Postby javiskefka » February 17th, 2008 7:47 am
As for as I know, there are three explanations.
1. Since Korean is a living language, the speech of people has changed over the years, and not all of the sounds represented by those 자모 are used anymore. Some have merged with similar sounds and some have simply disappeared.
2. As the speech changed, it was deemed no longer necessary to use those 자모 in the official spelling of words.
3. Those weird dipthongs on the end used only for transcribing some Chinese words that contained sounds like that, and for some reason they are no longer written that way.
