[KS] Re: Letter to the KH on Romanization Wars

John Harvey jharvey at nuri.net
Sat Jul 22 11:12:15 EDT 2000


Dear List:

    Please skip this if you're sick of Romanization or if you didn't have
trouble with my last posting on it.

    John Woo, at least, misunderstood my message on Gary's Romanization Wars
column, although I tried to make clear that I was following Gary's principle
that Romanization should take into account Korean ears as well as foreign
tongues.  I can see now that I may have thrown him off by writing in the
second
paragraph "if we apply ..." when I should have written "if the Korean
listener applies ..."

    The contribution to the discussion I was trying to make was
consideration of how Romanizations pronounced by foreign tongues sound to
Korean ears in their common context, which is not so often Korean (a
foreigner relying on Romanization rather than Hangul for pronunciation
guidance, after all, is probably not too fluent in Korean) as it is a
foreign language.

    What does a Korean hear when an English speaker reads "I live in Busan"?
"Busan" sounds just great to him, a voiced b after a voiced n. What does he
hear when an English speaker reads "I live in Pusan"? "Pusan" sounds a bit
funny, an unvoiced and slightly aspirated English p after a voiced n, which
is all wrong in Korean, so he is likely to identify the p as its strongly
aspirated Korean equivalent, which, of course, is not what is should be.

    I was not saying that "you have to put what became an English word
through the phonological mill of another language," but rather that that is
just what often does happen, and that Romanizing with voiced initials, as in
the new system and in Gary's own system, minimizes the problem, namely in
the case where voiced sounds precede without a pause, rather a common case
in English and other languages that use articles, prepositions, and such.

    Does that clear things up, or further obfuscate?

John Harvey
jharvey at nuri.net





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