The problem prior to 2002 was not the Romanization issue itself, but the inconsistency in using it, as Gomushin Girl mentions. The ŏ and ŭ were a problem for some on their computers and in doing searches, but it would have been a lot cheaper for the Korean government to work with Microsoft and Apple to make ŏ and o mutually searchable than to spend the tens of millions of dollars they did changing signs and everything else.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
My latest piece is in the Joongang Ilbo today, pulled together from the post "Chairman of the Presidential Committee on National Competitiveness wants to tinker with romanization." I got a call yesterday evening from the paper asking me if they could rework a couple things because they could not reproduce two of the characters I used: ŏ and ŭ. They're from kushibo's comment, which has thus proven itself ironic:
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Romanization is a necessary evil. I don't like it, but for news reports, airport info, tourism, etc., there has to be some system for the general non-Korean-speaking public.
The Japanese are fortunate that their language can be almost perfectly represented in Latin letters, but Koreans are not as fortunate.
I wish they had long ago embraced one system (or created their own) with enough sense to avoid those silly diacritical marks bearing in mind the most important uses for Romanized text.
What drives me absolutely bonkers is where Korean text uses "z" or "zz" to represent "ㅈ" or "ㅉ". Like a restaurant that sells "zzazzangmyeon" or a t-shirt with a thumbs-up logo and "zzang!" caption. WTF? What may I ask is wrong with the letter J, which so nearly approximates the 'ㅈ' sound? Whereas the representations in other Romanization systems may be difficult to follow, this is simply WRONG.
It's easier to learn 한글 than it is to learn one (if not all) of the Romanization systems. For foreigners living here in Korea, well, I'm tempted to say we should just be held to a higher standard and learn 한글.
As for tourists... well, I find it amusing that street and subway signs in Japan almost entirely forgo Latin transliterations, even though they have a language so amenable to Latin transliteration. But it certainly hasn't harmed their tourist industry, that's for sure.
As Matt said, Korean really doesn't lend itself to accurate Romanisation, partly because the letters of 한글 and the reading of them don't follow the same pronounciation rules as letters of the Roman alphabet, especially not in English. Of course, Romanisation is also not the way anyone who is serious about learning Korean should try and use it - you just have to learn how to accurately pronounce it. The main reason for this relates to what holterbarbour said. Korean consonants, such as ㅈ change in pronounciation value depending on where they are in a word, meaning they need two Romanised values.
Another thing to consider is that it is not only English speakers who need to use a Romanisation system - the Roman alphabet is used by speakers of many languages, and is recognisable in most parts of the world. Therefore Romanisation system needs to be language-neutral, reflecting a standard pronounciation most common among all the languages that use the Roman alphabet.
This is why most scholars of the Korean language actually prefer the McCune-Reischauer system, as it generally reflects these difficulties better.
Also, in reply to holterbarbour, the Koreans have created a system of their own - both of the main systems (McCune-Reischauer and Revised Romanization) are actually created by Korean - don't believe Wikipedia, McCune and Reischauer actually just proliferated a system they saw that worked well.
It shows a complete lack of understanding on behalf of the Korean government when they decided to switch to a system that had no accents or other marks that weren't present in standard English, as quite simply, it's only English that lacks these among the languages that use the Roman alphabet. The post is right, they should have just worked towards making it easier to use those characters on computers. I'd be interested to hear how non-speakers of Korean have got along using the Revised Romanisation, or the former system if they were in Korea then!
Apologies for the long post, it's just years of lectures emerging from somewhere!
whereas Chinese and Japanese are super easy to romanize
Yeah, like when you transcribe Tōkyō, Toukyou, or Tokyo.
Whenever I see a Korean-learning book that uses romanization I just want to burn it...
Romanization should be used only for the initial stages when the alphabet is introduced. And I definitely prefer McCune-Reischauer because it introduces the idea that one letter may have more than one pronunciation depending on its position. In this post's comment section I laid out in more detail than Brian would want me to present here why I think the 1984 "Olympic version" of McCune-Reischauer (with "shi" instead of "si") is superior to the 2002 "World Cup version."
I have a post I've been writing since the Corea versus Korean post, proposing a return to the "Olympic version" of Romanization, along with efforts to get ŏ/o and ŭ/u mutually searched online (as Brian cites in the article), and a standard convention of introducing Korean words with M-R pronunciation in parentheses and hantcha where appropriate, and then breve-less spelling afterward. This follows a format Hong Kong papers used to follow for introducing Chinese-language names.
For example:
... She lived in Shinchon (shin•ch'ŏn/新川), which was on the other side of the city, so half of her free time was spent on the subway. ...
By thĕ wăy, ŏn Măcs, thĕ brĕvĕ ĭs ăs ĕăsy tŏ typĕ ăs the áccént òr the funny thing under the ç in français and as easy as the mācrŏn used to Romanize Jàpánĕsē. Since the KT actually uses Macs, I don't know why they didn't stick to M-R. I've visited the JAD several times but don't recall if they use Macs, which are heavily used in publishing in Korea.
Am I the only person that prefers the 2002 Revised Romanization System? Despite its one or two quirks, I think it has a pretty sound logic about it, and is not nearly as fussy or pedantic as MCR, at least when its used in an everyday manner. For specialized academic applications, I can see how MCR has the edge, but using MCR in a non-academic capacity seems both gratuitous and unnecessary.
I agree with the previous comments about Korea focusing too much on the literal translation, but instead should be focusing on how it sounds. If romanisation is for the people that can't read Korean, then the sound is the most important thing.
For example, near where I live is an area called 시지 and the romanisation underneath reads "Siji", which when pronounced in English doesn't sound the same. We all know it should be romanised as "Shiji", but every Korean knows that ㅅ is supposed to be literally translated as "s" with no exceptions.
But agreeing with the right kind of romanisation will be difficult, as I've sometimes seen Americans romanise 밥 as "bob", where as in Australia (and most probably the UK and New Zealand) would romanise that to "bab".
Ryan's comment reminded me of how silly things like that can be-- when the transliteration is too, well, literal. The most idiotic example I can think of is when the "blockbuster" movie "쉬리" came out...and was transliterated into "Swiri."
Romanization has it's purposes. For one, it really does make learning Korean a lot easier. For two, the tourists have an easier time traveling from point A to point B with a standard, consistent name. The Romanization system implemented in 2000 is good - but it needed to be implemented across the board - that is, names and businesses would need to be changed as well...
As long as it doesn't get as complicated as the IPA, I'm game. While we're at it, why don't we add a few jamo (letters) for the 'th' sound, the 'z' sound, and the 'v' sound?
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