[KS] Romanization systems

[kevin parks]

I suppose I chose a bad example. It was chosen somewhat off the top of 
my head and in haste.

What I simply am trying to say, in response to Frank's assertion that:

"Yang ban is also pretty unambiguous if you use the correct transcription"

At some point that was pretty much true, but I think we now live a world 
where no one knows what the "correct" transcription is anymore. I am 
stubbornly hanging on to McC-R, but feel bad about it, personally.

Furthermore, why must we /always/ transcribe?

When I first started out as  everyone used McR and you could get the 
squeak by with the Yale since it wasn't nearly as common.

Now we have a level of complexity and ambiguity that seems to have 
crossed a threshold and is the genuine bane of the busy non-specialist
(read: Korean language/linguistics/literature scholar) who is simply 
trying to get work done.

I feel that one way out of the mess, and one that also allows us to 
respect the Korean Gov't decisions to boot, is to include the han'gûl in 
line with the text as I have indicated.

I realize that in many cases this is not practical. But I wish it were 
done more frequently.

The glossary approach is okay, but often in the glossaries I encounter, 
very few authors even bother to put the han'gûl and so you have hancha, 
which may be new vocabulary, and romanizations that you spend 10 minutes 
reverse engineering or alternately, you bug your Korean friends for the 
han'gûl so you could grok the vocab and cross reference.

As a musician, when I see some terminology used that I am seeing for the 
first time that I wish to look it up in other references or discover its 
etymology, hancha is often helpful, but han'gûl is just as essential. In 
any case, It all seems horribly unnecessary to me since you can learn 
han'gûl in an afternoon and then use that han'gûl to look other things 
up and now that computers are getting better at handling all the 
encodings, and everything is done on the computer... Well I am just not 
sure why we avoid the answer to the romanization nightmare that may be 
right under our noses. Is learning, using, and typesetting han'gûl such 
an unreasonable requirement when it frees the reader to instantly work 
with the proper pronouncation and mental representation of the 
terminology at hand?

best,

-kevin--





Frank Hoffmann wrote:
>> Yang ban (æÁ¼ð/®'î«)
>> Totally unambiguous. and if i want to know what that means i can look 
>> it up and if i want to know if that "yang" is the same as another 
>> "yang" i can even know that too.
>
>
> Kevin, "Yang ban" is also pretty unambiguous if you use the correct 
> transcription -- not two words but one, and not capitalized either. 
> Sure, there is also/ yangban/ with the meaning both sites, both ways, 
> but that is used rather seldom, and if looking at the semantics of its 
> use you would always know. In cases where there are rare or medieval 
> terms used -- a good example are 'shaman' texts/narrations -- most 
> scholars have since ever listed the han'gûl and/or hanja in the glossary.

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