In Slate, Michelle Tsai looks at how the media arrived at the name “Cho Seung-Hui” rather than “Seung-Hui Cho.” (HT to iheartblueballs)
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The name game
This entry was written by Robert Koehler, posted on April 20, 2007 at 12:44 pm, filed under Asides, Korean Diaspora. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
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15 Comments
I hope this puts to rest — permanently — the drivel from those crying wolf about how the entire American media was unified in “foreignizing” Cho by using his Korean name. As the article makes clear…media organizations followed different routes and came to different conclusions, they had no family members to ask to clarify, the documentary evidence wasn’t clear at the time, they consulted Koreans within their organizations for advice, went through a lot of effort and discussion before arriving at a decision regarding something that was breaking quickly….and for that they got accusations of racism from the peanut gallery of professional victims.
Great article! I was wondering about that myself.
I’m not sure if there is a “right” way to spell his name or not, but the complaints from the K-A community that spelling his name with the family name first is some sort of deliberate ploy to play up his foreign-ness seem quite petty in light of everything else.
What some folks don’t seem to get is that both “Cho Seung-Hui” and “Seung-Hui Cho” look pretty damned foreign to a black guy in Biloxi or a white guy in Peoria.
BINGO!
Andy gets the booby prize for insight of the day. The only people that would even consider the Korean version of his name “foreign,” are Koreans and whitebread with significant knowledge of Korea. Statistically, a sliver of the American population.
But by all means victim-whores, continue with your theory of how the American media is out to dehumanize Cho. Much like the Great Backlash, it’s comedy gold.
I am really sorry to hear this.
I personally believe that bluetranslator deserves an ‘A’ for finding away to put his Grad school cultural anthropology courses to good use.
There is a rumor going around that he actually found a way to apply his high school algebra classes to the real world.
Isn’t algebra Arabic for “8th grade math” and are are you intentionally try to offend the Arab community?
oops, some typos there. sorry.
Now if newscasts could just get the pronunciation down we’d be getting somewhere. I wish more Koreans would use English spellings of their names that sound closer to the original - like Jo Seung Hee, for instance.
There’s nothing worse than hearing Choi, which really should be spelled Chae or Chay.
dokdo - Not that ordinary Americans wouldn’t butcher the pronunciation anyway (Hoonday Automobiles), but I partly fault the romanisation system introduced rather clumsily back in about 2000. I haven’t heard any broadcasters say choi for cho. But the seung bit throws people off.
I recall the BBC presenter during the World Cup saying seeyo-gu-wipo for that Cheju resort town and countless other misfires.
I think the ROK needs to tweak the vowel romanisation of its new system, with the input of the target audience.
THX for the post.
Slim-
Sure, a good romanisation system would help, but what are the chances of that happening? Every reform seems to be for the worse and not the better. If it’s your name, you can spell it however you want to - so why not Jo, instead of Cho?
My reference to Choi was not related to this case, just an example of a Korean name in English that sounds nothing like the original.
I heard the “hui” part pronounced as “hwi” on one newscast. In that case, it’s not clear from any existing standardized romanization system that the pronuncation is closer to “hee.”
“My reference to Choi was not related to this case, just an example of a Korean name in English that sounds nothing like the original.”
The whole point of the romanisation system is that it is a korean name IN KOREAN using a ROMANisation system i.e. using the “roman” alphabet. It is NOT a korean name in english but in the roman alphabet. If you use the romanisation system then you will pronounce Choi correctly since “oi” represents “ㅚ” the sound “eh”. It can then be written by french, dutch, german, czech, italian, or anyone else who cannot write hangul but is familiar with the roman alphabet not only americans. After all who’s pronunciation would then be declared correct even in english alone tomAYto or tomAHto….
Your romanization system only serves Korean speakers - less than 1% of those who will read “Cho Seung Hui” reported in the world press. Most Koreans who know enough English to be reading about Cho in the NY Times also know English rules of pronunciation, and can distinguish the English ‘CH’ from ‘J’. They should easily be able to figure out who 조승회 is if they see Jo Seung Hee. Non-Korean speakers need a romanization system that serves their needs as well - especially if they comprise 99% of the intended audience.