[KS] Old McCune has got a prob: eo eo ô

[kushibo]

Lest the subject heading make sense only to me, it's to be sung to the tune
of Old MacDonald (as in, "Old MacDonald has a farm: e, i, e, i, o"). It's
late, and I need coffee.

John HarVey wrote:
> Dear KuShibO (I Stand CorRecTed):

According to the new system, wouldn't it be KuSibO (I thought that they were
going to go with "si" for ½Ã, rather than "shi", making the area between
Sogang, Ewhat and Yonsei Universities the Village of Sin. :)

>     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 never noticed that before, since I have been using the doctored Mac
fonts. It appears that option + shift yields a breve, but how do you get the
breve over the vowel? I have no problem getting the circumflex over the
vowels, though.

>     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.

I, too, often use circumflexes where M-R would require a breve, especially
in cases where I typed something up on my Mac but had to print it up on a
Windows system. To my knowledge, that the circumflex was a stand-in for the
breve was perfectly understood.

>     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?

Good point. Actually, I consider my audience first. I tend not to write
things for an audience composed of such people, and when I do, I keep to M-R
as religiously as I know how. Even when I tend toward laxness when
orthographing (:)) lax plosives, I usually first write the word in an
accurate M-R form in such a way that the apostrophe-less form later is
clearly connected to it.

At our mom-and-pop network, I try to keep to M-R as much as possible, and I
only hope that news of the new-and-disapproved system hasn't gotten to most
of the people in the frontier of Yangjae.

I have had to make concessions, though, in terms of the apostrophes. Take
the Seocho-goo (I realize that goo would be gu in the new system) versus
S™ch'o-gu. So many Koreans have had drilled into their heads for so long
that eo represents ¤Ã that it seems perfectly natural and CORRECT to so
many. Consequently, such thinkers at our glorified ham radio center strongly
resist M-R spellings of such things as S™ch'o-gu when we need to spell such
things on air (e.g., during a program teaching intermediate speakers how to
write a letter requesting an application, etc.). Our caption-generating
equipment is old, but is perfectly able to make upper- and lower-case vowels
with breves above them, and so I insisted on using M-R as the closest Korea
had to a standard. I pulled out my Andrew Nahm history books and pointed out
road signs as precedent, and I generally prevailed.

BUT the perceived awkwardness of some internal (and, to them, seemingly
unnecessary) apostrophes made that a harder case. The need for compromise
dictated that I pick either breves or apostrophes and sacrifice the other. I
would loathe putting eo on anything (unless we're talking about a yeoman),
so I gave in on the apostrophe argument.

Now, this discussion may not seem particularly academic, but it is a
real-world application of the practical difficulties of consistently
employing M-R.

K U S H I B O


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