[KS] Romanization systems

[Stefan Ewing]

Hi, Richard:

Thanks for your reply.  I actually posted a longer reply to my own 
questions, which should hopefully have appeared by the time you read this.  
On the lack of further evidence, it would appear that "shi" was a (arguably 
very useful) modification enshrined in the 1984 South Korean system.

Thank you for referring me to the _Korea Journal_.  Wonder of wonders, back 
issues of it are freely available online 
(http://www.ekoreajournal.net/paper/service/bk_issue.jsp).  With luck, I 
should be able to find it.  (A search for "romanization" turned up nothing 
in the date range you mentioned, as the search was only on article titles.  
I will dig until I find it!)

By the way, online back issues go all the way back to Vol. 1, No. 1 in 
September of that most pivotal of years, 1961, barely four months after Park 
Chung Hee's coup d'etat.  The articles are all, of course, about the events 
of the preceding year and a half, looking back to the long, dark years under 
Rhee Syngman, and written at a time when South Korea's economic situation 
still looked terribly grim.  I look forward to reading these contemporary 
accounts from what must have been a very tumultuous summer.

Stefan Ewing

>From: Richard Miller <rcmiller at wisc.edu>
>Reply-To: Korean Studies Discussion List <Koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws>
>To: Korean Studies Discussion List <Koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws>
>Subject: RE: [KS] Romanization systems
>Date: Mon, 30 May 2005 22:05:50 -0500
>
>Hi Stefan,
>
>Regarding your question about siot no longer romanized as sh only before 
>wi,
>I don't believe this is an "official" change in M-R. The Library of
>Congress, for example, in its 15-page explanation of Korean romanization
>(http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/romanization/korean.pdf) takes the original
>M-R paper as its base, and follows the original rule in spite of being
>biased toward pronunciation (in the Seoul dialect, of course) rather than
>han'gul orthography. Thus, even though everyone I know who has studied
>Korean as a second language (whether originally an English speaker, a
>Japanese speaker, or even a 1.5-generation Korean American) hears "sinla"
>(the kingdom) as "shilla," LOC renders it without the h ("silla").
>
>At one point, the Korea Journal published its own M-R-based romanization
>table, which functioned as a reference tool for some time. You might check
>that to see how they treated the mystery of H--I don't have it in front of
>me. If I remember correctly, they printed one in the late 1980s or early
>1990s, which would be after the 1984 South Korean romanization.
>
>Richard Miller
>University of Wisconsin-Madison
>http://mywebspace.wisc.edu/rcmiller/web/
>
>

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