Why post meaningless political drivel and cheap boobie pics when you can link to something useful? Take, for instance, the Academy of Korean Studies’ Glossary of Korean Studies. Wanna know how to say the Manbosan Sageon in English? Wanna romanize the word 거북선, but don’t know how? Well, fret no more, children, because the Glossary of Korean Studies has got it all and then some.
And you Korean Studies nerds out there (no need to name names—you know who you are) will be happy to learn that romanizations are given in BOTH the Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s official romanization scheme and that McCune-Reischauer gobbly-gook with all those diacritic thingamabobs and stuff.
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And you Korean Studies nerds out there (no need to name names—you know who you are) will be happy to learn that romanizations are given in BOTH the Ministry of Culture and Tourism’s official romanization scheme and that McCune-Reischauer
I would be happy if they hadn’t included the current official Romanization scheme. No doubt there are still tourists lost out in the countryside unable to find their way home becuase they keep pronounce “eo” as two syllables.
gobbly-gook with all those diacritic thingamabobs and stuff.
“Those diacritic thingamabobs” are useful even in English. It’s how you know that you’re talking about a resumé and not telling someone to start something up again. It’s how you know that the c in façade is pronounced as an s and not as a k. It’s how you make it clear that blasé has two syllables, not one. In Romanization of Japanese, it’s how you let people know that Tōkyō is pronounced as a long o, not a short one.
If the NAKL back in 2000 had put their financial resources into getting Microsoft to make it easier to input diacritics, instead of spending tens of millions of dollars on road signs, things would have been better off. No gimchi for me, please.
> Why post meaningless political drivel and cheap boobie pics when you can link to something useful?
It’s because you do all three that we continue to read you, Robert!
I’ve had the book-version of that database for years, which includes English definitions — very very useful.
I totally disagree with Kushibo on romanization systems, which seems to be a particular target of his wrath. I’ve used both in all sorts of writings and field-use for six years now, and think that the new system is far better in general (with a few exceptions; i continue to put an h in between an s & an i on my website). The government’s done a good job (boy, how often can you say that?) in consistently using the new system on maps, signs, websites, brochures & etc by now — except for previously-established proper nouns; kimchi is still kimchi, Hyundai is still Hyundai. It’s far more internet-friendly and closer to actual pronunciation.
I wish that the international academic community would give up their pointless resistance against it, stubbornly clinging to their system invented way back when most writing was still done by hand, so little squiggles were easy to put in… Most of them can’t even use it themselves on the net, so they write “Ch’Ongp’Ung” instead of “Cheongpeung” claiming that the latter one “looks funny” and “is hard to pronounce”… Sheeesh.
Sanshinsŏn (see how easy that little squiggle was to put in?), a couple points.
First, the government was pretty darn consistent with their usage of McCune-Reischauer before, so this is nothing new. And given that it’s good consistency with what is at times a bad system, that consistency is a bad thing.
Second, Sansinseon, much of what I do involves working with visitors or new residents trying to pronounce things, and the new system’s eo constantly trips people up, while the g, j, b, and j (not to mention si- for shi-) at the beginnings of words leads to a wrong way of pronouncing things which, unfortunately, often sticks with people for their entire association with Korea or Korean things.
Most of the people I know who have “accepted” the new system are people who have been here long enough to internalize these misleading elements. How many Koreans really do think that eo is pronouned like the u in fun or the o in son? Enough that many think that’s okay Romanization. But for the uninitiated, it’s a bewildering thing that throws up a huge obstacle to being understood. The head of one group that decided to go with the new system came back to us to do a reworking of everything because the new system was “utterly useless” for their purposes, which was to make people understood.
Tossing the previous system was an example of excessive government reaction to a minor problem that needed a little tweaking, and replacing it with a system that brought with it huge problems. Sorry, but I see that as an example of what the ROK government should not be doing.
Not of fan of either system. Never found the “diacritic thingamabobs” useful and the new Romanization system’s use of eo, as Kushibo points out as an example, does trip up many. In the case of the surname Seo I think it should be Suh. And I’ll never get how Hur, Cheoung and Park were considered appropriate when Huh, Jung and Bahk would have been much closer. Good thing hangeul (or is it hanguel?) is so simple to learn; after a few hours one need not bother with either system. Strange that Korean, with a very standarized pronunciation and not tonal, is romanized in such unhelpful ways. Not as bad as romanized Chinese, though. I can see where there would be some esthetic issues, for example replacing oo for u, but I can live with Boosahn.
How about the myriad unhelpful ways in which foreign words are transliterated into hangeul? I can understand that English is tough. But why can’t they even agree (for example) to translate a Japanese ki as 기 or 키? Trying to find a Korean translation of a foreign novel in Kyobo’s computer system is maddening, because the same author will have his name transliterated in several different ways. Not that Kyobo would shelve the same author’s books in one place anyway. (God forbid.)
