[KS] Re: pinyin system and Korean romanization

[John H. T. Harvey]

    I fully agree with what Ross King had to say on the subject of Pinyin.
But I would like to add another point, one I hesitate to make for fear of
trampling on Korean sensitivities, but will because no one else ever seems
to.

    Nowadays people who have any pretensions to being citizens of the world
have to learn English, with its whacky spelling "system." (Some of us, of
course, are lucky enough to get a head start on this at our mother's knee:
"too" = "to" = "two," etc.) Then, of course, one has to be able at least to
fake it with the odd but at least consistent French (j = zh, etc.), German
(j = y, etc.), and Spanish (j = h, etc.) spellings, not to mention
de-Cyrillicized Russian.  Recently along have come Japanese in Hepburn
romanization (not too tough, really), from the world's second largest
economy, and Chinese in Pinyin romanization (very tough, because they were
thinking not about the rest of the world's convenience but about their own
in a multilingual country with an ideographic orthography, as Ross points
out), from almost a quarter of the world's population.

    And now Korean, the language of 1% of the world's population, with the
eleventh largest economy, etc.?  "Gimme a break" will be the almost
universal response.  There must be some limit to what even a citizen of the
world has to swallow.  No, by the time he gets to Korean, he deserves all
the help we can give him. What about the other demands on his energies:
quality time with the kids, jogging, keeping up to date in his profession,
etc.?

    So Koreans can't cite Pinyin's arbitrary c's and q's and x's, or
context-dependent vowels, as a precedent for features like, say,
transliteration, with all the phonological rule-learning it would involve
for foreigners, or like "eo" and "eu" to represent somewhat schwa-like
vowels (not the vowels in English "eon" and "Europe) -- for roughly the same
reasons that Korean is not one of the five official languages of the UN and
that it is hard to find a Korean (or anybody else) who is at home in all
five.

    If this was too obvious to need to be said, I apologize.

    John H. T. Harvey
    jharvey at nuri.net





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