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I suppose I chose a bad example. It was chosen somewhat off the top of
my head and in haste.<br>
<br>
What I simply am trying to say, in response to Frank's assertion that:<br>
<br>
"Yang ban is also pretty unambiguous if you use
the correct transcription"<br>
<br>
At some point that was pretty much true, but I think we now live a
world where no one knows what the "correct" transcription
is anymore. I am stubbornly hanging on to McC-R, but feel bad about it,
personally.<br>
<br>
Furthermore, why must we <i>always</i> transcribe?<br>
<br>
When I first started out as everyone used McR and you could get the
squeak by with the Yale since it wasn't nearly as common.<br>
<br>
Now we have a level of complexity and ambiguity that seems to have
crossed a threshold and is the genuine bane of the busy non-specialist <br>
(read: Korean
language/linguistics/literature scholar) who is simply trying to get
work done.<br>
<br>
I feel that one way out of the mess, and one that also allows us to
respect the Korean Gov't decisions to boot, is to include the han'gûl
in line with the text
as I have indicated. <br>
<br>
I realize that in many cases this is not practical. But I wish it were
done more frequently.<br>
<br>
The glossary approach is okay, but often in the glossaries I encounter,
very few authors even bother to put the han'gûl and so you have hancha,
which may be new vocabulary, and romanizations that
you spend 10 minutes reverse engineering or alternately, you bug your
Korean friends
for the han'gûl so you could grok the vocab and cross reference. <br>
<br>
As a musician, when I see some terminology used that I am seeing
for the first time that I wish to look it up in other references or
discover its etymology, hancha is often helpful, but han'gûl is just as
essential. In any case, It all seems horribly unnecessary
to me since you can learn han'gûl in an afternoon and then use that
han'gûl to look other things up and now that computers are getting
better at handling all the encodings, and everything is done on the
computer... Well I am just not sure why we avoid the answer to the
romanization nightmare that may be right under our noses. Is learning,
using, and typesetting han'gûl such an unreasonable requirement when it
frees the reader to instantly work with the proper pronouncation and
mental representation of the terminology at hand?<br>
<br>
best,<br>
<br>
-kevin--<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Frank Hoffmann wrote:
<blockquote cite="midp06240801c24195febae1@%5B192.168.0.3%5D"
type="cite">
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<title>Re: [KS] Romanization systems</title>
<blockquote type="cite" cite="">Yang ban (æÁ¼ð/®’î«)<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite="">Totally unambiguous. and if i want to
know what that means i can look it up and if i want to know if that
"yang" is the same as another "yang" i can even
know that too.</blockquote>
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</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Kevin, "Yang ban" is also pretty unambiguous if you use
the correct transcription -- not two words but one, and not
capitalized either. Sure, there is also<i> yangban</i> with the
meaning both sites, both ways, but that is used rather seldom, and if
looking at the semantics of its use you would always know. In cases
where there are rare or medieval terms used -- a good example are
'shaman' texts/narrations -- most scholars have since ever listed the
han'gûl and/or hanja in the glossary.</div>
</blockquote>
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