[KS] dropping McCune-Reischauer for 20th/21st c. personal names

[Gari Keith Ledyard]

	I'm against a time line for any romanization system.  On the other
hand, flexibility in matters of personal choice as to the spelling of
their names by individual Koreans is a matter of civility and respect.  I
always cite a Korean writer of a book in a western language by the way his
or her name is spelled on the title page.  So I write Ki-moon Lee for his
western writings, but Yi Kimun for his home publications.  Given the
electronic character of our library cataloguing systems nowadays, any
other procedure would result in books not found.  If an individual can be
regarded as a public person and has an idiosyncratic personal name
spelling, one can hardly ignore it.
	But arbitrarily drawing a line at, say, 1945, would be silly and
counter-productive.  The idea is to bring order into our writing.  And I
strongly feel that too free a use of idiosyncratic spellings conveys a
chaotic picture of the Korean language, which could create an environment
in which it loses respect.  There is a certain order and a recognizable
appearance in Japanese and Chinese names spelled in the prevailing
romanizations.  People look at the name and say, "She's Chinese.  He's
Japanese."  Too often people look at Korean names in idiosyncratic
spellings and have no clue.  "Is he from Singapore?"  We should try to put
as many names into McCune-Reischauer as we considerately and civilly can,
so that Korea and the Korean language can claim a "look" which will
reflect well on Korea and its culture.  I believe that most of us believe
that the best "looking" of all the systems for romanizing Korean is Mc-R.
Obviously this is a subjective argument, but I put it before you.

Gari Ledyard