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.

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…

“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….)

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.

Huh, Jung and Bahk would have been much closer

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.

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.

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