geminates than in Korean tense consonants, presenting statistically significant difference between the two groups. On the other hand, F0 didn’t show any statistically significant difference. Using these results, a conclusion was made that closure duration and F0 values does not help to understand the phonetic similarities and differences that exist between Korean tense consonants and Tamil geminates, as it presented results that were against the results of VOT. These findings partially support Hulbert’s (1906) hypothesis and provides empirical evidence relevant to contrastive phonetics and pronunciation pedagogy in Korean language education.