[KS] The Mystery of the Breve

[Eugene Y. Park]

Dear all,

It seems to me that both Otfried and Stephen have made interesting points about
the disconnect between the perfect, technical viability of diacritical marks
and
the less-than-perfect "real world" that we live in. At least based on my own
experience, I am not so sure if we live in a world that is more significantly
diacritical mark-friendly world than, say, ten years ago.

What I've gone through with the title of my own book has been quite frustrating,
and the way amazon.com still does not display the title correctly has certainly
been one problem. Titled "Between Dreams and Reality: The Military Examination
in Late ChosOn Korea, 1600-1894," that single breve has been a source of
headache. When my book was coming out, I wracked my brain to get amzon.com to
display the breve correctly, but they kept on printing a funny character
instead. Then I tried dropping the breve, that is going for a simple "o" as do
folks often seem to do so with macrons in a romanized Japanese word. I was
willing to settle for this, and it seemed to work fine for a while. But then at
some point, that plain "o" got dropped, and now the dynasty name simple appears
as "Chosn."

So my point: I wonder if the future prospect of MR system is bleak in the world
of amazon.com, wikipedia.org, etc. Of course, I do find that both MR and RR
systems have weaknesses, at least in their present forms. I suspect that in the
long run, the success of a particular system will depend heavily on how
successfully the South Korean government teaches its citizens how to use it.

Yours,
Gene
-- 
Eugene (Gene) Y. Park
Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History
Department of History
University of Pennsylvania
E-mail: epa at sas.upenn.edu


Quoting Otfried Cheong <otfried at airpost.net>:

> Frank Hoffmann wrote:
> > 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.
>
> I think there are three factors:
>
> 1) Japanese learn how to romanize properly in school.  This is of course
> made easier by the fact that writing in Romaji is a popular input method
> for computers as well.  I've seen Japanese write entire long emails in
> Romaji because they used a computer where no Japanese input method or
> fonts were available.  Koreans would rather write in English, no matter
> how poor it is, than try to communicate in romanized Korean.
>
> 2) There is usually little loss of information when the macron is left
> out. The Tokyo city website is http://www.metro.tokyo.jp, with no fear
> of confusion.
>
> When people can't handle diacritics, their first impulse is to simply
> omit it, and often that is fine.   I've exchanged many emails in French
> without diacritics before they were easily available in email clients,
> and while they are slightly harder to read, no information is lost.
> Munchen, Koln, and Zurich are still recognizable city names.
>
> But this simply doesn't work for the McC-R romanization of Korean.  Is
> Chongju 청주, ì¢
주, 총주, ì •ì£¼, 청추, or what?
>
> 3)  There is a well-known widely used alternative to macrons.  When
> macrons are not available and one wants to make sure that no information
> is lost, Japanese write Romaji as they would write Kana, as in "TOUKYOU"
> for 東京.  The JR website (www.jr-odekake.net) actually allows you to
> use Romaji, but you have to write "TOUKYO" - "TOKYO" will not work.
>
>
> The lesson?  I think what Korea would have needed in 1999 was an
> acceptable way of writing McC-R without diacritics, _plus_ proper
> education of Koreans in romanizing (including the fact that omitting
> diacritics is evil).
>
> > 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.)
>
> This opinion is entirely based on my subjective impressions as a silent
> observer of the process on this list and in the Korean press.
>
> At the time, many Koreanists expressed the opinion that McC-R was
> perfect, that the technical issues were either already solved or would
> be solved shortly, that there was no need to change anything, and that
> there was therefore not even a need for discussion.  Since the RR
> Committee started out with the premise to create a diacritics-free
> romanization of Korean, their voices were ignored, and they had no
> influence on the decision.
>
> I believe that if Koreanists had pushed to allow alternate spellings for
> the diacritics in McC-R, the result might have been different.
>
> As I said earlier, I would have suggested to simply allow "eo" and "eu"
> for 어 and 으, and to replace the apostrophe by 'h'.  The latter looks
> ugly, but according to Wikipedia, that is actually what North Korea
> uses.  Is that true?  I've never seen the spelling Phyŏngyang anywhere.
>
> But that was 10 years ago. Switching the romanization system again now
> would be foolish, especially considering how widely accepted the RR has
> become by Koreans.  Who knows, perhaps they would be able to write
> emails in RR in the not-so-far future.
>
> In any case, my point is that any language needs a way of being
> romanized without diacritics.  It doesn't need to be the official
> romanized spelling, just a standardized alternate spelling for the
> situations where diacritics are not available.  Korean before 2000 was
> the only language I know that didn't have this, and so people had to
> make up their own romanizations.  It was an untenable situation.
>
> Ross King wrote (about the breves):
> > They do indeed have magical powers -- they render unambiguously and
> > without resorting to clumsy digraphs vowels that the Korean sound
> > system insists be distinguished and that otherwise would go
> > undistinguished in roman script. They signal, through their unitary
> > unigraphicity, that a single vowel is being represented -- something
> > that Seong-su or Seung-mi from Incheon cannot do with the new system.
>
> The funny thing is that Seong-su and Seung-mi wouldn't in their dreams
> consider to spell their names as Sŏng-su and Sŭng-mi.  Several years
> ago, they would probably have used Sung-soo and Seung-mee, but now there
> is a pretty good chance that they would go for - guess - Seong-su and
> Seung-mi.  If Prof. King wanted to demonstrate the success of the RR,
> this would be pretty good argument! :-)
>
> Best wishes,
>   Otfried
>
>
>
>