India has launched the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM) in 2009 with the ambitious target of installing 20,000 MW of solar power in the country by the year 2022. In order to achieve such a target, there is a need for a large number of trained people in the area of Solar Photovoltaics.

It is our pleasure to present this PV lab training manual as part of the ‘Teach a 1000 Teachers’ training programme on Photovoltaics. This initiative is part of the National Centre for Photovoltaic Research and Education (NCPRE, www.ncpre.iitb.ac.in), established at IIT Bombay by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE). We hope that this training initiative taken by NCPRE will be useful in fulfilling the manpower needs of JNNSM.

The manual contains detailed information on several carefully planned experiments on solar PV cells and modules. The planned experiments are in the areas of ‘characterization’ and ‘simulation’. The characterization experiments are planned to allow you to measure various data on solar cells, modules and PV systems. The simulation experiments enable you to simulate solar cells and circuits containing solar cells. For each experiment the details, such as its objective, expected outcome, theory, the equipments used, measurement methodology, results and discussion, are given.

Some of you may not be familiar with Korean and may never have even heard the Korean language spoken. Fortunately for you, the vocal organs used to pronounce both Korean and English are almost the same. Moreover, the process of sound production is known to be universal and does not differ from one language to another. We believe that understanding the general process of sound production will help greatly the reader’s understanding of the sounds of Korean and make you feel more familiar with the sounds of the Korean language. Hence, in this chapter, we will discuss the vocal organs that are used in speech production in 2.1, the major cavities in 2.2, the processes of speech production in 2.3 and ways of classifying speech sounds in 2.4.

Overview

In this section, we will examine the various vocal organs involved in the production of speech. Figure 2.1 lists the vocal organs involved in speech production.

Loanwords are words which, although foreign in origin, have become like native words and are frequently used. In Korean, Sino-Korean words undoubtedly form the major part of Korean vocabulary. In the history of the Korean language, Sino-Korean words started to be included from as early as the second to third century and since then they have formed a major part of Korean vocabulary. According to the Standard Korean Language Dictionary, around 57 per cent of Korean vocabulary consists of Sino-Korean loanwords.

During the twentieth century, loanwords, particularly those of English origin, rapidly increased in number in line with the Westernisation of the country. In this chapter, therefore, we will focus on phonological aspects of English loanwords.

In Chapters 2 and 3, general aspects of sound systems were discussed. In Chapter 4, consonants in Korean will be discussed, and in particular, what consonants exist in Korean and what their phonetic and phonological characteristics are. With this aim, in 4.1, the inventory of Korean consonants will be discussed; in 4.2, the phonetic and phonological characteristics of obstruents; and in 4.3, the phonetic and phonological characteristics of sonorants. In 4.4, we will discuss phonological features needed to discuss consonants in Korean, and in 4.5 we conclude.

Consonant chart

Table 4.1 shows the consonants of Korean classified according to the place (across the top of the table) and manner (down the left side of the table) of their articulation. The nineteen consonants of Korean can be classified as either (i) bilabial, (ii) alveolar, (iii) alveolo-palatal, (iv) velar or (v) glottal according to the place of their articulation. They can also be classified as (i) stop, (ii) fricative, (iii) affricate, (iv) nasal or (v) liquid (lateral approximant) according to the manner of their articulation. Furthermore, each consonant class has two or three sub-classifications. For instance, stop sounds have lax, tense or aspirated sounds, and fricative sounds can be classified as either lax or tense.