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

John Woo john_w_woo at hotmail.com
Sun Jul 23 04:16:43 EDT 2000


>     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 ..."
It was less misunderstanding than devil's advocate role-playing. What I 
meant with my argument was rather implying that romanizing - although it 
might be operated basically by Korean native speakers - is used (i.e. 
digested and more important phonetically reproduced) by foreigners.
>     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.
Well, your argument is technically true. Very. But what about English voiced 
stops being quite often assimilated in hangul as fortis? See for example 
/ppa esO/ for "at the bar". Non-English speaking westerners (excluding 
Germans, though), might reproduce Busan more or less as (IPA) [busan], but 
listen to AFKN, for instance, and you might hear [bbusan], which, to Korean 
ears, will sound like [ppusan].
Moreover, stops are - at least - 2/3 of the time unvoiced (initials and 
finals). It is, in my opinion, misleading to use voiced stops, at least at 
the initial, especially if you keep in mind that the purpose of a 
romanization system is to help foreigners deal with the language.

>     Does that clear things up, or further obfuscate?
idem...
J.W. Woo
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