[KS] Letter to KH on Romanization

[John Harvey]

    The Korea Herald hasn't published this letter yet, and judging from my
last critical submission, may never.

July 11, 2000

To the Editor:
          Who will edit the editors? Neither the writer of your July 6
editorial "Confusion over Romanization" nor your Editor-in-chief as of her
July 10 commentary "Romanizing as the Romans Do" had read carefully enough
the document in question, the National Academy of the Korean Language's (and
now the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's) "The Romanization of Korean"
(available at http://kacademy@sejong.or.kr/c_5data.htm).
          The first two horrors cited in the column, Geobugseon and (that
old favorite) Dogribmun, would actually be Geobukseon and Dongnimmun in the
new system. (By the way, the former is given wrongly here in the system the
Herald professes to use, the 1984 system based on McCune-Reischauer. It
should be Tongnimmun, as pronounced, not Tongnipmun.) The statement in the
editorial that "the [lax plosives] will always be transliterated g/b/d/j
under the new system" is quite misleading. It is true only in the special
case of letter-by-letter representation for special scholarly purposes.  In
normal use, the first three will be Romanized k/p/t, as in M-R, at the ends
of words and before consonants (except when they become ng/m/n!).
          I would like to take exception to Ms. Lee's claim that the Herald
and the Times have been using the M-R system. They have been using the M-R
system minus the apostrophe and the breve (or "half moon"), which is
something quite different, and definitely not something to boast about. Four
consonants and two vowels (roughly one fifth of the total in each case) are
not distinguished from similar but significantly different sounds  -  while
similar but not significantly different sounds, like the g and k in Han-guk,
are distinguished. English that far off the mark would produce sentences
like "Brezidend Glindon zbigz at UN."
          As I have pointed out, this "system" of Romanization makes it seem
that Korean, uniquely among the world's languages, has the same word for
"foot" and "arm" (both are written pal, although the initial consonant of
the latter is actually distinctively breathy, as is indicated by the
apostrophe in M-R) and that Seoul's Subway Line No. 2 has two stations with
the same name (both written Shinchon, although the second vowel of the one
south of the river is actually distinctively less "o-like," as is indicated
by the accent mark in M-R).
          The average individual, not finding any "dead-key" accent marks on
his English/Korean keyboard, and certainly not the breve, may be excused if
he finds it difficult to use this feature of M-R, even if current
word-processing programs do make them fairly readily available.  But how do
we excuse Korea's English-language newspapers, with all their typographical
resources? Couldn't they at least use one of the accents needed for French,
like ^? Of course, neither an individual nor a newspaper has any excuse for
not using the apostrophe, except, perhaps, a vague feeling that, as in
English, it should only be used for things like possessives and
abbreviations.
          It is true that one of the virtues of M-R is that when the naïve
foreigner, not knowing what to make of the apostrophe and the breve, just
ignores them, he still probably comes as close to the Korean as he can
without instruction or experience. But that is not a reason for failing to
fully indicate the pronunciation for those who care, which would include
most foreigners seriously interested in Korea and, I imagine, almost all
Koreans.
          There are certainly plenty of problems with the new system.
Despite the fact that ease of use for Koreans, or, which amounts to the same
thing, reflection of the spirit of the language, is supposed to have been a
major motivation, it seems unlikely that it has been achieved. Native
speakers of Korean naturally feel that the word for "rice," bap, actually
begins and ends with the same sound. What will they be told is the reason
for b becoming p at the end of a word?  That this feature is supposed,
somehow, to keep foreigners happy, like the distinction between r and l? And
what about the double consonants?  Why is it that k + g = kg, which sounds
just like the consonant elsewhere written kk?  (Compare hak-gyo, "school,"
with a-kka, "just now.")  The M-R system is no more complicated than this,
sounder linguistically, and truer to the Korean language.
          On the other hand, how does one explain to foreigners that eo is
not pronounced as in Leo or George and eu is not pronounced as in Europe or
Freud? Or that ui (an abbreviation of eui, by the way, which was apparently
just too much) is written as such even when pronounced i, as in Bak Jeonghui
for Park Chung Hee, violating the system's stated first principle, that it
follows standard Korean pronunciation?
           Linguists around the world tend to use the Yale system (no
diacritics!). Other foreign scholars use M-R, and will probably continue to
do so. (Significantly, also, it is the official system in North Korea.) A
stripped version of M-R is often used in the South Korean media. Most
Koreans have a sort of ancestral memory of the 1959 (pre-1984, Geobugseon,
Dogribmun) system, together with a fondness for certain English spellings
like young and moon. Now the government has gone ahead with introducing yet
another system with features of both the 1959 and the 1984 systems and a few
novel ones. Won't this just add to the confusion?
          If the defiance of the new system by the Herald and the Times
means that the issue is still open for discussion and consideration,
wouldn't it be nice if the alternative they proposed were the full official
1984 modified M-R system, diacritics and all? Then we could hope that the
government, if it is indeed willing to put its full weight behind improving
Romanization, could lean on the rapidly developing Korean software and
hardware industries to accommodate an accent mark (any will do) and on the
schools and media to adhere to the full system. As far as I can determine,
only Bahasa Indonesian is written in the Roman alphabet with neither accent
marks nor apostrophes, and only English and Hawaiian with no accent marks
(but apostrophes). The rest of the world's Roman-alphabet languages and
Romanization systems make use of accent marks, apparently without any
serious worries about "informationization," or resistance to
Americanization, or for that matter problems intrinsic to keyboards and
computer programs. So why not Korea?

John H. T. Harvey
Seoul

    I see in hindsight that I stopped one letter short. That should be
"Korean," .

    I did not mention another flaw in the new system, namely that it writes
Paldang like palda, "to sell," even though there is doubling (of dentals)
after l in Sino-Korean words.  M-R, of course, would spell the former
P'altang to distinguish it from p'alda.  A simple solution for the new
system would be to write Palttang.



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