[KS] Re: NAKL's New Romanization Proposal

[otfried at cs.ust.hk]

 > There is an old American saying, "If it ain't broke, don't
 > fix it."  

Dear list,

I'm afraid I'll have to disagree with much of what has been said on
the new proposed romanization scheme.  The argument "McCune-Reischauer
isn't broken, don't fix it" is perhaps the most obvious fallacy.  Yes,
M-R works well for publications in Korean studies, but it has been an
abysmal failure in Korea.  To put it bluntly, except for some
government publications, traffic signs and maps, M-R simply isn't used
in Korea at all.  Yes, you can get MsWord to show a circumflex instead
of a breve, but how is that going to help you when you need to enter
your Korean address at Amazon.com?  I bet you aren't using M-R there
either.  Koreans are in dire need of a transliteration scheme that
works for their purposes, and any claims to the contrary will only
stop them from listening to contributions to a better system.

The other main argument "transliteration is mostly for foreigners" is
as obviously false.  Contrary to what some people believe, most users
of Korean transliteration schemes are Koreans.  There are far more
Koreans living outside Korea than foreigners living in Korea.  Korean
companies are everywhere on the globe.  They need to be able to do
business and handle administrative tasks such as getting registered in
foreign countries.  The breves and accents have been a nightmare to
them.

I know what I am talking about, since my birthtown's name contains an
umlaut, and I still wonder every time I fill in an immigration form
how I'm supposed to write it.  Sure, MsWord allows you to use the
circumflex instead of the breve, but how does that help you when
trying to get the bank name right on the telegraphic transfer form?
Some of my colleagues have names with accents or umlauts, and find
them crippled at every conference I meet them.  A Czech colleague has
completely given up on the hacek on his last name.  Even in the
recently (re)published version of Gari Ledyard's PhD thesis (done with
modern electronic typesetting), the accents are typeset awfully.

Have you ever met a Korean who romanizes her name with a breve?  I
suspect the Korean foreign ministry wouldn't even issue such a
passport.  A notarized, "official" translator whom I had translate a
Korean family register didn't use M-R. In romanizing personal names,
chaos reigns, and it seems unlikely that this will ever change.

Studying the addresses on my Korean friend's business cards, I can't
find many breves there, either. Most likely is a M-R romanization with
accents and apostrophes removed, but often one will find the pre-1983
romanization, or sometimes a pig-English romanization.  When I've
lived in P'ohang, I've never seen the name of the city written that
way, except on traffic signs.  My colleagues would "correct" me if I
wrote it with an apostrophe.

Or imagine you are travelling overseas, visiting a university for
joint research as I'm doing now, or just walking into an internet cafe
on vacation to spend 10 minutes to send an Email home.  There's no CJK
support installed, of course.  I have seen Japanese in that situation
write a note in Romaji, and many mainland Chinese could probably use
Pinyin.  Koreans will give up and write in English.  Koreans are
deprived from using their own language since there is no
transliteration they can read and write reasonably fast. (This is, of
course, a matter of education---but M-R has priced itself out of this
market.) 

Much fuzz has been made of the change from a "foreigner-centric"
system to a "Korean-centric" system. It has even be alluded that there
was a kind of "hidden agenda."  I can't understand this excitement.
Isn't it obvious?  If the government of Korea designs a
transliteration scheme, it does so for the benefit of the Korean
people. Whether or not the same scheme can be used by scholars in
Korean studies is rather irrelevant.  After all, scholars will always
invent their own systems.  Linguists, for instance, still stick to the
Yale system.  If scholars can't even agree on a system among
themselves, why do they expect Koreans to look to them for the answer?

Foreigners dealing with Koreans certainly deserve to be heard, but in
the end they'll fare better with a system that Koreans use properly
than with a more "foreigner-friendly" system that Koreans don't
understand and therefore don't use.

To bring it to the point, the purpose of the current proposal is NOT
to replace M-R by a new system.  The hope is to ESTABLISH a system
that will actually be used, instead of the current chaos.  The
proposed system has better chances to achieve this than any of the
previous ones, in particular M-R.

The proposed system has been called foreigner-unfriendly.  The only
argument in favor of this claim seems to be the use of EO and EU.  The
outcry!  How do they dare to revive those ugly dissonants from the
remote past?  Doesn't EVERYBODY know by now that Seoul is the WRONG
romanization for So^ul?

Contrarily, I think it must have taken a brilliant and courageous mind
to come up with the proposed solution.  It is as simple as ingenious.
If one wants to avoid accents, some vowels have to be written with
digraphs.  Reviving the "ugly dissonants" has the advantage that you
don't need to teach it to anybody: EVERYBODY in Korea, including
foreigners, already knows that EO and EU stand for /o^/ and /u^/.
Even in the age of M-R, EO and EU are omnipresent in Korea, and most
foreigners will learn it at the latest when they step off the plane.

EO and EU have been called ugly.  I find that hard to follow.  WU and
YE for /u/ and /e/ in Yale romanization are far uglier, and still Yale
is used routinely by linguists.  But of course I'm prejudiced---look
at my last name.

The other main change of the proposal is representation of the
unvoiced allophone of the unaspirated lentis stops by voiced letters.
This makes the proposed system far easier to use for Koreans, since
they do not perceive the voicing as relevant.  I believe it also makes
it EASIER to use for foreigners as well. I have often observed
foreigners being misunderstood because they aspirated the stop.  If
they voice it instead, they sound a bit wrong, of course, but are
understandable.

I have little sympathy with the way in which the new proposal has been
made public, the non-involvement of foreigners or Korean scholars, the
amateurish questionnaire, or the completely unnecessary attempt to
push it through on the nationalist ticket.  Yet the proposed system
itself if far from being a "fiasco perpetrated by zealous, nationalist
language bureaucrats".  I'm pleasantly surprised that instead of
devising yet another incompatible new scheme, the committee has had
the good sense to look at what Koreans actually do.  If you ask a
Korean to romanize a sentence in Hangul, they'll either use
pig-English, or they'll use EO for /o^/, EU for /u^/, PA for /p'a/ and
BA for /pa/.  This is the real strong point of the proposal, and gives
it a better chance to be widely accepted than anything before it.

Clearly the proposal isn't the best possible solution, some
improvements have been suggested here, but whatever its shortcomings
may be, it is a big progress over McCune-Reischauer!

So before planning the boycot of the proposed new transliteration
scheme, maybe it is time to lean back, sip a cup of green tea, rewrite
a few paragraphs in the new transliteration, and contemplate whether
it is really all that bad.

Otfried Cheong




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