No surprise that my fellow K-S nerd Kushibo and i continue to disagree on romanization. I also frequently deal with people who are new to Korea a lot, and have not at all found that the g, j and b “at the beginnings of words leads to a wrong way of pronouncing things” — i’ve found just the opposite in fact; there are closer to the way that Koreans actually say those words, since foreigners usually can’t help aspirating the K, Ch & P at least some. Korean professors and government officials i work with usually agree, it sounds better to them.
When people arrive here they have always needed to be taught how that ŏ is pronounced, they don’t know it intuitively. Just the same, they need to be taught how the eo is pronounced; once they got it, all is fine. Americans also need to be taught how the Korean “a” is pronounced in both systems, so that they don’t say the last syllable of former President Kim Young-sam’s name like the American name Sam, as AFKN’s soldier-reporters did for five excruciatingly long years… (i wouldn’t mind if the government adopted “ah” for that a, for better pronunciation… but it wants as few letters used as possible). There’s no way to get around it, people have to be taught these pronunciations, that’s never going to change no matter what romanization system is ever used.
And pronunciation for newcomers was only a minor factor in the decision made to adopt the new romanization system. Much bigger is computers and the internet — it might be easy for you and i to put ŏ in text we write and read it on our systems, but it will never be easy or comprehensible for the rest of the world who only occasionally deal with Korean words, but whom we do want to be ever more approachable to. Globalization requires a common simplicity.
There may be a tiny factor here that the old McCune-Reischauer system is the favorite of academic elitists, who shudder at the thought that mere untutored commoners might be able to read and even write Korean words without having been lectured by those with PhDs. Why, they don’t even know the associated Hanja, how dare they presume??!! But OK, that just might be my own neurosis perceiving that, wouldn’t be the first time…
Using si- for shi- is a mistake and even possibly a crime, we can surely agree on that. I think you will also agree with me that reporter Kim of the “JoongAng” Daily followed the tradition of the title of his paper in achieving the worst of all worlds with the spelling of Korea’s most beautiful county as “Yeoungwol”
> 6,000 residents of the city of Yeoungwol were moved to shelters
http://joongangdaily.joins.com.....09041.html
As for consistancy, that glossary/web site is full of inconsistancies, both in M-R and that new thingie I won’t call a system.
When I was in the Korean studies field, I used both M-R [mostly for "cultural" transcriptions] and Yale-Martin – for linguistic use. Yale-Martin is the *only* consistent system – which makes it much weirder to look at than that new thingie I won’t call a system. And caters both for modern and ancient Korean.
Only for Americans, and that’s not even sure – esp since initial voiced plosives are often pronounced tense. See 도시*까*스 for city *g*as for instance.
Thanks, Robert! How long has the online glossary been up? I don’t recall ever seeing it or reading about it before.
I’m not even going to go there with the whole romanization thing…I’ve thrashed out the issue—from differing points of view—far too many times already. Better that they include both than exclusively one or the other, making it accessible to as many people as possible.
Seoulout wrote:
“Strange that Korean, with a very standarized pronunciation and not tonal, is romanized in such unhelpful ways.”
The problem is that even though there are 24 letters in the Hangeul/Hangŭl/한글 “ganada”/”kanada” versus 26 in the Roman alphabet—leading one to think that it should be possible to map every 한글 letter to a Roman equivalent—there are 6 non-palatalized (yotized?) vowels (ㅏ, ㅓ, ㅗ, ㅜ, ㅡ, ㅣ) in Korea versus 5 in the Roman alphabet (a, e, i, o, u, of course). Mapping ㅏ, ㅗ, ㅜ, and ㅣ to (Italian) a, o, u, and i is respectively is fairly unambiguous (although in the Yale system ㅜ is written “wu”). But what to do with ㅓ and ㅡ? This is where the various systems diverge, because there’s no simple correspondence between those two letters and a single, unmarked-up Roman vowel.
The consonants, on the other hand, are not so much of a problem, I think. The simplest mapping (phonetically hairsplitting issues aside) is the one currently in use in the 2000 system, because it establishes a largely one-to-one correspondence between 한글 and Roman consonants: ㄱ -> g, ㅋ -> k, etc. (ㄹ and double consonants being another issue….)
And complementary distribution of consonants aside, too. After all, plosives can be pronounced 4 different ways depending on position and surroundings – meaning four transcriptions each – which is much more than ㄹ…
Yes, I didn’t even get to initial vs. medial vs. final consonants (as McCune-Reischauer describes them), let alone all the other fun stuff….
In response to Dda’s comment above about the inconsistency of the AKS glossary, I would agree that there appear to be quite a lot of mistakes in there. But then I would guess that that is par for the course and, for me at least, it does not detract from the usefulness of the site. Perhaps I could suggest that people who use the site and notice errors could collect them and send them to the AKS (International Cooperation Dept. I think). That would certainly be in keeping with their desire to correct errors about Korea wherever they find them (”한국바로알리기”).
By the way, I posted about this glossary at Frog in a Well a while back and briefly discussed the methodology behind their choice of English translations for [Sino-]Korean terms. Personally I think this is a much more interesting topic for discussion than the [yawn] endless Romanisation debate.
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