[KS] Re: Road signs and more than we want to know

[John Harvey]

Dear KuShibO (I Stand CorRecTed):

    Of course, the basic TrueType (sorry for that second cap) fonts Arial
Special G1/G2 and Times New Roman Special G1/G2, available for several years
now to, I believe, Mac as well as Wintel users, "allow the user to print
perfect breves over Os and Us."

    I 've been pushing circumflexification rather than brevification for
fear that some people might not have those fonts yet (or want to be confined
to them) and because no readymade shortcuts are provided for keyboarding
them, to my knowledge.

    Your principle of leaving out the apostrophe where a lax plosive would
be voiced is rather like the 1984 MOE system's dropping of the breve in wo.
Both economies require the reader to know combinatory restrictions in Korean
phonology. That might be fine for native speakers and fluent foreigners, but
what about the beginners, tourists, and so forth for whom we are so often
Romanizing?

John Harvey
jharvey at nuri.net


----- Original Message -----
From: kushibo <jdh95 at hitel.net>
To: <korean-studies at mailbase.ac.uk>
Sent: Saturday, July 15, 2000 7:57 AM
Subject: Re: Road signs and more than we want to know


> John Harvey wrote:
> > Dear KuShiBo (and others):
>
> I think it would be KuSibO
>
> >     As you may know, I have been and still am one of the fiercest
opponents
> > of the new Romanization system (on behalf both of native speakers and of
> > foreigners) -- more on that in a later e-ffusion -- but the claim that
it
> > will feature internal caps is unfounded, if I read kacademy at sejong.or.kr
> > correctly. I do remember that that was one of the proposals being
considered
> > last year, but then what wasn't?
>
> I work at a TV/radio network, and our morning radio show addressed this on
> the morning after the recent announcement with a news story that I was
told
> had been taken from the Chos™n Ilbo, which explained that the new system
> involved internal caps.
>
> >     By the way, I also oppose the KH/KT "system," M-R without
apostrophes or
> > breves
>
> I will take pains to be as correct as possible in using the M-R system for
> new words I am introducing in a paper or article, but I will often leave
out
> the breves for words that have been used frequently, like Ulchiro, Taejon,
> or Itaewon. Sometimes out of laziness, I will omit apostrophes except in
> cases where the distinction is necessary (e.g., to differentiate between
the
> initial sounds of T'aean and Taegu, or Ch'™ngnyangni and Chinhae). OTOH,
who
> would not understand which consonant is being represented by the ch in
> Shinchon or the p in Mallipo?
>
>
> > (hey, folks, "diacritic" can be a noun, but "diacritical" is only an
> > adjective).
>
> Whoops! My bad. (actually the bad of the person to whom I was responding,
> whose lead I was merely following). But perhaps you're being a tad too
> diacritical yourself. :)
>
> > To set your mind at rest, KuShiBo, in MS Word (for English and
> > for the PC, so to speak) you can put a circumflex on a vowel by first
> > hitting Ctrl (+ Shft) + ^, and then the vowel (and similarly with the
other
> > French/German/etc. accent marks, although not the breve).
>
> I've known about the circumflexes for years (as long as I've been using
> Macs, going back to the 1980s, the circumflexes have been there), and use
> them frequently as
> suitable stand-ins for the breve. But really, given that explanations of
> English prounciation itself utilizes breves here and there, one would
think
> that someone up in Washington State would have gotten around to
> incorporating it into new and improved versions of their word processor.
> While the folks down in Cupertino, California, haven't done much better,
> there are Mac-based fonts (called "Time*" and "Courie*" that allow the
user
> to print perfect breves over Os and Us. These are available on several web
> sites dealing with Korean word processing for Macs.
>
> >     Isn't it ironic that now, after 20 years of unbelievably rapid
progress
> > in personal computing (during which my memory and onboard storage have
gone
> > up by factors of one thousand and one million, for just two indicators),
in
> > the first year of the third millennium (by the popular reckoning), an
> > orthography should be determined by perceived hardware and software
> > limitations?  "It's not on the keyboard."  Had anybody at NAKL ever
looked
> > at the keyboard options in Windows these days?
>
> Apparently not.
>
> K U S H I B O
>



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