[KS] The Mystery of the Breve

[Lauren Deutsch]

A curiosity ... 

Maybe English language Romanization of Hangul is not as accurate / clear as
say, French. In fact when we read Romanized Hangul, we aren¹t reading
English, rather manufacturing the sound of Korean into the rules of some
other visual system. I say this because when I saw the Hangul for ³Seoul², I
realized that it appeals to my understanding of ‹ and capacity to clearly
replicate sound in ‹ French.

Not being a linguistic, but, rather, linguistically curious, it seems that
the transliteration debate needs to have some new alternatives.

Lauren
-- 
Lauren W. Deutsch
835 S. Lucerne Blvd., #103
Los Angeles CA 90005
Tel 323 930-2587  Cell 323 775-7454
E lwdeutsch at earthlink.net



From: Otfried Cheong <otfried at airpost.net>
Reply-To: Korean Studies Discussion List <koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws>
Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2009 09:33:36 +0200
To: Korean Studies Discussion List <koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws>
Subject: Re: [KS] The Mystery of the Breve

Frank Hoffmann wrote:
> Regarding replacements or left-out of brèves, both has been practiced
> heavily on this list when using older email software -- leaving them out
> as well as replacing them by ô, û (included in the ASCII set).

Neither of which fulfils the requirements we discussed:  no diacritics,
but no major loss of information either.  The circumflexes _are_
diacritics, and _not_ included in the ASCII set (which is a 7-bit
character set).

The issue is not a particular character set - as I think I have
demonstrated, there are numerous occasions where you simply must be able
to restrict yourself to the letters A-Z (capitals only!).

> And I have not seen anyone in Korean Studies who,
> as you claimed, would have made the argument that replacing brèves with
> circumflexes would be an unforgivable sin.

I certainly did not claim this - what I said is that many on this list
considered replacing the breves by the _digraphs_ 'eo' and 'eu' an
unforgivable sin.

> NORTH Korea: this is an entirely different topic, of course. You wrote:
> 
>>>  As I said earlier, I would have suggested to simply allow
>>>  "eo" and "eu" (...), and to replace the apostrophe by 'h'.
>>>  (...) Is that true?  I've never seen the spelling Phyo—ngyang
>>>  anywhere.
> 
> (1) As you already pointed out yourself, "eo" and "eu" are used instead
> of o and u + brève. "Phyo—ngyang" is therefore no valid example.
> 
> (2) The "h" is indeed used to replace the apostrophe in McC-R for an
> aspirated t' or p'. For example "thongil" instead of "t'ongil."

This raises an interesting question:  North Korea uses a modified
version of McC-R that does not need diacritics at all (except for
hyphens to separate syllables, if necessary).   But apparently the North
Korean system was not considered as a contender for the new South Korean
romanization - as far as I can remember, this was not even suggested at
the time.  Why?

Unification with the Northern system would be the only good reason for
South Korea to change its official romanization again.  But of course
that's a hairy issue unless you can work out the differences in Hangul
spelling in the two Koreas.

Best wishes,
  Otfried



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