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

[kushibo]

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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