How to say "Seoul"
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So far as I know, most Americans pronounce the name of the capital city of the Republic of Korea as "soul".
(Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /səʊl/
(General American) enPR: sōl, IPA(key): /soʊl/
Rhymes: -əʊl
Homophones: sole, soul, sowl
From Korean 서울 (Seoul, literally “capital city”), originally from Claude-Charles Dallet's French-based romanization of Korean, reinforced by the 1959 South Korean Ministry of Education romanization of Korean, which transcribed the Korean vowel ㅓ (/ʌ/) with the digraph "eo" and which was official until 1984.
Note that English Seoul predates the Revised Romanization romanization of Seoul. The two romanization systems simply produce identical forms.
Then I asked many Koreans how they pronounce 서울, the Hangul pronunciation of the name of their capital city. They made it sound as thought it had two syllables. Ross King:
It's two syllables: something like [sɔul], depending on how speakers render the first vowel (for some it's more like a schwa).
For a deeper dive on the name 서울. Here's Wikipedia's take on the toponymy of the city:
Traditionally, seoul (서울) has been a native Korean (as opposed to Sino-Korean) common noun simply meaning 'capital city.' The word seoul is believed to have descended from Seorabeol (서라벌; historically transliterated into the Hanja form 徐羅伐), which originally referred to Gyeongju, the capital of Silla.
Wiryeseong (위례성; 慰禮城), the capital settlement of Baekje, was located within the boundaries of modern-day Seoul. Seoul was also known by other various historical names, such as Bukhansan-gun (북한산군; 北漢山郡, during the Goguryeo era), Namcheon (남천; 南川, during the Silla era), Hanyang (한양; 漢陽, during the Northern and Southern States period), Namgyeong (남경; 南京, during the Goryeo era), and Hanseong (한성; 漢城, during the Joseon era). The word seoul was used colloquially to refer to the capital as early as the 17th century. Thus, the Joseon capital of Hanseong was widely referred to as the seoul. Due to its common usage, French missionaries called the Joseon capital Séoul (/se.ul/) in their writings, hence the common romanization Seoul in various languages today.
Under subsequent Japanese colonization, Hanseong was renamed as Keijō (京城, literally 'capital city') by the Imperial authorities to prevent confusion with the Hanja '漢' (a transliteration of a native Korean word 한; han; lit. great), which may also refer to the Han people or the Han dynasty in Chinese and is associated with 'China' in Japanese context. After World War II and the liberation of Korea, Seoul became the official name for the Korean capital. The Standard Korean Language Dictionary still acknowledges both common and proper noun definitions of seoul.
Unlike most place names in Korea, as it is not a Sino-Korean word, 'Seoul' has no inherently corresponding Hanja (Chinese characters used in the Korean language). Instead of phonetically transcribing 'Seoul' to Chinese, in the Chinese-speaking world, Seoul was called Hànchéng (汉城; 漢城), which is the Chinese pronunciation of Hanseong. On 18 January 2005, the Seoul Metropolitan Government changed Seoul's official Chinese name from the historic Hànchéng to Shǒu'ěr (首尔; 首爾). Shǒu'ěr is a phono-semantic match incorporating both sound and meaning (through 首 meaning 'head', 'chief', 'first').
Since I'm mingling with people of various social levels and educational backgrounds who speak a variety of combinations of Korean, Chinese, and English — and mix the three freely in the same sentences and phrases, it is difficult for me to distinguish them. I will give specific examples in subsequent posts..
Selected readings
- "I.SEOUL.U" (11/15/15)
- "Using Sinitic characters in Korea" (7/3/15)
- "Japanese readings of Sinographic names" (/26/18)
Martin Holterman said,
May 12, 2025 @ 4:58 am
Interesting. I guess that casts new light on my musings, the other day, that South Korea maybe should move its government to one of the southern cities, so that it's less vulnerable to North Korean attack.
jin defang said,
May 12, 2025 @ 6:15 am
I've thought that, too, Holterman-sensei. Any ideas on the name for the new capital? Given the prickly relationship between Japan and Korea, they might be disinclined to copy the Japanese example wherein the old capital Kyoto, meaning capital, was changed to Tokyo, meaning eastern capital. So unlikely that the replacement for Seoul would translated to "southern capital"?
unekdoud said,
May 12, 2025 @ 11:27 am
Beijing is "northern capital", so moving to a "southern capital" would be close to maximally confusing.
Although there is an even more misleading hypothetical scenario where the capital moves to a different place, which is renamed New Seoul, and later moves back.
Jongseong Park said,
May 12, 2025 @ 11:29 am
The Korean language youtuber Hyangmuncheon (향문천/響文泉) has argued in his book (Hyangmuncheon-ui Hangugeo Bisa 《향문천의 한국어 비사》, 2024) that 서울 Seoul cannot be a direct descendant of 서라벌/徐羅伐 Seorabeol, though he does not dismiss the possibility that they share elements that have the same etymology and are thus cognate. This is based on the argument made earlier in the book that Modern Korean is not descended directly from the language of Silla.
Instead, he points to 사비/泗沘 Sabi, the last capital of Baekje, as the likely source of the name. He draws on the proposal of linguist Huisu Yun (윤희수/尹熙洙) that the water radical (氵) represents *-r of Old Korean in the Baekje transcription of the period after the capital was moved to Sabi. By this analysis, 泗沘 can be reconstructed as representing *sirpir.
The same place was previously transcribed as 소부리/所夫里 Soburi, reconstructed as *sɛrpɛrɛ. The anterior portion *pɛrɛ is presumed to be the same element as the 비리/卑離 Biri that frequently occurs in the Mahan (마한/馬韓) place names recorded in the Account of the Eastern Barbarians in the Book of Wei, in the Records of the Three Kingdoms (三國志魏志東夷傳). The same element appears in Silla transcriptions as 벌/伐 Beol *pɛr and later on as 火 *pɔr (here the Chinese character is used not for its usual reading but for the sound of its semantic match in Korean, the word for 'fire' which is 블 pul in Middle Korean with Yale romanization).
Hyangmuncheon admits that tracing the path from *sirpir to Seoul is speculative, but based on personal communications with Huisu Yun, he proposes that Old Korean *ɛ raised to *i around the year 500, causing a chain shift of original *i to *ʲi; this then weakened to *yo (the iotated version of the arae-a vowel ㆍ of Middle Korean written o in Yale romanization) and finally became ㅕ ye in Late Middle Korean.
In short, *sirpir became *sʲipir in the transitional period to Middle Korean, later to be attested as 셔〯ᄫᅳᆯ syěWùl in Late Middle Korean leading to Modern Korean 서울 Seoul.
The book also says that 首里/しゆり Shuri in Okinawa, once the royal capital of the Ryukyu Kingdom, derives from an old form of the Korean name Seoul.
Modern scholarship on Old Korean has made tremendous progress in recent decades, but it's a shame that there is very little information available on the topic for the general audience and virtually zero for those who don't read Korean. So the book is really helpful in providing an overview of recent developments in the field, and you can tell that the author really knows the stuff. From what I can tell, the book generally reflects the latest scholarship (even where it overturns previously widely-held assumptions). But being for a general audience, it doesn't always cite claims meticulously, so it's difficult to separate the author's own speculation from the conclusions of other scholars. The claim about Shuri deriving from an earlier form of Seoul is mixed in with other examples of Koreanic borrowings in Old Okinawan and the whole section only cites Serafim & Shinzato's The Language of the Old-Okinawan Omoro Sōshi (2021), so I assume that the etymology of Shuri comes from Serafim & Shinzato although it's not entirely clear.