[KS] formal question (which version of Chinese characters?)
Marion Eggert
marion.eggert at rub.de
Sat May 30 18:07:50 EDT 2015
Dear Rob,
We could not disagree less:
>
> Small point, I guess, but I'm a little unhappy with the "nothing is
> semantically gained" matter. When I write about Korean music, in
> English, my audience can be most anyone anywhere, such as a) Japanese
> who know English, but not Korean (on top of not knowing the
> romanization), b) Italians who know English and Chinese, but not
> Korean or Korean romanization, etc etc. Having simply a romanization,
> even if not ambiguous in its reference, is not nearly as effective as
> having the romanization together with (in my case) traditional
> characters, which can be read by many categories of readers to their
> semantic enlightenment.
>
That was exactly what I wanted to convey: There is "semantic
enlightenment" in the characters because they are a medium of
communication beyond the different spoken languages. I meant to say,
therefore, that the point of using them would be lost *if* you reduce
the characters to a script for a national language, e.g. by insisting on
using the Japanese forms for a Japanese word. Of course I prefer having
them in the text.
Andrew took this argument in a somewhat different direction, I guess.
Regards
Marion
>
--
Prof. Dr. Marion Eggert
Ruhr-Universität Bochum
Sprache und Kultur Koreas
GB 1/46
D-44780 Bochum
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