[KS] Kontsevich_Romanization

lev kontsevich lr.kontsevich at gmail.com
Sun Sep 13 09:20:26 EDT 2009


Dear Brother Antony. The question of a uniform transcription of the Korean
language has been ripened for a long time already. Being an expert in
transcription I am in horror of that occurs in this area. First of all I
wish to remind that the McCune-Reischaer (MR)  and the Korean Romanization
(KR) systems are not comparable. The first is a more or less exact *practical
transcription* of sounds of the Korean language; the second is mostly a *
transliteration* of words spelling in the Korean alphabet. Since 1939 the KR
was a practical system for Koreans for writing Korean words in Latin. These
two systems are impossible to be compared or mixed because of their
different purposes. They should not be intercrossed. If not for the policy
of globalization, which is actively being pushed ahead by South Korea, the
KR would have remained only for internal usage. Meanwhile it is actively
being imbedded by most various ways (through mass-media, the Internet, etc.)
beyond South Korea. I support the usage of the MR system in scholarly works.
At the same time I am sure that experts can modify it rather easily for
general public.

Unfortunately the KR has a lot of deficiencies as a practical script. It's
natural that the young scholars who received language training in Korea,
easily mastered it, without realizing that it was not a transcriptional
system. If Korean studies scholars can somehow handle the writing of Korean
words in the two systems, common users can not do it. As soon as
non-specialists start to use the KR, awful distortions emerge: they start to
pronounce transliteration being sure that it is transcription. Restoration
of pronunciation of written in the KR Korean words, without knowledge of
rules of re-transliteration, leads to big mistakes. They are especially
serious in the languages, which use Cyrillic (in Russian, for example).
Using the KR causes chaos here and ugly "Korean" words which cause
everybody's laugh appear. Tables of re-transliteration are of no help in
this case and it's impossible to distribute them to all the mass
media. Finally,
serious objections on the KR are available and in the North Korea. And now,
after a decade of coexistence of two systems I yet do not know how to
struggle with it in mass-media. There is no international supervisory
committee in this area. Therefore, at first, in my opinion, we must
comprehensive examination of the two systems, primarily by the specialists
in Korean phonetics, identification of areas of use of each system and the
choice of one of them for common and broad use on the basis of consensus of
the international community in Korean studies. I only suppose that if the
world academic community could come to a consensus, amicably oppose the
international distribution of the КR and accept the traditional or modified
MR system of transcription as the solely system for the academic works on
Korea, it would be the victory over the tone of the market.

Yours faithfully

Lev Kontsevich,
Leading researcher, Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of
Sciences (Moscow), the author of the Russian system of transcription of the
Korean words.
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