[KS] The Mystery of the Breve

[Otfried Cheong]

Frank Hoffmann wrote:
> Sorry to be so direct, but I feel that THIS should really not anymore be 
> one of the points to be discussed on the transcription/transliteration 
> issue.

With deference, but I feel it is very much one of the points to be 
discussed.

All the points you make were made in 1999, when the RR was discussed on 
this list.   That is now ten years ago - and we are still nowhere near a 
world were you could freely use diacritics on the web.  Just because it 
is in Unicode doesn't mean you can actually use it in a given web 
application, as Brother Anthony very correctly observes (his email, by 
the way, was encoded in EUC-KR, one of the "outdated" encodings that was 
predicted to go away ten years ago).

> (a) First, the problems listed (mostly limited for non-informed users) 
> will go away within the next couple of years, as soon as old and 
> outdated software and older computers have been replaced by newer 
> script/program versions (of message boards, email software, etc.) and 
> operating systems (such as Mac OS X or Windows XP and later). 

"will go away within the next couple of years" was something we heard a 
lot in 1999.   Ten years have gone by, and not much has changed.

If you don't believe me, please make a test, and try ordering something 
from the web to an address in Korea.  I have never found a site that 
would accept McC-R in its proper form.  (You _can_ type a breve into 
amazon.com's address form, but it's displayed as garbage on the 
confirmation page, and I never had the courage to see if the package 
would arrive nevertheless).  Try filling in an entry application for 
Australia or the US on the web, or a similar administrative site.

I am always surprised by the complete lack of attention on this list to 
the one major application of Korean romanization: Korean place names and 
addresses.  By sheer volume, Korean addresses probably make up 99% of 
all romanized Korean.   Addresses are needed when you order things on 
the web, when you apply for visas,  open bank accounts, get birth 
certificates for your children overseas, or simply when you register at 
a city hall overseas.  When I registered at city hall in the Netherlands 
a few years ago, I found that their administrative system could not 
handle umlauts, and so they had to type AE instead of Ä.  And this in a 
European country where diacritics are used!  Administrative
systems are _extremely_ slow moving, and I expect decades to go by 
before this changes.

Before the RR, romanization of Korean place names and addresses was a 
big mess.  The government usually did it right, and sign boards were 
mostly correct - but everybody else simply did what they thought was 
right.   Koreans generally had no idea what the apostrophe in Map'o or 
P'ohang stood for (and left it out).   The English language newspapers 
in Korea printed McC-R _without_ the diacritics ("for the convenience of 
the reader", as they actually explained once in an editorial on the RR).

The situation has really drastically improved since the introduction of 
the RR in 2000, and is getting even better with the introduction of 
street addresses.  In the foreseeable future a foreigner might actually 
be able to find a place in Korea by looking at a map :-)

So, in my opinion, Koreans deserve a romanization system that only uses 
the letters a-z, just like everybody else. (Americans on this list often 
point to European languages that use diacritics, while the Europeans of 
course know that all these languages have means of doing without them 
when the need arises.)

In 1999, I would have liked to see a revision to McC-R that would 
introduce the alternate spellings "eo" and "eu" for 어 and 으, and some 
alternate solution for the apostrophe (although I never came up with a 
satisfying solution - the natural approach of putting an "h" to indicate 
aspiration leads to Phohang, Mapho, Chheong).  These would have been 
alternate spellings, to be used when diacritics are not available, just 
like ae for æ in French, or ss for ß in German.  Then signboards, maps, 
and everything else could have remained in breve-style McC-R, but there 
would have been a standard way of doing without diacritics, for 
newspapers, addresses on the web, email, etc. (Perhaps the 
diacritic-free alternative would slowly have become the standard, just 
like the Swiss abandoned the ß in favor of writing ss, but that would 
then have been a natural evolutionary process).

Unfortunately, the proponents of McC-R at that time were so convinced of 
the innate superiority of McC-R that they were unwilling to really 
discuss any revision - and we know how the story ended.  I'm curious to 
see what the next round will bring!

Best wishes,
  Otfried Cheong