[KS] The Mystery of the Breve

[Frank Hoffmann]

Otfried, thanks for the clarification. I now 
better understand the point/s you are making. 
Your Netherlands, German 'sz' (ß), and Amazon.com 
examples did somewhat confuse me before reading 
your additional explanations.

You also say:
>>   These are _not_ purely technical problems.

Well, YES, that was the MAIN point I was trying 
to make. These are issues of IMPLEMENTATION and 
USAGE of both, international technical standards 
(mostly in Korea itself) and romanization systems.

Let me ask you then: How can it be that the 
Hepburn romanization system for Japanese has 
worked so well for the past 120 years for Japan? 
It uses macrons over o and u, not present in 
standard Latin fonts either. Japanese have 
passports too and may once in a while order books 
at Amazon.com or use a Visa card to do shopping.
I seriously do not know the answer, but my best 
hunch would be that those "extra" accents would 
simply be left out whenever it is anticipated 
that they might create problems with American or 
other international services such as postal 
delivery or order systems. But they are useful in 
academic texts, for example. Are there any hidden 
faculties that let the Japanese master Kanji, 
Katakana, Hiragana, and the Hepburn romanization 
system all together, while Koreans are dropping 
Hanja, and do not stick to any romanization 
system whatsoever? I would find that hard to 
believe. There may ba many pros and cons about 
all kind of aspects for all possible romanization 
systems, including McC-R and the current SK 
government system, but I do neither see any 
technical reasons to use one or the other nor is 
the "simple" vs. "complicated" reasoning very 
convincing. No concerted effort, no concerted 
outcome, whatever is being used.

By the way, it is not that McC-R would not have 
been implemented at all in Korea (although not 
anymore the official transcription system): try 
for example searching the most popular Korean 
search engine http://naver.com for any terms, 
place names or name in McC-R and you will find 
that both search terms with brèves and results 
will come up just fine -- same as German words 
and names with "sz" (ß) will come up in Swiss 
search engines such as http://www.search.ch.

You further write:
>>  In my opinion, the fact that Koreanists in 1999 were so
>>  adamant that this was all a technical issue that (a) was
>>  already solved, or (b) would be solved shortly, or (c) would
>>  be solved in due course, was the main reason that their input
>>  was greatly ignored - every Korean who had used an overseas
>>  web site knew better, and they were just making up their
>>  own romanization on the spot.

This opinion is based on what information?
Does anyone have an indication to think that this 
played any role in the decision making process? 
(I very much doubt it did.)


Best wishes,
Frank


-- 
--------------------------------------
Frank Hoffmann
http://koreaweb.ws