Background and Rationale

As its name implies, 中文 (チウ ヲエㄴ, chu wen, "Chinese written language") is not a spoken language; as such, Chinese has never been written with an alphabet.  While we are using 漢字 (ㅎㅓㄴ ㅊㅓ, han ja, "Han character") as a fundamental unit of our language (Read about the importance of our written language here), we have developed an alphabet to make learning TG as painless as possible for those unfamiliar with logograms.  This alphabet will provide a culturally neutral medium to record 正讀音 (ㅈエヒ テㅗカ ㅣㄴ, jeng dok in, "standard pronunciation [of TG]").

日本語 (ㅎㅣ ㅂㅗㄴ コㅗ, hi bon go, "Japanese language") is a system of morae, lacking concepts of separate vowels and consonants (the only consonant in 日語 is ん, or "n," and it cannot form the head of a word), and its writing system may well be more precisely called a set of syllabograms. For example, there is no distinct "b" character; instead, there are Japanese characters for "ba," "bi," "bu," "be," "bo" (日: ば、び、ぶ、べ、ぼ). While this provides faster recognition of syllables for the beginner, it simply cannot accomodate the versatility of the 漢字 we are using as TG's framework.

To allow for 日語 speakers transitioning to TG speech patterns, we have allowed for an extention of final consonants much like most native 日本人 (ㅎㅣ ㅂㅗㄴ ㅣㄴ, hi bon in, "Japanese person") would pronounce English.  The alphabet itself works towards this, by using Japanese 片假名 (ㅍㅣㄴ コㅓ ㅁエヒ, pin ga meng, "katakana," 日: カタカナ) as consonants, hinting at a vowel that can be said after a consonant if the speaker is unable to pronounce the consonant itself.  E.g., 食 (レㅣカ, shik, "food") can be pronounced "shika" or "shikka" (日: シカ or シッカ) if "shik" is too hard, and the 字母 (ㅈㅓㅁㅗ, ja mo, "letters") for a "k" sound is カ, which in 日語 would be pronounced "ka."

Notice that this does not constitute a 別讀音 (ㅂエト テㅗカ ㅣㄴ, bet dok in, "non-standard reading"), but rather just one of many 方言 (ㅍㅣㄴ ㅣㄴ, pin in, "dialect").  中國語 (チウ カㅗか コㅗ, chu kok go, "Chinese language," 中: 漢語/華語) speakers have also lost the consonant endings preserved from Ancient Chinese in 韓/粵 (ㅎㅓㄴ/ャウト, han/yut, "Korean/Cantonese") languages, so they may benefit from this type of reading as well.

(N.B. Long vowels are not extended with a 長音符 [ㅈㅓヒ ㅣㄴ ハウ, jang in fu, 日:音引き], as these 字母 are not actually 片假名, but are letters in a true alphabet.)

韓國語 (ㅎㅓㄴ カㅗカ コㅗ, han kok go, "Korean language," 韓: 국어, 北: 조선어), by contrast, uses a featural alphabet, 韓文 (ㅎㅓㄴ ヲエㄴ, han wen, "hangul," 韓: 한글, not to be confused with 漢文). A word is composed very much like a 漢字 is, and the 字母 for each sound in a word is written into a single character space, creating a syllable. While you can have a one-to-one correlation between 漢字 and a character unit in 韓文, it might not be as learner-friendly to those unfamiliar with this form of organization.

We have therefore combined characters from both the Japanese and the Korean writing systems, written out horizontally, to form the 統一語 音素字母 (トヒ ㅣㄹ コㅗ ㅣㄴ ㅅウ ㅈㅓ ㅁㅗ, TongIlGo inSuJaMo, "TG alphabet").  Unfortunately, there are no TG fonts available, so your computer will display TG 字母 as either 韓語 or 日語, and as a result, letter and word spacing is fairly awkward to read.  There is nothing we can do about this now unless we can find a font designer with a background in CJK fonts.

For this reason, Roman letters are the preferred form of transcribing 正讀音 when using computers or typewriters.  (Main article)

統一語 音素字母